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.
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.)
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.
FTFA:
> The buggy update doesn't appear to brick the car immediately. Instead, the failure appears to occur while driving — a far more serious problem
And from the GP upthread:
> There is no way to tell if you received the bad update.
> There is no way to tell if you received the 'fix' either.
Many security compliances require auto-updates to be on. It's thought of to be a lesser evil, because many (most) users never update their OS/browsers, which is worse.
If there are security related updates where the risk is severe then they may auto update.
This does not fix any QA process that is broken. And frankly you should not need to update any control unit firmware after it is sold. The fact that they're even doing this is broken.
Unless your Mac is somehow attached to 5000 pounds of metal going 65 on the highway, the same standards should probably not apply.
Oh you sweet summer child
The NASA space probes are constantly uploaded with new software that has greatly increased the scope of their mission.
If they didn't make "safety" right from the first time, why do you think they will do it better the second time, when the fixes are more expensive and the time pressure is enormous ?
...all of which is just an excuse to show this great picture of Margaret Hamilton [1] lead developer on the Apollo guidance system standing next to (and slightly shorter than) the printouts of the source code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Margaret_Hamilton_-_resto...
[1] Who was admittedly quite short apparently
I've worked on some interesting software with lives on the line as well and the amount of test code absolutely dwarfed the functional part. I wonder whether at the time of the effort you linked that was already common practice and if it was what the fraction of that code was tests.
Assuming she's 1.65 meters tall and 66 lines per page (quite common back then), at 0.2 mm thickness per page that's 8K pages times 66 lines / page is ~550K lines. Pretty impressive!
The idea that one can create complex bug-free software is a fantasy. The correct mindset is to learn how to deal with failure. (This is how airliners are designed.)
As for cost, surely you can ask Ford's lawyers who worked there in the 70s to give you a good calculation on life vs recall costs.
That is why Samsung push update to disable note 7 even after recalling them.
In Germany we let the Kraftfahrtbundesamt handle this. You are required by law to keep your address updated with the authorities, and all vehicles have to be registered to get a license plate. When a recall for safety reasons happens, the Kraftfahrtbundesamt writes a notification letter, and if you do not respond in time with evidence of having the recall issue remediated by a qualified shop (or doing it yourself and getting a sign-off from a licensed inspector), eventually they write to your local DMV office that can ban your vehicle from the roads, and if you miss that the police shows up at your home and physically removes the license sticker from the table.
And heaven forbid you get actually caught driving the car after having gotten the notification letter from your local DMV. That's automatically felony territory. Our authorities really, really do not mess around.
[1] https://www.kba.de/DE/Themen/Marktueberwachung/Rueckrufe/rue...
No. You test it. And release it if and when it is fully tested. (you know, V-cycle). But we are Agile now and testing is expensive.
Let’s not let perfection obstruct progress.
Yup, my test is not perfect, but "Let’s not let perfection obstruct progress".
In all scenarios, tricky bugs will happen. Something inconceivable will go untested. But that’s not what happened here. This is basically functionality being lost that very obviously should have been tested.
In that sense, they could have made progress. Nobody is expecting perfection. You seem to be hung up on the distinction
I would bet most updates, especially from a company this bumbling, will be more along the lines of increasing telemetry or pointless UI changes than releasing actually useful features and bug fixes.
I certainly wouldn’t accept one while I was still driving the car!
The solution here is that the manufacturer needs to test their damn update before any of their customer get them.
Huh ? What a stoopid idea. Who would protect your security ? Who will protect the children ? /s
OTA software updates should be a convenience, not a requirement, never be automatic, and be otherwise treated just like a visit to a car repair shop.
Similarly, no manufacturer should be able to tell you "oh, but it's a software problem" if your thing doesn't work as expected (I had Apple tell me this, for example).
Well, they should if they provided you with the hardware and you got the software from someone else. But that's the other problem: They prevent you from doing that, and then if their software is crap or they decide to turn off the servers, what do you do?
Watch for some carmaker to try to say that the car only had a 10 year warranty and then brick them by turning off some servers after they're over 10 years old, or just go out of business with the same result. It's a travesty that people even put up with that for electronics.
In this case, it appears somehow that an infotainment system update impacted the drivetrain. In my fully "fly by wire" computerized vehicle from 1999 (M-B E300), even if it somehow could receive OTA updates, these systems are physically separate. The ABS system is a different module from the transmission controller, which is different from the engine controller. They all communicate over CAN, but the only way one could crash another is if somehow it responds poorly to incorrect CAN messages.. And even if these computers crash the mechanical components they control will probably keep working more or less.. What has happened in the intervening quarter century that made it possible for this failure to happen?
I do not see reason, why CEOs of big companies should be exempt from this!
If bus driver makes mistake, or someone drives drunk.... They get punished. This is the same thing!
The current regulations are written for a time where cars didn't have rolling computers in them. And even then, the regulations don't account for Tesla-style linked systems. So I say we do need new regulations.
This is the standard I have been living by for decades, we didn't need to enter the OTA software update era to know that.
Anyone who drives their products now is just a person with no life skills in the product purchasing process. They make some of the worst-ranked vehicles for reliability, some of the most visually obvious bad assembly quality, some of the most tired and outdated vehicles on the road, and yet people just keep buying Jeep Wranglers for no discernible reason other than that they like to compromise their vision with rubber ducks.
No way. Testing is expensive. /s
This has happened to me twice with a Nissan Leaf. I paid money to get a read out from the computer system, and there were no timestamps on the screens of data.
Modern cars "computers on wheels" are dreadful.
Is it possible to disconnect the power from the radios used for "over the air" nonsense? Then at least they would be stable.
I've read online that for some cars, you have to dig deep inside to disconnect the cellular antenna.
I'm a little more lucky. On my car, you can pop out the SIM card from a slot in the ceiling, behind the rear-view mirror.
This assumes you haven't given your car access to your home WiFi. (Some people do this so they don't have to pay for a data plan for their car, and it kinda sorta "syncs" when you get home.)
It will throw a perpetual "check engine" light and disable the hands-free microphone, but OVMS users have made a "dummy TCU" that gets around that annoyance.
I have the opposite problem. The specific infotainment system update I need requires a $200 visit to a dealership with a specific model of a USB 2.0 SanDisk Flash Drive (NI-52727-1). Not available OTA despite the Leaf's OTA capabilities.
Buying a modern car seems to come with too many strings attached these days.
> The buggy update doesn't appear to brick the car immediately. Instead, the failure appears to occur while driving—a far more serious problem.
> My 4xe died in my driveway on Saturday after the update.
It seems not driving bricks as well.
https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...
A GPS update kills your entire powertrain. Appears to also engage parking for some users, super dangerous. Catbones, "Almost died on the thruway today ... with an 18-wheeler behind me. ... Jeep died, locked its hand brake and jolted so hard my face almost ended up in the steering wheel at 70mph." [1]
[1] Wrangler 4xe forum, JeepCares and Catbones accounts: https://www.4xeforums.com/threads/wrangler-4xe-ota-update-10...
Personal bet: Jeep accidentally enabled the remote kill switch for repossessing automobiles. [2] Possibly the "impaired driver" kill switch. [3]
[2] Stateline, Late Payment Kill Switch: https://stateline.org/2018/11/27/late-payment-a-kill-switch-...
[3] Trackhawk, Federal Kill Switch Law: https://trackhawkgps.com/blog/kill-switch-law
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.
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.
The entire box it’s on isn’t powered while the plane is in motion (“wheels on ground”). It’s shut off before preflight and doesn’t turn back on until the plane is on the ground. The service my code is part of is responsible for queuing updates and downlinking telemetry. Updates are manual and obviously you can’t run them while in motion if the box they are on doesn’t even have power.
Cars probably don’t have to go this far, but there’s a continuum and they’re clearly in the wrong part.
Airplanes are required by regulation to have a backup of all software to operate the plane, presumably so that a plane can’t get stranded by an emergency landing requiring system resets. What we built replaced a physical folder full of floppies or CDROMs taking up space in the cockpit. Some of my coworkers insisted it was for weight but I’m absolutely sure that pizza box server weighed more than the book.
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.
Like I said we are still young, so it feels sort of arrogant saying we have figured something out when I know how many things are industry standard now that almost resulted in shouting matches trying to get done even 20 years ago. Maybe our soap moment is coming up ten years from now.
But I suspect automated testing may be the wash your hands, because it represents a sort of hygiene that “we” used to just say fuck it or make a minimal effort.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_James_A._Garf...
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.
I do not trust them and never will. This is the #1 reason why every car is buy is just a car. I do not trust techbros with devices that can kill you, especially cars.
"Move fast and break things" is not really a virtue when the thing moving fast is a two-ton hunk of steel and the things breaking are people's bodies. Getting the easier stuff right but then then also killing people isn't "doing better" in my opinion; sometimes it's better to have a lot of lower magnitude failures than infrequent but catastrophic ones.
Autopilot aside, though, the regular boring car software bits are rock-solid, and I've never had an issue with using it or after an update.
Citation needed.
In the early days of autopilot/FSD most of the fatalities were people doing stupid things like watching a movie or sleeping in the back seat. That's why it now has to monitor your face with a camera to detect whether or not you are watching the road - to stop people from being idiots.
However we must acknowledge that any change in the automotive space is going to lead to problems and some percentage of those are going to cause injuries. That is the nature of cars. They do not have the certification standards of aircraft nor the training of pilots. They can't and they won't.
It is also inevitable that autonomous driving is going to make different mistakes than a person would make. On a miles-driven basis it still produces fewer accidents and injuries than human drivers.
My anecdata is that my car won't update its software without the owner explicitly requesting it. And then, it will only do it if the car has something like 50% charge, hasn't been used for an hour, and nobody is inside.
I once tried to do the update while I was inside, and it refused.
I can't speak about other cars, but my EV has nothing you can unplug. It's not like a regular car where stuff is exposed.
All it has under the hood is a storage space for charging adapters, a first aid kit, and a cap for the windshield washer fluid.
Even accessing the regular 12V battery takes a bunch of time and tools. The manual states several times that it should never ever be used to jump start another car, though it doesn't explain why.
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...
The times that I have been given a jeep rental while on vacation or work trips have always left me disappointed with the vehicle.
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...
I have no idea what I’ll buy when my 11 year old toyota finally retires.
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.
They are doing to cars what electronics manufacturers did to TVs - taking an already-solved UX problem and destroying it with poorly made software in the name of progress.
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.
But the whole point is, regulator wont have teeth. They have teeth when politicians back them. And as of now, politicians back billionaires and deregulation. Wall street hates regulators, billionaires hate regulators and sizable part of population prefers people dying if it means they cam hurt libs and ennemies.
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.
- As of Monday 8am ET, zero legitimate communication from any Jeep-related accounts on any social media platform, or any other form of acknowledgement from the company (unless I've missed something?)
- I only found out about the issue after finally searching a few Jeep groups on Facebook (of all places) to see if anyone else was experiencing the weird failure mode I was after the update.
- The only remotely-official info was from a 'JeepCares' account (which is ran by Jeep) on some random off-roading forum? We were seriously all living off of screenshots from this forum, and the advice coming from the JeepCares accounts was contradictory: they claimed that the Uconnect update was separate from the telematics update, and that there was no way to stop the telematics update if the vehicle received it. Later they gave advice to defer the Uconnect update, making it sound like they were coupled.
- Due to the lack of info from Jeep, people were coming up with all kinds of "if you reboot Uconnect while the Jeep's in ACC mode, it clears the check engine light". This probably did clear the CEL but didn't fix the fault.
- There is no way to tell if you received the bad update.
- There is no way to tell if you received the 'fix' either.
- Dealerships have literally no idea what is going on.
- 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.