Over-the-air upgrades will become integral to vehicle ownership

Legacy automakers, long chasing Tesla on the tech-nology to launch vehicle updates over the air, have been taking big steps of their own. Late last year, Honda said its 11th-generation Accord will serve as the test bed for integrating Google into its vehicles. Honda hopes the Google Built-In system will enable over-the-air updates to provide features that were not available when the vehicle was purchased. Automakers are betting that over-the-air updates will make the vehicle ownership experience more like a smartphone, receiving regular software updates and new capabilities via apps. In the use of over-the-air updates, in the words of Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius, it simply “gets better all the time.”