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Comment by qudat | Hacker News Reader

What a nightmare. This is where software engineering meets "real" engineering, where a "bug" has potentially life threatening consequences.

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> where a "bug" has potentially life threatening consequences.

What are you referring to? That is not relevant to this story, and would require a deep understanding of the system to make such a claim of negligence.

“The issue impacts the infotainment system. In most cases, the rest of the vehicle systems are still operational ...”

Also, you can't do an update while driving.

Based on the photo included in the article, what they're calling an infotainment system is actually two separate components, one of which appears to be taking the place of a traditional dashboard. If that's the case and there's no other way to monitor speed, fuel levels, engine temperature, warning lights, etc., I'd say that's quite a bit more worrisome than just not being able to play your favorite music while driving.

I understand, but the risk of life wouldn't be from the bug, it would be from conscious choice of driving without a speedo. There's a critical distinction there.

In this case, mileage/battery are still present, and I would assume safety critical warnings would still be displayed.

If you need thr car in an emergency and it's unusable, that almost counts.

"almost" only counts in horseshoes and nukes.

If it is unusable you just don't use it.

That any car can have a dead /failing battery/fuel pump/whatever one morning or fail and leave you stranded on the road to an hospital has never been considered a safety risk.

You've never been to death valley without air conditioning Or Russia without heat. I think the infotainment system in this case has a broken climate control function. There are workarounds, but why if you don't have your phone?

This is a great point. I would claim that it would be a bad choice to initiate the update (it's a manual process, requiring intent) when you're in these conditions. But, a less tech savvy person may not understand that updates can be risky, and give it a shot at a remote charging station.

I have been talking recently to someone whose job involves sometimes driving to other continents, and they mentioned that cars more recent than ~2003 were out of the question because outside of the EU you cannot expect random mechanics to have the computers required to interface with the car's computers - required for repairs.

If that's the only problem, then that would be fixed simply by taking "computers required to interface with the car's computers" i.e. a <$200 OBD-II device with you in the car, not choosing a car with 20+ years of wear and tear.

Also, since many of these places have a lot of used cars that once were in the EU or other places with legally required computers, this is changing as now most of the mechanics even in relatively poor remote places have to have these devices as now many of their local customers don't have "computerless" cars any more, and the existing pre-2003 cars won't last forever even there.

> What are you referring to?

Not the specifics of this article, but more generally about the gravity of the situation car makers (and their software engineers) operate under. The very idea that an OTA software update that causes a bug within more critical features of a car could be life threatening. So my point isn't about the specifics of this particular bug, rather the capacity for a bug that could kill.

critical safety systems/functions appear to be unaffected by this outage.

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