It's common for Tesla fans to mock other automotive manufacturers for being "old and slow" - as if they're incompetent because they take so long to develop new features and adapt to changes in technology. It's like a "why does it take 5 years for BMW to update their infotainment system when I can do the same thing with a Raspberry Pi in 5 minutes?" mentality.
What I think goes unappreciated by some is the level of testing that normally goes into automotive grade development.
That's not to say that modern ICE cars are more reliable than a Tesla, but their electronics are usually designed for a higher level of robustness.
Here are my issues:
- Why is the car rendered useless if the infotainment system fails? This should be a non-critical component. If it is critical and the critical part can't be isolated, then the system as a whole should have been tested more extensively.
- Why does the infotainment system fail if a log message write fails, and why was this failure mode not tested? It is very common knowledge that flash wears out, and log messages aren't critical.
- Why were they not using automotive grade flash?
This, coupled with the recent story about the non-automotive-grade displays failing really demonstrates that maybe, just maybe, the rest of the automotive industry isn't totally clueless. Maybe they're just more scared of a failure.
Who knows - it's probably a mixture of both.