IF you are so dumb to buy a car so “smart”, of course.

Driverless cars are, or will soon be, all electric. A major advantage of buying an electric car (assuming private car ownership continues to make sense, of course) is that they last MUCH longer than internal combustion cars. A great investment, and a purchase with a high resale value, isn’t it?

But last week Tesla gave, albeit unwillingly, a fatal blow to this vision. Two years ago, I asked how stupid it is to call “driverless” anything that drives itself only if YOU drive it too. Especially when the car maker itself says that their autopilot is not really an autopilot. This week, quoting from BoingBoing, which in turn summarizes from the Verge:

• someone bought a used Tesla with “Enhanced Autopilot” and “Full Self Driving Mode” at an auction
• soon after Alec started driving the car, these features were deactivated remotely, without warning
• the reason for deactivation was that the new owner (who had probably bought that Tesla exactly because it came with Enhanced Autopilot!) had not paid (again?!?) for that feature
• reactivation was no problem, as long as the fellow paid “$8,000 to get Tesla to press a button”

In the same days, somebody apparently unaware of this specific Tesla horror story was asking whether… Software Dependent Devices now need expiration dates like Milk. Among other things, he observed that:

• sooner or later, all software producers stop supporting certain versions of their software. Even if the hardware it runs on, which cannot handle newer software, could last many more years
• and this means that “unlike in the past when [vehicles] used to last for many years, now they will need to be retired because they fall outside of capabilities to support future updates”
• manufacturers [should] issue expiration/decommission dates on… software-driven things (including cars, obviously)

Summing up: “buying” a “smart” car is NOT buying, and is very likely NOT smart

The Tesla auction story is not about driverless cars. Not at all.

That story is about “smart” cars, driverless or not, that are so smart that they may live not longer than a smartphone. That story is about cars filled to the top with “functions” that are often as useless and dumb as they are expensive.

That story is about people who fall into believing they can “buy” such cars, or that it makes sense to pay (many) thousands of Euros to buy something that may “expire”, or be automatically confiscated, well before it has repaid itself. Maybe that day before starting a vacation, or commuting for a new job. A car that, for the same reasons will be also pretty hard to “resell”.