I'm trying to imagine time when I would want my car to be connected to the internet. Hard to come up with, other than remote locking, that's it for me. Not sure that's worth the attack surface.
What I do find useful is the car having "cellular connectivity" to make emergency calls. But that doesn't require internet connectivity.
My 2015 vehicle has remote start on the remote. Its very handy in cold and hot extremes to start a few min early, and then let it warm up or cool down.
My 2020 Subary only does remote start if you pay the monthly fee for their access (confusingly called Starlink), and requires the 'subaru app'
Tesla does it very well. My Tesla connects to my home wi-fi. When it's parked in the driveway it can download and install firmware updates. They are somewhat frequent. Other than major UI changes, I have been happy with the way they add features and ensure stability.
With the app it's very useful to be able to find out the location of the car, the status of the doors and windows, the current mileage, and be able to control the climate (Dog Mode, etc), warm up on cold mornings, cool down in summer. You can also get important notifications (i.e. Climate mode on for a long time, Door/Window is open, etc )
You might knock the remote climate feature but if you have dogs/kids/elderly it really improves their quality of life.
There's another recent feature which supports streaming music such as Apple Music, without your phone needed. This is convenient and useful.
Tesla charges $9.99 USD a month for this which I find to be extremely reasonable. ( I am an SRE and I know what it takes to maintain scalable secure infrastructures )
GM introduced this functionality 25 years ago with OnStar. It's been around so long the technology is considered legacy with support farmed out to Filipinos.
The fact that your car needs "somewhat frequent" updates doesn't concern you? Cars are effectively appliances, they should work right the first time, with minor updates here and there to fix serious issues which can be done in the safety of a shop at next scheduled service, and not risk pulling a Rivian and bricking the entire fleet at the push of a button.
Tesla does a lot of the “slick” features very well, but at least for me, they have been failing miserably at the basics:
- customer service: took 3 weeks to get my last service appointment, so I couldn’t drive my car for that long (service was because the charge port door wouldn’t open); was not told that when I had to replace the touchscreen (it had bubbles in it and I live in a very moderate climate), I would no longer have a radio.
- basic/critical features being poorly designed or seemingly had little thought put into them: see the above charge port door issue; window seals that drip going through the car wash; no physical controls for anything so you have to focus on the touchscreen while driving; other random fit and finish issues just due to substandard workmanship.
- substandard software: frequent issues and bugs with basic operation; after my touchscreen was replaced, the glove box pin no longer opens the glove box (minor nit, but annoying); loads of other random little annoyances.
The only way a connected car would be cheaper is if money is made from the data sent over the connection. Clearly that's the case right now.
Up-front NRE, per unit HW, perpetual cloud backend maintenance. There's a lot of cost to connect a car to the internet. It should be a luxury option that I can decline to have installed.
My Kia Niro is connected to the internet yet I can't OTA apply anything. Updates to the navigation data (~80GB) have to be done via USB and recall related updates have to get applied by the manufacturer. So I get 100% of the attack surface and ~0% of the convenience.
