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.
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.
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.
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...)
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.
Tell me you have zero experience with a Tesla without telling me you have zero experience with a Tesla
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.
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.)
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/subaru/comments/1p57ohp/these_ads_s...
Advertisers need to be regulated.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
