A family friend's Mercedes E500 brakes stopped working on 280, and he had to shift the gears down and pull over to the side (this is back in the early 2000s). He brought it to the dealer, and something along the lines of the dealer claiming they couldn't see a record of electronic failure in the logs, then refusing to give the car back to our friend.

He only got the car back when he engaged a lawyer to sue the dealer. The lawyer was happy to work on a contingency since "we have no chance of losing this one in court".

That's scary, especially considering the controversy over a similar problem that also lead to unexpected shutoffs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch...

But in the link you provided there's several comments that it happened shortly after refueling, which suggests to me a much simpler hypothesis of the root cause --- bubbles in the fuel line.

Honestly, I wouldn't classify 8 forum posts as a "known software problem".

I think if this was as wide spread as you make it seem, there would have already been a recall made by VW as this is clearly a huge safety hazard.

Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one. (Fight Club)

It's actually a paraphrasing of the Ivey (GM) and Grush-Saunby reports (Ford) from the 1970s. This was several years after Ralph Nader's famous book, Unsafe at Any Speed (1965)

1. http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/tortsprof/files/FordMemo.pd...

2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsafe_at_Any_Speed

Something like this would happen in my Civic too, not a decline but a small bump on the road like where two concrete blocks meet would set it off. It turned out to be a MAP sensor issue. This is something in the exhaust that feeds back to the controller, it was giving wrong values which caused the software to decide, fuck it let's shut it down. We all know the Toyota acceleration story. So the point of my story is, dont trust even reliable cars' software.

This was already happening 15 years ago.

I drove a Fiat Stilo on the highway when it suddenly decided to shift to 2nd gear because a gearbox failure occurred. It was a known software error.