At a certain point, your smartphone may no longer accept the latest software update from Apple or Google. Your laptop could get so cranky after four or five years that it is easier to replace it with a new one than spend hours staring at the blue screen of death. Even your toaster or your iron is not going to run forever. We are all used to the idea of built-in-obsolescence. Even so, the news that it can now extend to our cars, with Nissan switching off software for older models, is alarming – and will make selling more battery-powered vehicles even harder.

There won’t be any vintage market in old electric cars because the software has been turned off

The Nissan Leaf was one of the pioneers of electric vehicles (EV) in the UK, selling thousands to early adopters. And yet, this week the company has been accused of ‘dumping its pioneers’ after it emerged that the app that offers functions such as remote control of the heating will soon stop working for older cars. The car can still be driven and the heating and charging timers can still be operated from within the car. But the UK’s 2G network is set to be switched off, and so Nissan has decided this means the app will no longer be available for cars sold before 2016. If you happen to have a vehicle that is more than eight years old, that is just bad luck. There is no point trying to sell it now because the price will already have plummeted.

Software expiring in our phones and laptops, and increasingly in many other everyday devices as well, is something we have come to expect. A car, however, is of a different order of magnitude.

Firstly, they are much more expensive to replace. While you can get a very good new phone for £500, you can’t replace your old EV with a new one for anything much less than £30,000 and often much more. When the software expires, it means a major financial hit. Next, while petrol cars had their problems, and could be expensive to maintain, at a certain point they turned into vintage models and became desirable for collectors. Even British Leyland’s mid-1970s Morris Marina, generally considered one of the worst cars of all time, now has a rising value, and a fifty-year-old Jaguar or Mercedes is worth a fortune. Sure, you have to enjoy tinkering with the exhaust but you can still take them out for a spin on a Sunday afternoon. But it now looks like there won’t be any vintage market in old electric cars because the software has been turned off.

There were already lots of reasons not to buy a new EV, despite all the subsidies. Unfortunately Nissan just added another one to the list.