It's not botched... it's unintentionally feature rich.
Found On Road Dead isn’t just a gas powered thing ?
That is a big part of my hesitation. Not just possibility of bad design but the attemp to make it better. Almost everyone I met is drooling over OTA. I on the other hand am a bit paranoid about it. I have seen too may software updates that have broken something that was working before. Pressure to get something out and lack of resources to test every possible combination sometime result in someone missing something. When that happens on my tablet, that usually means an app not working correctly that I could live without for a while. On a 7000 Ib robot that is zooming down the road in the middle of traffic with me and my family in it, a different story. I hope there is a confirm, delay, skip and especially rollback option.
This seems like the beginning of The Hangover Part 4.
You have to stop thinking of it as a mechanical device. It has mechanical parts, of course, and they do fail but as there are fewer of them the don't fail often. Peoples' BEV don't brick very often because bearings or fuel pumps fail. They brick because of software glitches. Think of your experiences with computers, not cars, in anticipating what you will experience with BEV failure. When it happens you do what you do with your computer: reboot. On the Tesla's that's done by simultaneously pressing a button on the steering wheel with each of your thumbs. I used to say that you could always spot the Tesla drivers in a crowd. They are the guys with calluses on their thumbs.
I loathe this scenario. With the exception of being caught with your proverbial pants down by nature, in today's world there should be almost zero reasons anyone should find themselves running out of fuel (applies to both combustion and electric vehicles). There is just too much tech that will notify one that not only are you low on fuel, but (especially for electrics) also maps out where the nearest refueling station is including pre-planning a course to take advantage of what station to stop at so one can charge.
It's pretty obvious from both the OP and the responses that he is not talking about running out of kWh in the middle of nowhere. If that happens you call any company with a flat bed and have him transport you to the nearest charger. That is not at all the traumatic experience that comes when the nearest towing service that has a contract with Tesla is 150 miles away and the nearest Tesla repair center 250.
I don’t know if this is true but some suspect the new heating issues with Tesla was caused by a software update. Even if not true, I know it can happen.
With my Mach-E the biggest problems relate to the 12V battery. It is allegedly kept charged by the HVB but sometimes that fails. That can leave you unable to enter the vehicle let alone reboot without an external power source.
For all the reasons you mention, I’m not really concerned about fuel exhaustion. Past life experiences put avoiding that very high in my priority list (Airline Transport Pilot, Multi-Engine Land).
I certainly don't want to imply that there are not problems other than those caused by software. I is just that most of the problems stem from that. And sometimes the fact that software is the villain is not clear. Your low voltage battery problem is probably a software problem. My inability to position the passenger seat was a software problem. But my inability to position the drivers seat was a mechanical one. I've also had gaskets and seals fall off... but the things that eat your lunch are most likely to be software related.
