Connected Cars: Inside the IoT Platform Driving Modern Vehicles
In December 2023, Tesla recalled just over two million cars — nearly every vehicle it had ever sold in the United States. No tow trucks. No dealership queues. The fix arrived over the air while the cars sat in driveways, and by morning the recall was mostly done. That's what a modern car is now: not a machine with some electronics inside, but a rolling computer network that happens to have wheels — around a hundred electronic control units, more than a hundred million lines of code, gigabytes of telemetry an hour. Somewhere between the water meter and the data center, the car became the most complicated IoT device most people will ever own. 🚗 The Short Version The mental model that actually works: stop thinking of a car as a product with electronics inside — it's a fleet node, one instance of a software platform deployed a million times, that must be operated, secured and updated for fifteen years. Everything strange about the modern car business follows from that shift: ...