I work beside a Rivian showroom. Will be interesting to see how many of them get bricked.
cars are becoming like early access video games and that is not a good thing.
I work in software, I have seen many fuck ups. I have seen fuck ups that cost people jobs and the company lots of money. I have NEVER seen a company brick their own fleet in one update
Truly an amount of ‘Tism that only WSB or my brother could beat
It didn’t impact many vehicles, to be fair. Definitely not their entire fleet
Lexus did it to the GPS once.
damn your brother catching strays 😭
My kid’s $400 baby monitor camera did it last year. Sent an OTA update that bricked every camera. They had to send every customer a brand new one to fix the issue.
Company went bankrupt as a result. That made the $400 monitor a paperweight without cloud services needed to see the camera on your phone. Company assets were purchased by another entity who restarted cloud services with a $15/month fee when there was no fee previously.
One person’s fat finger error caused the company to bankrupt and tens of thousands of customers to lose functionality of their expensive baby monitor.
What does autism have to do with this?
it is maddening that there is not a ‘off’ button for these updates… or at least requiring a positive acknowledgement to do a change. it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know this type of problem will happen again.
There are plenty of mechanical things that can break or lead to recall, but this would enrage me if it were my car. I spend my working life on a computer, and I’m not a technophobe, but I think I see cars partially as an escape from computer BS. I’ve seen fans of various car companies complain about regressions, losing or degrading features that used to work. And having to learn about infotainment/feature error codes, glitches, code branches etc. just feels like a dystopian nightmare - I know I’ll eventually have to deal w/ it b/c in 20 years even old used cars will be like this.
I know that mechanical stuff goes wrong, and that pisses me off too, but at least then there is some chance that you can fix it, learn something, and have some degree of control. whereas with this, some idiot halfway across the country bricked your car by pushing the wrong “security certificates.” You as a consumer are basically helpless and it kinda feels like you don’t even really own your car…
My rule(s) of thumb: don’t buy first gen, don’t buy a future promise, don’t be the first to update.
I hate these updates. If nothing is broken/have no issue with your device and the updates is not a security patch, I don’t see the point of the headache of risking it, this is a CAR not a phone or a computer you can replace in the same day.
One of the reasons I don’t see network updates as a silver bullet. Ideally, you’d have some way to also update via USB, even on a bricked system, but well - few things are designed that way since it’s extra effort. I should know, I’ve worked on a few myself though outside the automotive world. An auto update rollback process would solve problems like this too, for what that’s worth.
I think this will become more common as automakers stumble through becoming tech companies or whatever. I’m actually surprised Tesla hasn’t botched an update yet, regressions aside.
This is the dilemma with these “new” tech companies.
In the beginning, they enlist team members that can assist in making their dreams come true. This first wave is the managers that have no “formal” training, things are often completed at the 11th hour, and a whole lot of everything is thrown at the wall to see what sticks.
At this stage, documentation is never great. There are a LOT of single point failures. The system is more “get it out and get it done! Deliver promises no matter what!”. These managers and leaders are good for a couple of years, but they don’t know who to sustain.
The second wave of management and staffing are the people that know how to make a workflow run properly. They take what exists, they typically disappoint a lot of customers- They start saying “no” to people that the first wave would have never said no to.
They develop documentation. They develop QC processes. They develop a proper workflow.
They hold each other accountable to doing things right, and they caution against overpromising and underdelivering.
It’s clear that a company like Rivian is probably still in this first phase. They are, ipso facto, a multi-billion dollar company. But the fact that this issue happened means they do not have measures in place to prevent a single point failure, and somebody on the team still thinks “they can just push the update- they know it will work” at the expense of the proper workflow and using the proper channels.
Shame on them.
I suspect that within the next 4 months we will see brand new leadership within the company.
Yup. A lot of BS/reductionism in this comment section! I’ve been through this transition as a dev and manager at software startups, and it’s all about the attitude towards risk changing in org… It changes as a company/team matures and the product reaches product/market fit.
The processes (or lack thereof) that led to a mistake like this being possible likely caused little harm until now. The rapid experimentation made possible by the lack of defined process likely enabled them to get to this point, only now (or recently) has it become a liability. Adding undue process too early has killed plenty of companies too. So, I disagree with you dismissing the early team as naive/incompetent, that’s likely not fair. There are tradeoffs, and you need to re-evaluate them with growth.
You’re spot on that this necessary cultural shift generally results in the people changing. Many good managers/execs at the inception/early stage are lousy at the growth stage and vice versa. Few can excel in both environments, habits and tendencies are hard to change.
It’s kind of odd to see this play out in the auto space… given there have been so few new companies enter it. Very common transition with software companies.
Now let’s say this were an update for autonomous driving instead of infotainment…
walk in and slam Git + Revision Testing down on the table, refuse to elaborate, walk out.
Motherfuckers would be flabbergasted
This is why I hate the idea of those cars that are always connected. With it comes the burden of the never ending cycle of pushing security updates along with the potential to brick/break your car. Imaging that shit when you are out of warranty, I’d be livid!
I’d lose it if that happened and you couldn’t access HVAC or audio. Holy…
Nerds
It doesn’t matter how good your process is. There is always some risk of this kind of thing. But that’s why you do staged releases first to consumer-test devices, then widening, as a final check.
This is the problem with OTA on things like cars. They “whoops” and now your (in this case very expensive) car is dead. “Sorry boss, I can’t come to work my car won’t go… yeah I know it’s brand new… yeah it totally pulled a Windows move with an update making it worse.”
Oh boy.
This is why we complain when everything is behind the touchscreen. You must have physical buttons for climate control for this exact reason.
This isn’t a physical vs touchscreen issue, it’s an OTA update issue.
A bad OTA update could just as easily brick a physical button since most (all?) modern cars use computers for their button control. I don’t think anyone is still hardwiring a button to a relay to do an action.
This is why we complain when everything is behind the touchscreen. You must have physical buttons for climate control for this exact reason.
Lol no. Just because the buttons are physical doesn’t mean an OTA update can’t brick the module.