Put your hate for Tesla aside for a moment. If a car company can fix an issue with a simple software update, it’s way more convenient for both the customer and the manufacturer. Quality control of an update is a separate issue but I don’t imagine there’s a difference whether your car updates itself or gets taken in for the update- the same patch gets applied in either case.
Comment on Tesla recalls all 3,878 Cybertrucks over faulty accelerator pedal - The Verge
deranger@lemmy.world 2 months agoSoftware updates should absolutely be recalls. Ship a complete vehicle or don’t. I absolutely do not want cars to turn in what games are today. I do not want hotfixes on my car because they didn’t test. Fuck an OTA update too, I don’t want that either, if they need an update it’s a recall and the cars have to go back to the shop. I want it to hurt as much as possible.
kinkles@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
deranger@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It’s not Tesla that I hate. It’s shipping products too quickly.
The inconvenience is the point. I want people to be inconvenienced, myself included. That means people complain to one another. I’ll know which models suck simply by talking to people around me. I do not want quiet stealthy patches for things like an accelerator pedal. Either do it right or pay the price. We used to make cars without hot fixes, we don’t need to start. It will allow auto manufacturers to further cut corners and push for faster releases with less testing, and we pay the price with our lives.
Toribor@corndog.social 2 months ago
I can’t wait to live in a world where my own damn car wont start because someone forgot to renew a cert.
ShepherdPie@midwest.social 2 months ago
We used to make cars without hot fixes, we don’t need to start. It will allow auto manufacturers to further cut corners and push for faster releases with less testing, and we pay the price with our lives.
Is that borne out in the data though? It seems modern vehicles are way safer and more reliable compared to older vehicles.
essteeyou@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Calling it a recall or an update won’t change that. Enshittification is happening everywhere all the time anyway.
kinkles@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Think of the inverse though- it used to be that in every case when your car had an issue you needed to either take it in yourself or have the technical knowhow to fix it yourself. I do agree that it’s a slippery slope for automakers to get lazy and cut corners, but I think stricter regulation is the better solution than forcing an unnecessary inconvenience onto the customers.
chakan2@lemmy.world 2 months ago
- it used to be that in every case when your car had an issue you needed to either take it in yourself or have the technical knowhow to fix it yourself.
That knowledge is mostly trivial. 7/10 repairs a regular Joe could do. Or worse comes to worse you can take it to a mechanic of your choosing.
I’ll take that level of service.
With the Tesla model, you very like end up with a 100k brick that no one can work on except very expensive very specialized very limited service centers.
A Tesla battery is expensive…now look at install costs. And if you’re not using an authorized installer, you’re locked out of the supercharger network.
inb4_FoundTheVegan@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I dont disagree with anything you said, I just think there should be a different, but equally severe term for clarity. It’s not hurting Tesla so much as devaluing the word “recall”.
deranger@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m saying upgrade what it’s considered to recall. No OTA hot fix, car goes back to the shop. A proper recall just like any other recall. A software issue is just as dangerous as a hardware issue for something like an accelerator pedal. To be clear, this isn’t Tesla hate, this is modern “sell unfinished products” hate. I’d say the same thing for any other manufacturer.
If the blinker pattern needs to be updated, that’s fine for OTA in my opinion. The accelerator, brakes, steering, anything safety critical - nah. Recall for that, proper recall.
DoomBot5@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Recalls still require the customer to take action. They’re much less likely to go into the shop to have it fixed than press a button on their phone and have the car fix itself overnight.
Your suggestion for not allowing safety software fixes OTA is dangerous.
fubo@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Other way around. Unsupervised OTA updates are dangerous.
First: A car is a piece of safety-critical equipment. It has a skilled operator who has familiarized themselves with its operation. Any change to its operation, without the operator being aware that a change was made, puts the operator and other people at risk. If the operator takes the car into the shop for a documented recall, they know that something is being changed. An unsupervised OTA update can (and will) alter the behavior of safety-critical equipment without the operator’s knowledge.
Second: Any facility for OTA updates is an attack vector. If a car can receive OTA updates from the manufacturer, then it can receive harmful OTA updates from an attacker who has compromised the car’s update mechanism or the manufacturer. Because the car is safety-critical equipment — unlike your phone, it can kill people — it is unreasonable to expose it to these attacks.
JustZ@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Fair enough.
What should the term be?
jkjustjoshing@lemmy.world 2 months ago
As someone who might be plowed into by one of these things, I care about the difference. Is it something where 80% of them will be automatically fixed within 72 hours by an auto-update, or is it something I’ll need to worry about for weeks/months. There’s no way to know which recalls have been fixed when encountering a vehicle in the wild, so if it’s a software-only recall fix that applies automatically, I feel less concerned about it once the fix is available.
None of this should be taken as support of recklessly shipping unfinished software into a car.
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 2 months ago
or is it something I’ll need to worry about for weeks/months
Try years. For example the 2020 Takata airbag recall… wouldn’t be surprised if there’s still a hundred million cars around the world that haven’t been recalled. If you don’t live in a first world country, it wasn’t even possible to get parts for the fix until recently.
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 2 months ago
I think you don’t understand the realities of software development. Have you ever tried to write an application that another person is going to use?
The software running onboard modern vehicles isn’t all from the vehicle manufacturer. There are computer parts in there from various manufacturers that have their own software, and all the various pieces have to interact. Bugs can show up later that didn’t appear in testing because no amount of testing can possibly check every interaction, it’s just too complex. And most of those bugs are relatively minor, things like the music player volume not adjusting properly, or a little lag time in the menus. The idea that every customer would bring their vehicle back to a dealer for an update that fixes something like that is ludicrously unrealistic.
dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I think the point the parent poster was making is that the system shouldn’t be designed that way in the first place. And when the vendor fucks it up due to releasing the product in a half-baked state, the hammer needs to be brought down on them in such a way that it will functionally discourage them from doing it again.
If the electronics providing functionality in your vehicle are so complex that the excuse is being made potentially adverse interactions between its various components from various OEM’s can’t be tested and accounted for, what has actually happened is that designed your product wrong. Throw it away, start over, and do it right next time.
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 2 months ago
the system shouldn’t be designed that way in the first place
Designed what way? Having parts from several manufacturers? Everything is designed that way. No manufacturer is an island, and having every manufacturer reinvent their own wheels is a terrible idea.
Tesla isn’t going to write their own firmware for every component that they buy from another company and no one sane would expect them to.
when the vendor fucks it up due to releasing the product in a half-baked state
There are so many assumptions about what’s going on in this statement that it’s hard to even begin addressing them. It is not possible to test any device that will be used in the real world in every possible set of circumstances that it might encounter. This doesn’t mean it’s “half-baked”, and it’s not an “excuse”, it’s just the nature of reality. Best you can do is test the most common circumstances.
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Fuck an OTA update too, I don’t want that either
Yeah no - you’re dead wrong about that. My oldish car has an annoying software glitch and I bet it could be fixed with an OTA update.
It’s not a safety problem, so wouldn’t rigger a recall, and there is no way the manufacture is going to voluntarily do it - that would cost a fortune. When it’s under warranty, they fix it, when it’s out of warranty… it can cost thousands of dollars just to find the problem (the symptom is it goes into limp home mode with a vague ECU error which can be caused by almost anything, power cycle the key to restore normal driving).
The fact it can be fixed with a power cycle means it’s obviously possible to fix it with an OTA update if my vehicle could do OTA updates and they would absolutely do that. The ones that fail under warranty must be costing them a fortune.
FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 2 months ago
You can’t get an update at a dealership if it’s something that critical?
nbailey@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
In my opinion it points to a more dangerous thing, “continuous delivery” software mindset seeping into safety critical systems.
It’s fine, good even, that web developers can push updates to “prod” in minutes. But imagine if some dork could push largely untested control system updates to your car’s ECU… it’s one thing for a website site to get a couple errors, but it’s a very bad thing if it makes your steering wheel stop working.
Unfinished products make more money, and it’s high time a consumer protection law clamped down on this.
joekar1990@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I agree I mean how many times in the past couple of years have large sites or services gone down because an update was pushed through. Most recently I can think of teams going down earlier this year.
Should be protocols put into place for cars that need to be followed for a software update.
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Protocols are in place. We can argue over wether or not those are good enough, but the car industry is incredibly heavily regulated.
JustZ@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Oh yeah don’t stop.