True. I have a Chevy volt, which I love. The check engine light came on while under powertrain warranty. It took them 5 days to upgrade the software to fix the problem, and they charged me for it since "software isn't part of the drivetrain."

GM is a very early adopter of the connect car, with their On Stsr technology. Your Chevy Volt should have it and if it's a newer model probably LTE. I would guess that there's some contractual or legal obligation that says GM cannot do work on your car. The dealers must do the work, and then get reimbursed by GM.

There's antiquated laws hat dictate manufacturer and dealer relationship, the most famous one being a manufacturer must sell cars through a dealer.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the original rationale behind requiring cars to be sold through dealers was to regulate the market and create competition among different dealers. Without that requirement, manufacturers could easily undercut dealers due to lower overhead. I'm not really sure what the point of car dealers is, but they have somehow found a way to prove themselves "necessary" to some lawmakers in some states.

> I'm not really sure what the point of car dealers is

From a DOJ analysis:

> Auto production is a capital-intensive business and a franchise system allowed manufacturers to concentrate their resources upstream while accessing capital through franchise fees from independent entrepreneurs at the retail level.

Given capital availability and resources at the time, it made sense for the auto makers to franchise.

https://www.justice.gov/atr/economic-effects-state-bans-dire...

Not sure why you're downvoted. This is the first rational explanation for this I've ever seen - thanks. Doesn't really justify it still existing today, but makes me hate the system a little less.

I'm not surprised, anything that doesn't toe the Musk/Tesla line is usually met with downvotes here (already -3).

Musk is pretty divisive here to be honest. I see tons of anti Musk comments. I assume from your tone you aren't a fan of his, so I think what we're both seeing is confirmation bias that everyone is against our opinions.

It's a rationale explanation and I see a part of it. It's not like McDonalds, where they have a corporate owned store and a franchisee store. Any price difference would be measured in nickels and no one is going to drive to the other side of the city to buy a burger. But if a corporate dealer can knock off $1,000 on a car just because there is no middle man, I can see why no one would want to franchise a dealership.

It's stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Thank you for responding to my confusion with this excellent article. It is intriguing to me that increased information on pricing and availability through the Internet has already eroded some of the benefits of dealership regulation. Perhaps they are a dying breed even with protective regulation that at least in the past proved mutually beneficial for automakers and dealerships.

If that were true, then they wouldn't need laws forbidding manufacturers from selling directly.

Dealers love to tell us how useful they are, but then they turn around and lobby for their privileged position to be enshrined in law and enforced by the government. Does not compute.

Dealers must provide value. Using laws to "create" competition is foolish and wrong.

If there's no value in me buying a screwdriver set from Home Depot I should be able to buy it from anyone else, including the manufacturer.

In other words, there's no fundamental reason or "right" that says a dealer must exist between a manufacturer of a good and the consumers of that good. Forcing such a structure is artificial and causes problems.

For example, lots of people hate the car buying experience and dealing with a "mafia-like" (as a friend put it) dynamic between hungry commission-based sales people and the manager in the back. The whole process is disgusting. It took three hours to get out of the dealer last time I bought a car and it was a brawl to not get screwed.

I hate dealers too and hate this law, but read this[1] comment that is a sibling to yours. It explains why this law exists. It's a shame it hasn't been removed yet because it is quite dated at this point.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12564578

As a manufacturer I am very familiar with the distribution model. Dealers do create an opportunity to have a smooth flowing supply pipeline as well as inventory distributed near consumers. They make money, you make money. The difference is that in my business I have very tight controls over what my resellers can do and how they do it. The government doesn't get involved.

In the auto business dealers can be horrible places to walk into. The other day one of my friends at the gym bought a used car. She got royally screwed. I didn't tell her because it'd break her heart. They did the old "let's talk about the monthly payment" trick. She is mathematically challenged and couldn't have managed the stream of information during the negotiations. She will be paying $24K for a $10K purchase.

Yes, I've always been astonished at how bad the software and software management is in the auto industry.

And I'm personally still annoyed at BMW from about 8yrs ago when my X5 was occasionally throwing a spurious trivial dashboard warning and I asked about it at the dealer when I went in for some other warranty service. When I got back there was a $200 bill for doing a flash update to some controller, and the dealer insisted that it was BMW that kept it off warranty and charged them for each install.

While I could perhaps see some trivial $15 service fee to install it, charging $200 to fix their own damn bug is pretty outrageous. They should just be installing the full set of accumulated updates every time the car comes in for service.

But that's not how the auto industry thinks, so yes, that is a huge advantage for Tesla, even if the others are starting to come around, they are effectively a decade late.

I anticipate (and hope) Google and other software vendor can step in and fill this void.

By the time other car makers going to release any serious competitor to Tesla , Tesla's software will be far advanced than those companies, and the thing about software is its design and implementation takes professional teams with a lot of experience. No matter how effective and advanced your team is, you need time to create a professional team to make mature software.

So the idea of other car makers somehow magically will design and implement software as mature as Tesla's , is wishful thinking I think.But software companies like Google, Microsoft, etc have required expertise in software development.

I expect iOS/Android for cars will handle the infotainment part of car software, but not the rest.

Yes. All the stories I ear about software developed by traditional car makers confirm your point. Traditional car makers produce very bad software and have very bad organisation for software development.

To a certain extent, this comes from historically creating safety-critical software which is an entirely different process compared to what is done for web apps etc. I don't think Tesla are as robust with their development processes, but they are able to make up for it with over-the-air updates.

I have worked for nuclear domain and for aeronautical domain. These are domains where safety critical software is understood. AFAIK, software is not understood in car industry. It looks like they compensate poor programming by more testing.

You should see Toyota entune. New RAV4 SE, awesome car, tons of safety and sensors. Garbage software.

I think car makes just don't realize how big of a role, great software plays in how you feel about a car.

Does every car have an LTE connection? Do you have to buy a sim from your local provider or how does that work?

Every recent Tesla has a built-in LTE connection. (I think some of the earlier models were 3G only)

You don't need to buy your own SIM - it comes with its own international roaming SIM, with free data for 8 years.

What happens in 8 years? Do you pay Tesla for a subscription?

Minor correction, it's free for 4 years.

As for what happens, nobody knows, because nobody's run out the four years yet. When they announced the four free years, they also said that the clock started for existing customers on January 1, 2014, so nobody will hit the end for another year and some.

I'd guess that it'll end up being a paid subscription after that, but nobody really knows yet. I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla doesn't know yet. I wouldn't be too surprised if they just make it free for life, since it's pretty cheap to provide and so important to the car, but that might just be wishful thinking on my part.

There will be a cost, but it will be minor, to offset their data costs on ATTs network for the massive amount of data they using for autopilot telemetry.

There is a rumor their cellular costs far exceed their Supercharger electricity costs.

I wouldn't be surprised if that last part was true. With my electricity costs, I pay about 4 cents per mile. If that's typical, and if the average Tesla driver does 1,000 miles/month with 10% on Superchargers (which I think is vaguely close to the truth) then the electricity costs would be something like $4/month/car.