5 ms·
My friend lives in very cold Alaska. She has an app on her car that lets her remotely warm her car, which is a requirement before driving because it's so cold.
by Consultant32452 5y ago
My friend lives in very cold Alaska. She has an app on her car that lets her remotely warm her car, which is a requirement before driving because it's so cold. The AWS outage meant her phone couldn't talk to her car. She was 20 mins late to work because of that.
This is the future. AWS has an outage and your car won't work.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoCouldn’t remote start the car with the fob? Viper/Directed has a paid cloud/app service for convenience, but the primary/default method to activate the remote start is RF.
- bserge 5y agoParaphrasing that stupid Apple ad: What's a key fob?
- hattmall 5y agoCouldn't you also just go outside and turn on the car, like people did before remote starts.
- throwawayboise 5y agoWe apparently don't teach advanced problem-solving like this in school anymore.
- faeyanpiraat 5y agoThats a funny comment, but in reality the heating was probably timed, and she only realized the car was cold when it was time to leave.
- samstave 5y agoWhen I was consulting in Nome AK - it was -40F outside and there were locals standing outside behind the hospitals smoking cigs... My brother lives in Anchorage and he went hiking with his with ~week ago, and he said it was -20F (My brother was a colonel in the USAF, so not just like a weak person) But the point is, she should have been able to just ran out to the car like other alaskans do, and not be late to work.
- ianlevesque 5y agoYeah at those temperatures it really depends on how much wind there is and how long you will be outside. -20F did freeze all my car doors completely closed to the point where they could not be wrestled open once though.
- Consultant32452 5y agoThe app failed quietly. So yes, bad app UI design but also bad back-end design with a single point of AWS failure.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- gpm 5y agoIt's unclear to me that the app being discussed started the car? In sufficiently cold conditions, you need to warm the engine up before starting the car, with an electric heating element. If this was controlling one of those heating elements, the problem was presumably that the car wasn't able to start at all, not that the car couldn't be started remotely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_heater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_heater
- Syonyk 5y agoIt's probably an electric that has to warm up the battery before going anywhere in extreme cold, though 20 minutes seems short. When I use a block heater, I let it run for a couple hours before needing the vehicle in the cold. I've got an outdoor outlet timer that I can use to start my truck's block heater around 2-3AM if I need it for something in the morning. It'll start at 0F without it, but it's exceedingly clear that it's not happy about the arrangement, so I preheat. Whatever it is, I'm entirely unsurprised that some app or another, talking to some cloud service or another, talking to some car or another, fails silently when "impossible" things have happened. Nobody seems to consider that the cloud can fail. Even though it does, quite regularly, and reliably breaks all sorts of stuff every single time it does.
- justusethefob 5y agoDid AWS hide her keys, too? This story makes no sense even in block heater Alaska.
- bombcar 5y agoApparently based on another comment the app fails silently. Which is wonderful design.
- Consultant32452 5y agoIt's amazing to me that people think they're adding something to the conversation by posting the most banal response. "Yes, the dumb broad didn't think to walk outside and turn the car on! I shall right this wrong with my clever internet post! Behold my intelligence!"
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bombcar 5y agoTo be fair if someone was using the “app didn’t work” excuse multiple times, suspicion could be raised. But for a one off occurrence? Why would you assume a car company knows what they’re doing over the person telling the story? It’s silly.
- Consultant32452 5y agoThere is a certain personality type common among midwits who are smart enough to think of the most obvious workaround/solution/exception but not smart enough to realize that when people communicate, especially online, they usually choose brevity over exactness. Like if I say "Humans have two feet" some midwit will come along with an article or anecdote about a person who was born without two feet. And if I say the multi-hour outage of AWS made my friend minutes late because of her car warmer, what is going through the mind of a person who offers the solution "Did she try walking to the car and turning it on manually?" These are the kinds of people that if you met them in real life you'd quickly distance yourself from them.
- throwawayboise 5y agoThere was a time when we didn't have remote start cars. We managed to get to work on time. This is why I buy older cars with minimal electronics, BTW.
- Syonyk 5y agoYeah... go out and start it, for whatever value of "start" you need. I frequently walk out to our Volt and start it to let it warm up the cabin on shore power, though I can also do it through a window with the key fob. Or I'll even go start a motorcycle to let it run for five minutes before I head out in the winter. I'm really not sure what I'm going to do with cars in the future. The Volt is the last wave of not-always-connected-software-OTA-big-data-analysis cars, and even it had Onstar, it just tries to talk to towers that no longer exist. But there's a difference between that sort of system and what newer cars have. I suppose you can always disable the cell modem and let them have occasional wifi access to update, but... ugh.
- jschulenklopper 5y ago> My friend lives in very cold Alaska. There’s another Alaska, less cold? I’ve read reports that even Ring doorbells don’t eh… ring because of the outage.
- bearjaws 5y ago5 years ago you couldn't even start your car remotely, and many people lived in Alaska, this is such a first world problem lmao.