I can't imagine how making improvements to two or three items every week (which is what Elon has said they do in the past) could lead to anything other than massive heterogeneity in the population of Tesla cars on the road. Unless it's something as ridiculous as changing the same insignificant parts over and over. But that would be stupid so I assume that's not what's happening. You change things for a good reason, and obviously the good reason must exceed some threshold of utility, as well as being below some threshold of difficulty and danger.
I don't see anything controversial or even debatable in what I wrote. Obviously there hasn't been huge impact, but I don't know why and I haven't seen anybody suggest why. If I were a tech in a Tesla service center, I would spend a ridiculous amount of time determining exactly what I was working on and making sure I understood the implications before I even touched the car -- meaning I wouldn't be able to function efficiently at all.
As a software guy, I imagine having to debug a customer problem where they have a version of the code somewhat different from any I've ever seen before. Not that big a deal, but it adds extra time and stress and uncertainty. Make every problem like that and the whole system gets stupid and slow. Cars are complex, closely coupled systems, so you can't go making changes without some surprises (see Charles Perrow's excellent
Normal Accidents). So what is it that I don't understand?
Story time! Once, back in 2015, a Tesla service center kept my car 1yo P85 for nineteen days trying to figure out why I was getting a whine during acceleration from one of my speakers. I didn't mind because I had a really nice loaner. They took the thing apart looking. In the end they had to replace the wiring harness in the dash, after experimenting with replacing various other things. It turned out to be some wiring that had been rerouted nearer to something that affected one rear speaker, plus inadequate shielding, plus some other thing that had happened to make it matter under some specific circumstances. I was very impressed with their desire and tenacity in fixing the issue, but it was clearly the unexpected result of some minor change. Yikes! How often can they do that sort of thing?
