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Comment by stefan_ | Hacker News Reader

Nothing was bricked at all. Thats just how clickbait journalists describe things that stop working in some way after an update nowadays.

(Most computers in a car don't need duplicate partitioning because they can be bootstrapped from a central computer)

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Brick is now slang for a lot of fail conditions that aren't classically 'bricked.' This has become really common I've noticed. Honestly, this ship has sailed and isn't even worth fighting anymore. Its like Xerox asking people to stop calling copies Xeroxes.

We just never bothered to develop a new term. Maybe 'soft-bricked?' 'Semi-bricked?' I would like journalists at least to start using more accurate terms, but 'bricked' I imagine gets a lot more engagement and ad impressions, so here we are.

Wikipedia has a section about this. They call it soft bricked vs hard bricked, according to the difficulty of restoring device function and how the broken state presents. Even hard bricked is usually recoverable with appropriate tools, so it is a spectrum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brick_(electronics)#Soft_brick

I’m sorry, but you’re incorrect the vehicle completely shutting down while driving and not working again until you put it into park and then it’s shutting down five minutes later is effectively bricked and extremely dangerous. Myself and my family almost died just trying to get home from dinner. It was a complete loss of propulsion and power steering.

There are many things that are dangerous that aren't "brick"-ings. If it can be later restored to function, then it is not bricked.

Thank you. I really hate how watered down the term "bricked" has become.

I prefer the term borked in these situations

being unable to drive my vehicle due to a software update is bricking. It's also a pun, us Jeep owners call our Jeep's flying bricks.

Being temporarily unusable is not how I've seen "bricked" used, bricked means unrecoverable and the item is completely unusable except for as a brick/paperweight/door stop.

If you can do something, anything, to the vehicle to repair it, then it's not bricked.

Then it would better be described as a life-threatening event rather than a bricking - especially as, in the hierarchy of concerns, the former is more serious than the latter.

And then it was fixed with another OTA, so it was not bricked. Why bring up this pedantic point you may ask? Because the grandparent raises a scenario that doesn't apply here. A/B updates or not were not at all the issue here.

I for one am always grateful when things are engineered thoughtfully and with redundancy as it is symbolic of respect for the people who are your customers. Especially in something as important as a car, "can be bootstrapped from a central computer" - when? how easily? how reliably? - is not good enough because things will inevitably go wrong for some portion of the user base.

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