This is today’s version of Industrial Musicals. In the 1950s-1970s, corporations would commission entire musical theater productions as propaganda/hype material for their conventions.
Twenty Thousand Hertz did a great episode about it, and there’s a documentary about them as well (trailer).
As someone who might be plowed into by one of these things, I care about the difference. Is it something where 80% of them will be automatically fixed within 72 hours by an auto-update, or is it something I’ll need to worry about for weeks/months. There’s no way to know which recalls have been fixed when encountering a vehicle in the wild, so if it’s a software-only recall fix that applies automatically, I feel less concerned about it once the fix is available.
None of this should be taken as support of recklessly shipping unfinished software into a car.
I’m inclined to believe this post, claiming this article is BS https://mastodon.social/@jplebreton/112825798853315264