No thank you. Not sure why the author frames this as a good thing. They've been bamboozled by the automakers and have got it backwards - you're buying a vehicle that already has the capabilities, but are disabled, then paying rent (or a fee) to turn them on. I'm much more likely to buy from a manufacturer that doesn't play these games.
For this reason, I always avoid cars with big flashy LCD screens that are central to controlling the cars accessories like sunroof, AC and other electricals.
The other issue is support. So many models stop getting updates after 5 years. So, if there is a bug in that big screen, you have to live with it for the rest of the car's life.
Finally, there's the issue of privacy. Most manufacturers contract with analytics vendors to send your data back to them. You can't even turn it off. For example, MG (now chinese owned) has Adobe analytics embedded into their big screens. The only reason chinese love using Adobe over other vendors is because they aren't blocked in China. So that's usually a dead giveaway that your data is being sent back there.
What kind of data? You will be surprised.
1. How many people are inside the car at a given point (measuring laden weight)
2. What are your favorite spots (your home, office, restaurants, etc)
3. How many people live in your family (average laden weight over time)
4. Your favorite routes, highways
5. If you are married/have kids
6. If you're having an affair
7. Your annual income, monthly spend, estimated net worth
And a lot more data points that I can list here. Remember, they have access to additional data brokers to stitch a complete user profile about you too.
This is very much not what "software-defined vehicle" means which itself is very much not the same thing as EVs. It's possible to criticize the explotative business practices you mentioned (or bad UI practices like moving everything to a touchscreen instead of physical buttons) without linking them to other issues that have no real relation beyond falling under the general category of "technology".
At a societal level, EVs are generally better than ICE cars. At a societal level, cars that can automatically fix a "recall" with an over-the-air update are generally better than recalls that will wait to get fixed until an owner schedules an appointment to have the car serviced. These two things can be true without endorsing automakers who charge and extra fee to activate the seat warmers that already exist in the vehicle.
There’s an argument to be made that this allows better integration between subsystems, and therefore a better user experience.
We have a vehicle built this way. It is a death trap. Most of its safety issues can’t really be blamed on it using a new computer network technology. For instance, if it is dawn or dusk (so, commute hours) the vision systems get flaky and it likes to override steering and brakes to force itself into oncoming or merging traffic.
However, one issue is firmly due to it being a software defined vehicle.
If you are changing lanes with the turn signal on, and hit a bump while the passenger adjusts the stereo volume, they’ll accidentally turn the hazard lights on. Af that point the steering override will kick in and try to force abort the lane change.
A normal car wouldn’t be able to wire the hazards into the power steering subsystem, and also probably wouldn’t have the button be part of the radio control panel.
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.
Why honda is killing EVs is directly related to just how damn cheap Chinese EVs have become and how stupid Americans are when it comes to EV efficiency. Who the hell wants large vehicles for EV when the best solutions are small efficient vehicles with long drive times.
Americans distort the market and margins, and Honda was never in the large SUV game.
This is a terrible idea, and that's why I have mixed feelings about the robo taxi. On one hand, it's a great resource-sharing tech. On the other hand, all of the above.
Who cares, because they are now connected to the internet and can be updated with links at effective speeds higher than 10kbps, and without having to go to the dealer.
Honda is going to get kickbacks by the EV industry to be more expensive.
I love the new BMWs. Their software is shit tho.
Ongoing subscriptions for access to physical hardware features like seat warmers* seems obnoxious at first glance, but a fee is more reasonable and you might find that there aren’t many auto makers that don’t do this or aren’t planning on it. BTW there’s very little in software or electronics that doesn’t do this, and many other consumer products do too. What might be less visible is how often the hardware is included and made trivial for a dealer to upgrade but doesn’t have a remote software unlock. It’s the same thing and it’s been happening for decades, but gets less outrage.
You would have paid a fee for the feature if it wasn’t included. Focusing on features being there already and locked being somehow “bamboozles” isn’t necessarily the right way to frame this, even from a pro-consumer perspective. This practice of building the high end model and locking some features behind a paywall makes the design and manufacturing cheaper for everyone by having only one design. The paywall model suggests that the design costs are more important than the manufacturing or materials costs of these features. That’s absolutely true for software apps, and it’s accepted by and large and we don’t feel like that’s a skeezy game. It doesn’t surprise me at all that with manufacturing at a global scale, it makes more sense to build one model and lock some features with software.
Do think of the potential benefits we get from this model - overall lower prices (in theory) from simplified design and manufacturing; the ability to upgrade later after you buy (or even downgrade if you don’t like it and it’s a subscription).
* AFAIK the BMW seat warmers subscription was a rumor at one point, got a bunch of online uproar, but didn’t actually happen? I’m not sure if anyone has actually done this.
The air is clean. For sure some of this is because it's a coastal city and has fresh sea breezes, but I've been in other Chinese coastal cities in times past and the air was significantly less clean.
There are social upsides for an almost-all-EV city.
This is an 18m person city. It's not exclusively wealthy people, its just a city with a very high local EV population and it shows.
The most noticable change which puzzled me where those big boxes with slots in all restaurants and grocery shops, which are rental powerbanks.
Other than these hardly anything changed, policemen in police station smoked right under no smoking sign and in that half an hour in their office I inhaled more secondary smoke than in years in Europe combined. To their credit they were as laid back as policemen in my small home town. Beijing province border checks are more strict, but they still let us go without registered accommodation on weekend.
Oh yeah, out of dozens restaurants we frequented ONE fancy hot pot restaurant had robot bringing over plates.
Plus Taobao/Tmall seems replaced now with Pinduoduo with super cheap purchases (think double the Alibaba/factory price) including free shipping.
Mutianyu great wall is now fully mainstream, everyone (99%) now use cable car instead of hiking uphill, before it felt at least 50:50, people got lazy.
Ah yeah, everywhere you go you need to present passport and sometimes also book ticket in advance, so from tourist standpoint it's worse, before you could just show up same visit major sights in Beijing even without passport.
Dutch city centres can be really crowded and yet actually quiet, because there are practically no cars. It's probably not Shenzen-level crowded, but I'd bet that the number of people that are being transported at busy locations isn't too far behind.
(As popular slogan is "cities aren't noisy, cars are noisy".)
True enough, the last time I have been in HK I was surprised to see less smog and overall less pollution.
Do the local mockingbirds sing the song of the car alarm? That one is pretty complex.
Shenzhen is not nearly "almost-all EV" city. There is a lot of wealthy people and almost none of them drives EV. You can see all expensive cars are ICE (blue plates).
Modern ICE cars emit almost no sound or emissions. Its not 70s with black smoke coming from exhaust pipes.
You can take any densely populated city with almost none EV vehicles (say Tokyo) and you can hear birds and air would be very clean.
The heavier EV's are causing genuinely harmful particles simply by driving on the roads themselves.
ICE cars have been planned out for years now, and something like 96% of all new cars in Norway were EV last year.
Basically, if you plan on keeping selling ICE cars, you're removing yourself from the market here. There's no future for new personal ICE cars here.
I figure most other countries will be the same.
It is the top EV market.
> I figure most other countries will be the same.
Most other countries are not Norway, it is a very wealthy, tiny market (150 K vehicles/year) with lots of hydro and not representative of the typical vehicle market in Western Europe and definitely not representative of the situation in the rest of the world.
EVs are the future, there is no doubt about that. But that future will not arrive everywhere at the same point in time and Norway is very far ahead of the rest of the world due to a fairly unique set of circumstances: exporting your own oil and gas to be able to have a 'clean' (and up to recently heavily subsidized) transportation network is in a way just a gigantic bookkeeping trick.
Of course something to note is the absolute number of cars sold, which has dropped dramatically at least here in Finland. Most people who are priced out of new EV market simply don't buy any new car at all, and the average age of cars is climbing fast. Either way, few people are looking for new ICE vehicles. No point buying outdated tech new, when the used car market has perfectly good ICE vehicles that perform just the same.
Perhaps that's why we never hear about Norwegian car culture (as opposed to Germany and the US). Ferdinand Porsche would have resigned to building apple carts.
Growing up in America I have memories of our roadside snowbanks becoming black and saturated by vehicle exhaust and it always felt so gross to me. The back half of winter was characterized by blackened, salt-saturated puddles and banks. I wonder if the prevalence of EVs has made things less dirty in the winter.
https://www.electrive.com/2025/01/09/norway-the-number-of-ne...
Tesla can fund the project of making EV chargers ubiquitous in the US and make it make sense within the context of a profitable business plan.
Chinese manufacturers can similarly make it make sense financially.
Japanese auto makers who are heavily subsidized by the Japanese government can't easily fund the infrastructure project of making EV chargers ubiquitous in a foreign country like the US or EU and their home market is much smaller.
I doubt EV would take any significant share if that would be the case.
Thats of course because people wanna go green and certainly has nothing to do with the 25% VAT exemption that ICE cars are subject to.
I would also say that any ICE vehicle that has 0 subscription models, upgradable firmware, tracking software will probably have a value premium to it in the not distant future.
FWIW downvoters - I have a PHEV - but I live in the real world and a likely future!
> I figure most other countries will be the same.
I figure you're wrong on that one.
A country that is bigger than half Spain with 10 times less population with one of the lowest electrify prices of the entire world(5-8 dollars MWh) because of huge hydro resources.
A country with huge capital reserves precisely because of oil resources.
I'll pay triple for a non software defined vehicle that doesn't track me and can't be touched by the dealer once I purchase it. My one SDV (Tesla) is still on FSD from 2023 because the newer versions are terrible judging from the comments on the Tesla forums.
I bought a perfectly fine macbook pro m1 in 2020. It has been made far, far worse, slower, bloated and less responsive by apple. I see nothing improved, everything significantly degraded. It used to be that I could airplay to our tv with a single mouse click, now it seems to work once every 5 attempts, and takes about a minute. It used to be near instantaneous.
I bought a top of the line philips oled tv in 2020. I think I paid 4k for it. It has been made slower, bloated, less responsive by google and philips (or whatever company makes those tvs branded by philips).
I buy a top of the line iphone every 2-3 years, and it gets worse.
I bought a SONOS soundbar a few years ago. It used to work fine and produce nice sound. Now if I start my tv, and don't play anything for a few minutes it goes to sleep, and I need to restart my tv to get the sound to play.
Blocking updates on anything newly purchased seems like the best option. Not buying anything from those absolute crap companies seems like the second best option, but its hard to find alternatives.
But you didn't? So... you wouldn't really?
I don't mean to be too cute but I think it's worth taking the sting out of your words a bit. Maybe you would prefer a different choice for your next car, but that's a far less dramatic way of putting it.
I've had FSD since 2020; the latest version is noticeably better than 2020. I wouldn't put too much stock in forums which tend to skew negative.
However I don't think Tesla's SFD is inevitable, or any other carmakers; for all I know, they're so bad they shouldn't be sold. It's early days. This or that brand might go out of business. But within 100 years, self-driving will conquer the world.
I hate that expression. It's software-limited, not defined.
300k subscribers that pay $100 per month must be..? Imaginary? Wrong?
That, and Japan is deeply screwed if they go all-in on EVs and then China decides they shouldn't be allowed access to any more rare earths.
This is a common misunderstanding. There are plenty of alternative locations to mine rare earth minerals, particularly Australia. China cornered the market because it's a high pollution low margin business. If geopolitical concerns cut off access to Chinese sources, alternatives will be developed.
Ford: It recorded a loss of $1.2 billion in EBIT in the third quarter on its EVs, bringing its losses on the segment for the first three quarters of 2024 to $3.7 billion
Honda: Honda to Write Off $15.7 Billion as EV Winter Arrives.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ford-r...
https://www.barrons.com/articles/gm-stock-general-motors-inv...
https://www.barrons.com/articles/honda-to-write-off-15-7-bil...
For what it's worth, this theory is blown up by hydrogen based vehicles, which Japan has gone heavily in on. Yes, slightly more parts than an EV, but not a ton. And the drivetrain is electric.
They're just more expensive, but not even that much.
EVs have lots of the same parts as an ICEV - the differences are engine and power systems, fuel tank, transmission... Most of the car is still there. There is a lot of churn - lead-acid is out, fuel injection, sensors are different and sense different things, and so on, but it's still a car.
https://www.economist.com/asia/2025/12/04/lessons-from-japan...
I don't see the OP article call the Prologue "Honda's EV"? Instead, the OP article explicitly says the Prologue was both "designed and entirely built by GM."
That's separate from where the OP article first states that Honda killed three other specific models "that were the company’s first ground-up EVs".
Can you elaborate on this? I'd love to have a cheap small truck like they used to make, but CAFE largely killed those.
Over 25% of vehicles sold world-wide were electric in 2025, and that percentage is steadily increasing. So VW & Ford were "too hot", Honda is looking like "too cold" and Toyota might be the "just right" of the three bears.
The biggest issue I think every auto maker needs to solve is cost. The average car payment is insane, with dealership markups it's even worst than it would be otherwise. I'm not sure how we got here on that, to me car interiors are no nicer than they were from 2005ish on. I don't even know what the cost is going into.
The adoption curve hasn't been nearly as steep as predicted, and the political landscape is unstable. Other manufacturers are also pulling back on their EV investments.
I'm not saying Honda isn't overdoing it, but a retreat from EVs isn't surprising.
Car company execs need to take a chill pill followed by a reality serum. Monetizing subscription based basic features and delivering in-car advertising is the absolutely worst way to go.
As consumers we need to stop buying into the bells, whistles and trinkets and demand essential and safe transportation.
Independently, I had to take my car into the dealer to get a safety critical recall installed via Ethernet that affected a braking system in certain edge cases and this was not installable OTA “in the night”.
While, yes, I am annoyed that the dealer price for my “infotainment” unit is $2k and reflects the technical specs of a 2016 mid tier android tablet running Intel cores; I do feel that vehicle is far safer with its airbags, 360 camera, lane keeping, and AEB on net than my 1970’s classic.
The used car market has, in many ways, usurped what used to be the role of the basic car used to be.
As a result, you see fewer and fewer new cars sold, and automakers have to more intensively monetize the cars they have. They must create ever-increasing returns to shareholders.
Or assume you have to provide a current model iPad or android tablet to run their software. That would keep the hardware functional if they kept the software working.
And I don’t trust the vendors to try to drive resale by eol’ing the logic/software. They’ll drive everybody to leases to avoid this and battery life concerns.
they dominated in the era of small engines.
with EVs - the Chinese have run away with the stick & sadly no one is catching up.
I wish the Japanese made good EVs - Germans are the only ones besides the Chinese making decent EVs
That's not nearly the case. They have made one of best EVs back in years, but decided to focus on hybrids. And that makes total sense.
Guess which three items out of that list I do not want.
Just look at Nissan, which is broke as a joke, but they still put a new Leaf model on the market.
Lately there’s been a vibe that the EV experiment has died off, but that really isn’t true looking at industry reporting.
There is stalling that seems related to subsidy expiration and/or scale back, but we could argue that subsidies expiring is happening because the subsidies aren’t needed to sell vehicles anymore.
20% of new vehicles sold globally are EVs. Critical mass has been achieved, and not just in China (20% of vehicles sold in Europe are EVs).
This is also an admission that Honda is just giving up on Acura completely. That $50k two row luxury SUV buyer that is such an industry staple buyer for the US auto industry is going to be buying Rivian R2s instead of an EV Acura MDX.
The oil industry spends a lot of money on astroturf.
As the buggy-makers failed to transition to making cars, and thus ceased to be, so too will automakers fail to transition to EVs, and thus end their viability as vehicle manufacturers.
The week I spent renting an EV (an Ioniq 5, so not even a high-end one) convinced me. Enjoyable to drive. Having to figure out where/how to charge it was sufficient to chase away the fears around that.
Agreed. It is exceptionally rare for a consumer to purchase one EV and then buy ICE as their next vehicle. I have owned EVs for more than 10 years. There is no going back.
The moment you do this things will stop working: for example phone app, but your car will be more or less unshittified.
And yes, there should probably be a law that makes this easier for the consumer to do for example mandating a plastic hatch or something.
But connected cars are not the end of the world and if we normalise disconnecting cars (make an online list or something of cars that are confirmed to work fine afterwards) then we’ve basically solved the issue. Remember, EVs are not the problem, and this kind of stuff will be mainstream/common knowledge once adoption rates are higher.
Probably untrue with Tesla. I have mine integrated via BLE to home assistant for solar charging. App works via BLE using same protocol.
Your biggest struggle would be avoiding to update the native app, but I guess nothing is stopping you from developing your own implementation.
Eg. I need to move 6 people and significant gear (skiing, camping, biking etc) long remote distances.
There is no EV that can do that really. And the ones that come close are easily $20-30k higher than an Odyssey. Plus the durability of large EVs is far from proven while the 300k mile club of Odyssey owners is large.
I need Suburban/Minivan functionality out of a proven OEM at a competitive price point. (I also need to see my friends with Rivians etc not having to schedule their vacation around charger availability. Have seen this waste hours and hours of time)
Congratulate yourself on visiting nature while simultaneously messing it up. And enjoy the fuel prices.
So can a $300 dollar iPad. Large EV scale batteries are needed to feed powerful computers? What are they on about?
The way we use the van, 90% of our drives are under 20 miles round trip. The rest are longer road trips. I've been waiting eight years for Honda to make an electric or even a plug-in hybrid where the gas motor just charge the battery.
It would be perfect for my family. I guess that's not happening now.
They're still going with their hybrids of course.
I have a Honda Hybrid CR-V and love the drivetrain. We're waiting until Honda moves that drivetrain into the Odyssey (which is the van we want... probably what you have, hah)
Ugh that sucks
> [...] and software-defined vehicles.
Take my money! I'll suffer with gas for that.
Charging in the US (other than at home) is still the biggest issue for me. I do lots of traveling, and waiting 30-45 minutes to charge even at a Level 3 charger is a PITA. If I had a J std charger, then it's even longer. This makes my monthly 8 hour trips one-way another 2 hours - this sucks. Sorry - I'll keep my 2005 Honda Element with 445K miles. Another engine would be cheaper than less than a year of car payments. And it's pretty much indestructible.
There’s other good roadtrip friendly options out there too, but ya with monthly drives like that you’re really limiting your options and ICE cars still make a lot of sense
The Honda Insight went on sale in 1999. They were 2 years behind Toyota's Prius but at least 5 years ahead of everybody else.
PHEVs with 50 miles of range would effectively make almost all day-to-day driving electrified, at least in "consumer" transportation, wouldn't require special recharging equipment beyond a 110V outlet, removes range anxiety, would alleviate urban air pollution.
Of course nothing will be done in this administration. But to the point of the article, oil and transportation dependence, even with extensive shale oil production, remains a national security risk that PHEVs and alt energy can mitigate.
I don't know, this actually sounds like a really good strategy. Jaguar, Ford, Porsche and others have spent a lot of money (and arguably brand capital) trying to get in early and developing EVs with too many trade-offs and limitations. Why not wait until you can develop a _really good_ 500-mile-plus, reliable, daily driver EV, if you feel you can get away with waiting?
And most users surely don't care about the whole software-defined-vehicle thing.
I don't have charging capability at my apartment or work. On occasion, I do 300 mile trips (adirondacks/nyc). Skeptical of winter performance. I have no interest in "frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems". Frankly, no spare tire is a no starter for me also.
The real Mad Max will be roaming the apocalyptic wasteland in a Kia EV5.
Like the Ukraine war, maybe one good thing thing we can say about this terrible situation is that it may encourage a lot of countries to move to renewables (or nuclear) sooner than they otherwise would and cut back on fossil fuels.
The energy crises of the 1970s caused people to start caring a lot more about fuel economy. Now we have the technology for people not to need to buy gas to propel their vehicle at all, and many of them once they switch they're never switching back.
Better hope your vehicle is never damaged.
The breakeven for this is so bad that it's only worth it for the gullible "wow" factor from the general public asking about it.
Maybe we aren’t there yet. The Model 3 and Y are probably still too expensive without incentives.
Maybe. But here's the thing... most cars today feel completely lifeless.
Honda knows how to build an engine and wrap it in a car that actually makes you feel something. That still matters.
Anyone here driven an S2000?
It's still the best car I've ever owned. Light, raw, grippy, and genuinely fun -- every drive felt like an event, not just transportation. (And it was still an affordable car!)
They killed it around 2010. I've never found anything that captures that same feeling since, at any price point.
So yeah -- Honda will always have a place in my heart. When they want to, they build something truly special.
Here's one of their marketing films they can use to find inspiration again.
* Failure: The Secret to Success - A Honda Documentary - YouTube // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOVig5H7UbM
Also, please ignore these announcements. CEOs are trend-following children and their declarations of future behavior should be heavily discounted. Honda will follow the market, as will all the other automakers. This is all sturm and drang. When an automaker says "We will transition to all EV by 2030" then ignore them. When an automaker says "We will not sell any EVs" then ignore them. It's like a child saying "I will grow up to be an astronaut". Just pat them on the head and go about your day.
Focus on what they are bringing to market at any point in time, everything else is foolish talk.
The article loses its credibility once it imagines a multi-billion, multi-country company executives thinking this way :).
> For the fiscal year ended March 31, 2025 (FY2025), motorcycles accounted for about 17% of total revenue, while cars made up around 65%.
I wonder what the plan is for motorcycles, where in much of Asia cars aren't really viable and there are no real competitors to Honda engine bikes.
I watched the reviews on YouTube, and they're all quite favorable.
If this is a global direction, it sounds suicidal.
The last 5 years just don't show it. The EV market is still small and infrastructure missing in most of the world.
Toyota played it safe and made bank when everybody was saying they were doomed.
German automakers went hard on EVs. VW group sold 1 million fully electric vehicles in 2025, they will probably overtake Tesla in a couple of years for the biggest non-Chinese EV automaker by sales, but is it paying off financially?
At the same time german premium brands have a very hard time differentiating when Chinese cars offer similar quality at half the price even after tariffs.
EV sales keep on growing world wide by juicy double digit percentages. Some markets less than others of course but the net effect is that all that legacy business keeps on shrinking because all that EV growth is at the cost of that legacy business.
The main issue with Honda and other Japanese manufacturers is that they are hopelessly dependent on Chinese suppliers to ship any EVs at this point. They've dragged their heels on doing their own tech and at this point while they might have some promising things in their labs, they lack supply chains and factories to mass produce any of it by themselves. That's going to take many years to turn around. Without guarantees that they'll be able to match the Chinese on cost. And the EU, Koreans, Chinese, and even US companies like GM are picking up the slack and growing EV sales at their cost.
Toyota seems to finally be producing a lot of EVs now to counter that. They've been catching up fast in the last year or so. But most of these EVs come with a lot of Chinese tech inside. Their alternative was to cede that market to competitors. Which seems to be what Honda is doing. I don't think that will end well for them.
China is already selling EVs to countries that haven’t even had many cars before, like Nepal. Is 75% of the world car market just going to be there’s because western auto manufacturers overfixated on their own very mature car markets?
Take VW: in 2020 they were by far the biggest automaker in China with ~16% market share. In 2023 they had fallen to number two at ~10% behind BYD. But now that they are starting to have competetive BEVs in their lineup they are tied for first place in the market at ~13% market share.
Of course, I drive a Honda that I will be buried in. So I may be biased.
The person I know who loves FSD has soured on updates since the last one changed how the car handles simple things like intersections, and it's added a lot more stress.
Cars should be appliances, boring and reliable, not something to amaze and delight you. Especially since the latter usually changes into "sell ads and your personal information".
Sadly, this view is considered antiquated and anti-technology by a younger generation of people who think what we see in sci-fi shows should be reality (good or bad). And if you don't get that vision then you're some dumb luddite who should be banished from society.
What's kind of remarkable is the onslaught of vehicles, many EV, which have critical functionality issues that are being ignored, but they have WiFi + hotspot on board! And if you want to do basic things with your own vehicle, like get the climate control ready before you leave on a trip you now need an app, a smartphone, and Internet connection and a subscription...to do things that could easily be done via some local BLE or WiFi connection.
I see a lot of car companies rush to make "immersive" driving experiences while neglecting the basics. The Ioniq 5 / EV6 have ICCU issues that are not addressed which can leave the car stranded and the replacement parts have the same mysterious failure modes, the Jaguar I-Pace had numerous failures including a UI that would lag for basic things like changing air conditioning settings, the last generation Leaf (just prior to the current re-design) has battery issues that have forced people to do lemon-law buy backs, the Ford Mach E has a Tesla-style iPad center display that can't be turned off at night so it's a distraction (among other issues with the poor concept), but it has OTA so awesome!
Absolutely, the sooner the better. The truth is, auto companies can track you, show you ads, and otherwise jerk you around without going all the way to having a "software defined vehicle." You just get a worse user experience.
Agree, but then how do you get people to change them?
My driving experience/controls has not changed since I bought it 18 months ago. They added an option for Grok which I don’t use, and the FSD is much better now. And enabled adaptive headlights.
>The person I know who loves FSD has soured on updates since the last one changed how the car handles simple things like intersections, and it's added a lot more stress.
The most recent FSD update made me recommend a model 3 or Y to my parents.
Even today my wife left her phone on the charge pad and the car beeped as we walked away to alert us - a feature that didn’t exist when we first got it.
Enshittification may come, but maybe there will be an Apple-like benevolent dictator that keeps it mostly clean.
Edit: I should say that I will never trust any “self-driving” at all based on cameras alone. It can’t even do Autopilot without me intervening on most trips.
But my guess is maybe Honda will wait for Tesla or another US based auto company with EVs to fail and buy that company. Seems that is how large companies do "innovation" these days.
That does not bode well for German car makers either I'm afraid. Take BMW for instance: they started off with two "pure" EV models, the i3 (a compact car) and the i8 (a sports car). Both of them promising, but neither a particular bestseller. So they switched to offering electric drive as an alternative to IC engines in several (most?) "regular" models. But I agree with TechCrunch that this is more of a cop-out than a winning strategy...
> Consumers, mostly those who buy EVs from the likes of Tesla, Rivian, and BYD, have grown accustomed to the frequent updates, slick infotainment software, and advanced driver-assistance systems. Honda has yet to make significant progress in any of those domains.
Here's an idea: what about making an EV free from this enshittification? One where you can decide yourself when to install an update, like in the "olden days" a few years ago? One that doesn't pretend to have an "autopilot" which isn't really one? I think there would be a market for such an EV.
I don't want anything of the sort as a consumer, so auto makers who don't "get" it either are fine by me. Nay, heroes.
Even the point about running computers when the car is off seems wildly uninformed: a 12 V starter battery in an ICE car is about 70 Ah. That’s 840 Wh. So you can run a 5 W computer (that does nothing but periodically wake up to look for and download updates and such) for 168 hours. (Of course, any competent implementation will not let electronics run the battery flat, but it still seems like way more than enough)
"Grown accustomed to" is a funny way of saying "begrudgingly put up with because the alternative is buying a new car, but really they would rather not have to deal with that crap at all."
The writing is on the wall. ICE vehicles sales are declining worldwide. The direction is very clear to anybody paying attention.
Once people realize that, then the game is over. Honda is just forecasting the future more accurately than other automakers.
There likely isn’t data for anything beyond 12-15 years but I’m not sure that’ll matter given most people own cars ~7-8 years.
Once people realize they're literally burning the expensive gas they put in their vehicle, the game is over.
Also, gas is a limited resource which after you burn never ever comes back, so it is expected to get more expensive, while all the rare earth metals in batteries can be recycled into new batteries because when you use the battery, you aren't actually burning it away into nothing. You can even recharge it.
Time will tell, but I think it’s a long term mistake.
Japanese society has long been romanticized in the West, but once you start noticing certain details, a different side becomes visible. A simple example: about a century ago, the average height of Japanese men and women was actually higher than that of Chinese and Koreans, but later the growth basically stalled, and in some periods even declined. It’s not that Japan is poor. It feels more like there are strong, invisible social expectations — women are not supposed to grow too tall, men don’t seem comfortable standing out physically, and people live within a very tight set of unwritten rules about what you should and shouldn’t do.
This is the same kind of thing people notice when they joke that Japan still uses Yahoo or fax machines. That discipline creates stability, and from the outside it can look orderly and even admirable. But when you look more closely, it can also feel restrictive, even a bit unsettling. It’s hard to believe that this kind of social atmosphere wouldn’t affect corporate culture as well. In that sense, it may help explain why Japan, which once dominated the global auto industry, hesitated for so long on electric vehicles and ended up being overtaken by China in the new wave of technology.
Another thing is that Japan can be very unrealistic. You can see this in their movies, anime, and literature — there’s this strong belief in the power of belief itself, like if you just believe hard enough, things will work out. That mindset shows up in real issues too, like rare earth supply, military readiness, and national strategy. Japan might actually be one of the countries with the strongest information bubbles in the world. From top to bottom, people tend to believe what they want to believe, even when reality says otherwise. And when reality does show up, the reaction is often to pull back quickly and say the problem isn’t real.
You could already see this mentality during World War II, especially with the attack on Pearl Harbor. After that, Japan’s postwar industrial success made the illusion even stronger. If a company messes up, they apologize, and everyone forgives them. Toyota is number one in the world and will always be number one — no need to worry. That kind of thinking is exactly why Japanese industry has been declining for a long time without people really feeling a sense of crisis.
You can even see Germans openly complaining about their country’s problems, but you don’t see that very often in Japan. As long as they still have Excel, Word, and loppy disk ,or some japan made code editor, everything feels fine, so there’s no need to feel anxious.
And if there were ever a war over China and Taiwan, most people in Japan might even think: as long as we take action, China will definitely lose.It’s just like the recent Iran war. many japanese people believe that China will collapse first, because China is too dependent on Middle Eastern oil, even though the real data shows that Japan is actually more dependent.
(write by me and translated by GPT)
They refine technology not really invent it (maybe invented VTEC). The transition to EV will be very gradual, I don’t even think we have enough rare earth metals and electrical grid capacity to go even twice as fast in adoption?
Honda is waiting for the standards and technology to settle out and become commodity technology, then they implement and iterate to a refined and reliable product.
It doesn’t seem like a winner take all market for EV? What would be the most? Perhaps I am ignorant on that part of market dynamics.
*edit for typos
Hells yeah, Honda went to the top of my list all of the sudden. SDVs coded by vibe coding bros are just not for me.
Yeah, if you're 5 and you want to keep paying subscriptions for a car you already bought! Not to mention software failures, over the air updates, hacking, etc
These tech writers (or bros) need to be replaced by AI or something, total disconnection with reality and what a car is for most people (e.g. it's not a computer and it should be mostly about reliability than anything else).
The moment a battery without lithium comes out, legacy car engines are dead for good.
Is it possible to deliver and store electricity in a more efficient way perhaps? Rumor has it that it does, but not in a way you can put a meter on :)
A new vehicle makes no sense. Unless I went a budget used Prius (with a good hybrid battery system). No plan to make changes.
