GM halts sales of its new Chevy Blazer EV amid reports of software issues | Hacker News Reader

GM halts sales of its new Chevy Blazer EV amid reports of software issues

engadget.com

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This is one of the first vehicles that intentionally dropped Carplay/Android Auto under GMs new strategy.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/03/gm-confirms-its-droppin...

Car manufacturers having bad first party software? Why I never

And they wonder why we don't trust them when they say their infotainment systems don't need CarPlay to be good.

Yeah they don’t even understand the #1 reason CarPlay/AA was desirable in the first place.

dropped it for yet another google auto "operating system": https://www.reuters.com/technology/gm-plans-phase-out-apple-...

Wonder how much Google paid (in compute credits?) to GM for them to do this.

My daily driver is a GM car and if there's no car play on new cars anymore i won't be buying GM again, their own software (even the google pieces) are just horrible.

That shouldn't affect the drivetrain. The infotainment system definitely has some issues, but something bigger is happening.

GM is not equipped to build software, and that’s okay. What’s not okay is that GM lacks the basic self awareness to recognize their own limitations. The schadenfreude is strong with this one.

It's sort of funny, I know of two "software engineers" that work at GM (on what exactly, I don't know, but it's embedded).

One I worked with at a previous job. He went to a prestigious US military academy for computer science, he worked in our marketing department, and at some point I turned the keys over to our Wordpress site to him. He fucked in up in so many ways and he did so many ass-backwards things...

The next guy was an electrical engineer at a previous job, he once had me help him with a GUI for a Python application to flash firmware to a device we made. It was some of the worst production code I had ever seen, it crashed often, had little error checking, I'm not sure how it even worked.

My classmate back from Uni is a pretty high up manager working on GM infotainment (as is his dad). He (the classmate) failed and had to retake CS101 three times.

That is embarrassing but it doesn't necessarily mean anything. What matters is did they end up a competent software engineer.

The proof is in the quality of the product they work on, apparently...

“Pretty high up manager” implies competent careerist, not software engineer. Especially at a company like GM.

I understand that all heuristics are imperfect but P(good engineer | failed cs 101 multiple times) is so close to 0 it is a rounding error.

A lot of companies have a kind of organizational disrespect for coding. I don’t think is is possible to build great software while wishing it didn’t exist.

It's never caught on, but I have jokingly dubbed this management myopia. It's not a perfect analogy but there are seriously people who just assume anything they don't understand must be easy and are unable to see the truth.

I think this is sometimes referred to the Dunning–Kruger effect.

Well they did invest and buy Cruise so they aren't good at vetting technology either.

This new infotainment system was developed by Google.

Even with AA or CarPlay, a (usually buggy) manufacturer-built system is running underneath.

But generally I agree that GM is absolutely insane and toredoing their company.

> GM is not equipped to build software, and that’s okay.

No it isn't, the idea that you can be a car company of the future without being able to develop software is crazy. The trend we see from Tesla and China is the exact opposite direction.

It goes much deeper just the entertainment system.

They hired some Apple people in the past year, so well after it was probably clear internally that this was going badly. Even if the new employees do everything right, I would assume that it will be difficult to graft a software culture into GM's culture. If they legitimately think it is imperative and have buy in and real support from the very top, it's possible, but if they think it's something to tack on it will never work.

For whatever reason GM also ended sale of their popular Chevy Bolt platform. It wasn't an amazing car and I'm sure suffered from its own faults as well, but at least from reading reports about the car nothing like what the Ultim-based vehicles are seeing now! Also it was cheaper than the Blazer, so I'm sure less profitable for GM but that made it popular to consumers. Not to mention it still qualified for an EV tax credit.

You'd think GM would have continued sale and guaranteed profit from the Bolt while they worked out the kinks of the next-generation.

The Chevy Bolt isn't dead. They're just taking a pause while they redesign it for the Ultium battery architecture. In the meantime, the Orion Assembly plant lines where the bolt was built are being used for electric light trucks.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a44639082/chevrolet-bolt-e...

You're right: the current incarnation is dead and at least right now basing it on Ultium seems like a regression. Perhaps they'll work out all the issues in the Ultium Blazer? Even so, there's a reason general consensus is to never buy the first model year of a new oe revised car.

There's something missing from this narrative that GM is not disclosing. It's very rare for a manufacturer to pause sales of a product that works well, is well received and in demand. GM has hyped their EV strategy and the Bolt is the one thing that's real and good.

Automakers redesign cars all the time without pausing sales. Automakers work on the new design in parallel, then switch over and call it a new model year.

Maybe a supplier raised prices and GM's gross margin tanked, or maybe they were always losing money on every car made and they need to stop the bleeding.

Isn’t it well known they had major issues with the battery design and 2 or 3 recalls related to it. If i remember correctly one of them include a warning not to park inside due to the risk of a fire.

Yes, and allegedly the issue was root caused and fixed. The cost to investigate and recall has been sunk.

And the root cause was LG, not GM.

The story I heard is that they needed to retool an existing factory for new ultium vehicles, and they were prioritizing production of more profitable vehicles (which I guess they consider the Cadillac Lyriq, Blazer, and Hummer to be). Supposedly they will be producing Bolts before the end of 2024. So a gap of about one year, with a much better specced platform... If only they can get the reliability of the platform right. Chevy insists these issues aren't ultium related, but I have doubts.

Reliability problems are mostly related to wiring and systems integration. Going to be hard to fix problems too expensive to fix actually

Clearly personal preference… but I would say the Bolt is a very strong commuter option. I originally thought I would buy an Kia EV6, then a Genesis GV60. In the end I bought a Bolt and I absolutely love it.

It is 85% of the car I wanted for 40% of the price of the others. It isn’t plush, but it has every modern safety system and everything is where you expect it (vs the toys / Tesla)

Highly recommend it for an around town / commuter car.

This is exactly my experience. Very happy with my Bolt as well.

I also wouldn’t buy another car without CarPlay

Naming an electric car the "Blazer" seems like tempting fate.

Even if the car is fine in absolute terms, the first time one lights on fire (for any reason) just invites memes.

And God help you if it should ever have a legitimate issue with the electronics.

Should've been Jolt, following Volt and Bolt.

Or Dolt.

Many a ice blazers have caught on fire in the past. They're part of a recent recall because the transmission [catches on fire].

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/recall-alert-chevy-gmcs-and-mor...

The Blazer has been around in various forms since the 70s. It’s not exactly a new name for gm.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Blazer

Folks you're killing me with the comments re: Blazer naming as if it's some new thing introduced for the EV.

The Blazer line has been part of GM since 1969:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevrolet_Blazer

I think the point is they could’ve chosen a different name with fewer EV/fire connotations. Like a new name, or reuse another retired model name like Ford does all the time.

There's a lot of goodwill built up in the name, and the new vehicle looks a bit like the old ones. This isn't like an EV Mustang, which has precious little to do with its namesake...

Related ongoing thread:

Our Chevy Blazer EV Has 23 Problems After Only 2 Months - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38749417 - Dec 2023 (23 comments)

Full stop, only native car software I’ve ever thought wasn’t trash is Tesla. Toyota does get second place with CarPlay support.

Tesla is the only one I’ve ever had that occasionally crashes, but it’s still so much better than the other stuff out there. I have had decent experiences with Toyota and Ford. Although their systems are boring and old, they work reliably and consistently.

My 2004 Toyota has the most reliable and intuitive phone integration I've seen, far better than the Tesla "everything is one screen so you need to look down and click through menus to find the toggle you want", and the CarPlay "Oh you're in a car? Let's give you a giant screen way below the normal eye level to distract you, then purposefully disable a ton of arbitrary features to make it more "safe", even if it means you take way longer with your eyes off the road to work around all the limitations they impose."

I have a magnetic phone charger suctioned to the windshield, and I installed a bluetooth integration into the stock head unit. The phone UI is the exact one I use day to day, I don't ever have to take my eyes off the road, and all the normal car functionality is physical buttons and switches whose positions I've memorized.

Coincidentally the infotainment system in my new F150 has crashed more than my partner’s Tesla. But I really hate the lack of buttons in the Tesla. It feels so incredibly unsafe to have to look at the screen to turn heated seats on.

And I think I like CarPlay more than Tesla’s infotainment setup these days.

> It feels so incredibly unsafe to have to look at the screen to turn heated seats on.

You can always wait until a stop at intersection or highways while on autopilot or use auto or use voice command.

People use touchscreens all the time to scroll media, yet climate controls are somehow sacred.

Sounds like they didnt do a great job with error handling on the canbus network and all the individual boxes are posting communication failures and then just completely crapping out.

What is even the point of the Blazer EV if it is essentially the same vehicle at the Cadillac Lyriq at essentially the same price? When they announced this thing they said it would be $45k, instead its almost $60k just like the Lyriq. Not sure if there's a difference in quality of materials, sound deadening, etc. It is technically a couple thousand cheaper, but it's also made in Mexico with non-union labor instead of made in the U.S.

They're still claiming the Equinox EV will be available at $35k mid 2024 but I'm highly skeptical of that at this point, unless they plan on selling them at a loss.

>What is even the point of the Blazer EV

State (eg: California) mandates that a certain percentage of cars sold be EVs. That naturally means a certain percentage of cars manufactured for subsequent sale have to be EVs to accomplish the sale percentage mandate.

You can't make sure 30% (note: arbitrary number for sake of conversation) of your car sales are EVs unless at least 30% of the cars you manufacture for selling are EVs.

Isn’t “sold” the key point though? Why make a worse car for marginally less instead of making more of the good cars that are, by comparison, a much better deal? They would be easier to sell…

> They're still claiming the Equinox EV will be available at $35k mid 2024 but I'm highly skeptical of that at this point, unless they plan on selling them at a loss.

I was curious about this also. It's a nice-looking vehicle, and the pricing does seem pretty aspirational. I figured they will force you to go up a trim level or two to get basic safety features like a blind spot monitor, or common features like dynamic cruise control.

Even though it won't have CarPlay, I would consider getting one if the price of a decent version is close to $35k.

I wonder if the infotainment stuff is the same on their gas cars? I just don't know why traditional carmakers couldn't get together, make an open source standard that we could all build on. I hate this future where in automobiles where I'm completely helpless to fix my car myself.

Even if we were to ignore the impossibility of OEMs agreeing on common interface standards, they don't want meaningful standardization of interfaces. It's a way to differentiate themselves from other automakers and do product segmentation without needing to change hardware.

If you're just talking the platform level stuff, that's the automotive Linux initiative.

I've never understood the "differentiate themselves" argument, which I've most often seen in the Android os skin world. It seems like most consumers don't know enough to care and the ones who do see the skins/customization as a bad thing.

I don’t think that’s true. Most consumers know that Toyota is a reliable brand. They know Mercedes is luxurious and that Ferrari makes fast sports cars. This is the differentiation.

The part that customers don’t care about is the stuff under the hood, but that’s not what consumers care about. They care about a set of features at a given price point and aesthetics that they largely don’t find repulsive.

Brands are obviously differentiated. But not by their software tweaks. That was my point.

I have a Silverado and the software is absolute shit. It’s like it has a virus. The media stuff is so wonky. It randomly plays Bluetooth stuff on my phone. It doesn’t even reliably play what I was actually listening to. Just random crap from my library or stuff from YouTube if I was using the app a week ago. I stop it and it keeps starting it again. I turn the system completely off. Later, I get a phone call and after I hang up it starts playing random Bluetooth stuff again. When it’s not doing that, it will insist on playing FM radio. You can’t turn it off. The best you can do is turn down the volume because it will keep turning the radio back on. It does this with multiple phones.

GM has literally a worse infotainment system than the worst I could imagine. It’s not like I expect much. The usual boring, featureless, laggy, permanent XM radio and Pandora icons, 6 year old nav maps infotainment system would suit me just fine as long as Bluetooth works. GM can’t even deliver that.

Meanwhile, the motor is great - V8, loads of torque - and this thing feels like it will run forever. It even gets good mileage - I can get 20-25 on the highway. They make solid trucks. But it’s like they used GitHub Copilot in a machine with bad RAM to make the infotainment.

It’s fascinating to see how the legacy automakers are completely failing at this.

Money can’t buy culture.

Are they throwing money at it? Or, more to the point, why do legacy automakers have such a hard time shipping polished software?

Volkswagen recently built a software org up to 6000 people (Cariad) and recently announced they are laying of 2000 of them. If they were structured anything like German suppliers I've dealt with, there was probably a 12 person team in charge of opening curly braces, 15 in charge of closing curly braces, but only a 5 person team responsible for semicolons so the timeline for each line of code was about 2 years. Great reliability though once it's done.

Cariad also had the CEO, CTO and CFO fired half a year ago. It's pretty impressive.

There are also rumors of Porsche and Audi being royally pissed off at Volkswagen for that garbage, and at least Porsche is ditching it for Android Auto.

I'm not sure that the german automakers are known for reliability :)

They are, and they have the emissions tests to prove it.

I'm a Lexus/Toyota stan but a lot of what makes a german car unrealiable is deferred maintenance. Lexus and Toyota build cars so you can treat them like shit and they'll still run and Germans build cars that are meant to be maintained then they will run well.

They're really two different approaches to car design. Why they do it this way really comes down to national culture.

The Japanese aren't likely to keep up with maintenance successfully? I've only been there a few times, but I didn't get that sense whatsoever. Pretty much nothing I encountered seemed materially neglected.

Schedules dictated by marketing and dealership deliveries.

I don’t think Ford, Volvo, Porsche, Nissan, BMW, Mercedes, even VW are “completely” failing. Stellantis, Mazda, and Subaru, yes. Toyota, yes and no — they didn’t really try with the BZ4X, but their plug-in hybrids sell as fast as they claim they can make them.

Ford just cut Lightning production (in half? A third? Something like that). Nissan stopped making the Leaf. Tesla is still increasing. You can't get ahead by decreasing production.

Curious what you mean that Mazda is failing

I have high hopes for Mazda to produce lightweight EVs that actually feel good to drive, but right now they just have (had) the MX-30, and that was by all accounts the worst EV on the market. They have a lot of work to do.

I am already looking forward for similar articles about their attempt to get rid of Android Auto / Apple Car Play.

How many more years of pain and blood until legacy auto realises they just need to buy licence of Tesla’s stack?

It runs Ultifi based on Linux - I know - it was a cheap shot.

This seems like a rushed must have development (Blazer) to get the SUV released by sales Jan 2024 to take on Honda.

But the Lyriq was based on it - released in 2022 - one would think the Blazer was just the same with different body panels/less battery.

"We are aware that a limited number of Blazer EV owners have experienced some software quality issues" - standard PR BS claiming it is limited when you have multiple testers of the vehicle having issues.

This is certainly a good reason to stop selling them, but I would argue they never should have bothered making them in the first place since they took out CarPlay/Android Auto.

Related/dupe from a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38716283

My next car is going to be a dumb one, CarPlay/Android Auto is fine, other than that.

I want the least minimum software possible on my car.

I just discovered that there was a Blazer EV yesterday, and now it's gone. What a cruel world.

Volt, Bolt, Blazer? The names for GM'S EV line are like some thing out the "Dodgeball" movie!

And porsche's "1970s east berlin exotic dancer" names are better?

Well if we're gonna nitpick naming themes, how about the US army naming anything and everything the M1.

Imagine an exotic dancer comes up to you and says, “Baby, my name is Boxster. What’s yours?”

Yes, better to name their cars with a locker-room-level acronym.

The Blazer is a 50+yr old product line, its not really new.

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