I bought a Skoda Octavia Wagon and Australian cars aren't fitted with esims. So i dont get the mobile phone app functionality or ability to update the entertainment system OTA. Does anyone know a way around this? 

Can you connect the car to your phones hotspot?

I can confirm that the Wi-Fi hotspot for wireless Android Auto/Apple Carplay is available on Australian cars @PetrolDave, but the cars do not have an inbuilt mobile data connection.

 

For whatever reason, Skoda Australia decided to deliver all of the current models (up to 2022) with no inbuilt mobile data connection. Anything related to online services simply isn't there to select on the infotainment screen. There is no online store, no OTA updates, no remote control via MySKODA/SKODA Connect, no user profiles, and no emergency SOS calling. Unfortunately, there is no workaround to access OTA updates or any of the online services in Australia @thecrevis. Software updates need to be done at the dealer.

 

You can think of Australian delivered cars as completely offline save for the content that is displayed by your phone when using Android Auto/Apple Carplay.

 

If I were to speculate, it's because market potential is low due to being a really big island with a sparse population. I would expect the reason that Skoda made this decision was because they did not want to make the investment in infrastructure (onshore application servers, etc) or working out agreements with the local cellular providers. The cellular modems in the cars themselves may also require some work around localisation to be used in Australia so they either meet regulatory approval or possibly support different frequency bands to the rest of the world (for example, LTE band 28 is commonly used in Australia, but less so elsewhere in the world). Hell, there may have even been hurdles for the legal department that prevented online services being available in Australia.

 

I'm sure it would have been technically possible to offer everything that's on offer elsewhere in the world, but probably not at a cost or in a timeframe that they were willing to commit to.

 

Personally, I see it as a blessing because Australian delivered cars miss out on all the software bugs to do with online services and SOS emergency calling that I've heard about on this forum.