When are other cars going to function as well as a Tesla?

For a few months now, I've had this job where I drive customers' cars from service places to their homes and/or workplaces. Recently I've also been substituting for a person who works at a vehicle inspection company, meaning that I get to drive a lot of different cars each day.

What I've noticed from trying out many different cars is that more often than not, the operating system of each car is fairly unintuitive, clunky and difficult to learn. Other times, the OS can literally just be shit, like the one the Subaru Forest (at least the one I drove) has. This specific OS looked like a project made during an introduction to a new programming language, and that's not the kind of feel you want to have about an arguably major part of your car.

Tesla tends to go for the Apple route when it comes to making things such as operating systems. A major selling point on Apple's products has always been the fact that "it just works", meaning that the user most likely already knows how the device works, even if they had never used an Apple product before. That, in my opinion, is the type of UI you should strive for, and that's what Tesla have gone for with their cars.

Thus far I've tried several systems of cars including those of Audi's, BMW's, Mercedes', KIA's and so on. The best OS by far has been the one Mercedes have. The car I tried it out in was a C-class Sedan from, I believe, 2016 maybe? In any case, it was very easy to use, and incredibly intuitive with this touch pad thing found from where the gear shift usually is. That being said, it was maybe the only OS of a newer car that I've actually enjoyed using. For instance, it took me around 15 minutes to figure out how to connect my phone by bluetooth to this BMW I was driving, because adding devices was not found from the bluetooth settings. To make things worse, you have to operate the OS the way you would use an older iPod; with a goddamn scroll wheel. In a car made in 2017.

Since I don't personally own a new car, and our family's low to mid-tier car from 2006 doesn't exactly have an OS that you could control things with, I always assumed that in newer cars, when there's an update to the software, you could simply just install it as if it was an update for your phone; just have your device connected to the internet and off you go. I was incredibly surprised to learn that this is not necessarily how things work when it comes to cars.

When I was picking up a customer's car from a service center, one of the customer reps told me that the problem the customer had been having should have been fixed because of a newly released update that the service personnel installed in the car. Why should you have to go to a service center just to have an update for your car? So that the service center could charge you money to fix the issue that you could very well fix yourself if only you were allowed to download updates by yourself, through the OS? Why should it be any more complicated than it is to update your phone?

Unlike (most) other car manufacturers, Tesla offers their customers over-the-air updates to their cars. The updates can be minor bug fixes with the software, or even things like making sure the wind wipers work correctly (which they didn't at the launch of the Model S.) Because of this, before I had actually driven these new cars myself, I always assumed it worked the same way in other cars as well, since it seems like an obvious thing to have. Then again, the service business with cars is huge especially in the States, and the people working there tend to sell their customers things that they don't necessarily even need.

This is something Tesla is actively avoiding with their (albeit expensive) cars. Depending on the customer's location, if there's a problem with their car, Tesla will even offer to come pick up the car and give the customer a loaner until their own car has been fixed. Even if the issue had something to do with the cosmetics of the car, such as scratches or dents, parts can be replaced by Tesla much faster than with regular car manufacturers, as Tesla builds the majority of the parts in-house, meaning that a part can be installed directly from the Tesla factory instead of having to be ordered from the other side of the world.

Naturally I can see how it is very easy for Tesla to be able to do these things right now because of them being such a new company. The infrastructure of the car manufacturer was built with all of these things specifically in mind, and one of the key aspects of the company has always been efficiency. It might be difficult and very slow for another company of even a hundred years to adapt to this ever changing field, but at some point it might very well be the root cause of bankruptcy with new players taking over.