[theandrewbailey]

Cars 20 years ago, even most of them 10 years ago, never got any updates unless they got recalled. Nothing broke, nothing got hacked, and most are probably still working fine.

What happened to cars today? I refuse to believe that it's solely because these are electric cars, as if the way the car stores and uses energy dictates that it must be part of the internet of things.

Edit: there were electric cars over 100 years ago. I bet they never got software updates.

[jdminhbg]

Cars 20 years ago didn't have realtime traffic on big touchscreens that you can use to look up your destination and plan out a route that also lets you schedule fueling/charging stops, oh and also stream humanity's entire library of recorded music, books, and podcasts. It's a tradeoff that the vast majority of people want.

[mckn1ght]

All that stuff should be done via smartphones and the screen in the car should be a dumb display for it.

[xeromal]

Requiring a cell phone to replicate features a car should have just makes more problems IMO.

[theandrewbailey]

But almost every smartphone already has those features, they work fairly well, and it makes more sense for a phone to have those features than a car. (Because sometimes it's useful to know where traffic is when you're not in a car, and stream things while walking around.) It doesn't make much sense for each car manufacturer to replicate everything if they can figure out how to connect a phone to a car, and borrow the phone's features.

[vmladenov]

> Nothing broke, nothing got hacked

This needs to be heavily qualified or else it is outright false.

[ryandvm]

As software eats the world, it becomes more and more apparent to the non-developers of the world that software engineering is not, and never has been, a real engineering discipline.

Tech Support: "Oh your garage door is bricked after last nights update? Yeah, apparently the [totally uncredentialed] contractor that wrote that update is only 3 weeks out of coding bootcamp and was just copying and pasting from ChatGPT. Lmao"