'Smart' Cars Hit a New Low

I last commented on "smart" cars about a year ago, passing along the good ergonomic news that automakers were bringing back button controls.

It did me good to see that, even in today's brainless culture, people can still sometimes see that, for example, yes, asking a driver to find a control six levels deep on a touchscreen might not be the best way to turn the heat on or off.

Unfortunately, I must now note that we're still a long way from being able to count on manufacturers doing a decent job of integrating this century-plus-old technology with modern computing.

Worse, the latest example is frankly quite alarming:

Owners of some Jeep Wrangler 4xe hybrids have been left stranded after installing an over-the-air software update this weekend. The automaker pushed out a telematics update for the Uconnect infotainment system that evidently wasn't ready, resulting in cars losing power while driving and then becoming stranded.

Stranded Jeep owners have been detailing their experiences in forum and Reddit posts, as well as on YouTube. The buggy update doesn't appear to brick the car immediately. 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. [bold added]

A commenter at the tech news site Hacker News points out just what a huge error this is:

Our OTAU [over-the-air update --ed] architecture uses A/B system updates. Core idea is that both the kernel and the rootfs (read-only) partitions had 2 different bootslots in storage, and the OTAU would only write to the bootslot that is unused. Hence, if something went wrong, the system would automatically fall back to the previous version by just switching the bootslot used. Over the numerous years that that architecture was used, I couldn't find a single post-mortem that resulted in devices being bricked. Something to note is that the rootfs partition was overlaid with a writable partition for persisting state data etc.

Now that was a two-figure USD device, not a 5- or 6-figure USD electric SUV. Is this a cost-cutting measure? At those price levels, doubling your NAND size is not even half of a percent of the total cost of the vehicle. [light edits, bold added]

This may or may not be a correct diagnosis, but it suggests to me that such gross problems are at least avoidable ... when it's just an entertainment system update.

Another commenter put out a laundry list of problems experienced when renting a Jeep Wagoneer that included the following gem:

When parking, the driver's seat would retract slightly to make it easier to get out, but it never moved forward again, so the seat would get further back at each stop until it was manually repositioned.

This is hilarious outside the potentially fatal context of ... your %#$& car bricking at highway speeds.

It is a shame that Trump's tariffs are causing used car prices to rise on top of never quite returning to pre-pandemic levels. The only prudent advice would seem to be to let early adopters land on those new car grenades, and thoroughly research anything you want to buy.

And my wife wonders why I don't particularly want a newer car...

-- CAV