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Despite years of effort and the outlay of billions of dollars, none of the world\u2019s automakers have yet to match Tesla\u2019s prowess in delivering over-the-air (OTA) software updates. Just like with your phone and laptop, these operating system refreshes allow owners to upgrade their cars remotely.<\/p>\n
Tesla introduced OTAs in 2012, but now Elon Musk\u2019s company pumps out these updates like no other automaker. \u201cTesla once issued 42 updates within six months,\u201d Jean-Marie Lapeyre, Capgemini\u2019s CTO for automotive, tells WIRED. But for many other automakers, says Lapeyre, OTAs ship \u201cmaybe once a year.\u201d<\/p>\n
For traditional car companies, software remains, or has been until very recently, merely one bolt-on component among many. In contrast, for Tesla and other digital-native automakers\u2014among them Rivian, Lucid, Polestar, and Chinese brands such as BYD, Xpeng, and Xiaomi\u2014it\u2019s almost the whole shebang.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, GM was actually the first automaker to introduce OTA functionality, two years ahead of Tesla, but it was limited to the OnStar telematics system. OTAs from traditional automakers often add just infotainment tweaks, while OTAs from the digital-first brands can be shape-shifters, increasing range and boosting speed. They often also gift features from the puerile to the genuinely performative: fart noises on demand from Tesla, plusher suspension for Rivian owners, and car unlocking by phone from Polestar.<\/p>\n
Cars have had onboard microprocessors since the 1970s, but until relatively recently traditional automakers made their cars with software designed to remain largely unchanged throughout a vehicle\u2019s 20-year lifespan. Since 2021, the complexity of the latest vehicle software platforms has increased by about 40 percent per year, estimates McKinsey. There are now 69 million OTA-capable vehicles in the US, reckons S&P Global.<\/p>\n
Such software-defined vehicles, or SDVs, would boost car sales, automakers hoped. According to two scorecards measuring SDV progress, Tesla leads the pack. Gartner\u2019s Digital Automaker Index for 2025 places Chinese EV manufacturers Nio and Xiaomi in second and third positions, respectively. Wards Intelligence agrees these are the three to beat. On the other end of the scale, and similar to the Wards analysis, Nissan, Toyota, Mazda, and Jaguar Land Rover wallow at the bottom.<\/p>\n
Done right, OTAs not only freshen a car\u2019s user experience, they can also slash the cost of recalls for automakers. More than 13 million vehicles were recalled in 2024 due to software-related issues, a 35 percent increase over the prior year. Before OTAs, the average cost of an auto recall was about $500 per vehicle. OTAs may be delivered wirelessly, but they are not cost-free, either for the environment or for automakers\u2014Harman Automotive, a supplier of OTA software, estimates that it costs an automaker $66.50 per vehicle to deliver a 1 GB update.<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s usually only the digital natives sending out huge update files, because generally only they are capable of firmware over-the-air (FOTA) updates. These can update powertrains, battery management, and braking systems. FOTA capabilities require cars\u2014usually EVs\u2014to have good, persistent connectivity and significant computing power, much of it left latent for future updates. Lucid\u2019s Gravity electric SUV, for instance, is equipped with the latest Nvidia Orin-X processor, with 512 GB of onboard storage, yet the vehicle\u2019s OS fits on just 100 GB, leaving oodles of room for later OTA refreshes.<\/p>\n
As Western car company revenues fall, automakers are looking to make money from OTA-enabled subscriptions. Give Tesla $2,000 and, with the optional Acceleration Boost, your EV can be unlocked over-the-air to become a tire squeal quicker off the mark. For another $10 a month, Tesla\u2019s \u201cpremium connectivity\u201d package adds streaming data, live sentry cams, and other goodies. Want what critics claim is the misleadingly named Full Self Driving (FSD) Supervised feature? It\u2019s yours for an additional $99 a month.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe believe … that the value of Tesla\u2019s recurring software revenue may exceed the value of its hardware business,\u201d predicted Morgan Stanley in 2021. Perhaps, but selling subscriptions is not always pain-free. In 2022, BMW sought to charge owners in some countries a monthly subscription to activate the heating coils in the seats already fitted to their cars. Following negative feedback, the scheme was dropped.<\/p>\n
Further negative feedback may lie ahead for automakers when customers better understand that OTAs also work in reverse. Cars don\u2019t just download data; they can upload it, too.<\/p>\n
Tesla\u2019s then-head of AI, Andrej Karpathy, openly discussed this at a machine learning conference in 2020, where he detailed Tesla\u2019s so-called Shadow Mode, a mirroring of the human driver\u2019s actions, snapshots of which are uploaded to Tesla to be used as training data for Full Self Driving. These petabytes of snapshots, collected since 2016, include some recordings of the car\u2019s camera footage as well as speed, acceleration, and other parameters. This harvesting of customer data is allowed by the Terms and Conditions that owners sign.<\/p>\n
Bricking is also a worry. Manufacturers can downgrade their products at will, as Chinese consumers discovered earlier this year. The $73,000 Xiaomi SU7 supercar lost 648 horsepower in an overnight OTA. The company said this horsepower would only be reinstated if drivers, via track sessions, proved they could cope with its super-fast car, capable of going 0 to 60 mph in less than two seconds. Owners revolted, demanding the return of the horsepower they assumed they had paid for. Xiaomi soon relented.<\/p>\n
Given the company\u2019s Silicon Valley beginnings, it\u2019s no surprise that Tesla\u2019s software-first ethos (which predates Musk) comes bundled with a tech startup\u2019s appetite for risk. It was only after scathing reviews that Tesla improved certain safety-critical features. The company\u2019s Model 3 was slammed for its poor stopping power in a 2018 Consumer Reports test, with the antilock braking system swiftly fixed with an OTA.<\/p>\n
\u201cOver-the-air software updates come with promise, and they come with peril,\u201d William Wallace, manager of safety policy at Consumer Reports, told Reuters in 2022. \u201cA two-ton vehicle is not the same as a computer. Automakers and their suppliers need to treat software that relates to safety like it\u2019s a life-and-death issue.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2022, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ordered Tesla to issue a recall to prevent FSD (Beta) from making illegal rolling stops instead of coming to a complete halt at some intersections. Musk denied there was an issue. \u201cThe car simply slowed to ~2 mph & continued forward if clear view with no cars or pedestrians,\u201d he wrote. Nevertheless, Tesla issued an OTA to disable the creep function. Tesla did not respond to a request to comment on this article.<\/p>\n
Unlike workshop recalls, OTA recalls tend not to inconvenience vehicle owners. And critically, the completion rate for OTA recalls often reaches 95 percent or more, while physical recalls can be half that.<\/p>\n
Most modern cars from traditional automakers contain 100 or more microprocessor-stuffed electronic control units (ECUs). Technology such as advanced-driver-assist systems, adaptive cruise control, automatic emergency braking, and electronic stability control has driven ECU and code proliferation. Add infotainment, modems and SIM cards, sensors and navigation features, and EVs in particular are powerful, always-online mobile computing centers.<\/p>\n
Automakers of all stripes are now aiming to make AI-infused cars with a central compute rather than distributed ECUs, but there\u2019s a risk that combining lots of little boxes into fewer boxes, with their own CPUs, could compromise safety-critical hardware. Rivian\u2019s original R1T electric truck had 17 ECUs; the latest has just seven. Chip architect Arm\u2019s new and not-yet-deployed Zena Compute Subsystems for Auto platform features a safety island and a security enclave to defeat attacks such as virus infections or other hacks, and it bristles with neural network know-how.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe move to AI in the car is absolutely happening,\u201d says Dipti Vachani, senior vice president and general manager of Arm\u2019s automotive business. Volvo signed a deal with Google\u2019s Gemini in May. Many Chinese car owners are already chatting with DeepSeek. And, for newer models, Tesla has now enabled the use of xAI\u2019s Grok, the chatbot which recently bragged it was MechaHitler.<\/p>\n