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> the alternative would be a corporation constantly providing -- for free -- updates and even support if your car gets into an accident or stuck. That's one al

> the alternative would be a corporation constantly providing -- for free -- updates and even support if your car gets into an accident or stuck. That's one alternative. Another alternative would be that you get what you get at purchase time, and you have to buy a new car to get the newest update. "Continuous development" isn't always a selling point when it's something with your life in its hands. A great example is Tesla. There are plenty of people who are thrilled with the continuous updates and changes to everything, and there are plenty of people that mock Tesla for it. Both groups are large markets that will have companies cater to them.

nradov 11mo ago
The consumers who mock Tesla (and other auto manufacturers) that deliver continuous updates are rapidly dying off or moving into assisted living facilities. They're not going to be buying many new cars in coming years. Pursuing that market segment seems like literally a "dead" end.
- hateselfdriving 11mo ago
  Funny, I have another 30-40 years before I'm "dying off or moving to assisted living". Yet, because I work in software engineering and cybersecurity, you'll have to rip my human-driven cars out of my dead hands before I ever use or own a self-driving vehicle. Don't get me wrong, as another commenter brought up, I hate traffic too, and the annual fatalities from vehicles are obviously a tragedy. Neither of them motivate me to sign away my rights and autonomy to auto manufacturers. What happens when these companies decide they suddenly don't like you, cancel your subscription, and suddenly you're not allowed to drive, or I suppose rather use, the vehicle you "own"? It will become the same "subscription to life" dystopian nightmare everything else is becoming. Or how about how these subscriptions will never be what the consumer actually wants? You'll be forced to pay for useless extra features, ever increasing prices, and planned obsolescence until they've squeezed maximum value out of every single person. I mean imagine trying to work with Comcast to get your "car subscription" sorted. You know else reduces traffic and fatalities? Allowing workers to actually work from home. Driving during COVID was a dream come true. Let's let the commercial real estate market fail as it was primed to.
  - bluGill 11mo ago
    Have you ever looked at how humans drive? Not the drunks, but the average person - they are terrible. You are not better. Self driving doesn't have to be very good to be better than humans.
    - hateselfdriving 11mo ago
      The _average_ person drives just fine. It's specifically the idiots who either should never have been allowed to pass a driver's test in the first place (i.e. lack the motor skills and/ or mental capacity) and the idiots who are so addicted to their phones they can't go 2 minutes without looking at it. I have a very hard time believing those are the majority or even average based on all my time driving. Which, these issues can be reduced if we stop giving people small slaps on the wrist for driving in ways that greatly endanger others. Hefty fines, temporary/ permanent driving bans, etc. Make people actually pause to consider their actions for once in their lives. Wow, an improvement we can start doing _today_, that doesn't involve forking over billions of dollars to tech companies to pump out half-baked "self-driving" capabilities. These companies' mission isn't to save lives, in case that's not obvious, it's to _make money_. They are not and have never been interested in potentially simpler/ better solutions if they don't lead to sucking the consumer dry of their money.
- margalabargala 11mo ago
  That's definitely the attitude I hear from the Tesla-can-do-no-wrong crowd, but in reality most of the people I meet in the Tesla-mocking crowd are under 40- younger on average than the other group. The non-Tesla manufacturers have noticed this and positioned products accordingly. Tesla does Musk-driven-development so only caters to the one group.
- dzhiurgis 11mo ago
  That's my impression too. You'd need to be 80 years old to be excited by a toyota.
  - hateselfdriving 11mo ago
    I'm 31 and I'm very excited by the '86 Chevy truck I just got. You know why? It's _not_ "smart". The smartest thing on it is the old-school AM/FM radio. There's no software updates, there's nothing (built-in) tracking my every move. It's just a simple, repairable truck, for, you know, _driving_. People have this strange obsession with over-complicating everything they possibly can.
    - dzhiurgis 11mo ago
      Car and house are usually most expensive persons purchases. It is absurd to not make them smart.
      - hateselfdriving 11mo ago
        Have you ever stopped to think _why_ cars specifically are so expensive? The manufacturers need to put on a fake show to the market and consumers and pretend they are innovating with new "features" every year. But in reality they stuff so many expensive, fragile, and difficult/ impossible to replace electronics and gadgets into cars because 1) every single piece in that car is marked up from the price they paid. The more (ideally expensive) components, the more they get to mark up as the middleman, the more they get to gouge the customer. 2) The more challenging it is to repair the car, the more likely you _must_ come back to the manufacturer (i.e. dealer) and pay them exorbitant fees to fix problems only they know how and have the parts to fix.
        mbg721 11mo ago
        I thought it was safety and environmental regulations, primarily. You have to have airbags, and now antilock brakes, and now rearview cameras, etc. If you were allowed to buy a new car built to the standard of the 1970s, it would be cheap.
- thfuran 11mo ago
  I know a lot of people who work on medical device software and think Teslas approach to updates is insane. A safety critical system simply should not have routine updates that affect UX or major performance characteristics.
- jerlam 11mo ago
  Tesla owners aren't that young. This site claims the average age of Tesla owners is 48 (updated for 2025): https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2018/11/tesla-owner-demographics/ https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2018/11/tesla-owner-demograph... Which should not be that surprising. Teslas were priced as premium vehicles initially, and then dropped as competitors appeared and to take advantage of tax credits. Teslas also benefit dramatically from owning a garage and adding a charger to it, which mostly homeowners can do. A homeowner buying an expensive car is very likely older and richer. Teslas aren't cool anymore, they are what your parents and your Uber driver has.
  - LightBug1 11mo ago
    >>Teslas aren't cool anymore, they are what your parents and your Uber driver has. Exactly.
LeoPanthera 11mo ago
> Another alternative would be that you get what you get at purchase time, and you have to buy a new car to get the newest update. The Mercedes-Benz model.
SecretDreams 11mo ago
> Another alternative would be that you get what you get at purchase time, and you have to buy a new car to get the newest update. We can always choose. The subscriptions aren't mandatory? And there's an alternative to the subscription where they offer it to you for a one time cost.
- malfist 11mo ago
  If the choice is offered. But with the way the markets are today, I wouldn't be surprised if we both paid at time of purchase, and then had to pay a subscription fee still. After all, heated seats are still installed and baked in to the MSRP, even if you're not subscribing to make them work.
whimsicalism 11mo ago
> Another alternative would be that you get what you get at purchase time, and you have to buy a new car to get the newest update. Doubt that is a politically tenable model. "You're telling me my son Bobby died in a crash that could have been prevented with finished software but they only roll it out to people who have the money for a new car despite no technical limitation?" -- yeah, good luck
- margalabargala 11mo ago
  I mean that's basically how every car with half-assed barely-functional auto lane keeping sold in the last 7 years has worked.
  - whimsicalism 11mo ago
    i think self-driving changes the calculus
    - margalabargala 11mo ago
      Relying on crappy lane keeping and crappy self driving are equally dangerous. If poor software drives you off the road, why does it matter what the feature was named?
      - whimsicalism 11mo ago
        I don't disagree on the practical level, but I think that optically it is significantly different.
      - ehsankia 11mo ago
        Anything before L4 is "driver assist", which means at the end of the day, the buck stops at the driver. Anything beyond L4, the car itself drives without requiring supervision, which makes a big difference. It's your responsibility to use lane assist in a reasonable way, it's not your responsibility to control how an L4 drives anymore. That's the point of self-driving, the "self" is responsible.
jdminhbg 11mo ago
> Both groups are large markets that will have companies cater to them. More likely, one group is a large market that companies will cater to and the other group is a small market that will be very loud about their displeasure on the internet.
- true_religion 11mo ago
  It's not as if every subscription works out for the company. Remember the heated seats subscriptions?
  - embedding-shape 11mo ago
    Like with Bethesda and paid-for game mods, the issue wasn't the functionality or the feature, but when it was introduced. Next time they do it, probably it'll blow over fast enough for them to just continue, rather than go back.
joquarky 11mo ago
I'm getting up there in age and I'm getting a bit tired of designers moving things around. It's taking longer to update my muscle memory each time. I still get pissed off at the Play Store app regularly for moving the search bar AND not focusing keyboard input on it when I click the search icon.

nradov 11mo ago

The consumers who mock Tesla (and other auto manufacturers) that deliver continuous updates are rapidly dying off or moving into assisted living facilities. They're not going to be buying many new cars in coming years. Pursuing that market segment seems like literally a "dead" end.

hateselfdriving 11mo ago
Funny, I have another 30-40 years before I'm "dying off or moving to assisted living". Yet, because I work in software engineering and cybersecurity, you'll have to rip my human-driven cars out of my dead hands before I ever use or own a self-driving vehicle. Don't get me wrong, as another commenter brought up, I hate traffic too, and the annual fatalities from vehicles are obviously a tragedy. Neither of them motivate me to sign away my rights and autonomy to auto manufacturers. What happens when these companies decide they suddenly don't like you, cancel your subscription, and suddenly you're not allowed to drive, or I suppose rather use, the vehicle you "own"? It will become the same "subscription to life" dystopian nightmare everything else is becoming. Or how about how these subscriptions will never be what the consumer actually wants? You'll be forced to pay for useless extra features, ever increasing prices, and planned obsolescence until they've squeezed maximum value out of every single person. I mean imagine trying to work with Comcast to get your "car subscription" sorted. You know else reduces traffic and fatalities? Allowing workers to actually work from home. Driving during COVID was a dream come true. Let's let the commercial real estate market fail as it was primed to.
- bluGill 11mo ago
  Have you ever looked at how humans drive? Not the drunks, but the average person - they are terrible. You are not better. Self driving doesn't have to be very good to be better than humans.
  - hateselfdriving 11mo ago
    The _average_ person drives just fine. It's specifically the idiots who either should never have been allowed to pass a driver's test in the first place (i.e. lack the motor skills and/ or mental capacity) and the idiots who are so addicted to their phones they can't go 2 minutes without looking at it. I have a very hard time believing those are the majority or even average based on all my time driving. Which, these issues can be reduced if we stop giving people small slaps on the wrist for driving in ways that greatly endanger others. Hefty fines, temporary/ permanent driving bans, etc. Make people actually pause to consider their actions for once in their lives. Wow, an improvement we can start doing _today_, that doesn't involve forking over billions of dollars to tech companies to pump out half-baked "self-driving" capabilities. These companies' mission isn't to save lives, in case that's not obvious, it's to _make money_. They are not and have never been interested in potentially simpler/ better solutions if they don't lead to sucking the consumer dry of their money.
margalabargala 11mo ago
That's definitely the attitude I hear from the Tesla-can-do-no-wrong crowd, but in reality most of the people I meet in the Tesla-mocking crowd are under 40- younger on average than the other group. The non-Tesla manufacturers have noticed this and positioned products accordingly. Tesla does Musk-driven-development so only caters to the one group.
dzhiurgis 11mo ago
That's my impression too. You'd need to be 80 years old to be excited by a toyota.
- hateselfdriving 11mo ago
  I'm 31 and I'm very excited by the '86 Chevy truck I just got. You know why? It's _not_ "smart". The smartest thing on it is the old-school AM/FM radio. There's no software updates, there's nothing (built-in) tracking my every move. It's just a simple, repairable truck, for, you know, _driving_. People have this strange obsession with over-complicating everything they possibly can.
  - dzhiurgis 11mo ago
    Car and house are usually most expensive persons purchases. It is absurd to not make them smart.
    - hateselfdriving 11mo ago
      Have you ever stopped to think _why_ cars specifically are so expensive? The manufacturers need to put on a fake show to the market and consumers and pretend they are innovating with new "features" every year. But in reality they stuff so many expensive, fragile, and difficult/ impossible to replace electronics and gadgets into cars because 1) every single piece in that car is marked up from the price they paid. The more (ideally expensive) components, the more they get to mark up as the middleman, the more they get to gouge the customer. 2) The more challenging it is to repair the car, the more likely you _must_ come back to the manufacturer (i.e. dealer) and pay them exorbitant fees to fix problems only they know how and have the parts to fix.
      - mbg721 11mo ago
        I thought it was safety and environmental regulations, primarily. You have to have airbags, and now antilock brakes, and now rearview cameras, etc. If you were allowed to buy a new car built to the standard of the 1970s, it would be cheap.
thfuran 11mo ago
I know a lot of people who work on medical device software and think Teslas approach to updates is insane. A safety critical system simply should not have routine updates that affect UX or major performance characteristics.
jerlam 11mo ago
Tesla owners aren't that young. This site claims the average age of Tesla owners is 48 (updated for 2025): https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2018/11/tesla-owner-demographics/ https://hedgescompany.com/blog/2018/11/tesla-owner-demograph... Which should not be that surprising. Teslas were priced as premium vehicles initially, and then dropped as competitors appeared and to take advantage of tax credits. Teslas also benefit dramatically from owning a garage and adding a charger to it, which mostly homeowners can do. A homeowner buying an expensive car is very likely older and richer. Teslas aren't cool anymore, they are what your parents and your Uber driver has.
- LightBug1 11mo ago
  >>Teslas aren't cool anymore, they are what your parents and your Uber driver has. Exactly.

LeoPanthera 11mo ago

> Another alternative would be that you get what you get at purchase time, and you have to buy a new car to get the newest update. The Mercedes-Benz model.

SecretDreams 11mo ago

> Another alternative would be that you get what you get at purchase time, and you have to buy a new car to get the newest update. We can always choose. The subscriptions aren't mandatory? And there's an alternative to the subscription where they offer it to you for a one time cost.

malfist 11mo ago
If the choice is offered. But with the way the markets are today, I wouldn't be surprised if we both paid at time of purchase, and then had to pay a subscription fee still. After all, heated seats are still installed and baked in to the MSRP, even if you're not subscribing to make them work.

whimsicalism 11mo ago

> Another alternative would be that you get what you get at purchase time, and you have to buy a new car to get the newest update. Doubt that is a politically tenable model. "You're telling me my son Bobby died in a crash that could have been prevented with finished software but they only roll it out to people who have the money for a new car despite no technical limitation?" -- yeah, good luck

margalabargala 11mo ago
I mean that's basically how every car with half-assed barely-functional auto lane keeping sold in the last 7 years has worked.
- whimsicalism 11mo ago
  i think self-driving changes the calculus
  - margalabargala 11mo ago
    Relying on crappy lane keeping and crappy self driving are equally dangerous. If poor software drives you off the road, why does it matter what the feature was named?
    - whimsicalism 11mo ago
      I don't disagree on the practical level, but I think that optically it is significantly different.
    - ehsankia 11mo ago
      Anything before L4 is "driver assist", which means at the end of the day, the buck stops at the driver. Anything beyond L4, the car itself drives without requiring supervision, which makes a big difference. It's your responsibility to use lane assist in a reasonable way, it's not your responsibility to control how an L4 drives anymore. That's the point of self-driving, the "self" is responsible.

jdminhbg 11mo ago

> Both groups are large markets that will have companies cater to them. More likely, one group is a large market that companies will cater to and the other group is a small market that will be very loud about their displeasure on the internet.

true_religion 11mo ago
It's not as if every subscription works out for the company. Remember the heated seats subscriptions?
- embedding-shape 11mo ago
  Like with Bethesda and paid-for game mods, the issue wasn't the functionality or the feature, but when it was introduced. Next time they do it, probably it'll blow over fast enough for them to just continue, rather than go back.

joquarky 11mo ago

I'm getting up there in age and I'm getting a bit tired of designers moving things around. It's taking longer to update my muscle memory each time. I still get pissed off at the Play Store app regularly for moving the search bar AND not focusing keyboard input on it when I click the search icon.