| > The OTA updates do provide an avenue to make cars much safer by reducing the friction for these type of safety fixes. True, but let us also acknowledge the immense systems safety downsides of OTA updates given the lack of effective automotive regulation in the US (and to varying degrees globally). OTA updates can also be utilized to hide safety-critical system defects that did exist on a fleet for a time. Also, the availability of OTA update machinery might cause internal validation processes to be watered down (for cost and time-to-market reasons) because there is an understanding that defects can always be fixed relatively seamlessly after the vehicle has been delivered. These are serious issues and are entirely flying under the radar. And this is why US automotive regulators need to start robustly scrutinizing internal processes at automakers, instead of arbitrary endpoints. The US automotive regulatory system largely revolves around an "Honor Code" with automakers - and that is clearly problematic when dealing with opaque, "software-defined" vehicles that leave no physical evidence of a prior defect that may have caused death or injury in some impacted vehicles before an OTA update was pushed to the fleet. EDIT: Fixed some minor spelling/word selection errors. |