Two things really struck me here. First, the comments about USB - I can fully understand them. USB has been repeatedly shown to be an insecure medium (pretty m

Two things really struck me here. First, the comments about USB - I can fully understand them. USB has been repeatedly shown to be an insecure medium (pretty much by design, it relies on the device being honest about its intentions) and Tesla is probably justified in not exposing a USB port to the customer. At the same time, it's been proven that Tesla's infotainment (eugh, I hate that word!) system runs Ubuntu, so they should really be publishing the source code for it anyway. Second, if this very large download is really a problem that even service centres can't offer it without affecting their own operational bandwidth, why not install a caching proxy in each service centre? Hardly expensive hardware, an RPi with a USB disk would be enough, then the connected cars can download from the cache instead of straight from Tesla each time? Multiple cars in parallel would not be a problem. As a side note, yes, pushing large downloads over cellular connections are expensive. It suits the carriers to have this model; in the UK, when smartphones first came out, unlimited-data plans were common, but very quickly vanished from the market when the carriers realised how many people would take the offer literally. Even now, the carrier I'm on offers unlimited data on the phone, but has a cap on tethering (it's Android, so I have no idea how it's detectable, but...). Compared to the likes of Apple, who have uncountable millions of devices and could easily lean on carriers to make OTA OS updates free, Tesla are comparatively small fries with less than a million cars on the road. They're mostly propped up by investor funding at the moment and are not even turning a profit (last I heard) yet. Not a good position to be arguing with carriers from. And if Tesla are complaining about their own bandwidth distributing these large updates, they obviously need to talk to someone like Akamai and get their updates onto a CDN.