One of the more remarkable things about newer cars is that they can now improve themselves while you sleep. An “over-the-air” update, OTA for short, arrives the same way your phone gets one. You wake up, and your car has new software. Sometimes it is just a bug fix or perhaps a tweak to how the transmission shifts. Occasionally, it is the arrival of a whole new feature.
For the most part, I think automatic software updates are a good idea. But I do want to gently push back on an idea I’m hearing more and more: the notion that just because a car can update itself, it somehow needs less looking after.
Your car still needs to be seen by an experienced auto technician and here is why
An over-the-air update is a message. It is lines of code that tell your car’s computers how to behave. What it cannot do is touch a single physical part of your vehicle. It can’t measure how much tread is left on your tires. It can’t see the brake pads wearing thin, or the coolant that’s turned the wrong color, or the suspension bushing that’s cracked, or the small oil weep starting at the back of the engine. It can’t smell that burnt-clutch smell that tells an experienced tech to go looking. No download rotates your tires. No update flushes your brake fluid. The car can rewrite its own software all night long, and your ball joints won’t know a thing about it.
However, there’s a second point that’s worth making. Sometimes an OTA update changes how your car drives. It might be how the throttle responds, how aggressively the automatic braking kicks in, how the lane assist behaves. That’s not always obvious to the driver until it feels “off.” Part of what we do at BA Auto Care is help you understand what has changed and make sure the physical systems in those features that you rely on are all in good shape to back them up.
So, here’s my advice. Enjoy the updates. Let the car get smarter. But make sure you stay on your regular preventative maintenance plan with us. Place these regular inspections on your calendar, because there is a whole world of wear-and-tear that lives entirely in the physical realm, and the only reliable way to catch it early is to put the car up on a lift and have a trained, certified pair of eyes and hands go over it.
Software is wonderful at fixing software. But it has never tightened a bolt once.
