> I think Tesla has done remarkably well and I suspect they were able to do it because they were small and nimble when OTA capabilities first became feasible.

I think Tesla have done well for another reason: they are strictly a software engineering company that just happens to make cars on the side. Tesla could easily port their software to any other existing car (Autopilot, mobile app + services, touchscreen OS), but then the Tesla cars would be just another bland electric car offering much like the others. It's the software that defines the Tesla experience, and that's why they have focused on cybersecurity since the beginning.

There certainly were some fun hijinks on the way I'm sure, like the engineer whose NDA expired and explained that the way OTA was done on the first batch of Model S was to have a massive bash script ssh into each car and run apt-get or a similar command.