Re: EV EOL
The end of software support won't stop the car from working as a car, but it might lose some features unrelated to its ability to drive from point A to point B (obviously that's not true for self driving vehicles, when those appear) A phone that no longer gets software updates still works just fine as a phone years later, even if it might no longer work well or at all as say a GPS or web browser.
There will need to be laws that mandate hardware support (or release of all information necessary for a third party to do it) though I expect someday we'll see some automaker(s) with a lot of EVs on the road go bankrupt and leave everyone in the lurch.
For autonomous vehicles software support will have to be mandated, at least for fixes for known problems that can cause injury or death. Might be a good idea to require companies that enter bankruptcy to be required to either sell their software IP to a third party who will take over responsibility for maintaining it, or release it under some GPL like license (yeah that's probably not going to happen since such software would also certainly contain some licensed closed source pieces...)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
