For most of its short life, my Tesla Model 3 has aged beautifully. Since I bought the car, in 2019, it has received a number of new features simply by updating its software. My navigation system no longer just directs me to EV chargers along my route—it also shows me, in real time, how many plugs are free. With the push of a button, I can activate “Car Wash Mode,” and the Tesla will put itself in neutral and disable the windshield wipers. Some updates are more helpful than others: Thanks to Elon Musk and his middle-school humor, I can now play an updated array of fart sounds when an unsuspecting passenger sits down.
But Musk is already starting to leave my car behind. In July, Tesla rolled out a version of Musk’s AI assistant, Grok, to its vehicles. Even as a chatbot skeptic, I could see the usefulness of asking my car for information without having to fumble with my phone. Alas, at present Grok runs only on Teslas made in the past few years, which have a more advanced processor to power their infotainment system. My sedan is simply too old.
Cars used to be entirely mechanical objects. With hard work and expertise, basically any old vehicle could be restored and operated: On YouTube, you can watch a man drive a 1931 Alvis to McDonald’s. But the car itself was stuck in time. If the automaker added a feature to the following year’s model, you just didn’t get it. Things have changed. My Model 3 has few dials or buttons; nearly every feature is routed through the giant central touch screen. It’s not just Tesla: Many new cars—and especially electric cars—are now stuffed with software, receiving over-the-air updates to fix bugs, tweak performance, or add new functionality.
In other words, your car is a lot like an iPhone (so much so that in the auto industry, describing EVs as “smartphones on wheels” has become a go-to cliché.) This has plenty of advantages—the improved navigation, the fart noises—but it also means that your car may become worse because the software is outdated, not because the parts break. Even top-of-the-line phones are destined to become obsolete—still able to perform the basic functions like phone calls and texts, but stuck with an old operating system and failing apps. The same struggle is now coming for cars.
Software-dependent cars are still new enough that it’s unclear how they will age. “It’s becoming the ethos of the industry that everyone’s promising a continually evolving car, and we don’t yet know how they’re going to pull that off,” Sean Tucker, a senior editor at Kelley Blue Book, told me. “Cars last longer than technology does.” The problem with cars as smartphones on wheels is that these two machines live and die on very different timescales. Many Americans trade in their phone every year and less than 30 percent keep an iPhone for longer than three years, but the average car on the road is nearly 13 years old. (Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment about how its cars age.)
Automakers have a legal requirement to offer free repairs on safety recalls for 15 years after a car was sold to its first owner. Many will issue recalls or updates for cars that are even older than that. “But it’s a different question when it comes to something like the Grok upgrade,” Tucker said. “Tesla never promised you Grok.” Future updates could be too computationally demanding for a car’s hardware to handle—especially as automakers race to introduce AI and autonomous features. Although missing out on such features wouldn’t hurt the driving experience, the apps that incorporate these enhancements might get slow or buggy on cars with older computers. “Certain models are destined to age their way out of compatibility with the latest software. It’s like trying to put Windows 11 on a PC from 2010,” Nick Yekikian, a senior news editor at the car site Edmunds, told me. “It would probably result in something completely unusable.”
Car companies have already signaled their intent to let older cars become obsolete. Throughout the 2010s, many vehicles came with 3G connectivity to power a host of in-car features, such as the ability to lock or unlock the car from one’s phone. Lapped by superior 4G and 5G, the network shut down in 2022—lots of 3G cars were still driving around. Subaru upgraded some of its vehicles to the new standard for free, and Tesla let its drivers pay for the better hardware. But when the 3G shutdown came along, companies including Ford, Hyundai, and Audi canceled services for the associated vehicles. “Most automakers’ response,” Tucker said, “was, Well, you don’t have connectivity anymore.” Those cars remained drivable, but in some cases, features that relied on the 3G network—including SOS emergency assistance and automatic crash notifications—just stopped working.
Wassym Bensaid, Rivian’s chief software officer, told me that the EV company is trying to combat the obsolescence issue by giving its computer systems “headroom,” a coder’s way of saying space to grow and add new features. His stated goal is to keep Rivians updatable for seven to 10 years. But what about after?
The worst-case scenario for today’s software-dependent car is the fate of Fisker, which went bankrupt in 2024—leaving no one to send out software patches or fix glitches. Some of the roughly 11,000 Fisker SUVs on the road “had software issues that, if not corrected, would’ve eventually made the car useless,” Cristian Fleming, the president of the Fisker Owners Association, told me. His group of owners banded together to update Fisker’s software. The long-standing auto giants, as well as the established EV start-ups such as Rivian and Lucid, are in a far better position than Fisker to stick around for the long haul. But, although IT support will very likely be there for your EV a decade from now, it is not guaranteed.
Most people just want to make the grocery run, whether they have a 2011 Toyota RAV4 or a new, six-figure Rivan. A vehicle that routes all of its basic functions through a touch screen can’t afford for the software to get laggy like an old iPhone. Bensaid promises that decade-old EVs won’t turn into pumpkins just because they get old. “You’ll be able to drive your car in a stable and safe way,” he said. But once software-dependent cars stop receiving updates, they will start to get worse. Maybe the navigation system starts to crash, or the Netflix app in your Tesla becomes so buggy that you can’t play KPop Demon Hunters while waiting for the car to recharge. These are the kind of nuisances many smartphone owners know well: not bad enough to make the device unusable, but annoying enough to make you think about trading it in.
Applying the same logic to an automobile threatens to ruin one of the best things about cars, especially electric ones: They endure. Unlike gas-powered cars—which have a conglomeration of timing belts, spark plugs, and mufflers—EVs are simple, with just a few dozen moving parts. That means they can last even longer than traditional vehicles, replacing the battery, electric motors, and a few other components when necessary. But as cars become smartphones on wheels, they may not get that shot at longevity.
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