Despite years of effort and the outlay of billions of dollars, none of the world’s automakers have yet to match Tesla’s 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.

Tesla introduced OTAs in 2012, but now Elon Musk’s company pumps out these updates like no other automaker. “Tesla once issued 42 updates within six months,” Jean-Marie Lapeyre, Capgemini’s CTO for automotive, tells WIRED. But for many other automakers, says Lapeyre, OTAs ship “maybe once a year.”

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—among them Rivian, Lucid, Polestar, and Chinese brands such as BYD, Xpeng, and Xiaomi—it’s almost the whole shebang.

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.

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’s 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.

Such software-defined vehicles, or SDVs, would boost car sales, automakers hoped. According to two scorecards measuring SDV progress, Tesla leads the pack. Gartner’s 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.

Saving and Selling

Done right, OTAs not only freshen a car’s 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—Harman Automotive, a supplier of OTA software, estimates that it costs an automaker $66.50 per vehicle to deliver a 1 GB update.

But it’s 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—usually EVs—to have good, persistent connectivity and significant computing power, much of it left latent for future updates. Lucid’s Gravity electric SUV, for instance, is equipped with the latest Nvidia Orin-X processor, with 512 GB of onboard storage, yet the vehicle’s OS fits on just 100 GB, leaving oodles of room for later OTA refreshes.

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’s “premium connectivity” 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’s yours for an additional $99 a month.

“We believe … that the value of Tesla’s recurring software revenue may exceed the value of its hardware business,” 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.

Harvesting and Bricking

Further negative feedback may lie ahead for automakers when customers better understand that OTAs also work in reverse. Cars don’t just download data; they can upload it, too.

Tesla’s then-head of AI, Andrej Karpathy, openly discussed this at a machine learning conference in 2020, where he detailed Tesla’s so-called Shadow Mode, a mirroring of the human driver’s 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’s 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.

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.

Given the company’s Silicon Valley beginnings, it’s no surprise that Tesla’s software-first ethos (which predates Musk) comes bundled with a tech startup’s appetite for risk. It was only after scathing reviews that Tesla improved certain safety-critical features. The company’s 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.

“Over-the-air software updates come with promise, and they come with peril,” William Wallace, manager of safety policy at Consumer Reports, told Reuters in 2022. “A two-ton vehicle is not the same as a computer. Automakers and their suppliers need to treat software that relates to safety like it’s a life-and-death issue.”

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. “The car simply slowed to ~2 mph & continued forward if clear view with no cars or pedestrians,” he wrote. Nevertheless, Tesla issued an OTA to disable the creep function. Tesla did not respond to a request to comment on this article.

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.

And Now, AI EVs

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.

Automakers of all stripes are now aiming to make AI-infused cars with a central compute rather than distributed ECUs, but there’s a risk that combining lots of little boxes into fewer boxes, with their own CPUs, could compromise safety-critical hardware. Rivian’s original R1T electric truck had 17 ECUs; the latest has just seven. Chip architect Arm’s 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.

“The move to AI in the car is absolutely happening,” says Dipti Vachani, senior vice president and general manager of Arm’s automotive business. Volvo signed a deal with Google’s Gemini in May. Many Chinese car owners are already chatting with DeepSeek. And, for newer models, Tesla has now enabled the use of xAI’s Grok, the chatbot which recently bragged it was MechaHitler.

Traditional automakers source their ECUs from various electronics suppliers. “We have about 150 of these” ECUs, Ford CEO Jim Farley told the Fully Charged Podcast in 2023. “The problem is that the software [for them] is written by 150 different companies, and they don’t talk to each other. So even though it says Ford on the front, I actually have to go to Bosch to get permission to change their seat control software.” Now Farley has launched a plan to make cars in a completely new way, bringing much of this tech in-house and supposedly solving issues.

In 2003, the German firms BMW, Mercedes-Benz, VW, Bosch, Continental, and Siemens collaborated on a software framework called AUTOSAR (Automotive Open System Architecture) to standardize electrical and electronic system architectures. The many-layered protocol is now long in the tooth but is still endemic to most traditional automakers.

The leggy framework isn’t loved by today’s automotive software coders. One mocked on Reddit that it took “an entire Italian restaurant’s worth of spaghetti code just to blink an LED.” An exasperated engineer added: “I would rather shove a shotgun in my ass and blow my god damn balls off than ever lay my eyes on AUTOSHIT ever again.”

Phones to the Rescue?

Automakers “have got to be able to update software [quickly],” says Arm’s Vachani, adding that consumers “don’t want a hunk of metal anymore. We want this ever-evolving thing. There’s not one [automaker] that isn’t thinking about how they move forward in this software-defined world.”

A novel approach to the software-defined vehicle is perhaps the $25,000 truck from Slate Auto. Backed by Jeff Bezos and other prominent investors, this Michigan-based startup aims to produce a stripped down, frills-free EV truck with manually operated windows and no infotainment system. The truck won’t come with a modem or SIM card. Instead, owners will use their phones to download OTA updates and then plug into the truck to transfer them.

Unlike smartphones, though, motor vehicles are subject to stringent software safety standards, such as ISO 26262. This demands rigorous validation of automotive software before deploying OTA updates, slowing progress and, for now, keeping auto brands on a tight leash.

“Companies that have been around for 100 years have this huge problem,” says Florian Rohde, who worked for Tesla between 2012 and 2018 cocreating the company’s OTA capabilities, then later worked for Nio. “Their strategies and their processes have been established for a long time. [Some auto executives] don’t want to change, because they fear they’ll lose influence and power in their company.”

“Traditional car makers [were also] extremely hesitant with software—they were afraid, rightfully, that their product would at some point hurt somebody,” Rohde says. “But they didn’t understand DevOps, where you monitor and improve continuously. When we started selling the first [Teslas], we had to improve them because they weren’t perfect. We were able to fix bugs and make software changes at very short notice. Established car makers are really slow.”

Tesla’s OTA prowess, continues Rohde, was built with a small core team that allowed really fast decision making from a talented group of people, a group that crucially did not have to consult with the multiple levels of hierarchy within the company.

Outside of China, Tesla is likely to remain the leader in remote updates, at least for now. “Tesla was not successful because it’s electric, or because it’s an SDV and OTA [pioneer]; and Tesla is not successful because it has this huge back-end [with details of every car], or charging network,” says Rohde. “Tesla was successful because it had all four.”

Tesla is not quite so successful today, however. Musk’s political shenanigans and the company’s now stale products have led to plummeting global sales. And now there’s increased competition, especially from China. Before making cars, two of China’s more impressive automakers—Huawei and Xiaomi—were, and still are, manufacturing cell phones. For several years iPhone maker Apple threatened to also launch a car, and had Project Titan ever produced a consumer EV, it would have likely been capable of killer OTAs.

It speaks volumes that Apple seemingly wasn’t able to simplify car operating systems and their OTAs, says Sid Odedra, UX lead at Polestar and who previously worked for Nio and Audi. “It’s not a simple problem to solve.”