Old And Busted: Botched Software Update Bricks Your PC. The New Hotness: Botched Software Update Bricks Your Car
Louis Rossmann has ample reason rant today, namely news of a failed software update that bricks your car.
Note: This happened on the Ford Mach-E Mustang, the ugly crossover SUV that shouldn’t be called a Mustang.
“Unfortunately a recent software update was not successful your vehicle cannot be driven. Please call customer support.”
“I’m confident that when you call that number, you’re going to be dealing with is somebody who helps talk you through how to restore your car’s operating system from backup memory. Because of course, if you’re dealing with mission critical firmware or something, surely you would have a copy of the original that came with it?”
“Or perhaps a copy of the last known good update that was actually working over there that you could go back to if the update was not successful?”
“Of course not! You paid $63,000 for a device that is literally more buggy than Windows 10.”
“This car is over $60,000 and they don’t have even the most basic, fundamental redundancy built in, so that if your update fails it will flash back to a known good [version] on the backup memory. Apparently that’s not a thing.”
Says that this problem isn’t because the Mach E is an EV vehicle.
“I do not believe there is a circumstance where the vehicle is so screwed up because the version of software that it had from February of 2023 was so behind that that vehicle is now fundamentally unfit to be on a road, even in limp mode. That’s ridiculous.”
“The ability to roll back a version of software to an older version if the update that you put on is an update that screwed it up this is something that has been more than perfected in the modern day.”
“To not implement it into a vehicle that costs over $60,000 to the point where the entire 4,000 lb hunk of metal needs to be towed, and you no longer have a method of transportation because of that? There’s no excuse for it.”
“One of the things that bothers me a lot is that every time you move to a new technology paradigm, we accept less freedom. We accept that things are going to suck more in ways that they don’t have to suck.”
“You see this subscription bullshit, this less reliability bullshit, this everything made to break bullshit, this everything made to be replaced in a year or two, this every…this is not something that is simply inherent to electric vehicles this is something that is pervasive. This is something that is happening everywhere.”
“This is something that we need to push back against every single time we see this happen.”
This entry was posted on Saturday, December 30th, 2023 at 3:44 PM and is filed under Uncategorized, unions, video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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5 Responses to “Old And Busted: Botched Software Update Bricks Your PC. The New Hotness: Botched Software Update Bricks Your Car”
The end state for all this is going to be a market where they can’t sell these cars to anyone besides the truly desperate, with the used market becoming insanely valuable. Which will then lead to draconian regulation demanding old cars be scrapped…
Whole thing is going to blow up in their faces. They keep right on cinching down on the straps, and the inevitable bag explosion is going to be coming right along behind it.
I wish to say WTAF? I have recently worked on three separate projects on small to mid size IOT (Internet of Things) projects where the device needed over the air updates. In two cases we used MENDER a FOSS software that can be easily (alright MOSTLY easily) built into a distribution and can with minimal manipulation be used with a self hosted or AWS/Azure hosted service. In the third case the vendor had their own update scheme which we used. The first two cases were cheap devices (under $50 for the electronics), the third was slightly more high end with maybe 2K-5k of hardware but a lot of that was sensors the CPU and memory were probably under $200. In all cases there was a rollback option often with a self determined restore or worst case with some simple set of physical actions to initiate the restore. If we had proposed anything that lame the customers for whom were were developing the software would have sent us packing. That a $63K vehicle can be so totally disabled by a failed update seems to verge on criminally negligent. One presumes that the software environment for the MACH-E is the same across the vehicles. Thus the testing should actually be simple but obviously wasn’t, further negligence on the part of FORD or whoever created the software for them.
There’s a Mennonite town not far from here. When I go through there I occasionally see their little black horse-drawn buggies, and the sign for the tack & buggy shop.
Who knows, I might be a customer one day. At this rate it’ll be more reliable than a car – and very possibly an awful lot cheaper.
The end state for all this is going to be a market where they can’t sell these cars to anyone besides the truly desperate, with the used market becoming insanely valuable. Which will then lead to draconian regulation demanding old cars be scrapped…
Whole thing is going to blow up in their faces. They keep right on cinching down on the straps, and the inevitable bag explosion is going to be coming right along behind it.
I wish to say WTAF? I have recently worked on three separate projects on small to mid size IOT (Internet of Things) projects where the device needed over the air updates. In two cases we used MENDER a FOSS software that can be easily (alright MOSTLY easily) built into a distribution and can with minimal manipulation be used with a self hosted or AWS/Azure hosted service. In the third case the vendor had their own update scheme which we used. The first two cases were cheap devices (under $50 for the electronics), the third was slightly more high end with maybe 2K-5k of hardware but a lot of that was sensors the CPU and memory were probably under $200. In all cases there was a rollback option often with a self determined restore or worst case with some simple set of physical actions to initiate the restore. If we had proposed anything that lame the customers for whom were were developing the software would have sent us packing. That a $63K vehicle can be so totally disabled by a failed update seems to verge on criminally negligent. One presumes that the software environment for the MACH-E is the same across the vehicles. Thus the testing should actually be simple but obviously wasn’t, further negligence on the part of FORD or whoever created the software for them.
There’s a Mennonite town not far from here. When I go through there I occasionally see their little black horse-drawn buggies, and the sign for the tack & buggy shop.
Who knows, I might be a customer one day. At this rate it’ll be more reliable than a car – and very possibly an awful lot cheaper.
Our new hero is Derek from Vice Grip Garage on YouTube. Just watch some of his “revivals” to see what I’m talking about.
This is why I keep, in my glovebox where it is easy to reach, a complete backup of my car on floppy.