My new EV is brilliant. Right up until it needed a software update.
The car itself is excellent. The driving, the in-car tech, all of it. But the update process told a completely different story.
The letter says the update takes around three hours. The app tells me to contact the dealer and offers appointment slots. So far, so simple.
Except none of it is true.
The slots in the app do not reflect actual availability. The dealer then tells me it can only be done Monday to Thursday. The car must be dropped off by 10:30. It will take eight hours. And it needs to stay overnight.
The bar that actually matters
My previous EV set a very different standard. Updates just happened. Quietly. Seamlessly. The way software is supposed to.
And here is the thing. I am not comparing this dealer to other dealers. I am comparing them to every other digital experience I have had this week. That is the bar now, whether legacy brands like it or not.
This is the comparison most legacy organisations are still in denial about. They benchmark against the rest of their industry — and against that benchmark, they are doing fine. The customer is not benchmarking against the industry. The customer is benchmarking against the last thing that worked beautifully — which was probably an app on their phone, or a wearable, or an AI agent that just got it done. That is the standard the customer brings to your service. Not the average of your competitors.
This is not just an automotive problem
It is the pattern you see in every industry where a traditional business has digitised its product but left its operating model untouched. The technology moves forward. The service stays planted in the past.
Banks build apps but route exceptions through call centres staffed for the era of the cheque book. Insurers digitise the quote but make a claim feel like a customs declaration. Healthcare digitises the booking but makes the actual appointment work like 1995. Utility companies put a slick app on top of meter-reading workflows that have not been updated since the rotary phone.
And — this is the EV story — automotive launches software-defined vehicles, then services them through an operating model designed for cars that did not get updates at all.
The product moved into a new category. The service did not move with it.
The mistake is not the eight hours
The mistake is treating the software update as a workshop appointment instead of as a product release.
A workshop appointment is bound by the constraints of the workshop. Opening hours. Bay availability. Technician rotas. Drop-off and collection. None of which have anything to do with the software being updated.
A product release is bound by the constraints of the software. Network availability. Customer presence. Rollback safety. Confirmation of success. None of which require the customer's car to leave their driveway.
A software-enabled business has to design its operating model around the cadence of the software, not the opening hours of the garage. That is a structural choice, not a tweak. It changes how you train technicians (more software, less spanner). How you measure success (rollout health, not bay utilisation). How you handle exceptions (rollback playbooks, not appointment rebooking). How you communicate with customers (release notes, not letters in the post).
Once your product becomes software-enabled, your service model is the product
This is the line I keep coming back to. The car is no longer just a car. The fridge is no longer just a fridge. The watch is no longer just a watch. They are software products that happen to have hardware.
Which means the experience of maintaining them — patching, upgrading, recovering, evolving — is no longer a back-office function. It is part of the product. Every customer interaction with the update process shapes how they feel about the brand. Every time the update process feels heavier than the rest of their digital life, the brand loses a tiny bit of credibility.
If your software update still feels like booking a minor surgery, you have not built a digital experience. You have just put an app in front of an old process.
The legacy brands that survive this shift will be the ones who recognise that the operating model is now part of the product. The ones who do not, will keep building beautiful software-enabled hardware and wondering why customers keep walking off to brands that started without the legacy in the first place.