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Comment by SkyPuncher | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to armchair and guess that your brother needed a new battery.

My (GM) car gets really funky startup behavior when the battery gets old. It will often turn the starter fine, but the electronics can get stuck in weird states until I disconnect the battery (essentially a hard reset).

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Subaru just had a class action lawsuit about their stupid car infotainment systems draining the battery.

https://www.subarubatterysettlement.com/

The dealers wanted a ton of money to diagnose the issue, even though I suspected it must have been the infotainment system draining the battery. I just ended up replacing the infotainment system with a cheap CarPlay compatible one and the problem went away.

Problem is I cannot get money from the class action settlement since the original infotainment system is already out and I fixed it myself.

> Problem is I cannot get money from the class action settlement since the original infotainment system is already out and I fixed it myself.

You only fixed it because it was a problem though. Not a/your lawyer though, so good luck and have fun navigating the American legal system!

But I cannot prove it without reinstalling the original infotainment system. That is many, many hours of work for little gain.

What I do not understand is how the settlement did not require Subaru to compensate all Subaru owners for the faulty design. Why was there proof required, other than the purchase of their car with the faulty components?

If it was surrounded by a crowd of engineers, surely someone would have tested the battery?

This is the point where I would tell the story of how I once got lost in Porto, while in a group of 25 geographers

But zero cartographers.

The problem with having a bunch of experts is that experts usually forget to check the basics.

I’m sure we’ve all been caught trying to troubleshoot a problem where the actual issue was a loose cable.

I worked tech support that included a device for software developers that had Ethernet connectivity. I learned very quickly to say "Try reseating the Ethernet cable" because if I said "Is the Ethernet plugged in" about 1/3 of the people would respond very negatively (e.g. "I'm not a fucking moron") but by having to reseat the cable, they would sometimes discover it's not plugged in.

The classic way to get the consumer to power cycle the hardware is to ask them which color ring is at the base of the DC plug. It doesn't really matter what color it is, what matters is that it was removed and the hardware definitely restarted.

I once has this happen with my father's new standing desk. He, PhD with an Electrical Engineering degree, couldn't get it working. Turned out the C13 power cable was only 90% inserted, and felt firmly in place but did not have enough connector to power the desk.

The other technique is to ask the customer to turn the cable around.

A friend who is an automotive engineer shared once that most colleages were not so great with cars. Engineering new cars is one thing; fixing them is another. It's like asking a programmer to do system administration - two different jobs.

It's not much different than computers.

Lots of programmers that would struggle to diagnose basic stuff when their laptop when it goes wrong.

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