Car software patches are over 20% of recalls, study finds

November 14, 2024 6:46 AM

[Ars Technica] Sep 2024 "Software fixes are now responsible for more than 1 in 5 automotive recalls. That's the key finding from a decade's worth of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recall data, according to an analysis from the law firm DeMayo Law. While that's a sign of growing inconvenience for drivers, the silver lining is that a software patch is usually a much quicker fix than something requiring hardware replacement."
posted by AlSweigart (17 comments total)

Left for discussion is if this is a bad thing because we have "too much" software in cars and cars should be simpler and cheaper, or is this a good thing because software (of certain kinds) in cars is a good thing, or is this a good thing because maybe hardware defects are decreasing so it only looks like software defects are increasing, or is it... just a thing?

Much as I love physically rolling down windows, it's also nice to control all the windows from the driver's seat.
posted by AlSweigart at 6:51 AM on November 14, 2024

I'm surprised it's so low.
posted by fairmettle at 6:56 AM on November 14, 2024 [2 favorites]

Not if the car is constantly showing an engine light and a couple of other rando issues because the software gave it an anxiety disorder and it’s too old for automatic updates so you gotta drive it all the way to … ugh, it’s a long story. I miss my Accord. It didn’t have a back-up camera or Bluetooth, but it didn’t have mysteries, either.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:57 AM on November 14, 2024 [3 favorites]

Seems like the classic problem of cars and advancing technology more generally: for whatever benefits, it adds more problems and things to break down. The "silver" lining is that some of those new problems aren't super hard to fix, but it's still more bullshit to deal with.
posted by Saxon Kane at 7:00 AM on November 14, 2024 [2 favorites]

We just sold our Tesla because **gestures wildly at everything**

When you sell a Tesla, you have to run a "Factory Reset" which clears all your information. Except, while sitting in the parking lot at the dealer, I found that I couldn't run the factory reset because Tesla pushed out a trial subscription for their stupid autopilot. The factory reset button is disabled until the trial ends.

Instead, I got to sit in my car and manually log out of all the various services and clear the navigation history for the last 3 months one by one. I also kept the door open the whole time because I was semi-worried that the door controls would stop working at some point while I wiped all my accounts.

It was a nice car in many ways, but I won't miss getting software updates randomly that wildly change the interface.
posted by Eddie Mars at 7:33 AM on November 14, 2024 [4 favorites]

I'm surprised it's so low.


Me too. So 80% are still serious mechanical problems? Yikes.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:42 AM on November 14, 2024

So 80% are still serious mechanical problems? Yikes.

No, not necessarily. A lot of recalls are for minor issues that don’t affect safety or performance, or are cosmetic, or are targeted at a small subset of a particular production run. The massive every-car-made-over-the-past-four-years-might-explode recalls get the press, but they are by far the minority of recalls.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:52 AM on November 14, 2024 [3 favorites]

Anecdotally, our friends’ parents have a Volkswagen ID.4. While out of town, they ran some sort of update on the system, and the process bricked their car.

Like most ppl here, I might argue the wisdom of running an update away from home, but also: you shouldn’t be able to “brick” a car. And while the OP suggests (and I would assume) a software fix would be quick, it took VW a month to get them their working car back.
posted by TangoCharlie at 8:48 AM on November 14, 2024 [4 favorites]

EVs have a lot less complex mechanical systems and a lot more software. Not so much for the EV part, there's some software involved for that but it's not too complicated. More for the infotainment system and auxiliary stuff like cameras, radars, cruise controls, etc.

I've read that in China the cars there are marketed more like cell phones. The key features are how good the stereo is, how fancy the apps are in the console. Stuff like motor performance or handling are secondary.

My 2023 Volvo C40 has been a software disaster. The infotainment system is based on Android Automotive OS, something I think in theory should be good. But they fucked it up awfully. The main problem is it crashes every other time I drive the car. Usually when I turn it on, sometimes when I'm driving. Everything it controls stops: radio, air conditioning. Fortunately the actual car driving systems keep working uninterrupted. There's other problems too, like the map display in the dashboard often bugs out.

I think often of this patch note Volvo issued last year

If FM radio station favorites are used in the car, they will need to be reinstated after the installation of 2.13.1.

Imagine being the product manager who writes this note to share with customers. Their genius software engineers fucked something up so simple, they either could not or did not care to preserve about 20 bytes worth of customer preference data. Rather than hold the release to fix the awful bug they were just like "nah, we'll just tell the customers and they can all reprogram their radios. Done!" Volvo is supposed to be a high end brand with good customer satisfaction. But they didn't give a shit here. Appalling.
posted by Nelson at 8:59 AM on November 14, 2024 [5 favorites]

Software patches are also being used to circumvent actual hardware faults without actually fixing the core issue, which can be a safety issue. When looking for my last car I was considering a Chrysler Pacifica hybrid, but came across many reports of transmission electrical faults disabling the vehicles while being driven down a highway. This forced the driver to immediately pull over and stop with no warning. Obviously, this is a safety issue that needed to be dealt with through a recall. But Chrsyler's fix was a software update to anticipate the fault and display a warning on the driver's screen to direct them to pull over as failure was imminent. In my mind, this is unnacceptable and does little to alleviate the danger of losing power while driving. I worry this kind of inadequate software patch for safety recalls could become more common.
posted by wigner3j at 9:49 AM on November 14, 2024 [3 favorites]

Remember the episode of 99pi/Reply All where a listener's Mazda radio wouldn't let him play the the 99pi podcast?
posted by stevil at 9:57 AM on November 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

The most annoying thing about our 2022 Chevy Bolt, beyond the battery recalls* is the quality of the software. At least I think it's the software, they've replaced some of the switches that were apparently made by Lucas, but the state of the "ignition" is always hard to suss out vs what state I think I've got it in via various button presses, it's constantly popping up mobile services dialogs that we have no idea what they're related to (don't use this service while driving! If you're the passenger, press "accept", but we have no idea what service it's talking about), and... don't even get me started on the rest of the entertainment system.

As a software professional of many years, it's clear to me that GM has no clue how to design software, nor how to write it.

* hey, there's another one announced today, but we don't know if it applies to our car yet but we're advised to not charge over 90% or discharge to lower than 70 miles range until we do! The good news is that we've gotten into the practice of not driving it any further than the BMW i3 that it replaced...
posted by straw at 10:24 AM on November 14, 2024 [1 favorite]

Now imagine what will happen when you put Elon "several major insurers stopped offering coverage of my vehicles because they failed so often" Musk in charge of a department of slashing safety regulations.
posted by subdee at 10:57 AM on November 14, 2024

The only software issues we've had with our cars has been with CarPlay refusing to switch which phone it connects with. Sometimes it just refuses, so I'll switch bluetooth audio to the correct phone, and then it'll mysteriously work.
The entertainment center on my dad's 2016 chevy will randomly reboot, which isn't fun, though.
And it's not really a bug, but my kid listens to a lot of K-Pop, and her Corolla will occasionally display nothing for some songs, where everything's in Korean.
posted by Spike Glee at 11:02 AM on November 14, 2024

The other significant piece of data is whether or not the total number of recalls is up, down or the same. Looking at the article it looks like there is some variation from year to year, generally trending up. So it seems that both hardware and software are getting worse, with the software getting worse faster.

And this was interesting, in a disheartening way:

It should be noted that not all recalls involving a software fix are to solve a software problem. Take the recent Jaguar I-Pace recall, which was triggered by battery fires caused by battery cells damaged during assembly. Jaguar's fix? A software update that sets a new, lower limit to the storage capacity of the battery pack, preventing it from fully charging to 100 percent.

Obviously the correct fix is to replaced the damaged battery, not reduce the capabilities of the car. If I were a Jaguar owner I would be pissed. I occasionally think that a Jag would be cool to own, but beyond the price, stories like this absolve me of that notion really fast.
posted by TedW at 11:11 AM on November 14, 2024 [2 favorites]

A lot of recalls are for minor issues that don’t affect safety or performance, or are cosmetic, or are targeted at a small subset of a particular production run.

Yeah, part of the incredibly high "number of recalls" stat is driven by increased sophistication in detecting and tracing potential problems before they became real ones. Stuff like issuing a recall that covers exactly 11 specific vehicles, as they received a self audit report from a supplier that a small batch of parts were not compliant.

Much as I love physically rolling down windows, it's also nice to control all the windows from the driver's seat.

This wouldn't be software though... just individual physical wires travelling from your driver seat window control unit to all the other windows in the car. 1-2 miles of copper wiring, still largely handmade, with workers bundling hundreds of individual wires into harnesses. The wires are routed by hand then manually wrapped . For now this low tech physical construction is incredibly robust and cheap, as long as you can pay workers $2 per hour in Thailand or something. Tesla uses a single shared data and power cable + software to remove much of this complexity but I'm not sure if it's a superior option compared to the $2 per hour workers doing this...

The automotive industry has been such a physical industry for the past 100 years, getting them to write software has been like asking a toothpaste company to start up a software division and then expecting it to compete against Apple or Google...
posted by xdvesper at 4:27 PM on November 14, 2024 [2 favorites]

My daily driver is a Yamaha Tracer 9 gt. That means I understand acutely how much safer vehicles are now with computer packages -- things like traction control, wheelie assist (prevention really), active suspension, and even the lowly antilock brakes, all exist because of the increasing sophistication of automotive computers.

It's had 3 recalls, and two were software. Both were adjustments of the throttle map, which is a big table of numbers that tells the engine how much fuel and air to send to the cylinders based on rider input, speed, and engine load. The third was a preventative supply chain issue like xdvesper mentioned, and mine didn't end up need anything done.

So it sounds like a lot of recalls -- three for a 3 year old model -- but I see them as a sign of increased capability and safety margins, so I'm glad for them.
posted by dbx at 5:16 PM on November 14, 2024