Getty Images
From a strictly technological point of view, the most surprising thing about owning a Tesla is not so much the driving experience, performance or looks, which impress even those who were skeptics not so long ago, and that have made it the vehicle with the best user experience ever, and is instead the unprecedented feeling that the product you have purchased a while ago is improving over time, through software upgrades.
Tesla has exposed the automotive industry’s many failings: starting with the dealer system whereby whoever sells you your car is responsible for fixing it when it goes wrong and your relationship as a customer is with that dealer or others but never with the brand itself, or by separating the phases of the user experience between acquisition - before purchase, when everything is beautiful - and afterwards - when whatever happens to the car is mostly your problem and not the brand’s, and everything is related to revisions and maintenance.
You don’t buy a Tesla: you buy a software platform that is constantly updated, further improving the driver experience, ranging from what is supposedly most important in a vehicle, such as its power, to seemingly secondary aspects such as the vehicle’s visualization, showing the road and what’s going on around you, or the way braking is managed and how lane changes are carried out in automatic driving mode. Some upgrades are about leisure, such as new games or watching Netflix when the vehicle is parked, but in general, they are anything but cosmetic, and mean a whole new user experience for a product like a car.
What does it mean when your car gets better over time? Since I bought mine a few months ago, the acceleration and performance has improved by 5%, it now recognizes maintenance cones, switches the braking mode on automatically, and sees all the lanes around me; the automatic lane change has also improved enormously. Some of the solutions its come up with for other issues are simply brilliant.
The next update, for example, will address the somehow inconsistent operation of automated windshield wipers for light rain, and will do so through a neural network that will learn from manual activations made by all users. Don’t expect these kinds of solutions from a car sold through a dealership or from other brands: all those guys are going to do is ask you to bring it in for a service, or recall it if there’s a truly major problem that might derive responsibilities. Let’s be clear about this: no carmaker has ever offered better performance over time on a product the have already sold, let alone for free. Tesla even went so far as to extend the battery life of its vehicles so people could get further away from Hurricane Irma back in September.
What do these updates show? That the company which sold you the vehicle is constantly evolving and is systematically considering how to deploy these improvements its fleet, which is also the source of constant data that allows it to do so. If you ask Tesla about your vehicle’s consumption, for example, you get access to detailed analyses of your trips, kilometer by kilometer, reflecting all the parameters involved, as well as consumption graphs. In other words, a direct relationship between brand and user, which as anybody who has ever bought a new car will know is a breath of fresh air, a serious competitive advantage that the competition will find hard to beat.
Now that Tesla’s software strategy has set it apart from the competition in the automobile industry, get creative: how many other industries will follow its lead in providing improvements to their products as if they were smartphone apps?
