Opinion: OTA updates shouldn't come at the expense of driving dynamics

I was driving the Mustang Mach-E again. Soon after, Darren Palmer, head of EVs at Ford, asks if we journalists have any questions. I do. Why does it steer like it does? The wheel is heavy, with gloopy inertia, and unnecessarily forceful self-centring. Why didn’t they let the Ford of Europe engineers have at it? I knew Palmer wouldn’t gloss over the issue. He used to be one of those European Ford engineers, developing the best-steering mass-made cars of all. He answered that yes, the Europe crew have now been let loose on the Mach-E, and a new steering calibration will be coming as an over the air update soon.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Ford chose the initial assistance programming just to make the Mach-E feel more like the V8 Mustangs, and Palmer doesn’t disagree. The first customer cars also got a pretty tail happy ESP calibration, and he says Mach-E drivers thought that was a bit (my word here) inappropriate, so that’s been dialled back already.

I also wondered why there isn’t more real time energy flux info in the screen system. Some cars will show you, live, the power used by, say, climate control, so you can choose to turn it up or down depending on the range you need. Palmer replied that yes, they could give owners that stuff OTA if they want. Or give more control over regeneration braking. Or power delivery. “All modules are upgradeable over the air. If customers want features we can add them.”

Pretty well all carmakers are doing these upgrades to a greater or lesser extent now. Tesla’s screen system gets modernised as often and as visibly as your phone’s. Tesla also does it for the driver assist systems. On occasion it has actually downgraded the capability, removing features that were a bit too beta. But right now Teslas have hardware that will let them do Level 4 autonomous driving, pending an as yet unknown date for the software and legislation to enable it. That really would be like waking up in the morning to a whole new car.

As an aside, I’m not sure what this does to car reviews. If the Mustang’s steering gets a bad rap and then Ford changes it, you could drive the altered car and wonder what on earth we were banging on about. Maybe Wikipedia will start doing a change log for this stuff, as it already does for Tesla’s autopilot.

All this software demands colossal effort to develop. I’m sad because in some recent cars (the Merc A-Class springs to mind), the screen and assistance systems clearly took priority over the old school basics of dynamics, including handling, ride and engine refinement. And if the hardware that affects those basics isn’t right from the get-go, no amount of OTA patches for the EPAS or suspension electronics will fix it. Let’s see what happens with the Mach-E. But over a wider canvas, my conversations with engineers are telling me there’s a severe danger the hardware R&D that separates a good car from a great one is getting pushed aside by the monster requirements of software development.