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My 4xe died in my driveway on Saturday after the update. Let me explain, from the perspective of a 4xe owner, how bad the response has been from Jeep/Stellantis

• SigmundA 1y ago
  I really want a 4XE Wrangler to replace my aging JK at some point, on paper its amazing, lots of torque and power, decent economy for a brick with large tires, and can actually run a pure electric enough to get around town, plus still takes all the standard Wrangler parts. However in classic Jeep style they just can't get reliability down, and the PHEV part seems too complicated for them. If it was just reliable it would still be the best selling PHEV in America, they let that go. There is no sign of the 2026 Wrangler 4XE it might be canceled like the Gladiator version...
  • kswzzl 1y ago
    Agreed, it's an expensive but great vehicle. Closing the last mile of the reliability gap is always tough, but they need to figure it out.
  • 20after4 1y ago
    It's probably canceled, not only for reliability reasons. EVs and plugin hybrids are probably doomed, at least in the US: The EV tax credit subsidy is gone, fuel economy requirements will be or already have been eliminated, electricity prices climbing (my rate increased almost 50% on my most recent bill) and the Trump administration is extremely hostile towards anything related to renewable energy.
    • frumplestlatz 1y ago
      Does the market actually want EVs and hybrids if they require subsidies and regulation to make significant market penetration?
      • skywhopper 1y ago
        A functioning market that priced in the externalities and future risks would far prefer them.
      • willdr 1y ago
        Unfortunately to survive the next few hundred years, we may need another dictator of human behaviour than what the market wants.
      • eldaisfish 1y ago
        yes, because EVs are cheaper to operate than combustion cars. US auto makers are obsessed with creating EVs the size of tanks, hence the absurd prices. The Chinese auto makers are selling what people want to buy.
        • parineum 1y ago
          It's funny to me that you think car manufacturers are either not doing any market research or are completely ignoring it.
          • eldaisfish 1y ago
            US car manufacturers care only about profits. Is market research the reason why US automakers sell "SUVs" instead of practical station wagons?
  • frumplestlatz 1y ago
    I’ve always been surprised that people even buy jeeps given the notorious reliability issues and frankly strange design choices. The times that I have been given a jeep rental while on vacation or work trips have always left me disappointed with the vehicle.
    • SigmundA 1y ago
      My Wrangler JK is 10 years old with almost no issues, its a relatively simple vehicle compared to most, easy to work on as well. The Pentastar V6 is well proven engine and the issues with it are well understood. I really like the vehicle, it has served me well and taken me many interesting places across the country, along with daily driving. I tow it with a RV and its one the few that can do so now days, plus its extremely capable offroad. The 4XE is very alluring, much more fun to drive (I have rented one) and I could charge it off home solar and still tow with RV (the only PHEV thats possible to do so). If only it was reliable...
      • frumplestlatz 1y ago
        There’s just no comparison when you consult reliability reports, though. Of course, even companies like Toyota are going in the direction of always on, arbitrarily updated software and subscriptions. I have no idea what I’ll buy when my 11 year old toyota finally retires.
        • jcgrillo 1y ago
          As a happy owner of a 30 year old Toyota 80 series I'd recommend getting one! The computer can be diagnosed with a light bulb. Or go even older like a 40 series Land Cruiser. No computers anywhere in those.
  • carlito02 1y ago
    My Wife just got one last year, the electric engine will give you about 17 miles on a full charge that takes about 7 hrs, its pretty much useless on full electric mode, pretty good with the milage on hybrid which is what this really is. And yes do not expect reliability, first day out of the dealership we got a check engine light, apparently one of the workers at the dealership forgot to attach a wire or hose, at least thats the explanation that we got, i told my wife to insist on getting it documented somehow or get a log from the dealer but of course they played it off as human error (total BS). Few months later and her screen started to turn off and on, or just die completely when air play was connected. Stay away from these cars.
• schaefer 1y ago
  My condolences. I wonder if you qualify for a loss-of-use rental under the warranty.
  • jacquesm 1y ago
    Personally, I would return the vehicle as defective after an issue like this. No way I'm going to trust the lives of family, friends and myself to a company like this.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
• d_sem 1y ago
  How did you verify that a software update can 1. Occur during driving operation of the vehicle and 2. results in vehicle power loss? I worked in an auto supplier years ago and there where several protections in place to prevent the risk of update corruption on safety related components. One of the simplest one the UDS programming session having entry protections related to vehicle speed, vehicle driving mode, etc.
  • kswzzl 1y ago
    My update occurred while parked. I hit the failure mode 1-2 hours later pulling out of my driveway.
    • d_sem 1y ago
      Thanks for the clarity. Wow this is a big deal.
• zoeysmithe 1y ago
  imho the occasional mixup is going to happen, and eventually it'll be big like this or like Crowdstrike, but pushing these out on Fridays means the critical staff isn't there to help. The people who could have communicated this stuff to customers and dealerships were in bed when people got into their jeeps at 6am on Saturday after an overnight update. I believe crowdstrike's update was on a Friday night as well. Unless its a serious security bug, it can wait for not only for better QA testing but also for next Tuesday. Read-on Fridays need to be an industry-wide thing.
  • radicaldreamer 1y ago
    Honestly the only thing that's going to change this is criminal liability for safety related software bugs. Otherwise, it's just business as usual and the business for the last 15 years has been cutting QA and asking developers to do testing themselves, which is literally impossible for a lot of software due to lack of proper staging environments and large permutations of configurations.
    • zoeysmithe 1y ago
      I think the nature of capitalism will make this impossible. The capital owning class will not allow criminal action for this and will also fight any common-sense regulations. If the working class gets that regulation in via the democratic process, that's fine, but its unlikely especially since it hasn't happened yet since we've gone digital on near everything starting from the 70s and 80s. The working class lately seems more focused on 'culture war' issues and not economic or material or consumer or worker's rights issues anyway, so we're probably as far from any kind of regulation reform in software as possible. I remember a couple decades ago FOSS as an ideal seemed stronger and you had people like Lessig pushing hard for IP reform and Swartz and others for 'information must be free' honest-to-goodness mainstream movements and all of that seems to have went nowhere and is somewhat to very unpopular today. When was the last time you saw a populist movement towards liberal tech reform like this? Outside of some edge cases like medicine or power generation, the regulations here are purposely kept weak because that's what the wealthy desire. Maybe our kids or grandkids will have this after the pendulum swings back, shrug.
• jlokier 1y ago
  > - You're basically at risk of your Jeep going limp (power loss, unable to safely make it to the shoulder) and being stranded on the highway, even as I write this. This seems extraordinary. I was going to ask: Are you really saying they kill the vehicle's power system, effictively the engine, while the vehicle is being driven on the highway? But no need to ask, the article says yes, that's what is reported: > Instead, the failure appears to occur while driving—a far more serious problem. For some, this happened close to home and at low speed, but others claim to have experienced a powertrain failure at highway speeds. Wow.
  • pinkmuffinere 1y ago
    Ya, that is shockingly scary. It makes me think we need some new standards about software updates to vehicles in general (or perhaps these already exist but were missed for some reason?). I can totally imagine that software used to be this ancillary selling point that didn't need such tight regulation, but as it becomes core infrastructure for the vehicle this is less of an IoT toy, and deserves stricter standards.
    • jacquesm 1y ago
      How about: you get to say whether you want to update and when and manufacturers are required to very explicitly list all of the changes in an update? That would seem to be an acceptable minimum.
      • pavel_lishin 1y ago
        I don't think that Jeep would have sent out a message saying that one of the changes would brick your machine. It seems that the ability to trivially roll back any update would be a better choice, at least for this. (But I'm sure there are downstream effects I haven't thought about if that were implemented.)
        • conductr 1y ago
          How do you roll back a fatal car accident caused by the faulty update? Giving user’s control over when the update runs allows them to be in a safe and secure setting when that update happens. Allowing them time, gives them and Jeep the ability to slow roll the update so they can halt it if initial feedback is negative. I say this as a Mac user who does not allow auto updates for MacOS. I wait a week or so until the chatter validates it as non-breaking. They pushed an OS update several years ago that broke a few things I rely on. So I don’t trust them now, but these things just happen on OS’s with third party software. I expect it. But, I also don’t want to be forced to deal with the headaches immediately. I’d rather let the third parties run updates and advise how to deal, before I have to dive into fixing things. With car firmware, there’s really no excuse for this except poor engineering / processes.
• jacquesm 1y ago
  It is completely insane that this is happening. I did DD on a company in the automotive space a couple of years ago and flagged that they did not check if the vehicle was stationary, motor disabled before updating. They were all surprised at how I thought that this could possibly ever lead to issues.
  • coldpie 1y ago
    Given the state of the software industry, it's honestly more surprising that this doesn't happen more often. Our industry is a complete joke, and somehow we've been given responsibility over people's lives.
    • jacquesm 1y ago
      > Given the state of the software industry, it's honestly more surprising that this doesn't happen more often. It probably does. We just don't notice. > Our industry is a complete joke, and somehow we've been given responsibility over people's lives. Amen to that. kqr made some choice comments the other day in that thread about the airliner that came to within a hair of crashing due to running out of fuel. Thinking about risk is not a skill that we're born with and it is always sobering to read the 'risks digest' for a bit and to see how thin the ice really is.
    • hinkley 1y ago
      We are really only about 60 years old as a proper profession, and we seem to be trailing behind doctors for professionalism and standard of care by about 100 years. I don’t know what will turn out to be our penicillin, or our Joseph Lister, but in 1960 the former is something that didn’t exist when older doctors were in school, and latter had only been dead for fifty years. It may not have happened for us yet.
      • npsomaratna 1y ago
        On the topic of professions: Joseph Lister was a surgeon. Modern surgery (which I define as surgery aided by anesthesia) is a relatively recent discipline dating to the early 19th century. The introduction of anesthesia made lengthy and intricate operations possible but also ushered in novel problems and complications. Surgery as a field had to learn tough lessons over time.
• hinkley 1y ago
  This sounds like the sort of thing that happens when a team has a deliverable that slips multiple times but everyone had vacations planned for a responsible amount of time after the deadline. Under time pressure and confirmation bias they signed off on code that was giving off signs of being broken, pushed it, and now key staff are either on airplanes, out of coverage on their phones, or cannot work entirely from memory and don’t have their computers with them because vacation.
  • ryandrake 1y ago
    I bet they already have communications ready, but everyone Director and above needs to "wordsmith" it to deflect blame and make sure nobody looks bad, and all the lawyers need to bless it so that it's not admitting anything. I bet you there's a Word doc being frantically E-mailed around all day, needing to be approved by 25 people before it reaches the light of day.
• SkiFire13 1y ago
  If a software update can affect the basic functionality of the car to such a degree then the whole car should be recertified after every update, change my mind.
• hilbert42 1y ago
  Why do you let your vehicle update without supervision and knowing exactly what the update entails (what it does)? If you knew upates were occurring why didn't you stop them by not allowing internet access and or disabling the web/net hardware? I find it very odd, I never allow any hardware unfettered internet access let alone update its firmware. Experience has taught me that that's a recipe for trouble.