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Comment by qrohlf | Hacker News Reader

I was recently an owner of a Merced-Benz commercial van, and the software was by far the worst part of that whole experience.

It had obvious race-condition type bugs when it came to the user interface layer, but most frustrating was its tendency to succumb to some kind of memory leak on long drives where the entire head unit would just lock up and crash to a black screen after 6-7 hours of being turned on. Because the vehicle kept the computer system "warm" for up to 30 minutes or so to avoid doing a full (and slow) bootup process every time you stopped for fuel, this was a real problem on long trips and couldn't always be solved by power cycling the vehicle.

Had a dealer try to update it twice, which didn't seem to meaningfully impact the system stability at all.

Then there were multiple other, non-head-unit related glitches like the lane assist and cruise control features being incompatible with the state of Nevada (if the system fails to detect any other vehicles for a period of more than about 90 minutes, it assumes that there is a sensor fault, and refuses to operate [1]. Unfortunately it is quite easy to spend hours on the road alone in many southwestern US states, triggering this failsafe mode)

Suffice it to say that I am very skeptical of any software coming from Mercedes these days.

[1] https://www.winnieowners.com/forums/f265/2019-sprinter-cruis...

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> if the system fails to detect any other vehicles for a period of more than about 90 minutes, it assumes that there is a sensor fault, and refuses to operate

I have a current model Sprinter and this behavior is frustrating (thanks for the explanation, by the way, I thought it was a random bug). Cruise will also disengage in heavy rain or snow, with the system saying the sensor is dirty. It wouldn’t be so bad if traditional cruise control would keep working without the active braking assist, etc. but unfortunately it’s all or nothing. I do like the system when it works, which is most of the time, and it’s never done something that felt unsafe.

I haven’t had any problems with the info system. This is my first vehicle with a touchscreen, and I was worried that it’d be a pain to use. But Mercedes provides real buttons for common actions, little trackpads on the steering wheel that can control the system without ever having to touch the screen, Car Play works great, and the built-in nav system is useful for those times I need directions and don’t have a cell signal.

My biggest worry is how these delicate parts will hold up over the years. My 10 year old car has a monochrome dot matrix display that loses a good number of pixels when it gets hot out. Will I really be able to get replacement parts for the Sprinter when the screen or computer start to die in 10-15 years?

> Cruise will also disengage in heavy rain or snow

That’s what it should do, honestly. It’s not safe to drive with cruise control in low traction conditions.

Yeah, the manual explicitly says that cruise control should only be used in clear weather conditions.

Yes, the manual does say not to use adaptive cruise control (Distronic) on icy or slippery roads, if visibility is poor, or if the radar sensors are affected by a variety of weather conditions. Cruise will even automatically disengage if electronic stability intervenes.

I’m mostly annoyed that false positives such as the Nevada issue described above or a one-time splash of water on the sensor when it’s perfectly safe to use cruise control results in the whole system being unavailable for an extended period of time. To me, the right solution would be to disengage Distronic when the sensor can’t see well enough and then allow the driver to re-engage traditional cruise control if they deem it safe to do so. The system doesn’t have the sensors or the smarts to know if it’s actually safe to use cruise control, only the driver can make that judgement. From the manual: “Cruise control is only an aid. You are responsible for the distance to the vehicle in front, for vehicle speed, braking in good time and for staying in your lane.”

Well... there is another problem obviously apart of low traction, which car cannot sense directly. Accumulation of water or snow obstruct the radar. Actually a car with no camera would report exactly that just from radar readout alone, since it can detect worse signal-to-noise due to too much reflection in its readings.

This is one unconscious bias from California-based self-driving companies: weather conditions worse than overcast skies exist in other parts of the world.

Recently, I drove in a whiteout blizzard with huge flakes without much accumulation on the road. Road was drivable, but I couldn’t see road markings. The experience would have been less scary with some sort of augmented display to show the road borders.

Unfortunately the augmented displays don't have better input and are likely much worse than your eyes (their major advantage is never getting bored or sleepy). In your described conditions it would likely have been even more blind than you were, so if there had been displays they would have little bearing to reality.

> Road was drivable, but I couldn’t see road markings.

That's a bit contradictory. If you can't see the road markings the road is not drivable.

In Ontario and it's very common to be driving on packed snow for a few days after new snowfall. You get barely any road markings at all. You just use common sense and memory to try and act like the lane dividers, turning lanes, stop lines are still there. It must be the same in many parts of the US as well. With winter tires and the right attitude its perfectly fine!

But yeah if you can't see the road markings due to an active blizzard, flip the hazards on, follow the tail lights ahead of ya, and stay in the middle of were the road should be.

I've lived there. St. Josephs Island to be specific. I also went to the funeral of more than one person that 'didn't make it' through that kind of condition.

> You just use common sense and memory to try and act like the lane dividers, turning lanes, stop lines are still there

Isn't this what road signs are for?

Here in Sweden, even the road signs are frequently covered by snow. I’m sure it’s a similar situation in Canada!

Interesting. In Russia roads are entirely covered by thick layer of hardened snow for 4+ months (intercity often more, especially up north) so I'm not even sure markings are normative but signs have to be visible. They tell you changes in the number of lanes and directions etc (something like https://www.drom.ru/pdd/pdd/sign_5_15_2/). At first it was unusual to see such reliance on road markings in other countries

> You just use common sense and memory to try and act like the lane dividers, turning lanes, stop lines are still there.

You’re absolutely right. You just do what you need to do.

Having some form of inertial navigation supplemented by GPS and visual odometery from features that stick out from the side of the road (like a road sign; memorized by the vehicle on past drives) would help a lot. A HUD UI could show road markings on “slice” of the road.

Call it “low viz aid” or something catchy.

In my case, I was driving on a rural road just before dusk without street lighting where there is nearly no traffic on a good day. Low-beam headlights were reflecting off the flakes and high-beams were obviously out of the question.

Risk of a collision with another vehicle was low, but going into the ditch was possible if you didn’t know the bends of the road.

Yes, these are dangerous conditions, but I started off driving in rain and didn’t anticipate the switch to snow mid-drive.

But what about a curvy 2-lane road with oncoming traffic on the other side? How do you ensure you not hit kerb the car if you can't see the kerb due to snow?

You slow down enough that you can confidently maneuver by the curb and the other vehicle.

Not all roads get properly cleaned (esp. non-major ones) in a lot of parts of the word, driving on snow is rather common in North Europe.

Try driving on non major roads (and some major) roads in the UK. They often have no markings because they've worn away!

As a Kiwi moved the the UK, I &%$ hate the roads here.

They're fun to drive on still, but there's an over-reliance on painted road markings, which are often not repainted, if they're even visible they disappear when it's raining, or just you know, when there's traffic and the car in front of me is covering it.

It's the absolute fucking worst on gyratorys and other complex roundabouts where I have no idea which fucking lane to be in because I can't see the road marking, covered by cars, positioned right at the entrance to the roundabout rather than before.

Would be completely solved by ensuring roundabout signs were so far in front of the roundabout depending on road speed, then on the roundabout sign indicating at each exit the # of which lanes you can take to get there, ie mark exits going around with 1 2,3 3,4 5. Then I know immediately that the left most lane is dedicated to the first exit, to take the 3rd exit I can be in the 3rd or 4th most lane. And "going around" has a dedicated lane, the 5th from the left.

So sick of being forced out the wrong exit because I've picked the wrong lane and there's too much traffic. So sick of locals in areas complaining on forums about the "idiot drivers" not magically knowing the road layout beforehand. So sick of having to change lanes and feeling like the asshole in the equation because I know it looks like I've done it to queue jump; I'm not trying to skip ahead, I just have no idea where the fuck I'm going.

Gyratory lane markings are shit, too. Proper lanes and then with each segment no marking at all before the lanes start again, it can often be difficult to tell which lane you need to funnel yourself into after the break because the road numbers on the lanes up ahead just aren't visible until you're right on top of them.

Then the driving test here. Oh, the driving test. The first time I tried it I failed for failing to indicate correctly at a mini roundabout. Okay, fine, fair dues. Pass second time. Been driving a while now & maybe like 30% of people actually indicate on a roundabout. Let alone all the other antics people pull while driving here; pass the strict test & then throw it all out the window.

Those mini roundabouts in the UK can be hilarious. A regular crossing with a black dot in the middle and suddenly it's a roundabout. A non local is utterly without a chance to navigate that in a non heart-stopping way.

Ontario has 10m people and most of us won't see the lane markings for the next few days in the middle of a 4 million metro area. Roads will be eminently driveable and some people will safely use a traditional cruise control.

"This is one unconscious bias from California-based self-driving companies: weather conditions worse than overcast skies exist in other parts of the world."

Mount Baldy (right next to LA) is expected to see 7+ feet of snow over the next few days.

I'm fairly certain they're aware of the particular fact you mention. We do have (had thanks to this drought) multiple ski resorts across the state that do not rely upon artificially-made snow to operate.

https://telstarlogistics.typepad.com/telstarlogistics/2007/0...

> Developed by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, the Advanced Rotary Plow (ARP) uses a network of magnets embedded along the roadway to guide the massive snow-spewing machine along the Interstate in zero-visibility conditions -- like a blinded pilot flying on instruments. Meanwhile, an onboard array of sensors sniffs out obstacles -- such as abandoned cars, hungry cows, napping yetis, or whatever -- that may lie hidden beneath the deep snows.

https://path.berkeley.edu/development-advanced-rotary-plow-a...

https://path.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/development_of... (pdf)

The PDF has a complete breakdown of how it works (and I mean really complete - like "here's all the gates in the magnetometers")

You can see some of the interface in https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/janfeb-2001/safe-plowi...

> This ASP Human-Machine Interface is mounted on the windshield. Some of the worst visibility conditions on the planet can be overcome with the aid of the ASP cab-mounted display, which receives its data from the plow's collision-warning system. Radar sensing assists human sight to find the road and obstacles that may be in the way of the plow.

---

Late addition...

https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/901/20031... has a better view of the interface in figure 2.2

The MN version is GPS based while the CA version was magnet based.

> California suffers from extremely wet and heavy snowfalls in their mountainous terrain. Snowfalls of 4 to 5 feet during a single storm are not uncommon. This wet, heavy snow forces snowplows to operate at relatively low speeds. Because of these conditions and the previous experience the California team (CalTrans, University of California at Davis, and the University of California at Berkeley’s PATH program) has with magnetic based vehicle guidance, the California team focused on the application of magnetic vehicle guidance to this snow removal problem. In addition to the application of the magnetic technology, the California team developed driver displays designed to convey information provided by the magnetic lane guidance system to the driver.

> In contrast to California, issues with snow removal in Minnesota arise because of high winds which can blow light, dry snow at high rates across vast stretches of prairie. This blown snow can create significant drifts which must be continuously cleared in order to keep roads open. Under these conditions, snowplow operations are required to run at relatively high speeds to avoid road closures because of drifting. Because of these weather and geographic conditions, the Minnesota team focused on DGPS based solutions to this particular snow removal problem. The Minnesota team also developed driver displays designed specifically to convey lane keeping and collision avoidance information provided by the on-board systems.

Eh, the risk is really overblown in my opinion.

Hydroplaning/sliding is a real risk, but you can mitigate that by simply understanding how your vehicle behaves and paying attention. Sudden, unexpected change in engine RPM, you should probably cancel cruise control. Weird torquing on the steering wheel, disengage cruise and steer by hand.

There also should always be an option to turn off traction control on gravel roads too. You want the gravel to pile up in front of tires it slows you much faster.

And snow is a pain too. Ford Transit vans were terrible for no manual over ride maybe it's all Ford since I doubt Transit has its own unique system. I used to drive a Transit for work the little goofy looking vans. I couldn't make it through a 12 inch high pile of snow the van kept cutting the engine power. I had to back up hit the gas put it in neutral and coast though the tiny little snow pile. You could pull the fuse to disable the traction control but it also shuts off ABS and the airbag. Useless piece of crap van.

Our Ford cars have a little button which disables all stability program functions, except ABS.

Strange that the van doesn't have it.

> Will I really be able to get replacement parts for the Sprinter when the screen or computer start to die in 10-15 years?

Most likely, yes. Part of why most automotive tech lags behind the times on raw performance is guarantees around things like how long you can source a given SoC, for example. 10 years is not an uncommon manufacturing lifetime in the space, and a Sprinter is a relatively high volume car so I wouldn't be too concerned about MB producing/stocking spares

I wouldn't count on it. I work for John Deere, and am often in discussions about some part going out of production. Sometimes we guess how many we need for the next X years and buy that many, othertimes we rewrite software for a new part. Care to guess how many boards can sit in a warehouse for many years and still have good capacitors.

I can't tell you how many years, but there is always someone in these discussions who points out with pride that we still tractors from the 1950 in use by customers who demand replacement parts for anything that breaks.

> Care to guess how many boards can sit in a warehouse for many years and still have good capacitors.

If you guys are having trouble storing boards for 10+ years with caps regularly going bad, I would highly recommend you look into a new supplier. Well-built caps should have no problem going for 25+ years in storage (especially cold).

In addition, this is probably the easiest component on the board to replace. If you can’t find functional new stock and this is the only issue, just recap them.

I have no insight into how we store things. I sometimes have input into the buy or port to a replacement decision, but if we decide to buy there is a completely different department that handles the details.

Caps are an issue that is easiest for people here to understand, but we have a long list of similar issues to watch for in storing parts

Or ditch electrolytic and tantalum caps wherever possible because they're crap. It's often possible to engineer a more expensive, reliable LR circuit for the impedance of a cheap RC one.

Tantalum have their own issues. Yes, they live longer. But they're nice little fire starters and are much more critical than electrolytic capacitors when it comes to voltage tolerance.

It's kind of amazing to me that we can build 3nm chips but we still haven't figured out how to build a uF-range cap that has long MTBF, good overvoltage tolerance, low series resistance, and doesn't blow up.

Indeed. But... caps are improving, but slowly. The size difference between say a 100 uf 25V cap today compared to one from the 80's is considerable, and if you add another decade it is hard to believe it is the same component.

By contrast inductors have not changed in size at all and resistors are very much limited by power dissipation.

In case anyone here weren't a farmer, John Deer is the Apple Tesla of industrial equipment with not just built-in planned obsolescence but built-in inability to self-repair or self-diagnose without proprietary equipment. Much hay has been made in R2R about John Deer's customer-hostile practices.

The harvest time sensor reset tax is why some small-time farmers stick to old and overseas equipment they can repair without a tech visit. It's not about the customer being unreasonable about NLA parts, but the modern unreasonableness of how the manufacturer impedes the customer with artificial scarcity and artificial limitations on knowledge, diagrams, diagnostic equipment, diagnostic equipment manuals, and the nature of some repair parts.

Exactly: farm equipment is one place where you really do not want to Buy American.

I work on automotive HMI and don't have to guess how many can sit in a warehouse for many years and still have good caps.

They're subject to a lot worse than that for design verification. And I assure you John Deere has many _many_ PCBs that have sat for 10 years to enable service needs today, it's not like they just started using complex circuit boards yesterday...

> built-in nav system is useful for those times need directions and don't have a cell signal.

You know you can also download Offline maps. One of Google Maps best features.

This is one of those things that while true and useful, I personally don't realize or think of it until just after I need it. It's always frustrating to get to a destination without signal and need to plot the return trip, or try to make adjustment in the middle of a dead zone and realize you don't have maps.

I keep an atlas in my back seat just to be safe now.

The nice thing about the built-in nav is that it always works everywhere in the U.S. Google Maps only lets you download an area about half the size of Washington State at a time and you have to manually select the area to download. Fine for local use, but too tedious (and too much disk space) for a long road trip.

?? The Google Maps I use offers to download the maps if I ask for directions on a long journey. It doesn't seem to have download limits and I never need to think about it again.

Have you heard of Open Street Maps?

You can keep offline all the maps you want.

> Cruise will also disengage in heavy rain or snow, with the system saying the sensor is dirty. It wouldn’t be so bad if traditional cruise control would keep working without the active braking assist, etc. but unfortunately it’s all or nothing.

A previous car I had, a 2019 CRV, did this too. I understand that it could be a very dangerous situation if the driver forgets or doesn't realize they're only using the dumb cruise control instead of the adaptive cruise control they're used to.

We had a young guy writing good software for us while he still was going to school. We still use it to get things done in production. Then he went to university. He came back for a summer job. He had the sudden urge to ditch everything he used to do and to use the newest unproven technology. Also he had a serious urge to install everything from Microsoft.

Then he created a piece of slow software full of flaws and performance problems - with a lot of unnecessary fluff in the UI. (At some time he mentioned that he was going to use multi-threading for every button, to reduce the lag when drawing the UI).

Then he joined Mercedes-Benz... And makes a lot of money there. And I'm really happy that I don't have to worry about him anymore. I read some job descriptions for Mercedes-Benz and I think he most likely totally fits in there.

What they do to young people in Universities today must be really terrible...

Interesting story. Thanks for sharing.

Not trying to blame anyone here. Did no one guide him? Just by virtue of him being a young student, surely his unproductive proclivities were easily correctable? Was he averse to mentoring?

He already did great things in the past. I liked him a lot before university.

There is too much self-esteem in those young guys. And they blindly trust every new framework that shows up on the market. Also they have excellent grades in university and get offered a lot of money. Somehow guys from management and HR like them. For me there was not much chance to mentor anything.

I could talk more about young guys being problematic... but to me this was extraordinary and somehow related to the things people complain about Mercedes software.

For me two things seem to be dysfunctional: 1) University today and in this case the University closest to Mercedes headquarter 2) HR (as usual...). Things like "practical experience with multi-threaded UI performance improvements" in a CV somehow clicks with HR. At the moment I have to deal with a guy who dislikes databases and instead of adding a column to a table wants the database-server internally to query his webservice when someone selects something from the table. I bet Mercedes HR will love this when he writes a nice line about that in his CV...

> At the moment I have to deal with a guy who dislikes databases and instead of adding a column to a table wants the database-server internally to query his webservice when someone selects something from the table.

micro-column-service oriented schema. He'll go far /g

> I could talk more about young guys being problematic

It's the false sense of 'knowledge' afforded by trivial access to technical content without the benefit of practical experience. It's the internet, not the young men. LLMs are going to max this to an unpleasant extreme.

MB is also famous for running Kubernetes. At a 1000 individual setups (all automated of course!). I had the pleasure of flamewaring someone who was very proud of this and couldn't really explain to me, why they would not just get two big physical machines with Corosync for like 70% of those (internal) applications. Doesn't seem much worse than a 3-node Kubernetes cluster (which is going to experience serious disruption too if anything goes down if it is running at full load......) and I doubt that scaling is an important concern with this setup.

At my last company we used k8s not primarily because of the scaling capabilities, but as a way to safely deploy applications.

I've seen it used this way too.

But that's like buying the mcdonalds supersize family meal because you want the fries. There's better ways to go about it.

It might not be ideal but getting all of that admin and upgrade tooling for free is often worth it

At my previous job we used docker swarm for a cluster of a dozen machines. Does not have all the fancy features of k8s but gets the job done to automate deployments

> multi-threading for every button, to reduce the lag when drawing the UI

Maybe it wasn't needed for those internal apps, but for consumer electronics I wish everyone reduced input feedback lag.

I’m also horrified by the trend to put more and more of the meters into the UI. My Ford has done the booting thing before on a highway as well as once it flipped the screen horizontally until it was shut down and started again. I can’t imagine the quality is any better for the display components that will replace speedometers and such

The media head-end software tends to be much less robust than the digital dash display software. I've had the head unit crash and act poorly on many cars, while digital dashes boot quickly and tend to be pretty solid.

The only time I had an issue w/a digital dash was in a Volvo that had a battery that was nearly flat. The screen itself would glitch in various ways, but the data itself was still solid.

My (admittedly-beloved) 2015 F-150 will reboot Sync if I'm listening to music (usually on Soundcloud) if the song title includes non-ASCII characters.

I'm reminded of: ( https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-roman-mars-mazda-... ) the Mazda head unit being allergic to Roman Mars.

The concept of technology being unable to handle some input as an "allergy" for some reason makes me giggle.

Or Janet Jackson's song Rhythm Nation crashing some old laptop hard drives, due to the hard drives' resonant frequency. The manufacturer worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220920-00/?p=10...

My 2011 Ford Focus with Sync would randomly lock up and loop the same 10th of a second of the current track. Like a really old PC if it crashed while playing a sound.

Turning the car and back on again to stop the noise got old really fast. All of the radio inputs stopped working when this happened.

Hey, ring buffer... I want you to play this, and I'm going to give you more data, just keep looping the buffer.

Oops, I forgot to give you more data... or tell you to stop... >:)

Awesome, a real world example of the phonograph-destroying record from the book "Gödel, Escher, Bach" ! What a time to be alive! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

Car software is a lot more involved than most of the people here would think. These days, the dashboard display is typically rendered by separate pieces of software. A pretty normal, moderately fancy rendering engine does all the animations and backgrounds while the really important information (e.g. engine/brake system malfunction) is overlaid from a separate, isolated software system with a stack that meets quite high functional safety standards. That is, the chance of the second part of the system ever failing is comparable to winning the lottery.

I don't think I've ever used software provided by an automaker that I would classify as "good". Just varying degrees from "functional, but barebones and clunky" down to "so buggy and useless it's a legitimate safety hazard".

As a result, I'm firmly on team "make every infotainment system a dumb terminal for your phone" and refuse to buy any car that doesn't support both Android Auto and Apple CarPlay.

I can't find that comic where the head unit is just a rectangle with a 3.5mm jack. That's all we need, really.

My old car has a cheap phone clip screwed into the dashboard, and the phone connects to the speakers for music. I can't imagine anything improving upon that.

CarPlay is definitely a huge improvement on that.

Most automobile engines made in the last 30 years are running software that works at least okay.

I find myself torn on this:

* Traditional Automakers: Mostly as you describe, though honestly I am fond of the UI in my VW. Most others score B-D in responsiveness and anywhere from B-F in my "is this UI closer to ideal, or to a caricature of a baffling UI that no one will ever like to use?" scale.

* Apple: "No one needs physical controls for anything, and people HATE seeing any details, so let's try to get as minimal as possible because that's just elegant. Maybe just a dashboard with a your speed, as a single number, unlabeled because labels are ugly, and three dots (touch target 0.6cm) that you have to touch to access a menu to access all other features."

* Recent Automakers: "People love screens. Let's delete lots of switches to save a few dozen dollars, and stick functionality in deeply-nested menus that require you to take your eyes off the road."

I really want the $20 worth of physical buttons, knobs, stalks and switches of a traditional car, and the extensibility of the CarPlay world.

A colleague with a recent Land Rover Discovery Sport has screens on the buttons/dials. Little mini screens for things like an AC knob.

It’s a Land Rover, so obviously those screen crash/bug out then he gets no HVAC.

He hates that car. It’s beautiful, luxurious and a pleasure to drive. But it’s been in the shop >50% of his lease.

I feel like a fanboy, but I absolutely love my Hyundai Palisade. It's legitimately changed driving for me. Some quirks and annoyances, but absolutely nothing as bad as listed here.

* Software is simple, consistent, and functional. Some goofy choices, but they're mostly visual preference than meaningful usage degradation.

* Hardware buttons support all of the core UX.

* Lane centering and adaptive cruise control as rock solid. I've legitimately had the car follow lane lines that I was struggling to see (rainy with reflections).

Tesla is the only one I'd classify as good enough for daily use without needing my phone. Possibly because they started as a tech company so they understand software.

That sw does not come from Mercedes, they just buy different devices for what they need from suppliers. The salary offered by one such supplier for a graduate engineer was less than what a construction company was offering to hang dry wall (qualified worker). The construction company was raising a new building for the supplier.

That's mostly an irrelevant detail.

Mercedes may not be the OEM in this instance, though they are certainly the vendor, who put their name and reputation to it.

Exactly, the buck stops with Mercedes. It's on Mercedes for not investing in higher quality software for their vehicles.

That was their choice though.

Some Mercedes also have the bug where the sign classifiers somewhat regularly mis-read 80 as 60 for speed limits, causing cruise control to arbitrarily slam on the brakes in some parts of the country. You would think that they would catch these things with rudimentary quality control.

The automotive code for many of these systems is incomprehensibly awful but the entire process of how it is made virtually guarantees this outcome.

I just ran into this issue in Montana the other day. Weird thing was that it’d sometimes read the 80 mph limit correctly, then a second or two later revert to 60. My Sprinter just beeps at me, though. No brake action if it thinks I’m speeding.

Wonder if the “80” is from maps, which is then overridden by buggy vision?

Everyone I know that has discovered this bug, discovered it in Montana. All of the States that have ubiquitous 80 mph speed limits are clustered around that area.

It reportedly happens with 80 kph speed limit signs in Canada as well.

Texas has an 80 mph limit on a long stretch of I-10. They have one other highway (130) with an 85 mph limit.

80 mp/h speed limit?!?

I just borrowed a Tesla Model 3 that stopped for green lights. I asked a service person: apparently it is known to stop for a green light if there is no car ahead. The display shows a green light, a red line, and fine print saying that the car will stop for traffic control.

I don't understand this. What does stop for a green light mean?

It treats a green light like a stop sign

Great way to get rear ended.

The other thing that worries me is how integrated modern headunits are. It used to be that when your headunit broke or became obsolete, you could just whack a new one in for a few hundred dollars, prolonging the life of your vehicle. Now even basic cars have fully integrated headunits making upgrades impossible. Even if the headunit continues to function, the technology is going to become so obsolete that they’ll be virtually useless in 20 years. I doubt the iPhone 35 will connect to a 2023 car. I guess people who buy new cars couldn’t care less about what happens to them in 20 years, which is an easy win for car manufacturers looking for ways to reduce the effective lifespan of their vehicles.

Yep, exactly. My personal vehicle is a 2000 model year Toyota. It has an incredibly good, stable, and modern CarPlay head unit from Sony, because back whin the car was made we had standards like double-DIN head units and you could just plop in a new stereo. Which is exactly what I did, and now I have a "golden age" mechanically reliable, nigh-un-killable Toyota with a modern carplay head unit.

And as a bonus, I can adjust everything about the car (climate control, volume, overdrive, 4wd, ECT mode, etc) with real buttons and tactile feedback while going down a washboard track, without ever having to take my eyes off the road.

If anyone out there starts making EVs with the same bare-bones attitude (analog knobs and dials, no flashy infotainment system, double-DIN head unit slot, modern safety features and a simple ultra-reliable EV powertrain), sign me up. It'll probably never happen because there's not really an economic incentive right now to try to hit lower price-points in the EV market, everyone's going upmarket. But I'd still love to see somebody try.

>couldn't always be solved by power cycling the vehicle.

From experience, I've found that turning a car off is akin to putting a computer to sleep. If the state is fubar, no amount of turning the car on and off will fix it.

The only proper way to "power cycle" a car is to momentarily disconnect the car battery (remember to turn the car off first) so all power to the computers are physically cut off and they /have/ to start from a cold boot next time you turn the car on.

Disconnecting the battery can have other consequences. Easier to reset the fuse

A good idea, put a fuse + switch there, and add it to the dash. 1/2 an hour of work.

Better yet, do so, then demand part costs + time + debug + this is the only way to fix it. A $1000 seems abiut right. Having the dealer fail to fix it (all those reflashes) helps, for the small claims court case, as surely they will refuse to pay.

Then post the court case win online.

This seems to be the only way to get big anything to do right by the consumer, these days.

Contrary to all the legends of "German quality/engineering" (of which there is certainly in certain industries) I've heard that German cars were shit during the 90s.

Japan OTOH seems to be very aware of how these newfangled tech can screw your reputation.

The 90s was a sweet spot for the three luxury German brands: Audi, BMW and Mercedes Benz. Mercedes in particular has had a very marked decline in quality since then.

Like what’s the highest quality luxury brand now, Lexus? Given that it’s Toyota engineering behind it I’d assume they are still good but I’ve never been in that market so idk.

Still those three, plus Lexus, Infiniti, Acura, Range Rover etc.

Are you claiming that Land Rover makes a high quality product? Or just a luxurious one?

Mostly a luxurious one today. I test drove a 2012 Range Rover in 2020 and all the rubber on the controls had melted. Would Not Recommend, but they are popular certainly.

RR is overpriced junk.

I am currently renting and driving a Tesla from Hertz at SEA on mainland for a week of skiing at Mt Baker. I have a 2020 Lexus RXL at home. While the Tesla has better driving software and sportier handling, the Lexus rides much better and quieter and just seems nicer. Anyway, love the Lexus fwiw.

I had a 2001 Audi and it was by far the best vehicle I've ever owned. I bought a 2016 Audi trying to replicate that and I was dumbfounded by how little it had changed in 15 years, but what _had_ changed seemed to be distinctly for the worse. I won't be buying another one :(

Honestly, I feel like German cars have an undeserved reputation for quality. German cars are superficially well built, quite fast, and make satisfying thunks when you close the doors. However, they are fairly unreliable, sensitive, and when they do fail, cost a lot to repair.

I'll take a Japanese car any day, however, Hyundai, Volvo, Skoda, Kia, Peugeot and Ford are also better engineered than most German cars nowadays in my opinion.

This is just a personal anecdote - I got a brand new Mercedes in 2016, it was even fully made in Germany - and it was probably the worst assembled vehicle I have ever owned in my life(and I used to own a 1995 Fiat Cinquecento), the number of creaks and rattles coming from all places in that car was almost funny if it wasn't so upsetting. I've had several visits to the dealership just to fix rattling seats, upholstery, dashboard and sunroof. Drove very well and never had any mechanical or electrical problems, but the interior was horrendous.

Then in 2020 I swapped it for a brand new Volvo XC60(made in China!) and in the last 3 years this car has literally been completely trouble free. No rattles from anywhere, nothing. Extremely well put together, comfortable, drove it across Europe multiple times now and literally no issues with it whatsoever. Such a stark contrast to mercedes for me.

Are you sure it's made in China? For most markets XC60 are built either in Sweden or indeed in China, but I always wondered about chinese-produced ones. Fellow Volvo owner (XC90/2022 - Sweden-built though), car's a dream.

Yes I'm very sure. The car was built in Chengdou in January 2020 then transported over here by train (option which no longer exists at the moment because Russia closed the land link so cars have to be brought to Europe by ship the old fashioned way). It's a T8 plug-in hybrid for the British market.

Skodas are just previous gen Volkswagens btw

I understood Skodas are usually _next_ gen Volkswagens. At least when I lived in Europe they always got the new chassis/engine/gearbox to beta before it rolled out to VW, did that change?

Not even previous gen any more. They just get interiors that aren’t quite as nice (more plastic).

My Skoda is the most boring, unsurprising, uninteresting and reliable car I every driven. I love it.

I'm sad they've stopped making functional-first cars like the Yeti, and now just do versions of VW models. I think Dacia might have taken up the mantle of no-frills and reliable though.

Mercedes' reputation for reliability is mostly a legacy of the 60s and 70s. Their cars from that era were absurdly overbuilt, especially the diesel powered models. You will still find diesel MBs from the 70s on the road today, some of them having racked up 500k miles or more.

My father has a 98 S320, with over 1 million kilometers. The engine just recently started to have overheating problems and needs to be rebuilt with new gaskets, but otherwise runs fine!

As a former Audi owner, the old saying was absolutely true: if you can afford to buy two Audis, you can afford to own one. Absolutely fantastic vehicle until it blows up and then you are buying VW parts with Porsche price tags.

I've driven mostly BMW's and their build quality has been decent.

Where does this German engineering saying come from? I find German engineering unnecessarily complicated and it looks more or less designed by a committee of bickering members.

Japanese engineering on the other hand in my experience is very solid and also pretty cheap. It is easier to repair and vehicles are like mountain goats that can go anywhere and can be handled roughly.

someone should let toyota know, because their software sucks 5 kinds of taint on my 2020 taco

> Japan OTOH seems to be very aware of how these newfangled tech can screw your reputation.

My toyota is absolute crap, if this helps.

What's wrong with it? But yes it seems like more recenr toyotas are crap, especially the interior.

It has a neat feature of auto locking itself if you forgot it, so if you forgot your keys in, they will be autolocked in.

The positions of the pedals is not fit for humans (but that's a bit OT)

The integrated not readily replaceable without servicing the entire dashboard USB port just broke.

The feature to alert me when I'm about to hit an obstacle triggers when I've already done a full stop.

The radio touch interface is awful. There is basically no way to say "play everything". You've got to select the artist, then the album, blabla. Of course you need to stop the car to move on to the next album.

The detection for speed signals is so wrong. It consistently gets the signs that are meant for slow-down lanes to exit the highway as the actual limit I'm supposed to have.

In some specific places it imagines ghost speed signs every single time I pass.

Apart from the electronic junk how is the actual driving experience? Can you drive comfortably with good power?

> Can you drive comfortably

As I said, the pedals are placed in a position that was not designed with human beings in mind. So, not really. Quite uncomfortable.

Mercedes' crap software caused me to stop driving them, even though I love the handling, the reliability of the engine and the general lack of distractions. They really blew it, their software is a safety liability rather than an asset and I really wonder what caused them to drop the ball in such a terrible way.

Do you know any programmers who think it's cool to work for German car companies or that they at least offer a decent pay? I think that's the answer: those traditional German industries don't care nor understand IT. These days and entry level KIA has better software than a BMW (I owned several BMWs from different eras and will not buy anything from them again).

BMW is just plain embarrassing. A long time colleague was a huge fan of the brand, he'd buy pretty much all of their top of the line models one after the other. Some of them were so often in the shop with software issues that he ended up getting attached to the replacement vehicles :)

> couldn't always be solved by power cycling the vehicle.

Made me remember when I turned on my new (dumb) TV and it did a startup sound. I knew it would get worse in the future.

I really despise smart TVs. My new Roku tv poops itself all the time and the apps stop working so I have to look for the system reset and it's not always super straight forward.

This is why I only buy used MBs from pre-2016. They're fantastic and they don't require a subscription. Though the 2016 E/S is a wifi hotspot if you really want that in a car.

> It had obvious race-condition type bugs when it came to the user interface layer, but most frustrating was its tendency to succumb to some kind of memory leak on long drives where the entire head unit would just lock up and crash to a black screen after 6-7 hours of being turned on. Because the vehicle kept the computer system "warm" for up to 30 minutes or so to avoid doing a full (and slow) bootup process every time you stopped for fuel, this was a real problem on long trips and couldn't always be solved by power cycling the vehicle.

Had this problem with an A-K200 about 13 years ago - when driving long distances, after a couple of hours the nav system would randomly stop working. Sometimes stopping at a gas station would allow the system to reset by itself, sometimes not.

This comment is extremely enlightening. I'm really considering a Sprinter van as my next vehicle purchase.

We do a _lot_ of driving on rural roads where we can count on a single hand the number of cars we pass in an hour.

I own a MB V-class and had no software issue I remember.

Beware of Sprinters: they contain Dodgy parts.

Your final conclusion surprised me. All of the software woes you describe sound like they come from insufficient foundational technology, so why not be pleased that they are now investing in those foundations?

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