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Cars have had computers for decades now. Before the age of OTA updates, whenever one of those computers had a problem, a recall was issued and you needed to phy

Cars have had computers for decades now. Before the age of OTA updates, whenever one of those computers had a problem, a recall was issued and you needed to physically take the car to a dealer, probably pay some kind of service fee, and have them plug something into a hidden slot somewhere to flash an update. Other times they'd just swap out the physical computer (call it a "part") and throw out the buggy one. I don't like the modern 'car OS as a service' system where every month or so defects need to be fixed for some reason, but OTA is a hell of a lot better than the system before software updates became available to consumers.

mrbadguy 2y ago
That’s simply untrue. The old way was definitely better because, with OTA, the manufacturers will succumb to the usual web-software bullshit of “we don’t have to sell them something that actually works now, we’ll just push the update later”. I mean, it’s a car, I can easily take it to a garage and do so for anything else that might be wrong (if I can’t fix it myself) so I don’t see the problem in doing so for software patches. OTA doesn’t solve many issues for me but it sure as hell will create new ones.