It could be argued that the existence of an OTA mechanism incentivizes lower quality (RTM patches); I'd counter that it might do so in the short term only, although I have no data.
Rather than hacking all the individual cars, hack the Tesla server and push the updates. Happened few times to open source software.
Interesting, what are some examples?
I'm pretty sure that if your car isn't connected in the first place, so that its essential control systems can't be updated remotely by a single malicious actor like that, then this isn't a significant concern.
Anecdotally, I've seen the same in general software.
Traditional product recalls are very expensive, but they centralize costs on the manufacturer, and disperse much smaller individual costs across all consumers. In doing so, they incentivize manufacturers to not screw up.
OTA externalizes costs to consumers, increasing their individual cost through the disruption of more regular updates and regressions, security issues, etc, while decreasing the manufacturers costs dramatically.
This -- surprise! -- incentivizes shipping crap.
Long-term manufacturers can lose brand goodwill due to shipping a buggy product, but if everyone is shipping crap, it's not like consumers have a choice or even particularly high expectations.
Is there any evidence of this? I think of automatic updates more like a safety net, or a seat belt.
Does the presence of those things change how acrobats or drivers perform?
Yes. They change the risk analysis; this can make the difference between acrobats performing at all.
As a thought experiment, just consider what you know about human nature and incentivisation of behavior.
Do humans tend to:
1) Prioritize long term concerns over short term concerns?
2) Prioritize high -- but incremental -- costs to others over costs to themselves?
3) Prioritize future risk amortized over many small events?
4) Prioritize costs that can be externalized onto others over their own costs?
Quiet OTA updates play to all of those weaknesses. The only possible result, as long as humans are involved, is lower quality software.
Is there any data to support the "only possible result" that you conclude? Or, maybe examples of high-quality software that doesn't have any kind of high-frequency automatic update mechanism?