51–60 of 189 posts
Every passing news cycle, I am getting more and more reasons to repair and stick with my current vehicle. Perhaps I would be better off paying a mechanic to teach me how to do the basic maintenance and repairs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My eldest daughter knows her way around cars, and she refuses to buy any car that has any sort of computer in it. She knows how to change this, repair that, fit whatever and is very happy doing that. But she also knows that as a female if she goes into any garage for a 'diagnostic' she will be overcharged. In fact even for something normal with a 'non-computer' car she will be overcharged. Cars without computers are…
As a fellow “analog” automotive enthusiast, I’m curious how she defines computer in this situation? Given that ECUs / microprocessors have been standard on cars since the late 60s / early 70s. For me it’s the network connections and updates that scare me. The software on my ‘99 Benz hasn’t changed in 24 years, and I don’t need it too.
What brand of car? So I know what to avoid?
My Tesla had an update fail, and it didn't break anything, I just got a new update package the next day. I also replaced my own headlight and had to run a software update to initialize the new part. I called a service center and had a software update in less than an hour. Try that at Audi.
Also the scrutiny Tesla has received at the start of it's operations might be quite a bit more than the other makers.
I'm hearing Kia/Hyundai's needing a replacement battery are having to wait months if not up to a year, while new ones sell away.
Buying a used EV will become like buying a used ICE car - there are ways to do it well, and ignoring either is at your peril... and no guarantee a brand new one will be reliable, nor the warranty performant when needed.
Does anyone have an original source for this? The picture is reposted from a different social media influencer's tweet https://twitter.com/githii/status/1738289618921951296 , but with less compression artifacts and without that influencer's story.
It’s a bit troubling that automakers (and, well, anyone who is building things that have mechanisms for software updates) aren’t making software updates failsafe. If you have multiple copies of the image on storage, and you take care not to touch the currently-running image, then a failed software update to the alternate image shouldn’t have any impact. Think of it like blue-green deployments on the cloud; and it’s w…
Tesla is. Failed updates are non-destructive, they also have an RTOS gateway isolating entertainment software from the software needed to drive the vehicle. https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/reverse-engine... And this is their decade old architecture. If you watch some cybertruck videos you’ll see it is much more elegant now.
My Tesla had an update fail, and it didn't break anything, I just got a new update package the next day. I also replaced my own headlight and had to run a software update to initialize the new part. I called a service center and had a software update in less than an hour. Try that at Audi.
I wish someone would make a truly dumb car. Sure you can have microcontrollers for emissions, safety, etc but beyond that give me a 1970s user interface and make the car as independent of technology as possible.
Running out of disk space pops up time and again. I've often wondered why software fails so often in this situation. But it's because the basic components of the system start to break -- things like "Call with temporary file" stop working, because creating a tempfile fails. And usually you're writing that code precisely in a spot where it assumes it can't fail.
This just happened on my PS5. I thought I'd play a bit of Armored Core 6 over Christmas, so I sat down and was greeted by "Can't start game." There was a pending update which couldn't be installed. So I skipped update; same error. But now the update was skipped, so it wouldn't even try to reinstall it. I ended up having to reinstall the whole game. Never seen a PS5 game completely brick itself like that.
Disk space woes are also one of the primary reasons websites go down. Ever forget about a server for two years and suddenly see your service break? It's almost always because the process ran out of file handles (resource leak) or because it ran out of disk space (hello imagemagick tempfiles).
Of course, the bug here could be completely different, but disk space errors are so common that it's as good a guess as any. Computers don't do well when you're out of disk space. MacOS freezes and bluescreens instead of going to sleep, because it can't save the hibernation file to disk. PS5 media recording stops working, because the hour-long recording backlog no longer has room to write the video to disk. This software update obviously passed their unit tests, but failed in this particular case; disk space is one of the few variables that they probably didn't test for.
I wish it were easier to write unit tests for all possible out-of-space situations. There are just so many. Even if it technically doesn't break, it often craps up the experience so much that the user ends up wondering why the software is so bad.