TEG wrote:
The message was clearly delivered and received that some owners want an SOC meter.
I would characterize the response as "OK, we hear you, and we are working on improvements in this area."
(In other words, no specific commitments, but it is clear that they know it is an area where we want them to make it better.)
Regarding not having specific commitments, I didn't want to take up valuable floor time by attempting to speak for Nissan (esp. since I have no visibility into their resources and processes), but some of us have worked in very large companies before or had business models that involved dealing w/other companies w/their own motivations.
Part of the perceived lack of commitment on certain improvements (broader than just the SOC meter) is perhaps they didn't want to promise something they can't deliver or may not be able to deliver in a timely fashion. It's better to under promise and over deliver than the other way around. Car companies generally are working on the next project years in advance and they may not have the resources to devote to improving a car that will be change significantly/be at the end of its generation (whenever that is). They might've actually fixed some of the issues that were brought up or already have it in the pipeline...
I used to work on mobile devices and we had a problem where the manufacturers didn't have the much motivation to release updates for older devices (because it's integration, dev, test and support work), esp. ones that are no longer sold and thus no longer bring in revenue. This is most visible w/former Windows Mobile devices and can be seen w/Android devices, to some extent.
When I worked in another group, sometimes customers were reporting bugs that were known issues to us, but our hands were tied (due to policy) by saying that it was under investigation (even if I had finished testing the fix for it). The group had a lame policy of not acknowledging bugs. The other part was the sometimes the fix caused new/worse problems and would need to be pulled for the next update cycle. So, if we made a promise and didn't deliver when we said we would...
With the age of updates on certain consumer electronics (but not all), there seems to be some expectation of updates/improvements. There are certainly many counterexamples of devices receive few or no updates. (For instance, there was one firmware update for my now pretty old Samsung TV that IIRC, resolved some power up issues. Samsung hasn't released anything else the improved nor fixed anything. I'm sure they'd much rather sell me a new TV than expend resources on a TV that was discontinued a few years ago.)