Why Dead Sonos Speakers Mean You'll Never Own a Driverless Car
Why the tech inside a Tesla changes everything.
Until the rise of Tesla, end-of-support woes have never really been a problem for the auto industry, where support traditionally ended when you drove the car off the lot. This changes radically with the arrival of automated vehicles, and it’s why you will probably never own one.
For more than 130 years, the automotive business model has been to design, build, and sell vehicles to customers (or more precisely to dealers, who then sold to customers). Once you had the title to that vehicle, you were largely on your own. For some number of years after purchase, manufacturing defects would be fixed under warranty. But aside from the inevitable effects of wear and tear from actually driving, the vehicle stayed fundamentally the same. Sure you could buy aftermarket upgrades and modifications, but by the time the car was in your garage, the engineers who created it were already working on the next generation.
But Tesla brought the software support philosophy to the auto industry by making its vehicles capable of accepting over-the-air updates. The company has regularly deployed software updates that add new functions, improve driving range, or even make the car accelerate faster, mostly at no additional charge to the customer.
Compared to a car, even pricey Sonos speakers or MacBook Pros are relatively modest in price. Up to this point, Teslas have been by far the most software-defined vehicles ever produced. A customer can pay to add the AutoPilot driving assist features to a three-year-old car with an in-app purchase and OTA update because the hardware to accept those updates was built-in at the factory. But you can’t do that to a 2014 model, because the necessary sensors and actuators just weren’t there.
Software crashes, random reboots, and flaky sensors are simply not acceptable.
For much of the past decade, we’ve been hearing that the automated (or autonomous or self-driving) car was just around the corner. These vehicles will begin trickling out onto our roads in the next few years. Setting aside the question of the quality of Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” option, which is a subject for a whole other rant, almost none of us will ever own a highly automated vehicle. The reasons why have at least something to do with the uproar over Sonos declaring that some of its older products would no longer be able to provide their existing capabilities alongside newer versions.
Automated driving in a vehicle is a safety-critical function. If your Sonos speaker dies, you might be annoyed and have to go dig some Bluetooth speaker out of a junk drawer. But the threshold for a minimum viable product in automated driving is orders of magnitude higher. Software crashes, random reboots, and flaky sensors are simply not acceptable.
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