People need to realize how every traditional car manufacturer has a completely different relationship with software than Tesla does.
Im still waiting for my Taycan but Ive done a lot of digging on the Jaguar I-Pace as I wrote a third party Android app and Python library and through that work I got to know quite a few people over at JLR Engineering and on the connected car team. All of them shared my frustration when it came to the state of software development at the traditional car manufacturers.
The I-Pace came out in 2018. Fabulous car, terrible infotainment. Jaguar made a huge deal out of the fact that the car supported OTA updates and owners were confident that issues would be resolved over time through those. As time went by, a few minor updates came through and fixed some but not all issues. Then, two years later a completely new infotainment system was introduced with no support for older vehicles and the older infotainment system was now effectively EOL.
Very little infotainment system development is done in-house at these companies. It’s outsourced to third party vendors such as Panasonic with little to no incentives to provide updates over time. Furthermore, since the infotainment system is integrated with a plethora of other vehicle components that are also sourced from various other vendors, testing and QA becomes a huge ordeal, making future updates even more of a pain.
An amusing example from the I-Pace: There is a long standing issue where you’d be frequently logged out of your Jaguar navigation account from the infotainment. The reason was that there was a bug in the way the authentication token was refreshed so every time the token expired it would fail to renew and you’d be logged out. Everyone knew about this bug but it never got fixed. Why? Jaguar turned to Panasonic who turned to Nokia HERE. Nokia blamed Panasonic but Panasonic didn’t lift a finger because their deal with JLR was effectively finished, meaning JLR would have to put more money on table. In the end, no agreement was reached and the bug persists.
JLRs main motivation for adding OTA functionality to begin with was primarily to save costs. By having updates delivered directly to the owner rather than paying the dealer for the 6 hour labor they could save a significant amount of money.
The moral of this story is: Dont think Porsche does what Tesla does. They’re just not operating in a remotely similar manner. If the new PCM update relies on the newer hardware platform it would be very unlikely that older systems get the update. For the I-Pace, what seemed to be just a simple head unit upgrade was in fact a lot more extensive, including a completely new network architecture which simply would not be compatible with older systems.