Our Chevy Blazer EV Has 23 Problems After Only 2 Months
edmunds.com
edmunds.com
Tesla & Rivian have good ui, updates over the air. Tesla has a great 10 year history. Rivian had a good one year history until they made an extremely terrible update that made some people's cars undriveable. I don't recall Tesla ever having anything that bad. They lost their great reputation. Rivian needs at least a few years of continuing updates to recover their previously great rep.
Back to legacy auto. The failures of the blazer ev are apparent to anyone who uses one. Customers have been reporting problems with the blazer ev and other ultium cars for months on places like reddit group r/electricvehicles. The past week or 2 there have been a least a couple dozen reviews where gm sent out the cars to be evaluated in official reviews. And it doesn't seem like many or maybe any of them worked out well. This is a collosal failure of a huge auto company. The failures must have been apparent to everyone working there.
This is way too long already, I'm not going to go into vw software updates that take so long they were afraid it would run out the 12v battery system and brick the car (most all evs have a 12v battery that recharges from the big battery, but during os updates for safety it only runs on the 12v "starter"/utility battery).
https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/news/gm-halts-sales-of-its-n...
That said, the article leaves a weird impression of being written by AI, or SEOed. Something about the repetitive sentence structure centered around the EV model name.
Perhaps it’s partly because it’s not just the same kinds of parts in different form factors and configurations. It’s an entirely new paradigm of parts for all the steps of the supply chain. A fraction of the parts, but still a brand new set of challenges.
Manufacturers could make a $20000 electric car that is equal to an equivalent-costing existing gas car (like a Camry or Corolla) in terms of capability. Reuse most of the same parts and technology from the original, just make it electric. Consumers would lap it up, not to mention how much it would help the environment. And yet, they don't, for seemingly no reason.
To be fair, there are differences between ICE cars and EVs. The battery and motors go under the body, not in front of it. But I'm sure they could do it if they wanted to.
All we get are premium-level cars that are slowly coming down in price, when what we really need (to get normal people to switch to electric) is a Camry-level electric car that is Camry-level cheap.
"We do believe there are subscription revenue opportunities for us," Kummer said. GM Chief Executive Mary Barra is aiming for $20 billion to $25 billion in annual revenue from subscriptions by 2030."[0]
https://www.reuters.com/technology/gm-plans-phase-out-apple-...
I can't overstate how unappealing this sounds, and how little faith I have in these companies to build "software on wheels" that works well, isn't buggy, doesn't have to be updated all the time, doesn't get in the way of the 1 thing I want the car to do: drive me where I want to go without interference.. while providing something necessary and functional that justifies subscription payments. Why would anyone want to pay Chevy for presumably what they can already get on their phones etc instead of just buying a normal functional car without pointless bugs?
Compliance cars were just that, minimum viable products that manufacturers made plenty of crummy decisions on needlessly.
Doesn't that strike you as a rather large change? Significantly changing the center of mass on multiple axes and the allocation of space within the body of the car seems like a pretty big deal as far as the design of a car goes. And that's ignoring the fundamental differences in characteristics between an ICE and an electric motor and what effects that and the different placement has on the drive train and other systems.
Perhaps the lesson is that absolute attention to the smallest details is needed to avoid producing 0.1%, or even 0.0001%, of vehicles that can cause severe reputational damage, i.e. an attitude quite different from the "move fast and break things" approach.
Like, Ubuntu just works. I love it. It's great. But so many of the most knowledgeable and most skilled people are over on Arch.
Maybe they're working on stuff ICEs already solved, but the ICE people who know about those solutions are still working on ICE?
Maybe it's too different to.just directly copy and paste, and what they really need is to get the same people who solved the problem the first time?
Their "new" ultium battery system is its own massive failure, they can't put batteries together for mass production, years after it was supposed to be working. Their previous technology platform worked and continues to work just fine, but they just discontinued the old bolt. New owners have been reporting problems for months. I figured they had improved problems before putting out a new vehicle, but this is just shockingly a complete disaster for them.
In short, they are trying to integrate modules written by their component makers, whereas Tesla (and presumably BYD and the other Chinese pure play EV companies) are writing all their software in house.
[1] https://fullycharged.show/podcasts/podcast-213-can-lightning...
There is a serious cultural mismatch between the Seattle office and Mercedes, just look at the Seattle offices commuting culture (mostly not by car, with many team members literally not owning cars).
We’ll never get it but I would love to look, in forensic detail, at the process that led to allowing the car out the door. Somewhere there is a deck or comparable vehicle where software was moved from red to yellow. I just cannot imagine taking this kind of brand and quality risk with such a key model. Massive organizational failure.
Low-level software engineers are all afraid to push the STOP button. They slightly softball their estimates, the impacts of their bugs, etc. Their supervisors soften it up just a bit more before reporting to their management. (This is all done via a byzantine tangle of Excel "project trackers" stored 7 folders deep on various Sharepoint sites.)
At the weekly meeting where the managers update on progress, they do a little bit more nerfing of the seriousness. They have faith the dates will be met, so all Criticals become Majors or even Minors. Majors become Minor or Warning.
Someone at the very top will get this shipped. They have no time to hear about failures, they want only Solutions. There are no Problems, only Opportunities. The wider employee base gets to attend monthly meetings with Powerpoints that show how "We're updating our Culture for a new Paradigm". What they take away from these meetings is to keep your head down and don't get in the way of The Paradigm Shift.
Only when the rubber meets the road (literally!) is all this exposed.
[0]Insert company here.
They will continue to get eaten by manufacturers that can control the entire stack, from servo firmware all the way up to infotainment.
GM halts sales of its new Chevy Blazer EV amid reports of major software issues - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38748943 - Dec 2023 (26 comments)
GM halts sales of its new Chevy Blazer EV amid reports of software issues
More discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38748943
At some point they're going to have to realize that the "Apple experience" matters for consumers and they should make the UX both usable and reliable.
At least one would hope this happens. Most likely one will, and then if it catches on with buyers as a purchasing decision then the others will hop on to try to remain competitive.
maybe google just considers it a beta?