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A recent software update was not successful. Your vehicle cannot be driven
- prakashn27 3y agoSoftware and hardware are prone to bugs , but that should not hinder its ability to perform the core operation (driving) of the product unless something major (brake failure) is detected.
- oldpersonintx 3y ago[dead]
- DrawTR 3y agosaying "for the tow truck operator" is horrifying language to put in a 'your car is bricked' spot
- rpmisms 3y agoMy Tesla had an update fail, and it didn't break anything, I just got a new update package the next day. I also replaced my own headlight and had to run a software update to initialize the new part. I called a service center and had a software update in less than an hour. Try that at Audi.
- iknowstuff 3y agoTesla knows what it’s doing. Not these guys.
- rpmisms 3y agoThat's the point I'm making. Fail-safe and good testing.
- gumballindie 3y agoThey know so well that there was a report yesterday showing how tesla’s a low quality vehicle. Behind the dacia.
- mikem69 3y agoThe report regarding TUV inspections? Do you do understand that failing those inspections doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the car, right? Tires, wiper blades, or even rust on rotors (due to only using regenerative braking) will cause a fail. Having owned Mercedes, Audi, Toyota, Porsche, Range Rover, my Teslas have been the most reliable vehicles I’ve ever owned. Not a single mechanical issue over 4 cars and hundreds of thousands of miles.
- j45 3y agoThis is the way. Also the scrutiny Tesla has received at the start of it's operations might be quite a bit more than the other makers. I'm hearing Kia/Hyundai's needing a replacement battery are having to wait months if not up to a year, while new ones sell away. Buying a used EV will become like buying a used ICE car - there are ways to do it well, and ignoring either is at your peril... and no guarantee a brand new one will be reliable, nor the warranty performant when needed.
- neither_color 3y agoBack when it was in news cycles that Tesla's stock couldn't possibly be worth more than legacy automakers' because it was only a matter of time until they came for Tesla's lunch, I couldn't imagine they'd fumble it this badly.
- savagej 3y ago[dead]
- inferiorhuman 3y agoLord knows Tesla's never had any problems with updates before… https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/my-car-is-bricked-by-a-failed-update.158338/ https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/my-car-is-bricked-by... https://old.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/112oqln/new_tesla_model_3_bricked_after_update/ https://old.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/112oqln/new_te... https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/failed-software-update-bricked-my-2020-x-today.258670/ https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/failed-software-upda... https://old.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/qt0ekf/2021_model_s_bricked/ https://old.reddit.com/r/TeslaLounge/comments/qt0ekf/2021_mo...
- alphabettsy 3y agoAn Audi doesn’t need a software update to replace a light from my experience. Also, my experience with Audi and BMW are that community tools exists to let you flash modules and change settings all on your own. Try that on a Tesla. Tesla is way ahead on software imo, but I don’t want my car to be like modern smartphones where they’re dependent on the manufacturer to maintain and keep working.
- mikem69 3y agoMine did - had to code the module to the car.
- alphabettsy 3y agoThis is usually because the modules are generic and don’t know how to behave, for example, a light fixture needs to know if it’s US or Germany and work accordingly. You could’ve done it yourself with the proper software and knowledge is my point and most things don’t require this.
- mikem69 3y agoI tried to do it myself, but the module was running newer software than the vehicle, and required the other vehicle modules to be flashed to the same software version.
- smsm42 3y agoI replaced two of my lights in my car and I had to re-adjust the carpet piece that covers it. That's all I had to do, no software updates, no service centers, nothing. Are we going in the future to have to call a service center for a software update when we replace a floor mat or a windshield wiper?
- mikem69 3y agoWhat car do you drive? Go replace the headlights in a modern vehicle and see what happens. You have to code the module to the vehicle.
- smsm42 3y agoNot a Tesla, this is for sure. As long as there are any cars with physical controls and replaceable lightbulbs on the market, those are the ones I'll be driving. Fortunately, this is still very much the case, especially if a car for you is a means of transportation, not the expression of your ego.
- mikem69 3y agoDoesn’t really seem like you even know what we’re discussing. You don’t need to do any coding when replacing bulbs (assuming the car has bulbs) - we’re talking about the entire headlight, which has modules that require coding. This has been true as far back as 1999, when my BMW needed its HID module flashed. As for bulbs themselves, even a base corolla now has LED headlights that you won’t be replacing yourself. I suppose one could consider a Toyota Corolla to be an “expression of your ego”, but I’m not sure who would.
- linusg789 3y agohttps://nitter.net/danluu/status/1739387245034139692 https://nitter.net/danluu/status/1739387245034139692
- anothernewdude 3y agoWhat brand of car? So I know what to avoid?
- Rebelgecko 3y agoLooks like the Ford Mach E screen
- rsstack 3y agoScreenshot says Ford.
- shreyansh_k 3y agoFord
- _trampeltier 3y agoIn the centre over the phone number is "Ford Customer Relationship Center". So I guess it's a Ford.
- jofla_net 3y agoFound On Road Deactivated
- exmicrosoldier 3y agoIt is a Ford. Either an f150 lightning or a mustang mach e.
- jpollock 3y agohttps://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/ford/mustang-mach-e/photos-interior https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/ford/mustang-mach-e/phot... Looks like the Mach-E
- bastard_op 3y agoI'm sure it's the Chevy Blazer, or at least same problem as. https://www.thedrive.com/news/the-chevy-blazer-ev-launch-has-gone-from-rough-to-worse-as-gm-issues-stop-sale https://www.thedrive.com/news/the-chevy-blazer-ev-launch-has...
- sp332 3y agoWhat kind of car is it?
- resolutebat 3y ago[flagged]
- thot_experiment 3y agoI know there's no market for people like me, but I would never buy an internet connected car. It just seems so fucking insane to me that people are willing to accept relying on something that can be bricked remotely. Same goes for any sort of involuntary OTA updates to anything, and software as a service in general. The thing that matters to me is that my tools still work tomorrow when I need them to, and if they break it'd better be my fucking fault. We live in fucking clown world. Thank god you can still perma disable windows update, having a cell phone that breaks itself every few months is bad enough.
- ajross 3y agoYou'll change your mind the first time you turn on the heat from across the parking lot while sipping coffee in the ski lodge, or need to check the charge status while eating lunch, or point stuff out on the satellite imagery on the live map. I know it's easy to imagine that the product you think is "a car" is finished, but product categories evolve. People want their devices to do different things today than they did 20 years ago, and next year will be more changes. Connectivity isn't going away, the market has spoken.
- whstl 3y agoAll this is possible without integrating the software into the vehicle itself, making it brickable. Reliability and repairability going down is not "evolution" in any sense. And the market hasn't really said anything when those things have been pushed into consumers without much choice. Saying "the market has spoken" in this case is like saying the market has spoken when someone claims that slapping a fruit logo is enough to sell computers. Turns out the choice of which car to buy is non-binary, it's not "internet connected" vs "non internet connected".
- hgomersall 3y agoI feel it's not completely impossible to design a system that is properly partitioned, such that an update failure to the seat heating software doesn't brick the car. Updates to core systems should be rare in the extreme.
- bilsbie 3y agoI wish someone would make a truly dumb car. Sure you can have microcontrollers for emissions, safety, etc but beyond that give me a 1970s user interface and make the car as independent of technology as possible.
- poulpy123 3y agoMy 2012 Dacia Sandero is as dumb as you can be nowadays I think.
- whstl 3y agoGreat news! [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7-7Ps8EWnk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7-7Ps8EWnk
- thot_experiment 3y ago100% this, an electric car could be so reliable and simple to work on and repair if we wanted it to be.
- shwouchk 3y agoNissan Versa. It’s also one of the cheapest cars available. Enjoy
- clumsysmurf 3y agoThat's why I have kept my '97 dodge dakota all this time... Like you said, dumb, but also using standard components like headlamp bulbs for repair-ability.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pyaamb 3y agoAbsolutely this. Been hoping that this will become a cool trend someday. Perhaps when teen-age Gen-Alpha or Gen-Beta kids seek to differentiate themselves from their Algorithm-controlled over-sharing IG/Tiktok parents.
- 3y ago
- otterley 3y agoIt’s a bit troubling that automakers (and, well, anyone who is building things that have mechanisms for software updates) aren’t making software updates failsafe. If you have multiple copies of the image on storage, and you take care not to touch the currently-running image, then a failed software update to the alternate image shouldn’t have any impact. Think of it like blue-green deployments on the cloud; and it’s what TiVo was doing with software updates to their DVRs all the way back in the late 1990s.
- variadix 3y agoMy router has dual firmware partitions, the fact a car doesn’t is inexcusable
- KennyBlanken 3y agoIt should be mandated, but corporations dominate legislation and regulations. "You'll drive up costs for the hard-working American consumer" "We'd have to cut salaries or fire factory workers" "We wouldn't be able to compete against that car company from Nothereistan!" etc.
- g_p 3y agoAbsolutely. One fact I recall from many years ago (so I don't know how true it is now) is that auto makers were shipping 7 year old silicon (and thus board support packages for their software). The guys working on chips and CPUs were writing software and it wouldn't hit the road for 7 years. This was why infotainment systems lagged the state of the art for so long - they were apparently shipping components that would have belonged in a smartphone from more than half a decade before. In this case, I believe we had a few phones get A/B updates by Android 7, which was late 2016. Giving it a year or so to filter to more CPU chipsets, that would mean (if the old rule held true), we would expect to see A/B hitting new cars in the next year or two. This assumes auto makers are using enough of the Android BSP to get the bootloader with A/B (which isn't a given), and then that they use it! Anyone with any experience of auto software know if the teams doing software are experienced and understand the platform side of things, or if it's a traditional front-end heavy "crunch release" type affair? I've seen some pretty poor quality infotainment systems in the past, so my assumption is inexperienced devs with limited platforms knowledge, focused on "get it working to ship it", but would be interesting to hear from anyone with experience of how this really goes down.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lifestyleguru 3y agoHow could they waste the opportunity of undivided driver attention not to display any ads?! Show them nearest Starbucks where they can relax, or Lidl where they can buy some Coke. C'mon automotive, hammer in the final nail to your coffin.
- yieldcrv 3y agoI can hear the dejected software engineer that wrote or plugged in that error message after layers of bureaucracy
- lifestyleguru 3y agoNot at all. Dejection and uncooperativeness render one a bad team player. The recruitment pipelines aggressively screen against these. Software engineers rarely care or have authority to be ethical gatekeepers.
- yieldcrv 3y agoI’m pretty good at hiding it tbh
- pharrington 3y agoDoes anyone have an original source for this? The picture is reposted from a different social media influencer's tweet https://twitter.com/githii/status/1738289618921951296 https://twitter.com/githii/status/1738289618921951296, but with less compression artifacts and without that influencer's story.
- sp332 3y agoIt's not the same photo, but here's one with the same error from from July. https://www.f150lightningforum.com/forum/threads/priority-update-23-pu0306-bcf-det.15669/page-11 https://www.f150lightningforum.com/forum/threads/priority-up... (about halfway down)
- tap-snap-or-nap 3y agoEvery passing news cycle, I am getting more and more reasons to repair and stick with my current vehicle. Perhaps I would be better off paying a mechanic to teach me how to do the basic maintenance and repairs.
- afn 3y agoCan’t recommend highly enough: https://www.howacarworks.com/ https://www.howacarworks.com/
- j45 3y agoProblems can be found just as easily with the wrong year and make of any ICE vehicle. In those vehicles, software updates are generally only done by a mechanic, sometimes loaded from a cd or DVD loaded into the car's stereo.
- djhope99 3y agoFORD- fix or return daily ?
- sillysaurusx 3y agoI see a lot of people asking "How could this possibly happen?" It turns out that there's a common failure mode that makes it past almost every unit test suite: a lack of disk space. Running out of disk space pops up time and again. I've often wondered why software fails so often in this situation. But it's because the basic components of the system start to break -- things like "Call with temporary file" stop working, because creating a tempfile fails. And usually you're writing that code precisely in a spot where it assumes it can't fail. This just happened on my PS5. I thought I'd play a bit of Armored Core 6 over Christmas, so I sat down and was greeted by "Can't start game." There was a pending update which couldn't be installed. So I skipped update; same error. But now the update was skipped, so it wouldn't even try to reinstall it. I ended up having to reinstall the whole game. Never seen a PS5 game completely brick itself like that. Disk space woes are also one of the primary reasons websites go down. Ever forget about a server for two years and suddenly see your service break? It's almost always because the process ran out of file handles (resource leak) or because it ran out of disk space (hello imagemagick tempfiles). Of course, the bug here could be completely different, but disk space errors are so common that it's as good a guess as any. Computers don't do well when you're out of disk space. MacOS freezes and bluescreens instead of going to sleep, because it can't save the hibernation file to disk. PS5 media recording stops working, because the hour-long recording backlog no longer has room to write the video to disk. This software update obviously passed their unit tests, but failed in this particular case; disk space is one of the few variables that they probably didn't test for. I wish it were easier to write unit tests for all possible out-of-space situations. There are just so many. Even if it technically doesn't break, it often craps up the experience so much that the user ends up wondering why the software is so bad.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- qingcharles 3y agoI had a rock solid app that I wrote die on me yesterday because it tried to access a folder and Windows returned "Drive is corrupt," which of course I hadn't handled because that will never happen. Out of drive space is the worst, though. Like you say, most things don't handle it, they just plough headlong into an install and then die, leaving the whole drive in a horrible unknown mess of files where you might or might not be able to retry the operation, and you might or might not have used up the last few bytes on the drive and now for some reason when you try to reboot it can't even boot the system up because it can't write some temp file it needs.
- tibbydudeza 3y agoBricking a device like a car is not on , even my router and PC has a recovery option if a firmware update goes south. Don't they know about A and B images ???. They cheaped out to ensure their flash memory is adequate for restoring from a bad update.
- mikewarot 3y agoBack in the 1980s I was in the room with a customer who I had written an inspection system for, using a hand-held computer. After downloading the data from the handheld, it would upload a new inspection route. While demoing the transfer, He asked "What happens if I disconnect this right now?".... I didn't know, and said so. I week later it was bulletproof... you could unplug it any time you wanted, and never lose data. That was the days of MS-DOS. So, here we are, 30+ years later, and computers are nowhere near as constrained as they were back then. I don't understand how Ford could even allow a screen like that to exist. It's a big red flag saying "Never buy a Ford again, they're unreliable"
- 7thaccount 3y agoAs someone who has been considering an EV, I'm noping out pretty hard right now and thinking about buying an old and reliable Honda Accord. A few more of these posts and I'll be driving a Volkswagen bug with a garage full of spare parts ;)
- neon_electro 3y agoThere are EVs without this problem.
- solarkraft 3y agoWhich?
- olyjohn 3y agoIt's not an EV thing. All this same tech is moving into ICE cars too. I know someone with a Genesis GV80 that just randomly threw itself into limp mode and wouldnt go over 20mph. Genesis support gave him the magic button combination to reboot the onboard computers and the car was totally fine. This car has all the same tech as any EV. It gets updates. Has all the sensors, screens, safety tech, advanced cruise (he says it drives itself)... Hell even my mom's Subaru Outback has all this same tech, an onboard modem, updates, etc.
- cs702 3y agoVery lame. My immediate question upon seeing the headline was: Which EV brand are we talking about? Evidently it's not Tesla, because if it had been, the headline would have mentioned it, no doubt. It's a Ford, in case you're wondering. Shame on Ford! Ford and all other automakers are learning the old-fashioned way that making truly great user-facing software is... harder, slower, and costlier than they expected.
- ProjectArcturis 3y agoFord makes bad cars in general, so why would we expect them to make decent UI, let alone truly great?
- fmajid 3y agoFor decades software engineers have moaned “why can’t software engineering be a real engineering discipline like civil engineering”. The travails of the legacy car makers, compared to Tesla or Rivian, show conclusively mechanical engineering is easier.
- Retr0id 3y agoOr maybe there's just a stronger regulatory environment around mechanical engineering. If you sell cars whose fronts fall off, you're going to get in trouble. If your software updates fail, your users are mostly limited to complaining at you on twitter.
- rightbyte 3y agoMechanical engineer is in no way easier. However, it is easier for a better mechanical engineer to spot issues in your design just by eying it, whereas software is for all practical purposes a black box unless you spend 100s of hours reading the code.
- est31 3y agoYou take a software engineer's point of view. The people who build cars, especially at established car companies are mechanical engineers however. And they design consumer technology, they don't design military vehicles or ambulances, so their main goal is not reliability, never has been. Cars have constantly gotten harder to repair, more brittle, and if a repair is needed, you often have to, instead of being able to swap out a $5 component, replace larger components that the $5 component is part of. This is by design as replacement parts is a high margin revenue source for the car manufacturers. Why should the software side of things be any different?
- analog31 3y ago>>> why can’t software engineering be a real engineering discipline like civil engineering Programming pays better than civil engineering or mechanical engineering. The software team pays better than the hardware team, and programming in support of hardware pays like hardware. When asked why, the answer is: "Software is more valuable because it's closer to revenue." And: "Software has no cost after it has been written once." No manger or engineer can explain what this phrase means, but it's taken as conventional wisdom.
- onetimeuse92304 3y agoSome 20 years ago I was asked to prepare OS distribution with OTA upgrade capability for some PoS system. I think I prepared two system partitions and a custom MBR which would alternate the system partition on every start (uses one bit of non-volatile memory to alternate selection of partitions on each boot). When the system starts, it does self-test. If it fails the self-test it just restarts. If it succeeds -- it writes the result on its partition and then looks at the other partition. If the other partition did not succeed the test, it reports the fact back to HQ and overwrites it with the current system. The upgrade procedure is extremely simple -- the current system writes to the other partition, then restarts. If the upgrade is interrupted at any point in time, the other system will know it was interrupted and will just restart immediately. In any case, after two restarts we are back to the system that initiated the upgrade and if it checks the other system did not start and self-tested successfully, it can redo the upgrade as many time as we want and you still have a working system. Could it be done better? Probably it could. It took me one day to think up and implement. I would think Ford could do it better (Edited: yes, not a Tesla)
- jnwatson 3y agoThat is very much standard.
- matt-attack 3y agoYep TiVos did something similar
- onetimeuse92304 3y agoI wouldn't know what the standard is. This seems like something my kid could figure out. It is a shame that multi-billion dollar company that makes consumer products costing hundreds of thousands of dollars can't.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Kirby64 3y ago
- rabbits_2002 3y agoDo car companies outsource their software to fiverr or something? Every single car I rent lately is a buggy piece of shit.
- fragmede 3y agoUgh. I rented a Ford Explorer recently, and somehow they managed to screw up Applr Carplay. I'm in a place I don't know very well, navigating using Apple Maps via Carplay, and my GPS location goes for a wander. Just wanders off so that the navigation gets way confused trying to route me to my designation, because the current location is miles and miles off from where we are. So I unplug my phone and suddenly my GPS location is back to the correct location. HowTF did that even happen?
- emeril 3y agocarplay just seems like crap on all cars I've used (including the new subaru I own) I don't even try it anymore and just bring a vanilla charger and pipe audio to the car via bluetooth (which generally works without issue on every car I've tried) and the phone for actual navigation
- fragmede 3y agolol even that was broken on the rental Ford Explorer - audio from Siri and music worked, so I know the Bluetooth connection was fine, but the GPS navigation audio didn't speak.
- chillingeffect 3y agoFwiw there are dozens or perhaps 100s of microcontrollers on cars, usually sharing a small number of comms networks. Not all have the luxury of flash space for dual-boot. It's possible an error on one can affect a large number of others. It should be better, but it's more complex than a single firmware image.
- RecycledEle 3y ago> Fwiw there are dozens or perhaps 100s of microcontrollers on cars, usually sharing a small number of comms networks. Not all have the luxury of flash space for dual-boot. The auto maker needs to use micro controllers with larger flash memories, or write simpler code.
- from-nibly 3y agoWell I think 90s Honda's are gonna start going up in value.
- wyclif 3y agoAs a huge fan of '90's Hondas, I agree.
- Szpadel 3y agoLet me try to play devil's advocate. This screen is actually result of alternative boot in dual boot image, but it's not A/B system but system/recovery. This is valid solution when there is not enough space to fit second full os in available storage. Recovery allows for repeating update of major system. Another potential issue is that car is composed of multiple connected systems and one "main" computer, it will try to upgrade everything else to the one expected version that was tested with this release. Something failed in secondary module that does not support a/b systems (3rd party?) Another possibility, update is composed of update and verification of secondary modules and verification is not passing, because update is passing there is not really good way to recover now, because maybe flash is now damaged. edit: usually all components in car communicate using canbus (including software updates) this usually works in this way: You first switch device into flashing mode by sending speciall command, it will then jump to special mini application that will write new bytes to flash and finally you finalize to reboot. In case something in flashing went wrong and device is crash looping or stuck in infinite loop or in any other way is not able to finish boot, you cannot retry anymore because there is no way to put it again into flash mode as its not able to receive canbus messages anymore. If that is critical component the safest thing to do is prevent car from driving
- mensetmanusman 3y agoSoftware ate the world.
- FullyFunctional 3y agoThe same thing happened to our Tesla Model X a few years back. Tesla even wanted us to pay $200 flat fee to fix the problem they created and that we couldn’t opt out off. I may have used impolite language until they waived that. And that’s not even addressing the massive time sink it was.
- throwaway2037 3y agoDoes the owner get compensation for this bug? For example, if you need a rent a car for the day, will Ford reimburse the cost? If no, can you sue in small claims court?
- pengaru 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeons_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeons_law
- karmakaze 3y agoEver since using computers and waiting for PC/Windows to boot up, I've dreaded software coming to general utility hardware. Unfortunately the ills and lack of quality software is permeating things that doesn't need it. At the very least, separate the core function of driving from everything else (entertainment, navigation, etc).
- pharrington 3y agoThe car owner's original thread is https://www.reddit.com/r/MachE/comments/18m3ne2/what/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MachE/comments/18m3ne2/what/
- fennecbutt 3y agoCars are so much safer with all the technology we have in them, this is just a bad implementation. A lot of the actual mechanical/engine related software really does help a tremendous amount. Even something like ABS can be improved with more sensors to help sense exactly what's going on when you need to stop to prevent yourself careening through a barrier and down a cliff in bad weather.