Capability creates reality first, and legal consensus usually arrives later. It has always been thus. On land, states must back claims with an ability to project force. In low Earth orbit, words mean little unless you can literally, physically show up and enforce them.
I appreciate your sentiment, and I agree with you in the hypothetical universe I think you’re imagining. But in this universe, that ship has long since sailed. Cars are software. They have been so for a long time. The only difference between a Tesla and an economy car from Stellantis is whether the software is well written or not.
My wife has a 2015 Jeep Cherokee. For its purpose It’s actually quite a nice vehicle, sending aside concerns of mechanical reliability. But it also has many annoyances, and EVERY single one of them (with no exceptions) are software-defined bugs or behaviours, and all could all be improved with software updates. But legacy order has never cared about improving software after you bought the car.
For all of Tesla’s many faults, they one of the first automakers where it feels like the software is not abandonware. It’s a positive trend and it’s nice to see a few other manufacturers following suit.
I'm afraid it's exactly the opposite -- Tesla has awful software, and no self discipline about adding more bloat. There is a lot of rigorously designed software in cars where you can't see it. Jeep is no one's idea of quality in any respect though.
Legacy brands do significantly improve software as the model evolves, and provide firmware updates to earlier models. The best car is probably the last one before a new platform step change.
Tesla has also pioneered putting large amounts of software in mission critical compute like instrument displays and touch screens, disregarding decades of careful evolution in HMI and TCB design. There is so much wrong with their cars without even touching their autonomy system, a proven killer.
I know enough about the software in BMW (NBT/OS7) and Audi (MIB2/MIB3) instrument cluster stacks to know there's at least as much complexity — if not substantially more — in many of the legacy brands. Not to mention the exponential complexity which comes from their highly modularised approach, where systems from a variety of external suppliers have to co-ordinate with each other.
By contrast, the Tesla software stack is (or appears to be based on a few minutes of research) shockingly straightforward considering its apparent complexity. Rather than being a hodge-podge of vendor software, it appears to be Qt-based software running within a Linux environment on Nvidia and/or Intel chipsets. Reviewers routinely praise the screen for being responsive and "iPad like". If there's a bloat issue, it'd be interesting to hear some specifics.
As for your quip about "decades of careful evolution in HMI and TCB design" you might have been right 20–30 years ago.
Isn't the role of the VW MIB2 (as in "Modular Infotainment Baukasten") explicitly the infotainment part of the vehicle (and NOT the instrument cluster, cruise-control, etc.)?
I never had an issue with those, as their reach is isolated (or "limited" as people would say today) to the infotainment part of the car. It couldn't even take control of the climate system back when I had one.
Can't argue much about MIB3, it is just a few years old and a child of the Tesla Software-defined-car era (albeit still tries to uphold Volkswagen's DNA of strictly separating roles of all components, partly making it the mess it is...)
Look at the automotive standards for system verification, in standards like ISO 26262 functional safety. These standards are followed by engineering led organisations that respect safety. Tesla prefers a more laisse faire approach.
This is all orthogonal to software defined vehicles, except that you have to choose to segregate functions to achieve strong non-interference goals, and all that checking might slow down software development and Tesla doesn't like that.
The HMI on Teslas is trash, and drivers are measurably slower and more distracted in simulated and real conditions in their designs. The scan is slower, the affordances are weaker, the multi modal nature causes processing delays. The worst part is design and marketing teams being forced to copy them. Chinese imitations, like the insanely cheap/ugly MG4 tablet instrument, are going to age very badly.
Volkswagen tried to evolve to a more "touch" based HMI -that everybody hated- and is now touting it's abandoning that HMI as the largest redeeming factor of it's cars.
China is banning the ridiculous "innovations" on car handles and further "innovations" on steering wheels.
The Tesla software stack has few advantages: it's cheap and can be easily revised when the Beta-user discovers issues with it. So I have to pause and think to who's benefit it's made the way it is.
From an HMI perspective a Tesla is a nightmare, getting in and out one is constant question as to -why- these design choices were made. Especially after taking out "just doing things different" as a reason. A friend's first additions was loops to the physical door-releases so that passengers could actually get out should something happen and incapacitate the infuriating button-based door releases.
Luckily there is progress such as the recent Ferrari HMI that actually thinks about how the HMI will be used. The central screen even offers a palm-rest for when manipulating the screen. Integrating physical buttons and switches with the canvas of a screen is the logical way forward.
The car industry is soul-searching as we speak on what to do with technology and our interaction with it. But one thing is absolutely certain: whatever Tesla did is not the future.
At least your friend can add loops to the physical door-releases. If the problem is software defined, good luck hacking in even the simplest of one-liner bugfixes.
I agree Tesla door releases are silly, on both sides of the door. As a bald person in a city with hot summers, I am no fan of the glass roof either. But at least I can mitigate those. And neither are anywhere as maddening as being unable to wind windows up after opening the door. Or having to switch the radio off every single f****g time I start driving. While those might sound like mere annoyances, the repetitious inanity is utterly grating. I value physical ergonomics greatly, but there's something about pseudo-malicious software behaviours which make me angrier than any door handle ever could.
On a recent holiday I rented a Model 3 (pre-facelift) for a few weeks. It has a few quirks, but nothing that irritated me. It was an utterly pleasant experience. The quirky door handles became second nature within a day, for example. Navigating maps and music on that screen was less of a driver distraction than in many other cars I've driven. Not perfect, but well above average.
I do appreciate physical buttons, but my 1-series BMW from 2013 has taught me that there's something better than physical buttons. It's having systems behave well enough that the buttons might as well not exist. I almost never touch the climate control. Setting the internal temperature to 22 degrees seems to work perfectly all the time; somehow it always seems to do the right thing. The only intervention I regularly make is to press the "MAX A/C" button when driving home from sports or the gym. And I'm pressing that before I start driving anyway, so it's not a driver ergonomics issue.
I literally worked on building the next generation of handheld OBD devices (m68000 based) that techs used to reflash Toyota ECUs in 1997. Automakers can and do update software after the car has been sold. Before that, techs would need to swap EEPROMS.
It’s getting better, but even now many traditional automakers strictly limit software updates to bug fixes only. And they'll probably only fix the bug if there's a legal or sales incentive to do so.
My own car is a 2013 BMW 125i. Its software stack received a handful of very simple quality-of-life improvements in 2014. The clearest example is the on-screen volume overlay. As delivered, my car’s volume knob provided absolutely no visual feedback.
If you ask nicely, BMW dealership can update it. But that's not enough. The way BMW "codes" your vehicle after a software update means that any features introduced after its date of manufacture are disabled. So even after I had the dealer install newer software (to fix a crashing bug with navigation) the volume overlay didn’t appear. What I ended up having to do was "recode" the ECU with a new delivery date. Literally all I did was change the delivery date in a pirated copy of BMW E-Sys, push the change to the car, and the overlay appeared like magic.
You can do all the research in the world about a car, learn everything there is to know, and decide "this is worth my money". (Bait)
And then your car's manufacturer chooses to use the update mechanism to modify the center console screen to serve ads[1] while you're driving. (… and switch.)
Cars have software. But I don't think cars are software. Can I apply a software update to make my Honda Accord into Tesla or Dodge Ram?
> The only difference between a Tesla and an economy car from Stellantis is whether the software is well written or not.
Is that actually true? I mean, assume I have access to all software in the world and all IP lawyers got kidnapped by aliens - could I just write a software for Stellantis Economy to turn it into Tesla (or vice versa)? I don't think so.
> Cars have software. But I don't think cars are software. Can I apply a software update to make my Honda Accord into Tesla or Dodge Ram?
That's a disingenuously literal misinterpretation of what I said. I wasn't saying that a Tesla and some economy car are identical, only that they have in common the characteristic of being defined at their core by software. It should go without saying that software alone can't turn a Cherokee into a Model Y for the same reason that software alone can't turn a HomePod into an Apple Watch.
But there's an obvious difference between a good software experience and a poor one. Like in my wife's Cherokee, how the radio always turns on every time you start the car, no matter what you do. Like how the digital speedometer is completely concealed by any warning text that appears. Like how all window controls stop working as soon as any passenger opens their door after stopping the engine. This is all software, and I write this in response to rkagerer saying "no thank you" to cars getting meaningful software updates.
> I wasn't saying that a Tesla and some economy car are identical,
You literally said:
> The only difference between a Tesla and an economy car from Stellantis is whether the software is well written or not.
You didn't say "one of many differences". You said "the only difference". Maybe you wanted to say something else, and you still can, but you can't claim it's my fault you said that.
> It should go without saying that software alone can't turn a Cherokee into a Model Y for the same reason that software alone can't turn a HomePod into an Apple Watch.
Which invalidates your statements that the cars "are software". They are more than software. They are a complex combinations of software and hardware, each of them having its part - and, obviously, if one of the parts is bad, it makes the car worse.
> But in this universe, that ship has long since sailed.
No, you're combining "there can be updates" and "there will be subscriptions, always-online and enshittification" as if it wasn't splittable.
It is. It can. It will be.
As long as there are people making purchasing decisions, no ship will ever sail.
This is just passive HN fatalism as we know and resent it; probably a survival tactic to not go insane in the SV (or any large corp).
Even for me (a software developer who reads these articles) it's really hard to actually know whether the software is any good. Are there unlockable features? Are there subscriptions with reasonable costs? What happens if I don't have a subscription? How often are updates shipped? What's the general consensus around the quality of the system as a whole?
It took decades for people to land on - in fairness some times very handwavy -generalizations like "Japanese cars are reliable", "German cars are well built", "French cars are...french".
All this is now on its head. The landscape changes very quickly and you don't even recognize the brands. A Chinese maker of vacuum cleaners might have sold more cars than VW in 2025 and yet you never heard of them. A reputable car manufacturer like Honda could be a complete novice when it comes to EVs and so on.
Even though software is extremely important for how cars work, we still don't have easy comparisons. It's mentioned in reviews/tests of cars, but it's mostly "Yeah it feels snappy and modern, 7/10" and no real meat in the comparison. I wish there was an WLTP comparison scheme for car software which made it easy to compare.
Looking at most modern cars, I'm of the view that most of them are so fully whacked with the enshittification stick, that it's pretty hard for them to get even more enshittified without risking sales to actual normies. A very normie person in my extended family decided against an MG because she could tell how bad the software was — an impressive feat of enshittedness.
Right now I don't need a new car, but if I did, it would be a Tesla for literally no reason other than their track record of delivering substantial software updates to existing customers for free, with no subscription requirement and none of the usual dealership nonsense or corporate shenanigans.
You can already do that now?
It’s actually much harder to “better” yourself when in jail than outside.
The conditions range from pretty bad to horrible. Of course if you go to jail in like Sweden it might not be so bad. But everywhere else hell naw
People in this thread seem to think that jail is something like vacation.
Idk, in my hometown, jail is seen by some as being preferable to winter village life. A few people commit petty crimes for the purpose of a 6 month lockup until spring (or at least this was the case 3 decades ago).
Could be that Alaska has (had) particularly great jails?
My M1 Air (16GB) is a rocket ship for absolutely anything I have thrown at it. Apple will have to work a lot harder making macOS inefficient before I feel the need to upgrade it.
I wonder if it’s less about price and more about supply chains. Are there enough manufacturing capacity to allow every laptop maker to secure enough supply?
In advance of the neo’s release, Apple probably invested billions in ensuring the supply chain was ready.
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