> But in this universe, that ship has long since sailed.

No, you're combining "there can be updates" and "there will be subscriptions, always-online and enshittification" as if it wasn't splittable.

It is. It can. It will be.

As long as there are people making purchasing decisions, no ship will ever sail. This is just passive HN fatalism as we know and resent it; probably a survival tactic to not go insane in the SV (or any large corp).

Even for me (a software developer who reads these articles) it's really hard to actually know whether the software is any good. Are there unlockable features? Are there subscriptions with reasonable costs? What happens if I don't have a subscription? How often are updates shipped? What's the general consensus around the quality of the system as a whole?

It took decades for people to land on - in fairness some times very handwavy -generalizations like "Japanese cars are reliable", "German cars are well built", "French cars are...french".

All this is now on its head. The landscape changes very quickly and you don't even recognize the brands. A Chinese maker of vacuum cleaners might have sold more cars than VW in 2025 and yet you never heard of them. A reputable car manufacturer like Honda could be a complete novice when it comes to EVs and so on.

Even though software is extremely important for how cars work, we still don't have easy comparisons. It's mentioned in reviews/tests of cars, but it's mostly "Yeah it feels snappy and modern, 7/10" and no real meat in the comparison. I wish there was an WLTP comparison scheme for car software which made it easy to compare.

It depends on who controls the software. In the US, the DMCA says it ain't you.

Looking at most modern cars, I'm of the view that most of them are so fully whacked with the enshittification stick, that it's pretty hard for them to get even more enshittified without risking sales to actual normies. A very normie person in my extended family decided against an MG because she could tell how bad the software was — an impressive feat of enshittedness.

Right now I don't need a new car, but if I did, it would be a Tesla for literally no reason other than their track record of delivering substantial software updates to existing customers for free, with no subscription requirement and none of the usual dealership nonsense or corporate shenanigans.