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The 2022 Chevy Silverado I rented died at 488 miles on the odometer. The roadside assistance mechanic said the transmission "lost data connection to the engine"

The 2022 Chevy Silverado I rented died at 488 miles on the odometer. The roadside assistance mechanic said the transmission "lost data connection to the engine". Later, a tow truck had to drag it onto it's flatbed as the rear wheels were locked up. Also, apparently the tailgate is electric now. And for some reason it stopped working when the transmission died. Also also, there is no way to turn the truck off? When it entered the error-state, the dash stayed on and the cabin motor stayed blowing, but the "Start" button wouldn't turn anything off. I know I'm an odd case, my newest car is from 1997... but I am gobsmacked at just how terrible modern vehicles are. I know customers are dumb and are easily impressed by cheap gadgetry, but why did we have to throw the baby out with the bath water? So when I hear that GM is going to build their own CarPlay or whatever I can't help but laugh. They can't even build a good fleet pickup truck.

caycep 3y ago
This brings to mind the CANBUS hack article on HN a few weeks ago...horrifying but fascinating to think you can steal a car by attacking it's IoT headlight..
bombcar 3y ago
The computerization of vehicles can be done exceptionally well or exceptionally bad, and some of them are just phenomenally bad.
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  yes i have always enjoyed every time i drive a vw id.3. i have not enjoyed so much tesla or any other american made computerized car.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    It's even beyond the UI and how the components work with each other (the example of the transmission dying killing everything). Some of the vehicles will shut down entirely, some will cut out into limp mode, etc.
- ubermonkey 3y ago
  And we see where GM stands.
- usrusr 3y ago
  Are the bad ones exceptional though?
RandallBrown 3y ago
> but I am gobsmacked at just how terrible modern vehicles are CarPlay, adaptive cruise control, lane assist, automatic lights (brights, on/off, turning), cameras, remote start from my phone, and lots of other things are awesome modern additions to cars that I wouldn't want to go without anymore.
- r00fus 3y ago
  Lane assist done poorly (seen on my latest Toyota Corolla rental) is distracting and made me want to turn it off. Any advanced features that are rushed or poorly thought out - can turn into liabilities instead of assets.
  - libraryatnight 3y ago
    Indeed. Some cars feel dangerous with lane assist when there's significant noise from repaving,sealing, etc to confuse the car and it's trying to correct nothing. That said, I still enjoy most of the modern computer conveniences that cars have. Remote start is great, cameras are great, so I'm sure more and more good/safe designs will come with time.
  - ramesh31 3y ago
    >Lane assist done poorly (seen on my latest Toyota Corolla rental) is distracting and made me want to turn it off. TSS is actually pretty good once you get comfortable using it. But this is the Toyota philosophy on ADAS systems in general. They are not going all in on FSD like the other manufacturers because it simply isn't ready yet. And so their lane assist is designed to be a safety catch for innattentive drivers, not an automated system.
  - MegaDeKay 3y ago
    Lane assist done poorly IS dangerous. Case in point: my 2016 Civic. On the highways around here, they will add pullover lanes on the right hand side so that through traffic doesn't have to slow down if someone ahead is slowing down to turn right. Great. But my car just sees the road as getting wider so it steers RIGHT DOWN THE MIDDLE between the two lanes. I just keep this potentially deadly feature turned off. And let's talk about the car's adaptive cruise control. It is wonderful. When it works. My drive to work starts with a long featureless country gravel road that is straight as an arrow north / south. Every now and then, I'll be driving along and after 10 km the car will figure "Not much going on here. The radar must have failed. As a safety precaution, I'm just going to beep at the driver and turn off ACC with no error message of any kind that would trouble the driver". Well no problem, I'll just press the button to turn it on again. But how presumptuous of me: the car is smarter than I am because it just beeps and turns it immediately off again. The only way to get ACC back on again is come to a full stop, turn the ignition off and back on again. My dealer was mystified so they phoned the factory. Also mystified. I've taken the car to get it looked at more times than I care to think of and just gave up. I shudder at a future filled with autonomous vehicles filled with strange bugs like these.
spenczar5 3y ago
> I know customers are dumb and are easily impressed by cheap gadgetry, but why did we have to throw the baby out with the bath water? I don't think it's about gadgetry. I think there are a few other things going on. None are really pro-consumer, in my opinion. - Software can be updated. Overhauling mechanical parts is way harder. This lets the manufacturer go a little quicker with development - you can "fix it in post." - Software can be easier to reuse across models of vehicles (in theory). "We'll figure out software-based tailgates just once, and can use it everywhere." - Software can be controlled remotely. For example, Ford filed a patent to disable cars remotely if the owner misses a payment [0]. - Software can help build a monopoly on maintenance. Electronically controlled stuff is way harder (even impossible) to diagnose if you don't have maintenance software and computers to interface with the car. So the manufacturer can control more of the maintenance chain. --- [0] https://fortune.com/2023/03/02/ford-patent-late-payments-shut-off-air-conditioning-radio/ https://fortune.com/2023/03/02/ford-patent-late-payments-shu...
- freedomben 3y ago
  One other reason I've discovered, is regulatory. The amount of mandatory "features" required nowadays by government regulation is incredible, and the only economical way to meet many of those is with software implementations. The big automakers certainly aren't complaining because it justifies higher price tags and has a major stifling effect on upstarts and other competition, and they've got the machinery (literal and figurative) to navigate the requirements. Hell they write a lot of them.
philwelch 3y ago
Worth pointing out that GM actually failed as a business and only survived the 2008 recession because the government briefly nationalized it as part of an economic bailout. In a free market GM wouldn’t exist.
- letsdothisagain 3y ago
  It's worth pointing out that the free market would replace it with BYD. Economics are politics, and as such are a little more complicated than that one chart you saw in high school.
  - tgma 3y ago
    Somehow BYD is the product of free market in a way that GM isn’t? I think that’s a ridiculous characterization for any Chinese company operating at scale.
- pySSK 3y ago
  It's a moot point. In a free market, Tesla wouldn't exist either and neither would some of the biggest financial institutions, or the interstate highway system.
HWR_14 3y ago
> I know customers are dumb and are easily impressed by cheap gadgetry, but why did we have to throw the baby out with the bath water? Are they impressed by cheap gadgetry? Or is it just no one makes cars without it?
- LarryDarrell 3y ago
  This is a great question and I actually go back and forth on it myself. I do tend to be harsher to consumers, because that's who I'm around. My friends who work directly at the auto makers or their suppliers like to blame "MBA's". But find me an engineer that doesn't blame it all on MBAs.
justin66 3y ago
> I am gobsmacked at just how terrible modern vehicles are. Okay, but in fairness to modern cars as a whole, how long has it been since Chevrolet was considered a high-quality brand by the market? Forty-five years?
- greedo 3y ago
  Even longer than that unless you're lumping Cadillac (or other GM makes) in it.
bdcravens 3y ago
Is that an issue with modern cars, or GM's quality? Overall, American cars have been seen as low quality for decades. I've had several Toyotas, Hondas, and now a Kia. I know I'm just a dumb guy but they all had "cheap gadgetry". However, what they didn't have was any of the issues you describe.
jjav 3y ago
> "lost data connection to the engine" I've been commenting on this for a while, the current cars are extremely fragile electrically given how everything is interconnected. I had a tail light go out in a BMW, a repair that should cost maybe $1 for a new bulb or in the worst case a few more dollars in new wire. On the BMW? A $1000+ proprietary control module plus access to multi-tens-of-thousands dollars of BMW factory diagnostic equipment to "pair" the new bulb with the new controller. This is all insane if viewed objectively. The worst part is not the cost, although that stings. A few decades down the road, where is this proprietary bulb control module going to come from? It won't be available from anywhere at any cost. I get that it's cool to see a new car with all the gadgetry but we should really be thinking longer term here. The lifetime of a car is many decades. The lifetime of electronic gadgetry is a few years, maybe a decade tops. It is perfectly reasonable to daily drive a car from the 80s, but imagine continuing to doing real work on a computer from the 80s today? The lifetimes of cars and electronics are too vastly different, they need to be decoupled. I confidently predict that a century from now there will still be collectors driving classic cars from the 90s and before, but there will be nearly no cars from the 2020s that remain operational. I'm sure car manufacturers aren't too unhappy to create a world where everyone throws away their car as often as they throw away their phone, but let's consider the enviromental disaster of this waste.
- nyarlathotep_ 3y ago
  People also fail to realize that often dealers are the only source that can even replace these components. Bob's Tire on main is likely not going to be able to troubleshoot nor replace stuff like this when these components start to fail regularly out of warranty in the coming years.
smaccona 3y ago
This sort of thing is not limited to Chevy/GM. The new 2023 BMW i7 (starting price ~$120K, fully loaded ~$160K) comes with options for a massive fold-down widescreen cinema in the back seat, and the back seat can turn into a recliner for the ultimate movie experience (I am paraphrasing)[1][2]. My daughter looked at a couple of reviews and said something along the lines of "it's like they thought of every amazing thing they could put in a car, and then went and did all of them". And indeed, the video reviews look very impressive. Then I saw the one from Car Guide[3] in which he mentions that not only when the cinema screen is down in the back, the driver can't see out of the rear view mirror (obvious when you think about it), but also when the back seat is in recliner mode, it folds the front passenger seat forward, and then the passenger headrest completely obscures the passenger wing mirror, so that the driver then has no idea what's going on around the car. It's clear how superficially impressive the car is looking at the video and from my daughter's reaction (she's a teenager, but I don't think being impressed by this stuff is limited to teenagers, and I confess to a "wow!" moment myself when watching the same video). But the car is failing at its basic functionality: being a car that's safe to drive. Like BMW or not, I don't think this sort of stuff would have happened in the past. It feels like they have lost their way. From my own perspective, I really dislike the touch-sensitive user interfaces in new cars. Anything that distracts me from looking at the road is bad, and there is really no tactile element to these interfaces (when I rented a Jeep recently, I found myself having to examine the touchscreen when stopped at red lights to learn where the various controls were - granted this can happen in any car, where you have to learn where things are, but at least there aren't usually multiple nested levels of menus - but still having to at least glance at the screen to see where to put my finger, whereas in older cars once you learn where things are you can locate controls by touch and activate them without having to take your eyes off the road). [1] Review from The Verge with pics of the screen https://www.theverge.com/23686915/bmw-i7-xdrive60-review-photos-specs-price https://www.theverge.com/23686915/bmw-i7-xdrive60-review-pho... [2] Video review showing all the crazy features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwQvZaqpwDk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwQvZaqpwDk [3] Car Guide video review, link to discussion of screen and mirror issues: https://youtu.be/VsvrQSpl-5U?t=497 https://youtu.be/VsvrQSpl-5U?t=497
- switch007 3y ago
  BMW lost its way when it made an SUV, at the turn of the last century. Then horrible things like front wheel drive happened in 2004! Then more odd numbers! 2, 4, 6…! And then they put a turbo on the M3. Absolute carnage after 1999 lol
iancmceachern 3y ago
"but I am gobsmacked at just how terrible modern vehicles are" I have a F250 platinum with many similar features, including an electrically operated tailgate and I've had exactly zero issues in 50k miles. Obligatory knock on wood.
dopamean 3y ago
This is why I keep a motorcycle for most of my daily usage. I like how dumb it is.

caycep 3y ago

This brings to mind the CANBUS hack article on HN a few weeks ago...horrifying but fascinating to think you can steal a car by attacking it's IoT headlight..

bombcar 3y ago

The computerization of vehicles can be done exceptionally well or exceptionally bad, and some of them are just phenomenally bad.

mnky9800n 3y ago
yes i have always enjoyed every time i drive a vw id.3. i have not enjoyed so much tesla or any other american made computerized car.
- bombcar 3y ago
  It's even beyond the UI and how the components work with each other (the example of the transmission dying killing everything). Some of the vehicles will shut down entirely, some will cut out into limp mode, etc.
ubermonkey 3y ago
And we see where GM stands.
usrusr 3y ago
Are the bad ones exceptional though?

RandallBrown 3y ago

> but I am gobsmacked at just how terrible modern vehicles are CarPlay, adaptive cruise control, lane assist, automatic lights (brights, on/off, turning), cameras, remote start from my phone, and lots of other things are awesome modern additions to cars that I wouldn't want to go without anymore.

r00fus 3y ago
Lane assist done poorly (seen on my latest Toyota Corolla rental) is distracting and made me want to turn it off. Any advanced features that are rushed or poorly thought out - can turn into liabilities instead of assets.
- libraryatnight 3y ago
  Indeed. Some cars feel dangerous with lane assist when there's significant noise from repaving,sealing, etc to confuse the car and it's trying to correct nothing. That said, I still enjoy most of the modern computer conveniences that cars have. Remote start is great, cameras are great, so I'm sure more and more good/safe designs will come with time.
- ramesh31 3y ago
  >Lane assist done poorly (seen on my latest Toyota Corolla rental) is distracting and made me want to turn it off. TSS is actually pretty good once you get comfortable using it. But this is the Toyota philosophy on ADAS systems in general. They are not going all in on FSD like the other manufacturers because it simply isn't ready yet. And so their lane assist is designed to be a safety catch for innattentive drivers, not an automated system.
- MegaDeKay 3y ago
  Lane assist done poorly IS dangerous. Case in point: my 2016 Civic. On the highways around here, they will add pullover lanes on the right hand side so that through traffic doesn't have to slow down if someone ahead is slowing down to turn right. Great. But my car just sees the road as getting wider so it steers RIGHT DOWN THE MIDDLE between the two lanes. I just keep this potentially deadly feature turned off. And let's talk about the car's adaptive cruise control. It is wonderful. When it works. My drive to work starts with a long featureless country gravel road that is straight as an arrow north / south. Every now and then, I'll be driving along and after 10 km the car will figure "Not much going on here. The radar must have failed. As a safety precaution, I'm just going to beep at the driver and turn off ACC with no error message of any kind that would trouble the driver". Well no problem, I'll just press the button to turn it on again. But how presumptuous of me: the car is smarter than I am because it just beeps and turns it immediately off again. The only way to get ACC back on again is come to a full stop, turn the ignition off and back on again. My dealer was mystified so they phoned the factory. Also mystified. I've taken the car to get it looked at more times than I care to think of and just gave up. I shudder at a future filled with autonomous vehicles filled with strange bugs like these.

spenczar5 3y ago

> I know customers are dumb and are easily impressed by cheap gadgetry, but why did we have to throw the baby out with the bath water? I don't think it's about gadgetry. I think there are a few other things going on. None are really pro-consumer, in my opinion. - Software can be updated. Overhauling mechanical parts is way harder. This lets the manufacturer go a little quicker with development - you can "fix it in post." - Software can be easier to reuse across models of vehicles (in theory). "We'll figure out software-based tailgates just once, and can use it everywhere." - Software can be controlled remotely. For example, Ford filed a patent to disable cars remotely if the owner misses a payment [0]. - Software can help build a monopoly on maintenance. Electronically controlled stuff is way harder (even impossible) to diagnose if you don't have maintenance software and computers to interface with the car. So the manufacturer can control more of the maintenance chain. --- [0] https://fortune.com/2023/03/02/ford-patent-late-payments-shut-off-air-conditioning-radio/ https://fortune.com/2023/03/02/ford-patent-late-payments-shu...

freedomben 3y ago
One other reason I've discovered, is regulatory. The amount of mandatory "features" required nowadays by government regulation is incredible, and the only economical way to meet many of those is with software implementations. The big automakers certainly aren't complaining because it justifies higher price tags and has a major stifling effect on upstarts and other competition, and they've got the machinery (literal and figurative) to navigate the requirements. Hell they write a lot of them.

philwelch 3y ago

Worth pointing out that GM actually failed as a business and only survived the 2008 recession because the government briefly nationalized it as part of an economic bailout. In a free market GM wouldn’t exist.

letsdothisagain 3y ago
It's worth pointing out that the free market would replace it with BYD. Economics are politics, and as such are a little more complicated than that one chart you saw in high school.
- tgma 3y ago
  Somehow BYD is the product of free market in a way that GM isn’t? I think that’s a ridiculous characterization for any Chinese company operating at scale.
pySSK 3y ago
It's a moot point. In a free market, Tesla wouldn't exist either and neither would some of the biggest financial institutions, or the interstate highway system.

HWR_14 3y ago

> I know customers are dumb and are easily impressed by cheap gadgetry, but why did we have to throw the baby out with the bath water? Are they impressed by cheap gadgetry? Or is it just no one makes cars without it?

LarryDarrell 3y ago
This is a great question and I actually go back and forth on it myself. I do tend to be harsher to consumers, because that's who I'm around. My friends who work directly at the auto makers or their suppliers like to blame "MBA's". But find me an engineer that doesn't blame it all on MBAs.

justin66 3y ago

> I am gobsmacked at just how terrible modern vehicles are. Okay, but in fairness to modern cars as a whole, how long has it been since Chevrolet was considered a high-quality brand by the market? Forty-five years?

greedo 3y ago
Even longer than that unless you're lumping Cadillac (or other GM makes) in it.

bdcravens 3y ago

Is that an issue with modern cars, or GM's quality? Overall, American cars have been seen as low quality for decades. I've had several Toyotas, Hondas, and now a Kia. I know I'm just a dumb guy but they all had "cheap gadgetry". However, what they didn't have was any of the issues you describe.

jjav 3y ago

> "lost data connection to the engine" I've been commenting on this for a while, the current cars are extremely fragile electrically given how everything is interconnected. I had a tail light go out in a BMW, a repair that should cost maybe $1 for a new bulb or in the worst case a few more dollars in new wire. On the BMW? A $1000+ proprietary control module plus access to multi-tens-of-thousands dollars of BMW factory diagnostic equipment to "pair" the new bulb with the new controller. This is all insane if viewed objectively. The worst part is not the cost, although that stings. A few decades down the road, where is this proprietary bulb control module going to come from? It won't be available from anywhere at any cost. I get that it's cool to see a new car with all the gadgetry but we should really be thinking longer term here. The lifetime of a car is many decades. The lifetime of electronic gadgetry is a few years, maybe a decade tops. It is perfectly reasonable to daily drive a car from the 80s, but imagine continuing to doing real work on a computer from the 80s today? The lifetimes of cars and electronics are too vastly different, they need to be decoupled. I confidently predict that a century from now there will still be collectors driving classic cars from the 90s and before, but there will be nearly no cars from the 2020s that remain operational. I'm sure car manufacturers aren't too unhappy to create a world where everyone throws away their car as often as they throw away their phone, but let's consider the enviromental disaster of this waste.

nyarlathotep_ 3y ago
People also fail to realize that often dealers are the only source that can even replace these components. Bob's Tire on main is likely not going to be able to troubleshoot nor replace stuff like this when these components start to fail regularly out of warranty in the coming years.

smaccona 3y ago

This sort of thing is not limited to Chevy/GM. The new 2023 BMW i7 (starting price ~$120K, fully loaded ~$160K) comes with options for a massive fold-down widescreen cinema in the back seat, and the back seat can turn into a recliner for the ultimate movie experience (I am paraphrasing)[1][2]. My daughter looked at a couple of reviews and said something along the lines of "it's like they thought of every amazing thing they could put in a car, and then went and did all of them". And indeed, the video reviews look very impressive. Then I saw the one from Car Guide[3] in which he mentions that not only when the cinema screen is down in the back, the driver can't see out of the rear view mirror (obvious when you think about it), but also when the back seat is in recliner mode, it folds the front passenger seat forward, and then the passenger headrest completely obscures the passenger wing mirror, so that the driver then has no idea what's going on around the car. It's clear how superficially impressive the car is looking at the video and from my daughter's reaction (she's a teenager, but I don't think being impressed by this stuff is limited to teenagers, and I confess to a "wow!" moment myself when watching the same video). But the car is failing at its basic functionality: being a car that's safe to drive. Like BMW or not, I don't think this sort of stuff would have happened in the past. It feels like they have lost their way. From my own perspective, I really dislike the touch-sensitive user interfaces in new cars. Anything that distracts me from looking at the road is bad, and there is really no tactile element to these interfaces (when I rented a Jeep recently, I found myself having to examine the touchscreen when stopped at red lights to learn where the various controls were - granted this can happen in any car, where you have to learn where things are, but at least there aren't usually multiple nested levels of menus - but still having to at least glance at the screen to see where to put my finger, whereas in older cars once you learn where things are you can locate controls by touch and activate them without having to take your eyes off the road). [1] Review from The Verge with pics of the screen https://www.theverge.com/23686915/bmw-i7-xdrive60-review-photos-specs-price https://www.theverge.com/23686915/bmw-i7-xdrive60-review-pho... [2] Video review showing all the crazy features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwQvZaqpwDk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwQvZaqpwDk [3] Car Guide video review, link to discussion of screen and mirror issues: https://youtu.be/VsvrQSpl-5U?t=497 https://youtu.be/VsvrQSpl-5U?t=497

switch007 3y ago
BMW lost its way when it made an SUV, at the turn of the last century. Then horrible things like front wheel drive happened in 2004! Then more odd numbers! 2, 4, 6…! And then they put a turbo on the M3. Absolute carnage after 1999 lol

iancmceachern 3y ago

"but I am gobsmacked at just how terrible modern vehicles are" I have a F250 platinum with many similar features, including an electrically operated tailgate and I've had exactly zero issues in 50k miles. Obligatory knock on wood.

dopamean 3y ago

This is why I keep a motorcycle for most of my daily usage. I like how dumb it is.