Comment by EvanAnderson
7 months ago
This is chilling (from https://www.jlwranglerforums.com/forum/threads/2024-4xe-loss...):
> On my drive home I abruptly had absolutely no acceleration, the gear indicator on the dash started flashing, the power mode indicator disappeared, an alert said shift into park and press the brake + start button, and the check engine light and red wrench lights came on. I was still able to steer and brake with power steering and brakes for maybe 30 seconds before those went out too. After putting it into park and pressing the brake and start button it started back up and I could drive it normally for a little bit, but it happened two more times on my 1.5 mi drive home.
If that happened on the highway I could easily see people being killed.
On a reasonably well constructed car, loss of power steering at highway speeds is barely noticeable. Loss of power brakes is a different story. An inability to actually get all the way off the highway before running out of speed could also be quite dangerous, and a loss of power steering can indeed make it quite difficult to maneuver at low speeds.
If its drive-by-wire steering, then isn't loss of power steering the same as loss of all steering?
I'm shocked (literally) to see there are production vehicles with steer-by-wire. Couple that with OTA updates and you have a vehicle I'd refuse to ride in, much less purchase.
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If its drive-by-wire steering…
Which it isn’t. What production passenger vehicles have no steering column? (EDIT: oh, yeah, forgot about Cybertruck.)
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I think there are only a couple of cars that are steer-by-wire.
The Infinity Q50, QX50, QX55 and QX60 (with backup that connects upon electric failure).
Without backup, but triple redundancy, can be found in the Tesla Cybertruck. But I'd take that redundancy with a grain of salt as they don't have the best track record telling you the truth.
That said, I really with companies would go back to the good old hydraulic steering. I don't need self-parking. But self-parking needs at least electric steering (with our without steering column).
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Which vehicles other than the Cybertruck have drive by wire steering? To my knowledge it's the only one without a physical steering column...
I've lost power steering on my dad's F250 once. It was incredibly noticeable, since I had to crank the wheel like a ship from the age of sail in order to get onto the shoulder.
I guess you could argue that it wasn't a reasonably well constructed car.
I lost power steering every day during the winter in my old car, when the engine stalled while coasting through a particular intersection, and I was busy re-starting it and negotiating the turn.
It's amazing how much more reliable cars have gotten. You used to be always on the alert for some critical function to fail spontaneously, and also listening for warning signs.
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I had flaky power steering on an old Lexus LS400, and it would stop working for minutes at a time, more or less at random. At 40mph, I could generally tell that it wasn’t working but there was no meaningful extra difficulty when steering. At 15-20mph it was quite a bit harder to steer. At 5mph, it took some real force to steer. At parking speeds, it was very hard to make the large wheel movements needed to park. At a full stop it was almost impossible.
In general, this wasn’t especially hazardous, since I rarely needed to move the wheel very far while moving at very low speed in a place where other cars could be a hazard.
(Yes, I got this fixed. And the old LS400 cars were extremely well designed and built.)
In most situations a rudder is very, very gentle on the hands. You rarely have to crank down hard.
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Losing power steering would be no big deal. Anything that caused a sudden loss in forward velocity worries me.
There's construction on the Interstate highway in my area with lanes that have no "breakdown" space ("contraflow" lanes). I would be terrified to lose power in that lane. I would be worried about getting rear-ended and / or causing a pile-up.
Loss of power steering is definitely noticeable. Especially when it comes to getting off the freeway.
Lost power steering at highway speeds in my '91 Corolla a couple of decades back. Didn't notice on the highway (belt just made a loud pang and I thought "What the heck was that?"), but as soon as I took an exit and had to turn at the light, I seriously had to muscle the wheel over. Good learning experience about what power steering offers.
My assumption is that the HN audience is not perfectly gaussian distribution of the population but probably not extremely far from it.
So can someone who owns a modern car please help me understand why you would buy a car that has the mere capability to be remotely shut off?
A vehicle is a personal safety device, that allows for independent travel away from bad things and towards safe things. That is one of the most critical aspects of a vehicle.
Assuming that one of the most critical times you might need a vehicle is fleeing oppression, having a remote switch off as a possible vector to impede your escape is an existential threat and basically makes one of the core reasons to have a vehicle moot.
My assumption is that most people are not thinking about their vehicle as one of the most critical tools for freedom.
Having traveled the world and lived in war zones, vehicles are life savers and it’s insane to me that anyone would allow a possibility for someone else, specifically corporations and governments with major power levers, to even have the ability to stop that remotely.
Given the increasing computerization of modern cars, how could you possibly verify that this wasn’t possible on *any* car you buy?
The only way I can think of is “don’t buy a car made within the last 25 years”
> The only way I can think of is “don’t buy a car made within the last 25 years”
You don't need to go that far back. None of my cars have any kind of connectivity, the newest one is 2014. I'll never own a car with any kind of remote connectivity, the risk is far too large to ignore.
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This is why some hardcore folks go ‘trad diesel’. Just glowplugs and mechanical parts!
Notably, you have to go back to 70’ish era to get that kind of equipment. Almost everything else has some kind of ECU.
Cellular connections didn’t start becoming somewhat common until the late 90’s-early 2000’s though.
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No need to go that far back. My 2010 vehicle has no remote connection.
You can usually delete the modem on your car.
Correct
I will not buy a post patriot act vehicle
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Don't buy modern cars. There is a real movement to keep driving cars from circa 2010. This was around peak car for me. You could still block off the egr valve, remove the cat and any dpf nonsense. No 'driving aids' to distract and infuriate me. No touch screens to distract and infuriate me. No software updates. Can still get over 50mpg. My car is going to keep being fixed as long as it is viable.
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> Assuming that one of the most critical times you might need a vehicle is fleeing oppression
That's a hell of an assumption.
If we're talking about population distributions, I would argue that "having lived in war zones" puts you well outside the center of the curve.
It is extremely far from it in the US, I promise.
But direct answers:
1. They don’t know that can happen. The salesman doesn’t point it out.
2. They figure all cars will be that way soon so why worry about it.
3. It’s never happened to anyone before so why worry about it.
4. We don’t know anyone who has ever had to flee from oppression in their car so why worry about it. And this is America, if that’s what we’re worried about we’ll stock up on ammo.
Etc
> So can someone who owns a modern car please help me understand why you would buy a car that has the mere capability to be remotely shut off?
In practice, getting t-boned at an intersection where I have the right of way is a much greater risk to me than my car getting shut off, so it makes sense to optimize for safety in the former case.
Like smart TVs, the only possible alternative is buying a 10 year old model on the secondhand market. Vehicles without these features have not been produced in a long time
Dumb TVs are still being made. I bought this Sharp commercial TV just last year: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CCMXNRFH
Of course they're not mass-market and will be lacking on some other bullet point features, but if you really care about your TV not turning into an ad billboard in 2 years, they're the way to go.
Or never wire the tv. Thats what I did. Everything runs through my Apple TV (admittedly captured by my years of employment there) but could just as well run through a Kodi instance
You’ve got me thinking. I drive a Chinese made EV. If China ever had a nuclear war with the west they would definitely brick all of the cars they’ve sold us. Also it doesn’t have to be China that issues the command. Remote shutoff of cars is a great cyber warfare target.
I’ve looked at the fuse box for my car and found the fuse that powers the Ariel Module. Removing this fuse breaks GPS and all cellular connectivity. Hopefully it breaks automatic updates. I am tempted to leave it disconnected to see if my car skips an update.
The rest of the car works fine. If the political situation heats up then I can remove this fuse to isolate my car from the internet.
Some people connect a toggle switch in place of this fuse so they can leave the car disconnected from the internet when they are not using online functions.
I would be surprised if simply removing a fuse voids my warranty.
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Disable brakes and set acceleration to max, on all of them simultaneously, would have rather bigger impact than switching them off.
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> So can someone who owns a modern car please help me understand why you would buy a car that has the mere capability to be remotely shut off?
That’s not what is going on here. These cars are not being intentionally shut down remotely. Instead, a software update for some computerized components of the car was pushed down to the cars and installed with the owners permissions, but that update apparently has severe bugs that should have been caught by QA.
This is a distinction without a difference. Intentional or not, these vehicles were disabled remotely.
Even if the owner gave permission to install the update, I would strongly wager that they did not give concurrent permission for the update to change the behavior of the vehicle.
Of course, I sincerely doubt the EULA offers any way to separate those permissions; you are all in, or you are all out. Assuming that you even have an option to opt out.
And that’s exactly why these cars can never be trusted under any circumstances, ever.
"Do you want to update? Yes or later". And blocks semi-critical stuff so you must address it.
"Do you want to update? Yes or later". And blocks semi-critical stuff so you must address it.
"Do you want to update? Yes or later". And blocks semi-critical stuff so you must address it.
"Update now. You cannot refuse since you said no 3 times"
Or, other parodies, "Just say MAYBE LATER to drugs"
if you really mean help you understand why and that wasn't a rhetorical exageration, it's not hard to understand.
Most people have a variety of things they are looking for in a car they want to purchase, and other factors are more important to them than this one, which they figure probably won't happen anyway. There may be few options that aren't updateable over the air, and those options don't meet their other criteria -- if they even get that deep into considering it, which they probably don't, they just aren't really thinking about it. But even if they did. you don't have the option of buying your perfect fantasy car. I'd like to buy a car with manual mechanical controls instead of touch screen controls, but there aren't that many options for that either, and they may not meet my other needs.
Realistically I would be cycling out of my city because if there was anyone else except me running from oppression, we would be all caught in the same traffic jam.
I happen to live on the outskirts, but there are several choke points where it would be really easy to set up a barrier. Those choke points apply to cars mostly.
> Realistically I would be cycling out of my city
Good for you, sensible and community minded to keep roads clear(er)
You have no dependant children or pets that you must take care of too
Lots of child comments mention fleeing oppression as being something outside the norm. A more relatable thing to flee for Americans might be hurricanes and wildfires-- both of which sizeable numbers of Americans have had to flee somewhat regularly.
Same reason people buy most things these days: convenience. Do you own a cell phone? It can be remotely updated (and even shut down by malicious actors), yet most people own one and don't think twice about it.
> So can someone who owns a modern car please help me understand why you would buy a car that has the mere capability to be remotely shut off?
Because afaik, all the modern cars have this as a 'feature', but there's lots of other nice features they have.
The best of both worlds right now is an earlier modern car where the 2g/3g modem can no longer connect to the outside world. Even better if you can pull the modem, but they're usually up behind a lot of trim.
They generally just don’t think about or even know it’s a thing.
Most people push button, aim steering wheel, and voila.
Don’t even have to push a button nowadays. That convenience is apparently worth the risks. It’s really nice to not have to have keys or worry about turning the car off or on.
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> why you would buy a car that has the mere capability to be remotely shut off
One answer to this I would presume is: there are no other new cars for sale without this flaw.
Why there aren't regulations or forced options in the market without these functions (as well as with physical control knobs instead of touch surfaces) is a good question too. There is huge demand for cars without most of this nonsense, yet I don't see that demand being met.
I doubt anyone wants a car whose infotainment system can be improperly updated to cause catastrophic power and engine failure while driving, if given this information and a choice to avoid it.
The more cynical/conspiratorial among us (myself included) have come to the conclusion that this demand isn't being met because powerful people want it this way.
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You can usually remove the fuse that powers the 5G antenna. That will probably isolate your car from kill switch software updates.
Agreed that most people don’t think about this. I’m a preper and I hadn’t thought about this.
I'm buying a reliable and comfortable way to travel around the home town, not into warzone.
Yes, I want it to be connected to the app, to conveniently see fuel level, location, etc.
Wouldn't it make sense to keep your prepper car in the garage (next to the welder) and low-mileage? Use the one with fancy electronics as a daily driver and hope the revolution doesn't happen during your commute.
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This is the kind of intolerable fuck up that should land professional engineers in legal peril.
Does the NTSB or whoever have opinions on who gets to write code for safety critical systems and what obligations they have?
This is what MISRA C and AUTOSAR C++ is for. However I think those only apply to automotive components like the ECU, not the infotainment systems.
But by implication doesn’t this failure mode mean the infotainment system was interacting with the ECU in some manner?
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The “engineers” live in another country and are paid fifty cents an hour.
I suspect it did happen on the highway for some people, that would explain the disabled Jeep sitting on the (minimal in construction zone) left shoulder of an expressway that I drove past yesterday. I just figured there'd been a fender bender in the already terrible construction traffic and the second vehicle hadn't moved on yet.
If I owned a Jeep I'd be dumping it off at CarMax first thing Monday morning.
I’d keep it and consult my lawyer first.
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It did happen on the highway to my sister. She was in the middle lane but luckily had the space to get to the side. Managed to start it again and get off the highway where it did it again and wouldn’t start after that.
Very scary.
When car company cut corners and let junior developers do the vibe-updates...
So would do a flat tyre and myriad of other things. Is software supposed to be perfect?