12 ms·

I was recently an owner of a Merced-Benz commercial van, and the software was by far the worst part of that whole experience. It had obvious race-condition typ

by qrohlf 4y ago

I was recently an owner of a Merced-Benz commercial van, and the software was by far the worst part of that whole experience. It had obvious race-condition type bugs when it came to the user interface layer, but most frustrating was its tendency to succumb to some kind of memory leak on long drives where the entire head unit would just lock up and crash to a black screen after 6-7 hours of being turned on. Because the vehicle kept the computer system "warm" for up to 30 minutes or so to avoid doing a full (and slow) bootup process every time you stopped for fuel, this was a real problem on long trips and couldn't always be solved by power cycling the vehicle. Had a dealer try to update it twice, which didn't seem to meaningfully impact the system stability at all. Then there were multiple other, non-head-unit related glitches like the lane assist and cruise control features being incompatible with the state of Nevada (if the system fails to detect any other vehicles for a period of more than about 90 minutes, it assumes that there is a sensor fault, and refuses to operate [1]. Unfortunately it is quite easy to spend hours on the road alone in many southwestern US states, triggering this failsafe mode) Suffice it to say that I am very skeptical of any software coming from Mercedes these days. [1] https://www.winnieowners.com/forums/f265/2019-sprinter-cruise-control-design-flaw-362188.html https://www.winnieowners.com/forums/f265/2019-sprinter-cruis...

coffeebeqn 4y ago
I’m also horrified by the trend to put more and more of the meters into the UI. My Ford has done the booting thing before on a highway as well as once it flipped the screen horizontally until it was shut down and started again. I can’t imagine the quality is any better for the display components that will replace speedometers and such
- mmastrac 4y ago
  The media head-end software tends to be much less robust than the digital dash display software. I've had the head unit crash and act poorly on many cars, while digital dashes boot quickly and tend to be pretty solid. The only time I had an issue w/a digital dash was in a Volvo that had a battery that was nearly flat. The screen itself would glitch in various ways, but the data itself was still solid.
- eckza 4y ago
  My (admittedly-beloved) 2015 F-150 will reboot Sync if I'm listening to music (usually on Soundcloud) if the song title includes non-ASCII characters.
  - xp84 4y ago
    I'm reminded of: ( https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-roman-mars-mazda-virus/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-roman-mars-mazda-... ) the Mazda head unit being allergic to Roman Mars.
    - vlachen 4y ago
      The concept of technology being unable to handle some input as an "allergy" for some reason makes me giggle.
    - cpeterso 4y ago
      Or Janet Jackson's song Rhythm Nation crashing some old laptop hard drives, due to the hard drives' resonant frequency. The manufacturer worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220920-00/?p=107201 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220920-00/?p=10...
  - doubled112 4y ago
    My 2011 Ford Focus with Sync would randomly lock up and loop the same 10th of a second of the current track. Like a really old PC if it crashed while playing a sound. Turning the car and back on again to stop the noise got old really fast. All of the radio inputs stopped working when this happened.
    - nubinetwork 4y ago
      Hey, ring buffer... I want you to play this, and I'm going to give you more data, just keep looping the buffer. Oops, I forgot to give you more data... or tell you to stop... >:)
- gmueckl 4y ago
  Car software is a lot more involved than most of the people here would think. These days, the dashboard display is typically rendered by separate pieces of software. A pretty normal, moderately fancy rendering engine does all the animations and backgrounds while the really important information (e.g. engine/brake system malfunction) is overlaid from a separate, isolated software system with a stack that meets quite high functional safety standards. That is, the chance of the second part of the system ever failing is comparable to winning the lottery.
babypuncher 4y ago
I don't think I've ever used software provided by an automaker that I would classify as "good". Just varying degrees from "functional, but barebones and clunky" down to "so buggy and useless it's a legitimate safety hazard". As a result, I'm firmly on team "make every infotainment system a dumb terminal for your phone" and refuse to buy any car that doesn't support both Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.
- nicbou 4y ago
  I can't find that comic where the head unit is just a rectangle with a 3.5mm jack. That's all we need, really. My old car has a cheap phone clip screwed into the dashboard, and the phone connects to the speakers for music. I can't imagine anything improving upon that.
  - jeromegv 4y ago
    CarPlay is definitely a huge improvement on that.
- maxerickson 4y ago
  Most automobile engines made in the last 30 years are running software that works at least okay.
- xp84 4y ago
  I find myself torn on this: * Traditional Automakers: Mostly as you describe, though honestly I am fond of the UI in my VW. Most others score B-D in responsiveness and anywhere from B-F in my "is this UI closer to ideal, or to a caricature of a baffling UI that no one will ever like to use?" scale. * Apple: "No one needs physical controls for anything, and people HATE seeing any details, so let's try to get as minimal as possible because that's just elegant. Maybe just a dashboard with a your speed, as a single number, unlabeled because labels are ugly, and three dots (touch target 0.6cm) that you have to touch to access a menu to access all other features." * Recent Automakers: "People love screens. Let's delete lots of switches to save a few dozen dollars, and stick functionality in deeply-nested menus that require you to take your eyes off the road." I really want the $20 worth of physical buttons, knobs, stalks and switches of a traditional car, and the extensibility of the CarPlay world.
killerpopiller 4y ago
I own a MB V-class and had no software issue I remember.
mtillman 4y ago
This is why I only buy used MBs from pre-2016. They're fantastic and they don't require a subscription. Though the 2016 E/S is a wifi hotspot if you really want that in a car.
ASalazarMX 4y ago
> couldn't always be solved by power cycling the vehicle. Made me remember when I turned on my new (dumb) TV and it did a startup sound. I knew it would get worse in the future.
- 7thaccount 4y ago
  I really despise smart TVs. My new Roku tv poops itself all the time and the apps stop working so I have to look for the system reset and it's not always super straight forward.
lh7777 4y ago
> if the system fails to detect any other vehicles for a period of more than about 90 minutes, it assumes that there is a sensor fault, and refuses to operate I have a current model Sprinter and this behavior is frustrating (thanks for the explanation, by the way, I thought it was a random bug). Cruise will also disengage in heavy rain or snow, with the system saying the sensor is dirty. It wouldn’t be so bad if traditional cruise control would keep working without the active braking assist, etc. but unfortunately it’s all or nothing. I do like the system when it works, which is most of the time, and it’s never done something that felt unsafe. I haven’t had any problems with the info system. This is my first vehicle with a touchscreen, and I was worried that it’d be a pain to use. But Mercedes provides real buttons for common actions, little trackpads on the steering wheel that can control the system without ever having to touch the screen, Car Play works great, and the built-in nav system is useful for those times I need directions and don’t have a cell signal. My biggest worry is how these delicate parts will hold up over the years. My 10 year old car has a monochrome dot matrix display that loses a good number of pixels when it gets hot out. Will I really be able to get replacement parts for the Sprinter when the screen or computer start to die in 10-15 years?
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  > Cruise will also disengage in heavy rain or snow That’s what it should do, honestly. It’s not safe to drive with cruise control in low traction conditions.
  - ht85 4y ago
    Yeah, the manual explicitly says that cruise control should only be used in clear weather conditions.
    - lh7777 4y ago
      Yes, the manual does say not to use adaptive cruise control (Distronic) on icy or slippery roads, if visibility is poor, or if the radar sensors are affected by a variety of weather conditions. Cruise will even automatically disengage if electronic stability intervenes. I’m mostly annoyed that false positives such as the Nevada issue described above or a one-time splash of water on the sensor when it’s perfectly safe to use cruise control results in the whole system being unavailable for an extended period of time. To me, the right solution would be to disengage Distronic when the sensor can’t see well enough and then allow the driver to re-engage traditional cruise control if they deem it safe to do so. The system doesn’t have the sensors or the smarts to know if it’s actually safe to use cruise control, only the driver can make that judgement. From the manual: “Cruise control is only an aid. You are responsible for the distance to the vehicle in front, for vehicle speed, braking in good time and for staying in your lane.”
GoToRO 4y ago
That sw does not come from Mercedes, they just buy different devices for what they need from suppliers. The salary offered by one such supplier for a graduate engineer was less than what a construction company was offering to hang dry wall (qualified worker). The construction company was raising a new building for the supplier.
- TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
  That's mostly an irrelevant detail. Mercedes may not be the OEM in this instance, though they are certainly the vendor, who put their name and reputation to it.
  - radicaldreamer 4y ago
    Exactly, the buck stops with Mercedes. It's on Mercedes for not investing in higher quality software for their vehicles.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  That was their choice though.
jandrewrogers 4y ago
Some Mercedes also have the bug where the sign classifiers somewhat regularly mis-read 80 as 60 for speed limits, causing cruise control to arbitrarily slam on the brakes in some parts of the country. You would think that they would catch these things with rudimentary quality control. The automotive code for many of these systems is incomprehensibly awful but the entire process of how it is made virtually guarantees this outcome.
- lh7777 4y ago
  I just ran into this issue in Montana the other day. Weird thing was that it’d sometimes read the 80 mph limit correctly, then a second or two later revert to 60. My Sprinter just beeps at me, though. No brake action if it thinks I’m speeding.
  - mwint 4y ago
    Wonder if the “80” is from maps, which is then overridden by buggy vision?
  - jandrewrogers 4y ago
    Everyone I know that has discovered this bug, discovered it in Montana. All of the States that have ubiquitous 80 mph speed limits are clustered around that area. It reportedly happens with 80 kph speed limit signs in Canada as well.
    - dreamcompiler 4y ago
      Texas has an 80 mph limit on a long stretch of I-10. They have one other highway (130) with an 85 mph limit.
  - phist_mcgee 4y ago
    80 mp/h speed limit?!?
- amluto 4y ago
  I just borrowed a Tesla Model 3 that stopped for green lights. I asked a service person: apparently it is known to stop for a green light if there is no car ahead. The display shows a green light, a red line, and fine print saying that the car will stop for traffic control.
twroieuwro43 4y ago
Contrary to all the legends of "German quality/engineering" (of which there is certainly in certain industries) I've heard that German cars were shit during the 90s. Japan OTOH seems to be very aware of how these newfangled tech can screw your reputation.
- jen20 4y ago
  The 90s was a sweet spot for the three luxury German brands: Audi, BMW and Mercedes Benz. Mercedes in particular has had a very marked decline in quality since then.
  - ls612 4y ago
    Like what’s the highest quality luxury brand now, Lexus? Given that it’s Toyota engineering behind it I’d assume they are still good but I’ve never been in that market so idk.
    - jen20 4y ago
      Still those three, plus Lexus, Infiniti, Acura, Range Rover etc.
      - monkpit 4y ago
        Are you claiming that Land Rover makes a high quality product? Or just a luxurious one?
        jen20 4y ago
        Mostly a luxurious one today. I test drove a 2012 Range Rover in 2020 and all the rubber on the controls had melted. Would Not Recommend, but they are popular certainly.
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        RR is overpriced junk.
levymetal 4y ago
The other thing that worries me is how integrated modern headunits are. It used to be that when your headunit broke or became obsolete, you could just whack a new one in for a few hundred dollars, prolonging the life of your vehicle. Now even basic cars have fully integrated headunits making upgrades impossible. Even if the headunit continues to function, the technology is going to become so obsolete that they’ll be virtually useless in 20 years. I doubt the iPhone 35 will connect to a 2023 car. I guess people who buy new cars couldn’t care less about what happens to them in 20 years, which is an easy win for car manufacturers looking for ways to reduce the effective lifespan of their vehicles.
- qrohlf 4y ago
  Yep, exactly. My personal vehicle is a 2000 model year Toyota. It has an incredibly good, stable, and modern CarPlay head unit from Sony, because back whin the car was made we had standards like double-DIN head units and you could just plop in a new stereo. Which is exactly what I did, and now I have a "golden age" mechanically reliable, nigh-un-killable Toyota with a modern carplay head unit. And as a bonus, I can adjust everything about the car (climate control, volume, overdrive, 4wd, ECT mode, etc) with real buttons and tactile feedback while going down a washboard track, without ever having to take my eyes off the road. If anyone out there starts making EVs with the same bare-bones attitude (analog knobs and dials, no flashy infotainment system, double-DIN head unit slot, modern safety features and a simple ultra-reliable EV powertrain), sign me up. It'll probably never happen because there's not really an economic incentive right now to try to hit lower price-points in the EV market, everyone's going upmarket. But I'd still love to see somebody try.
cvccvroomvroom 4y ago
Beware of Sprinters: they contain Dodgy parts.
picometer 4y ago
Your final conclusion surprised me. All of the software woes you describe sound like they come from insufficient foundational technology, so why not be pleased that they are now investing in those foundations?
SkyPuncher 4y ago
This comment is extremely enlightening. I'm really considering a Sprinter van as my next vehicle purchase. We do a _lot_ of driving on rural roads where we can count on a single hand the number of cars we pass in an hour.
jacquesm 4y ago
Mercedes' crap software caused me to stop driving them, even though I love the handling, the reliability of the engine and the general lack of distractions. They really blew it, their software is a safety liability rather than an asset and I really wonder what caused them to drop the ball in such a terrible way.
- bluecalm 4y ago
  Do you know any programmers who think it's cool to work for German car companies or that they at least offer a decent pay? I think that's the answer: those traditional German industries don't care nor understand IT. These days and entry level KIA has better software than a BMW (I owned several BMWs from different eras and will not buy anything from them again).
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    BMW is just plain embarrassing. A long time colleague was a huge fan of the brand, he'd buy pretty much all of their top of the line models one after the other. Some of them were so often in the shop with software issues that he ended up getting attached to the replacement vehicles :)
adornKey 4y ago
We had a young guy writing good software for us while he still was going to school. We still use it to get things done in production. Then he went to university. He came back for a summer job. He had the sudden urge to ditch everything he used to do and to use the newest unproven technology. Also he had a serious urge to install everything from Microsoft. Then he created a piece of slow software full of flaws and performance problems - with a lot of unnecessary fluff in the UI. (At some time he mentioned that he was going to use multi-threading for every button, to reduce the lag when drawing the UI). Then he joined Mercedes-Benz... And makes a lot of money there. And I'm really happy that I don't have to worry about him anymore. I read some job descriptions for Mercedes-Benz and I think he most likely totally fits in there. What they do to young people in Universities today must be really terrible...
- b0afc375b5 4y ago
  Interesting story. Thanks for sharing. Not trying to blame anyone here. Did no one guide him? Just by virtue of him being a young student, surely his unproductive proclivities were easily correctable? Was he averse to mentoring?
  - adornKey 4y ago
    He already did great things in the past. I liked him a lot before university. There is too much self-esteem in those young guys. And they blindly trust every new framework that shows up on the market. Also they have excellent grades in university and get offered a lot of money. Somehow guys from management and HR like them. For me there was not much chance to mentor anything. I could talk more about young guys being problematic... but to me this was extraordinary and somehow related to the things people complain about Mercedes software. For me two things seem to be dysfunctional: 1) University today and in this case the University closest to Mercedes headquarter 2) HR (as usual...). Things like "practical experience with multi-threaded UI performance improvements" in a CV somehow clicks with HR. At the moment I have to deal with a guy who dislikes databases and instead of adding a column to a table wants the database-server internally to query his webservice when someone selects something from the table. I bet Mercedes HR will love this when he writes a nice line about that in his CV...
Dalewyn 4y ago
>couldn't always be solved by power cycling the vehicle. From experience, I've found that turning a car off is akin to putting a computer to sleep. If the state is fubar, no amount of turning the car on and off will fix it. The only proper way to "power cycle" a car is to momentarily disconnect the car battery (remember to turn the car off first) so all power to the computers are physically cut off and they /have/ to start from a cold boot next time you turn the car on.
- slrainka 4y ago
  Disconnecting the battery can have other consequences. Easier to reset the fuse
  - b112 4y ago
    A good idea, put a fuse + switch there, and add it to the dash. 1/2 an hour of work. Better yet, do so, then demand part costs + time + debug + this is the only way to fix it. A $1000 seems abiut right. Having the dealer fail to fix it (all those reflashes) helps, for the small claims court case, as surely they will refuse to pay. Then post the court case win online. This seems to be the only way to get big anything to do right by the consumer, these days.
chokma 4y ago
> It had obvious race-condition type bugs when it came to the user interface layer, but most frustrating was its tendency to succumb to some kind of memory leak on long drives where the entire head unit would just lock up and crash to a black screen after 6-7 hours of being turned on. Because the vehicle kept the computer system "warm" for up to 30 minutes or so to avoid doing a full (and slow) bootup process every time you stopped for fuel, this was a real problem on long trips and couldn't always be solved by power cycling the vehicle. Had this problem with an A-K200 about 13 years ago - when driving long distances, after a couple of hours the nav system would randomly stop working. Sometimes stopping at a gas station would allow the system to reset by itself, sometimes not.

by qrohlf 4y ago

coffeebeqn 4y ago

I’m also horrified by the trend to put more and more of the meters into the UI. My Ford has done the booting thing before on a highway as well as once it flipped the screen horizontally until it was shut down and started again. I can’t imagine the quality is any better for the display components that will replace speedometers and such

mmastrac 4y ago
The media head-end software tends to be much less robust than the digital dash display software. I've had the head unit crash and act poorly on many cars, while digital dashes boot quickly and tend to be pretty solid. The only time I had an issue w/a digital dash was in a Volvo that had a battery that was nearly flat. The screen itself would glitch in various ways, but the data itself was still solid.
eckza 4y ago
My (admittedly-beloved) 2015 F-150 will reboot Sync if I'm listening to music (usually on Soundcloud) if the song title includes non-ASCII characters.
- xp84 4y ago
  I'm reminded of: ( https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-roman-mars-mazda-virus/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-roman-mars-mazda-... ) the Mazda head unit being allergic to Roman Mars.
  - vlachen 4y ago
    The concept of technology being unable to handle some input as an "allergy" for some reason makes me giggle.
  - cpeterso 4y ago
    Or Janet Jackson's song Rhythm Nation crashing some old laptop hard drives, due to the hard drives' resonant frequency. The manufacturer worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220920-00/?p=107201 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220920-00/?p=10...
- doubled112 4y ago
  My 2011 Ford Focus with Sync would randomly lock up and loop the same 10th of a second of the current track. Like a really old PC if it crashed while playing a sound. Turning the car and back on again to stop the noise got old really fast. All of the radio inputs stopped working when this happened.
  - nubinetwork 4y ago
    Hey, ring buffer... I want you to play this, and I'm going to give you more data, just keep looping the buffer. Oops, I forgot to give you more data... or tell you to stop... >:)
gmueckl 4y ago
Car software is a lot more involved than most of the people here would think. These days, the dashboard display is typically rendered by separate pieces of software. A pretty normal, moderately fancy rendering engine does all the animations and backgrounds while the really important information (e.g. engine/brake system malfunction) is overlaid from a separate, isolated software system with a stack that meets quite high functional safety standards. That is, the chance of the second part of the system ever failing is comparable to winning the lottery.

babypuncher 4y ago

I don't think I've ever used software provided by an automaker that I would classify as "good". Just varying degrees from "functional, but barebones and clunky" down to "so buggy and useless it's a legitimate safety hazard". As a result, I'm firmly on team "make every infotainment system a dumb terminal for your phone" and refuse to buy any car that doesn't support both Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.

nicbou 4y ago
I can't find that comic where the head unit is just a rectangle with a 3.5mm jack. That's all we need, really. My old car has a cheap phone clip screwed into the dashboard, and the phone connects to the speakers for music. I can't imagine anything improving upon that.
- jeromegv 4y ago
  CarPlay is definitely a huge improvement on that.
maxerickson 4y ago
Most automobile engines made in the last 30 years are running software that works at least okay.
xp84 4y ago
I find myself torn on this: * Traditional Automakers: Mostly as you describe, though honestly I am fond of the UI in my VW. Most others score B-D in responsiveness and anywhere from B-F in my "is this UI closer to ideal, or to a caricature of a baffling UI that no one will ever like to use?" scale. * Apple: "No one needs physical controls for anything, and people HATE seeing any details, so let's try to get as minimal as possible because that's just elegant. Maybe just a dashboard with a your speed, as a single number, unlabeled because labels are ugly, and three dots (touch target 0.6cm) that you have to touch to access a menu to access all other features." * Recent Automakers: "People love screens. Let's delete lots of switches to save a few dozen dollars, and stick functionality in deeply-nested menus that require you to take your eyes off the road." I really want the $20 worth of physical buttons, knobs, stalks and switches of a traditional car, and the extensibility of the CarPlay world.

killerpopiller 4y ago

I own a MB V-class and had no software issue I remember.

mtillman 4y ago

This is why I only buy used MBs from pre-2016. They're fantastic and they don't require a subscription. Though the 2016 E/S is a wifi hotspot if you really want that in a car.

ASalazarMX 4y ago

> couldn't always be solved by power cycling the vehicle. Made me remember when I turned on my new (dumb) TV and it did a startup sound. I knew it would get worse in the future.

7thaccount 4y ago
I really despise smart TVs. My new Roku tv poops itself all the time and the apps stop working so I have to look for the system reset and it's not always super straight forward.

lh7777 4y ago

> if the system fails to detect any other vehicles for a period of more than about 90 minutes, it assumes that there is a sensor fault, and refuses to operate I have a current model Sprinter and this behavior is frustrating (thanks for the explanation, by the way, I thought it was a random bug). Cruise will also disengage in heavy rain or snow, with the system saying the sensor is dirty. It wouldn’t be so bad if traditional cruise control would keep working without the active braking assist, etc. but unfortunately it’s all or nothing. I do like the system when it works, which is most of the time, and it’s never done something that felt unsafe. I haven’t had any problems with the info system. This is my first vehicle with a touchscreen, and I was worried that it’d be a pain to use. But Mercedes provides real buttons for common actions, little trackpads on the steering wheel that can control the system without ever having to touch the screen, Car Play works great, and the built-in nav system is useful for those times I need directions and don’t have a cell signal. My biggest worry is how these delicate parts will hold up over the years. My 10 year old car has a monochrome dot matrix display that loses a good number of pixels when it gets hot out. Will I really be able to get replacement parts for the Sprinter when the screen or computer start to die in 10-15 years?

SoftTalker 4y ago
> Cruise will also disengage in heavy rain or snow That’s what it should do, honestly. It’s not safe to drive with cruise control in low traction conditions.
- ht85 4y ago
  Yeah, the manual explicitly says that cruise control should only be used in clear weather conditions.
  - lh7777 4y ago
    Yes, the manual does say not to use adaptive cruise control (Distronic) on icy or slippery roads, if visibility is poor, or if the radar sensors are affected by a variety of weather conditions. Cruise will even automatically disengage if electronic stability intervenes. I’m mostly annoyed that false positives such as the Nevada issue described above or a one-time splash of water on the sensor when it’s perfectly safe to use cruise control results in the whole system being unavailable for an extended period of time. To me, the right solution would be to disengage Distronic when the sensor can’t see well enough and then allow the driver to re-engage traditional cruise control if they deem it safe to do so. The system doesn’t have the sensors or the smarts to know if it’s actually safe to use cruise control, only the driver can make that judgement. From the manual: “Cruise control is only an aid. You are responsible for the distance to the vehicle in front, for vehicle speed, braking in good time and for staying in your lane.”

GoToRO 4y ago

That sw does not come from Mercedes, they just buy different devices for what they need from suppliers. The salary offered by one such supplier for a graduate engineer was less than what a construction company was offering to hang dry wall (qualified worker). The construction company was raising a new building for the supplier.

TheSpiceIsLife 4y ago
That's mostly an irrelevant detail. Mercedes may not be the OEM in this instance, though they are certainly the vendor, who put their name and reputation to it.
- radicaldreamer 4y ago
  Exactly, the buck stops with Mercedes. It's on Mercedes for not investing in higher quality software for their vehicles.
jacquesm 4y ago
That was their choice though.

jandrewrogers 4y ago

Some Mercedes also have the bug where the sign classifiers somewhat regularly mis-read 80 as 60 for speed limits, causing cruise control to arbitrarily slam on the brakes in some parts of the country. You would think that they would catch these things with rudimentary quality control. The automotive code for many of these systems is incomprehensibly awful but the entire process of how it is made virtually guarantees this outcome.

lh7777 4y ago
I just ran into this issue in Montana the other day. Weird thing was that it’d sometimes read the 80 mph limit correctly, then a second or two later revert to 60. My Sprinter just beeps at me, though. No brake action if it thinks I’m speeding.
- mwint 4y ago
  Wonder if the “80” is from maps, which is then overridden by buggy vision?
- jandrewrogers 4y ago
  Everyone I know that has discovered this bug, discovered it in Montana. All of the States that have ubiquitous 80 mph speed limits are clustered around that area. It reportedly happens with 80 kph speed limit signs in Canada as well.
  - dreamcompiler 4y ago
    Texas has an 80 mph limit on a long stretch of I-10. They have one other highway (130) with an 85 mph limit.
- phist_mcgee 4y ago
  80 mp/h speed limit?!?
amluto 4y ago
I just borrowed a Tesla Model 3 that stopped for green lights. I asked a service person: apparently it is known to stop for a green light if there is no car ahead. The display shows a green light, a red line, and fine print saying that the car will stop for traffic control.

twroieuwro43 4y ago

Contrary to all the legends of "German quality/engineering" (of which there is certainly in certain industries) I've heard that German cars were shit during the 90s. Japan OTOH seems to be very aware of how these newfangled tech can screw your reputation.

jen20 4y ago
The 90s was a sweet spot for the three luxury German brands: Audi, BMW and Mercedes Benz. Mercedes in particular has had a very marked decline in quality since then.
- ls612 4y ago
  Like what’s the highest quality luxury brand now, Lexus? Given that it’s Toyota engineering behind it I’d assume they are still good but I’ve never been in that market so idk.
  - jen20 4y ago
    Still those three, plus Lexus, Infiniti, Acura, Range Rover etc.
    - monkpit 4y ago
      Are you claiming that Land Rover makes a high quality product? Or just a luxurious one?
      - jen20 4y ago
        Mostly a luxurious one today. I test drove a 2012 Range Rover in 2020 and all the rubber on the controls had melted. Would Not Recommend, but they are popular certainly.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      RR is overpriced junk.

levymetal 4y ago

The other thing that worries me is how integrated modern headunits are. It used to be that when your headunit broke or became obsolete, you could just whack a new one in for a few hundred dollars, prolonging the life of your vehicle. Now even basic cars have fully integrated headunits making upgrades impossible. Even if the headunit continues to function, the technology is going to become so obsolete that they’ll be virtually useless in 20 years. I doubt the iPhone 35 will connect to a 2023 car. I guess people who buy new cars couldn’t care less about what happens to them in 20 years, which is an easy win for car manufacturers looking for ways to reduce the effective lifespan of their vehicles.

qrohlf 4y ago
Yep, exactly. My personal vehicle is a 2000 model year Toyota. It has an incredibly good, stable, and modern CarPlay head unit from Sony, because back whin the car was made we had standards like double-DIN head units and you could just plop in a new stereo. Which is exactly what I did, and now I have a "golden age" mechanically reliable, nigh-un-killable Toyota with a modern carplay head unit. And as a bonus, I can adjust everything about the car (climate control, volume, overdrive, 4wd, ECT mode, etc) with real buttons and tactile feedback while going down a washboard track, without ever having to take my eyes off the road. If anyone out there starts making EVs with the same bare-bones attitude (analog knobs and dials, no flashy infotainment system, double-DIN head unit slot, modern safety features and a simple ultra-reliable EV powertrain), sign me up. It'll probably never happen because there's not really an economic incentive right now to try to hit lower price-points in the EV market, everyone's going upmarket. But I'd still love to see somebody try.

cvccvroomvroom 4y ago

Beware of Sprinters: they contain Dodgy parts.

picometer 4y ago

Your final conclusion surprised me. All of the software woes you describe sound like they come from insufficient foundational technology, so why not be pleased that they are now investing in those foundations?

SkyPuncher 4y ago

This comment is extremely enlightening. I'm really considering a Sprinter van as my next vehicle purchase. We do a _lot_ of driving on rural roads where we can count on a single hand the number of cars we pass in an hour.

jacquesm 4y ago

Mercedes' crap software caused me to stop driving them, even though I love the handling, the reliability of the engine and the general lack of distractions. They really blew it, their software is a safety liability rather than an asset and I really wonder what caused them to drop the ball in such a terrible way.

bluecalm 4y ago
Do you know any programmers who think it's cool to work for German car companies or that they at least offer a decent pay? I think that's the answer: those traditional German industries don't care nor understand IT. These days and entry level KIA has better software than a BMW (I owned several BMWs from different eras and will not buy anything from them again).
- jacquesm 4y ago
  BMW is just plain embarrassing. A long time colleague was a huge fan of the brand, he'd buy pretty much all of their top of the line models one after the other. Some of them were so often in the shop with software issues that he ended up getting attached to the replacement vehicles :)

adornKey 4y ago

We had a young guy writing good software for us while he still was going to school. We still use it to get things done in production. Then he went to university. He came back for a summer job. He had the sudden urge to ditch everything he used to do and to use the newest unproven technology. Also he had a serious urge to install everything from Microsoft. Then he created a piece of slow software full of flaws and performance problems - with a lot of unnecessary fluff in the UI. (At some time he mentioned that he was going to use multi-threading for every button, to reduce the lag when drawing the UI). Then he joined Mercedes-Benz... And makes a lot of money there. And I'm really happy that I don't have to worry about him anymore. I read some job descriptions for Mercedes-Benz and I think he most likely totally fits in there. What they do to young people in Universities today must be really terrible...

b0afc375b5 4y ago
Interesting story. Thanks for sharing. Not trying to blame anyone here. Did no one guide him? Just by virtue of him being a young student, surely his unproductive proclivities were easily correctable? Was he averse to mentoring?
- adornKey 4y ago
  He already did great things in the past. I liked him a lot before university. There is too much self-esteem in those young guys. And they blindly trust every new framework that shows up on the market. Also they have excellent grades in university and get offered a lot of money. Somehow guys from management and HR like them. For me there was not much chance to mentor anything. I could talk more about young guys being problematic... but to me this was extraordinary and somehow related to the things people complain about Mercedes software. For me two things seem to be dysfunctional: 1) University today and in this case the University closest to Mercedes headquarter 2) HR (as usual...). Things like "practical experience with multi-threaded UI performance improvements" in a CV somehow clicks with HR. At the moment I have to deal with a guy who dislikes databases and instead of adding a column to a table wants the database-server internally to query his webservice when someone selects something from the table. I bet Mercedes HR will love this when he writes a nice line about that in his CV...

Dalewyn 4y ago

>couldn't always be solved by power cycling the vehicle. From experience, I've found that turning a car off is akin to putting a computer to sleep. If the state is fubar, no amount of turning the car on and off will fix it. The only proper way to "power cycle" a car is to momentarily disconnect the car battery (remember to turn the car off first) so all power to the computers are physically cut off and they /have/ to start from a cold boot next time you turn the car on.

slrainka 4y ago
Disconnecting the battery can have other consequences. Easier to reset the fuse
- b112 4y ago
  A good idea, put a fuse + switch there, and add it to the dash. 1/2 an hour of work. Better yet, do so, then demand part costs + time + debug + this is the only way to fix it. A $1000 seems abiut right. Having the dealer fail to fix it (all those reflashes) helps, for the small claims court case, as surely they will refuse to pay. Then post the court case win online. This seems to be the only way to get big anything to do right by the consumer, these days.

chokma 4y ago

> It had obvious race-condition type bugs when it came to the user interface layer, but most frustrating was its tendency to succumb to some kind of memory leak on long drives where the entire head unit would just lock up and crash to a black screen after 6-7 hours of being turned on. Because the vehicle kept the computer system "warm" for up to 30 minutes or so to avoid doing a full (and slow) bootup process every time you stopped for fuel, this was a real problem on long trips and couldn't always be solved by power cycling the vehicle. Had this problem with an A-K200 about 13 years ago - when driving long distances, after a couple of hours the nav system would randomly stop working. Sometimes stopping at a gas station would allow the system to reset by itself, sometimes not.