Mark Heyer
Aug 9, 2017 · 1 min read

Self and assisted driving cars today are a maintence trainwreck in progress

The feature naming problem is only the tip of the iceberg.

I have a sickening sense of deja vu all over again. Remember the early days of the computer industry? Everyone marketing gee whiz incompatible and immature systems, before Gates and Jobs showed up. Even today, Android updating across multiple vendors is a nightmare. How likely is it that these car companies and their dealers are going to stay on top of the latest Nvidia updates? What happens when your car is six years old and no one has any interest in keeping its now antique software working? Or can even remember how?

Cars are way more expensive than computers, so tossing them when some electronic bit goes bad is not a good option. I am hopeful but not optimistic that car companies and especially their dealers will get their act together in reasonably good order.

I also expect Apple to do what they do best — wait till the market gets established, the feature set and components relatively locked in. By then consumers will be sick of their badly designed, non-standard mainteanance nightmares. Then Apple will introduce a line of cars in which every single model runs on the same operating system with a limited range of virtualized hardware. It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out.

    Mark Heyer

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