A recent article by Hagerty titled “The Tech Driving Today’s Vehicles Could Turn Them into Tomorrow’s Junk” landed without resistance because the premise is already visible in the cars themselves. Modern vehicles are no longer machines with software layered on top. They are software systems with hardware attached. When the software ages out, the car ages out with it. The smartphone comparison is not rhetorical. It is literal. A device can be physically intact and functionally dead at the same time.
Hagerty is right about the direction, but the failure mode is already here. The 3G shutdown quietly amputated features from cars that were not even a decade old. Remote start, navigation overlays, emergency services, and app-based controls simply stopped working when the network went dark. Nothing broke. The infrastructure disappeared. That is the template. Tesla, Rivian, and anyone building a fully integrated software stack are exposed to the same risk at a larger scale. When the stack fails, there is no fallback layer. The car does not degrade. It loses functions wholesale.
General Motors is making a different version of the same mistake. Removing Apple CarPlay and Android Auto is not just a user-interface decision. It is a durability decision. CarPlay and Android Auto externalize the problem. Apple and Google carry the burden of maintaining compatibility across hardware generations. Remove them, and GM inherits that burden for every vehicle it sells. That obligation will not be met over the life of the car. When support ends, the interface becomes the failure point, and in a modern vehicle the interface is the car.
This is where the right-to-repair fight stops being theoretical. Mechanical failure used to be localized and legible. A failed alternator stranded you. You replaced it and drove home. Now a failed module can take down multiple systems because everything is networked. Lose the central display, and you may lose HVAC, navigation, media, charging control, and basic settings. The car is not broken in the traditional sense. It is locked. Without access to software, tools, and documentation, the owner is not repairing a machine. They are negotiating with a gatekeeper.
There is already a counterexample, and it is not theoretical either. Porsche treats time as part of the product. PCCM and PCCM Plus are not nostalgia accessories. They are continuity infrastructure. A 911 from the 1960s or a 996 from the early 2000s can be brought forward into the present with factory-supported hardware that speaks the current language. The interior remains coherent. The car remains usable. The update path is designed, not improvised.
Porsche Classic goes further because it has to. Software alone is not enough. They remanufacture engines, reproduce trim, and recreate components when the original tooling is gone. That includes electronics. Old control units are rebuilt with modern internals inside original housings, so the system works without rewriting the car’s architecture. When data is missing, they scan surviving parts and build them again. This is not nostalgia. It is systems thinking applied over decades.
Mercedes-Benz Classic operates on the same premise with less theater and equal seriousness. Ferrari Classiche does it at a different altitude, but the logic is identical. Preserve the ability to maintain the car as a complete system, not just as an object. Keep the knowledge. Keep the parts. Keep the pathway open. The result is continued usability, which is what actually sustains value.
Set that against the mainstream market. There is no parallel effort. No archive of firmware. No program to replace failed infotainment systems with supported units. No plan for what happens when a server is shut down or a supplier disappears. The assumption is simple: the car will age out before the problem matters. That assumption was safe when the limiting factor was mechanical wear. It is not safe when the limiting factor is software abandonment.
The uncomfortable conclusion is that most modern cars are not built to survive their own architecture. They are built to function inside it. When that architecture expires, so does the car’s usefulness. A failed touchscreen in a recent EV is not cosmetic. It can take climate control, charging logic, and basic operation with it. That is not a repair problem. It is a design decision expressed over time.
None of this is inevitable. Open interfaces, modular hardware, documented systems, and long-term support planning already exist. They are simply not being applied outside a narrow band of manufacturers who have decided their cars should still matter in twenty years. Everyone else is building appliances with better branding.
Hagerty’s warning is directionally correct, but the mechanism is clearer than the headline suggests. Cars are not becoming junk because they are complicated. They are becoming junk because they are closed, network-dependent, and unsupported beyond their sales window. That is a choice. It will define which cars survive as machines and which ones survive only as receipts.