A rare Ferrari V12 can still turn heads and command seven figures half a century later, but if an electric Ferrari stops receiving software support after 10 years, what happens to its collectability and value? That question exposes the fundamental problem with modern electric vehicles. They're computers on wheels, and computers have expiration dates determined by manufacturers, not owners.
Tesla owners in the US alleged in a lawsuit that a software update significantly reduced the effective range of their EV by over 20 percent, and to fix the issue, they had to spend up to $15,000 to upgrade to new batteries. The owners contend that these software updates were implemented without prior notice, specifically in Model S and Model X Teslas, with some owners paying $500 to $750 to reduce the problematic update. A working vehicle became less capable overnight because of code pushed remotely by the manufacturer. That's not a bug. That's a business model.
The parallels to consumer electronics are deliberate. Laptops, mobile phones, and electric toothbrushes have lithium ion batteries that typically last for only two to three years, and unfortunately, these batteries cannot be easily replaced, leaving no alternative but to purchase a replacement. Car manufacturers watched this approach generate billions in replacement sales and decided to apply the same thinking to vehicles that cost fifty times more than a phone.
When Fisker went bankrupt in 2024, some of its 11,000 SUVs risked becoming expensive paperweights without fixes for critical glitches. The company disappeared. The software support vanished with it. Cars that drove perfectly yesterday won't update, won't connect, and may not function tomorrow. Simply withdrawing software support can brick a car, a calamity that's befallen some unlucky Chinese buyers of home market EV startups that failed. You own the hardware. You don't control whether it continues working.
Then there's the cellular network problem. Already older cars that used 2G and 3G eventually lost access as carriers stopped supporting that connectivity. In the 2010s, many cars relied on 3G networks to power remote locking, emergency assistance, and crash detection. Those networks shut down. The features died. Your car didn't break. The infrastructure it required simply stopped existing, and manufacturers offered no retrofit because designing backwards compatibility costs money they're not collecting anymore.
The update treadmill creates impossible situations. The rapid and deep update cadence of the Ultium platform created an untenable support burden, with updates that can and often do change components integrations relied on and break functionality that previously worked flawlessly. Third party companies trying to add Apple CarPlay support to GM EVs gave up because each over the air or dealer level update necessitated a full re engineering cycle to maintain compatibility. The car keeps changing. Nothing built for it stays functional.
Americans replace their phones every couple of years, but the average car on the road today is nearly 13 years old. Automakers are legally required to support safety recalls for 15 years, long after your smartphone would've been tossed in a drawer. But software isn't governed by the same rules. Future updates may simply be too demanding for older in car computers, and as companies race to roll out AI driven features and more sophisticated autonomy, some models may fall behind, slowed by outdated chips or incompatible systems. Try running current Windows on a 2010 laptop. That's your 2025 EV in 2035.
Many modern cars rely on software to operate, and manufacturers often design this software to be proprietary, meaning that it can only be serviced by authorized dealers, which can make repairs more expensive and limit the lifespan of the vehicle. Another example is the use of non replaceable batteries in electric cars, where when the battery reaches the end of its lifespan, the entire car may need to be replaced. You can't take it to an independent mechanic. You can't source parts yourself. The manufacturer controls everything, including whether your vehicle remains viable.
The environmental implications are staggering. In a country where a quarter of vehicles are 16 years old or more, limits on future software updates could have major economic implications for owners and considerable environmental implications when it comes to end of life processing. Disposal of electronics is already a global environmental crisis, and the disposal and recycling of key EV components like lithium ion battery packs is already recognized as a significant impending challenge. EVs were supposed to help the environment. Instead, they might create mountains of electronic waste when software support ends and vehicles become unfixable.
If automobile manufacturers are going to embrace OTA technology in their vehicles, they ought to be required to guarantee software and security updates to a vehicle for the standard lifetime of the car, which in the United States means 12 years. That regulation doesn't exist. Manufacturers promise updates until they don't. Support ends when it's no longer profitable. Your vehicle might physically function for decades, but it'll be locked out of the ecosystem it requires long before then.
Traditional cars aged gracefully. Parts wore out. You replaced them. A skilled mechanic could keep a combustion engine running indefinitely if you had the will and the budget. EVs don't work that way. They're appliances with planned expiration dates, and those dates are determined by software support windows, cellular network lifecycles, and manufacturer bankruptcy risk. You're not buying a car anymore. You're leasing functionality from a company that can revoke it whenever economics or strategy dictate. The light bulb that lasts forever is commercial suicide. So is the car that works beyond its planned obsolescence window. And you're the one holding it when the timer runs out.
