I mean, there are "solutions" for this, e.g. brand. You vote with your wallet next time, by not buying from them again. If enough consumers are bothered by this, they will change, or else another manufacturer will try to capture that market.
I'm not saying I like this behavior myself necessarily, but the bar for making something illegal should be quite a bit higher than "I personally don't like this". Engineers tend to always be against auto-updates, and yet consumers in general massively prefer this (and there are good cases for it).
> I'm not saying I like this behavior myself necessarily, but the bar for making something illegal should be quite a bit higher than "I personally don't like this". Engineers tend to always be against auto-updates, and yet consumers in general massively prefer this (and there are good cases for it).
Perhaps I missed another part of the discussion - automatic updates are not universally good or bad; the problem is they are not always deployed in a way that benefits the user. I disagree that consumers massively prefer it when the item they purchased suddenly changes, particularly the UI - people build muscle memory when they use an interface, and significant changes undermine that, wasting time and effort and, in the case of a car, increasing personal risk. Think about the consternation caused by the introduction of the ribbon bar in MS Office (not an auto-update per se, but as good as that for many people for whom upgrades were mandated).
Auto updates that add new features in a sympathetic way, or solve underlying performance or security problems without substantially changing the product, are obviously usually a good thing, but that's not what this Tesla update is about.
> Think about the consternation caused by the introduction of the ribbon bar in MS Office (not an auto-update per se, but as good as that for many people for whom upgrades were mandated).
I mean, if that's what we're talking about, you're literally arguing against any change ever.
> Auto updates that add new features in a sympathetic way,
I'm not sure what you mean by sympathetic, but most updates are made because the company thinks it will make the product better, or increase the company's bottom line. Rarely are they deploying a change to actively make something worse.
> I mean, if that's what we're talking about, you're literally arguing against any change ever.
I'm arguing against change for its own sake.
(edit: to be clear, the point about the Office ribbon was a counter to your claim that 'consumers in general massively prefer [auto updates]' when those updates make significant UI changes)
>...most updates are made because the company thinks it will make the product better, or increase the company's bottom line
...and you can't see how those two goals can be misaligned? Stuffing the HN front page with ads would increase YCombinator's bottom line but it certainly would not make HN better for the user.
I'm not saying I like this behavior myself necessarily, but the bar for making something illegal should be quite a bit higher than "I personally don't like this". Engineers tend to always be against auto-updates, and yet consumers in general massively prefer this (and there are good cases for it).