“The beauty of the Mustang Mach-E is that what our customers experience on day one is just the beginning—it will evolve to add even more features and capabilities over time. Our clever over-the-air updates also minimize downtime through incredibly fast activation and ensure your Mustang Mach-E is always getting better, even when you’re asleep,” said John Vangelov, connected services manager at Ford.
That’s possible thanks to a more modern way of designing vehicles. Until the very recent past, each car contains dozens of discrete black boxes, each with a processor and code responsible for discrete functions, like traction control or engine management, and so on. But more modern electronic vehicle architectures are condensing these functions into many fewer, more powerful multiple domain controllers, and the ability to update those controllers is baked in from the start.
Updates will download in the background, and owners will only be prompted with a request to install them once they’re ready to go, so “I’m late for work because my car spent an hour downloading and installing new software like a PS4″ probably won’t be a viable excuse to give your boss. Ford says that many updates will be invisible to owners, who can specify that updates happen at a particular time—late at night, for example—when the car won’t be in use.
Ford told us much of this back in November, but there is one new piece of information that stands out: when, exactly, the rollout of OTA happens. That should start about six months after the first Mustang Mach-Es are in the hands of their new owners, Ford says.