Tesla is not unique by any means. Cars nowadays are cellphones on wheels. Software updates are common. What is not common is Tesla's yolo attitude - in the car industry.
A nice perk of 3g going away is that you can buy new-ish cars that won’t be able to connect to the cellular network anyhow. Toyota for example didn’t update some of their models to 4g until 2019.
Your driving data and history should be yours alone and not in a cloud available to third parties directly or indirectly
Tesla is unique in that they do improve the vehicles over software.
But those notifications could be sent to a phone to allow.