MY BLUE TESLA

Software updates were a major selling point during the early years of Model S. It was unheard of for a car (out of all things) to receive over-the-air packages which would new-and-improve an existing vehicle purchased years ago. Yet this has now become somewhat standard with many automakers since the Age of IoT is here.

Tesla, being the cutting-edge, trail-blazing manufacturer intending to conquer the world, still provides frequent updates even to a decade-old Model S. To be clear, Big Blue has the MCU2 upgrade which almost certainly qualifies it to receive all the new hotness (at least with an update set relevant to a car this old, which means quite little compared to any modern Tesla). If I were still using MCU1 then I'd guess updates would be extremely few or nonexistent at this point.

In recent years I've begun to notice minor annoyances every time a new update is made available. In the last year in particular, it seems like the Autopilot feature related to automatic braking/collision warning/hill hold becomes unavailable right after a software update. Not every update triggers this, but it has become more common. It's as if existing calibration data (like the kind used with the forward-facing camera) gets erased or needs a refresh to accommodate new code. Either that or it's only relevant to newer cars but QA didn't backtest against older vehicles with MCU2.

It goes away after a while, perhaps 30 - 50+ miles in, but nevertheless it makes the update experience inconvenient as an owner.

Another one that's consistent is that my AC settings revert back to a default-off state. I don't think my driver's profile is set like this, assuming HVAC settings are stored with the driver's profile.

And while new games and other in-car gimmicks are fun, at the end of the day Big Blue doesn't get new vehicle features since it simply doesn't have the hardware capability to support it. Those days of real functional improvements are over for a car this old. Almost every update I get just has "minor fixes and improvements" as shown in the release notes. It's quite a vague and obscure catch-all explanation for the benefit of the software update, which means in my case it's likely more of a software patch than any feature set addition. Or probably just security fixes which they're going to stay hushed on the details.

The price you pay living with an old model that Tesla has very little incentive to support. It's not like Microsoft provides anything similar for Windows 7, or as if Apple supports updates for macOS Catalina (10.15). It makes me wonder when Tesla will effectively end-of-life older vehicles from a software support perspective.