Tesla driver stuck in car during software update. Warns others to avoid in-car updates and highlights the importance of knowing manual release features.
Have you ever run a software upgrade to another brand of car? I was once present when a BMW was updated and it took 40 minutes to scan the CAN for all of the control network members, after which the update could start.
It's more the opposite. The hardware level updaters, are usually small pieces of non-updateable code called bootloaders. These are purposefully made small, slow, and ROBUST. They do parity checks on everything, status checks, store local copies of data transfer in weird esoteric ways to not be disturbed during the actual update.
The issue is that you can make it work 99% of the time without issue way faster. But bricking a car that then has to be towed for free to a service center and flashed is super expensive. So the fix is slow and robust updates that happen when the user isn't even there.
Yep, my ford took 25 minutes to do the update that added Android Auto, after 2 minutes of downloading it to a USB stick. The car only has USB 2.0, so that could be a factor though