[ploxiln]

Well, consider, you could have paid more for a different car that has better software, like a Tesla, Lucid, Rivian ... but you didn't.

I'm not blaming you, I initially thought a VW ID.4 was a cool option. It just wasn't clear to the marketplace how bad the software was, and it's easy to assume "it's fine, I don't need fancy stuff" until you live with it and see how fundamentally bad the software is. How is the market to know? If it takes a couple years to figure it out, it makes sense for the hardware company managers to just make the hardware specs at the competitive price, and software is ... just whatever needed to get it out the door.

I worked for a few years at a sub-division of Samsung, and I've thought for a while about why "hardware" companies can be so bad at "software" ... in many cases, it's just that the leadership chain doesn't know what good software is and who is good at it. Managers don't really know what a good programmer is or does. Division heads don't know what managers are good at managing software teams and projects. And so on.

So at some point 2 years after the car is released, the CTO drives it and realizes that the software systems are fundamentally crap and can't be fixed, and it was not close or in-progress or anything, but he should have realized it 3+ years ago if he had good software sense, long before the car was released. And that's what happened with the VW ID.4

[pjc50]

This is, incidentally, why it's so important to have a free market in software separate from hardware, despite what Apple may think. You can't have a free market competing on every possible feature; some features are going to be dominant. So people will choose cars based on size, aesthetics, price and brand .. but not on the quality of the software, which is very hard for them to evaluate even on a test drive.

[jwr]

> you could have paid more for a different car that has better software, like a Tesla, Lucid, Rivian ... but you didn't

At the time, I did not pay much attention to the software, because I never expected it could be so bad. Now I know better, and my next choice will consider software as one of the main factors (I don't be buying a swasticar anytime soon, though).