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Comment by nomel | Hacker News Reader

Taking on the persona of a boring consumer, who has had to go into the dealer to get several updates with their unconnected car, and sometimes charged for it ($200 to $700), I don't see this as bad, if it's done well.

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OTOH i'm well pleased i can pay $200 for a new memory card for my in-car navigation and have 0 reliance on cellular service or some cloud provider that might not exist in a few years

the newest toyota's seem to lack functionality inside a parking garage

That doesn't strike me as a tradeoff based on a realistic assessment of the likely outcomes. For example, VW issued updates for the 2012 GTI only until 2018. Meanwhile, even if Google or Apple were to stop operating their maps services, you could switch from one to the other, or you could switch to OSM or whoever steps in.

You can download an area map and use google maps offline https://blog.google/products/maps/google-maps-offline/

Maps also caches tiles along a route when you plan a trip and if it thinks you are on an unmetered internet connection.

As far as I can tell, literally nobody is doing it well.

In a way this is a blessing in disguise, because the moment a large car company thinks they can do software well, they'll want that team to be a profit center not a cost center, which means they'll start charging for subscriptions.

There's an argument that we're at Peak Mediocrity for car systems that one can own (at least at the levels that we think we own our cars now).

> the moment a large car company thinks they can do software well

Reminded me of this:

GM stops selling the Chevy Blazer EV to deal with ‘software quality issues’

https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/23/24013357/2024-chevy-blaz...

Orrrr perhaps they could just make their software update files publicly available on their website, so I can download it to a flash drive and stick it in the car myself? That's what the dealer is being paid $200-$700 to do, after all.

That makes it much harder to collect all sorts of useful statistics about the cars use, which is profitable, which is why all the manufacturers will eventually go with OTA.

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