Your car just asked for a software update. And somewhere between laughing and mild existential dread, you realized — this is just normal now.
We’ve crossed a strange threshold in automotive history. The thing most likely to strand you on the side of the road today isn’t a blown gasket or a dead battery. It might be a null pointer exception, a cloud server hiccup, or a firmware update gone sideways — at 100 km/h.
As someone caught squarely in the middle — a Mechanical Engineer by degree, a Software Engineer by trade — I’ve had a front-row seat to these two worlds colliding. And I have thoughts.
How did we go from wrenches to Wi-Fi? And what did we quietly give up along the way?