However, a second update has now been pushed that reportedly reverts the software to the previous version, and Jeep Cares cautioned that customers will not be able to tell which version they currently have by looking at Uconnect, because the problematic package doesn’t make any changes to the infotainment suite itself, meaning the version numbers will appear the same.
What kind of complete amateur hour operation are they running there at Jeep/Stellantis?
After working with them for nearly a year, it’s even worse than you think.
Half the team didn’t have basic understanding of git, and exactly none of the team designing the “smart charge” scheduling had or even had driven an EV.
The complete incompetence of every vehicle OEM team I worked with outside of Tesla and Rivian is part of the reason I left that job.
You are just confirming my suspicion on that car manufacturers have terrible software divisions. Outside of some new EVs which have software one of major selling points.
Why don't classic manufacturers not ramp up their software quality side? I mean it's 2025, they lag behind at least a decade, but software development (infotaiment) practices seems like dark ages.
Except for MCU - from user perspective they just work.
>Why don't classic manufacturers not ramp up their software quality side?
VW is now at their second billion dollar attempt to fix their software. It's not like they aren't trying.
Also consider how software development works at hardware companies. It is all outsourced, inside the company you have "engineers" who are "managing" the requirements" and in "best cost countries" you have the dev teams, communication is hard and the actual devs are not particularly skilled and definitely not paid to care, they just have to do the requirements.
Tesla was revolutionary because they had Software developers, which they paid normal software developer salaries. VW has just sunk Billions into Rivian to have them do the software.
> Why don't classic manufacturers not ramp up their software quality side?
Because they use the fight-club metrics for software too:
A x B x C = X, where A is the number of vehicles in the field, B is the probable rate of failure, and C is the average out-of-court settlement.
The company does not initiate a recall (or fix) if the calculated value X is less than the cost of the recall itself.
Edit: If anyone from a car company wants competent software engineering management to build a better team, HMU, I can put you in contact with someone. It'll never happen though.
You don't need 300k FAANG workers to make competent and reliable software. Companies in China and Japan manage just fine and half the tier 1s actually writing anything are outsourcing it to places where 300k USD is unthinkable.
It's more important to start with an organization that cares about quality in the first place.
Yes, but you do need a few really good senior people. If your salary table has a hard cap at 150k (and no equity to make up for it), you can’t hire those people.
You also have a hard time hiring good mid-levels because you can’t possibly pay them as much as the top people, right? You also have the problem that some of your SWEs might make more than their managers, and that’s just unconscionable.
So what do you do? Have a “secret bonus” program that even most people in HR don’t know about? Hiring becomes tricky: Better make sure you don’t have a live one on the line when the only HR with need-to-know is on vacation.
One of the points I'm trying to communicate is that there are skilled people in most parts of the world. They're less common outside SV, but that doesn't matter unless you're trying to hire at big tech campus scale. So you focus your much smaller efforts on recruiting those people with a good environment, give them the tools to produce work they're proud of. If you pay what they'll be happy with, it's almost always going to be vastly less than big tech pays.
That even works in the bay area, which is how places like Oxide keep fantastically skilled people despite paying below market rate.
Is it the easiest way to hire? No, but I never said it was.
Who in Japan is good at this? I can only imagine the R&D division at maybe Playstation and thats it.
China has so many people that EE and CS are a dime a dozen, thats why they have a competitive market thats low cost. People are in a jungle trying to survive.
The video is (Supposedly) EEs doing customer support roles thus allowing Cheap PCB for hobbyists, the equivalent in the US does not exist.
Side Note: I hear this is also why SASS never really took off in China. Why pay someone else for software when you can get a dozen people to make your own cheaper.
One of the best engineers I know works for [1] Woven by Toyota, Inc. They do care about getting software right, arguably more so than the german automotive sector. Don't get me wrong they all want good software, but wanting good software and putting the right systems in place while resisting the urge to chase the next hype wave are quite two different things.
>They do care about getting software right, arguably more so than the german automotive sector.
How so? All 3 major German Car Groups have invested substantially into software. VW Group set up an entire company with the core goal of allowing different operating practices for software development, which doesn't sound too dissimilar to Woven, at least in its goals.
VW had CARIAD, but it was a massive failure, and they moved on in spirit:
"Instead of developing software for cars independently, Cariad will act as a coordinator for externally developed technologies – primarily software from Rivian and Xpeng."
Most Japanese companies doing firmware are happily working like it's still the 90s. Nikon and Omron are examples. Sure, they don't have working networking, but some would say that's a good thing in automotive software.
By all accounts, rakuten is dealing with absolute horror shows of internal codebases, but they're generally competent at delivering reliable software without a lot of surprises in my experience.
I have a theory that most companies run by people who had harder education programs than CS... will misunderstand software engineering, underappreciate the difficulty of doing it well, and undervalue the people who can do it well.
Not only EEs, and not only any real engineer, but the hard sciences, as well.
> Why don't classic manufacturers not ramp up their software quality side?
I've wondered this but it does seem to me that the companies that do the best software also seem to be the newer companies that were driven by investors instead of sales/profitability.
Can classic manufacturers afford the kind of spending it takes to overcome inertia and make quick strides on the software side when it likely won't move the needle on sales anywhere near as much as it costs them?
Edit: for me, it's similar to what we see in the "flying taxi" maybe-autonomous eVTOL field: Airbus gave it a shake, but there are at least half a dozen startups bankrolled by VCs outspending them on a prayer they'll be the one to succeed.
>Can classic manufacturers afford the kind of spending it takes to overcome inertia and make quick strides on the software side when it likely won't move the needle on sales anywhere near as much as it costs them?
Look at how much VW has spent. They built up entire Software company and they are now giving billions to Rivian.
VW's having to invest huge amounts of their revenue while Rivian's going around burning VC/investor cash without a care in the world for profitability.
I was just answering your question. VW clearly has the money and is willing to spend it.
>Rivian's going around burning VC/investor cash without a care in the world for profitability.
I believe that a huge part of the VW deal with Rivian was that they needed more money. Making cars is expensive and Rivian can not succeed on investments alone.
Who have you worked with? Any thoughts on Toyota or Mazda? I heard that while Mazda is quite conservative in car design (still use buttons, less futuristic design) they appear to have a extensive data collection operation which surprised me given their conservative nature in literally everything else.
What youre likely seeing is the inevitable endpoint for corporate growth.
Money over all. Safety should never impact profits, quality control is a cost not a benefit, poor design due to rushing something out the door, and lowest bidder for everything.
I planned on keeping my Wrangler for life when I ordered it, and so optioned it as mechanically simple as possible, including roll-down windows, manual trans, and no keyless entry. Stuff like this is, in part, why. Threw an aftermarket wireless CarPlay head unit in, and that is all the tech I need and more.
I bought my 2018 Wrangler with the same idea... keep it for life. That was also the last year they offered the "lifetime" warranty. Glad I went for that.
So far, the Jeep has been fairly reliable, with my issues being:
- Electric door locks and mirrors stopped working
- Radiator leaked
- CV Joints
The Lifetime Warranty has now broken even (~$2500).
Unfortunately, now my issue is rust, and the warranty doesn't cover that.
Rust. I live in the north half of Ohio, so my stuff gets bathed in salty brine for several months out of the year and rust is a real problem for me.
What I've found that works (for me):
For stuff that isn't yet rusted, Fluid Film. It's easy to buy (it's on the shelf even at Wal-Mart). It's made primarily from lanolin, which is a product of the wool industry and is how sheep stay dry. If I were Very Serious about it, I'd find a shop that would cover the whole bottom of the vehicle (and anything that can be reached through holes) in the stuff and pay them to get that done. (I buy it in spray cans; some shops buy it in 55 gallon drums.)
For stuff that is definitely already rusting, Corrosion-X. It's some kind of oily chemical soup that is supposed to prevent existing rust from getting worse, and also prevent new rust. One interesting feature is that it's available in 3 different viscosities; vaguely speaking, those viscosities are thin, medium, and elephant snot.
The thin one does a fantastic job of creeping around to cover even unseen surfaces, but it washes off the fastest. The thicker ones hang around longer and creep less. (Tradeoffs, I guess.)
I prefer Fluid Film just because it's more natural than some other things are and that makes me feel good in some way that I don't care to rationalize, but Fluid Film is not very good at recovering from existing rust.
Corrosion-X, though? I can get the thin version of that worked into the joint of a completely rusted-stuck pair of box-jointed pliers and have them working very well (and looking fairly decent, though not "new") in a few minutes with a shop rag. I've heard stories of it being used to hose down whole electrical rooms in ocean-going boats. It's amazing stuff. (And it's expensive.)
The practical downside is that these products all feel greasy, and they all turn black with enough time and enough miles. They're all ugly.
For visible painted body panels, the best way I know to deal with small spots of rust from rock chips and stuff is to go full-ass on it. Get the Dremel out, pick an appropriate abrasive stone, and start grinding those little pinholes out until there's nothing but clean, shiny metal surrounded by paint. And then: Fill in with touchup paint that matches the factory paint code. (It's never perfect, but it does get easier to do a job that looks better than little rust spots do with some practice...and the little spots then don't turn into big spots.)
There are many shops in the US which will apply Noxudol both underneath and inside body panels and frame rails with special 360 degree applicators. I believe it is a formula developed in Scandinavia.
All of my cars are sprayed with the stuff for over a decade with no other maintenance.
Perhaps, but: I don't want to deal with avoiding permanently-affixed overspray on parts that don't want to be coated.
I also don't want to work with fasteners that are coated in bedliner: I'm already not having a fun time of things when I'm crawling under an old car doing some manner of repair. I want every possible advantage while I'm down there, and a well-stuck layer of bedliner seems like a big disadvantage.
As a point of comparison, stuff like Fluid Film [and the others that have been mentioned] can be applied to just about anything under the car that's metal (including bendy things like springs), and can be scrubbed off sometime later if it accidentally gets on body-colored parts using just soap, water, and some elbow grease.
Fasteners that are both rust-free and oily usually come apart like a dream when the time comes, and oily coatings that stay goopy tend to self-heal after being abraded by whatever the tires might kick up from the road.
Fluid coatings seem like the right set of tradeoffs in this non-ideal world compared to something like bedliner.
They're not perfect, but nothing is.
(Ideally, I'd live in a place that doesn't require driving through brine... but my world isn't ideal.)
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["elephant snot"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.
There was a car mechanic who lived next to where my dad grew up in rural Sweden. He spent enormous amounts of time on the cars he got in to fix and took out automatic locks and all electric wiring to the point of the car being basically invincible to time and very simple to repair again. Some cars he never managed to finish fixing and they were simply left forever in his front yard... My grandma drives a 25 y o Suzuki Alto that is basically this car. It even has the old school non powered steering. Runs great still, has no issues since she only drives in summer.
There is really something to be said for old mechanics and simple electric solutions.
These days _everything_ has an embedded microcontroller and a touchscreen. I'm more on the luddite edge myself...
If anyone is interested I can try to dig up an interview with the car mech on youtube (in swedish) :)
OTA firmware updates for a vehicle should not exist. A car is an appliance that should do what it does. There are up upgrades to four rolling wheels. If there are, roll them into the next model year. Let the dealers upgrade older vehicles or recall the model.
Customers do NOT demand firmware updates. Customers demand reliability, they may demand FAST resolution for an issue but that doesnt translate to demand for forced OTA updates.
Actually my customers are customers BECAUSE I shun the internet.
Which customers? I definitely do not demand software upgrades on any of my vehicles and in fact if I could easily pin a certain version and upgrade only after seeing the changelog or diff that would be best.
There is no reason they couldn't offer a way to firmware upgrades through customers too if they actually cared. But most upgrades to any firmware should already be essentially "done" within the dealer service window.
This. if you can update is by software it becomes a dynamic characteristic.
If Honda could have OTA updated 90s Integras or late 90s model Accords they would closed open programming ports on PCM modules that actually added to the value of those vehicles (see HONDATA and HONDASPEED OBD2 and other programmers that unlock the entire engine behavior profile and still work on some modern vehicles)
>If worked fine in the em early 2000 for cars with service plans or recalls.
If you are telling customers today that their car will not receive updates or that the only way to receive updates is with an appointment at a dealership, they will not buy your car.
It is not the early 2000s anymore, customers expect and want software support for their vehicles.
You've been drinking too much corporate coolaid. Zero percent of consumers care about having forced OTA updates. They want their vehicle to turn on, go, stop, and stream music from their personal tracking device.
Next you'll tell me co-pilot is the best part of office 365
In the context, it would take an ignorant consumer to choose a vehicle that could lose engine, steering, and braking - and complete bricking - while at highway speed, over a dealer appointment that's included in your maintenance program.
Frankly, this incident seems like an active nhsta would regulate away ota updates on its own. The best interpretation is that this single update is worse than the failed keyed ignition issues that led to push to start regulation.
No customers demanded this. Tesla did it because it means they don't have to verify their software to as high quality (and because they want to use their user base as beta testers).
I don't think anyone wants software upgrades to require a dealer but that's not the sane alternative.
> This ought to be the sort of thing that management is there to remind the developers of, but in practice it seems like the opposite is true.
In my experience, management does remind developers of this. Usually after an incident that ultimately boils down to management having incentivized everything else at the cost of good operational practices.
I remember a firefox dev commenting that the updater code was the most dangerous part of the app to touch because if you break it, it's game over, you can't push a fix.
100%. How you manage updates and software configuration in general in remote embedded systems is near to my heart for the same reasons. I keep having to fight at work because none of my coworkers or management understand that outsourcing updates is basically hiring a third party to sometimes brick your equipment.
I already feel this with an app that only serves a few thousand people. Even with the paranoia I managed to mess up the updater once, a year+ later and still have people who haven't updated from that version.
Always good to have a few redundant systems to help with this. Minimum being some way to push alerts to specific versions.
The funny part is one of Chrysler's "mitigations" was adding a "security gateway module" to "protect" all the communications (read: lock out diagnostic tools).
Tesla isn't the best proxy for what is normal. While Tesla has had a lot of issues and the critiques and articles are valid, it definitely seems like the media coverage was much more widespread and pervasive because 1)Anti Elon sentiment sells ads and clicks 2) it was somewhat agenda based. I am not making a political statement, but I think what I said is objectively true.
> Jeep wrangler owners waiting for answers week after an update bricked their cars
Don't worry. It will be fixed in a future update.
Does Microsoft entered the Automotive business ? Because this surely looks like a lot of the issues with Windows, where an update breaks something and Microsoft needs a couple of succesive updates, until they acknoledge and fix the problem.
Yeah it's really hard, my 2025 Toyota Sienna is always connected. You can't just pull a fuse or rip out an antenna, I have to take the entire dashboard apart to reach the Data Communication Module (DCM) module. If anyone's curious what that looks like, it's a little bit easier on the Toyota Tacoma, here are some pictures of the process:
https://www.tacoma4g.com/forum/threads/disabling-dcm-telemat...
It's complex enough that I haven't done it yet in my Sienna, but I plan to!
- there must be a physical mechanism providing connectivity to cellular networks
- this mechanism cannot be required to handshake in order to start the car (not everywhere has cell service!)
Manufacturers can certainly increase the difficulty to remove the offending hardware, but given these two axioms is can’t be determined to be impossible.
"- this mechanism cannot be required to handshake in order to start the car (not everywhere has cell service!)"
In 2025, this is true. At some point in the future, I predict this will be false. Maddening.
It's the We Must See You Online Or We Don't Owe You The Service You've Paid For Principle. Sure it starts with software (e.g. Adobe) and content (e.g. Spotify) but I can see it extending to home appliances and vehicles. Because they can.
Word to justify this principle will be used and the words will sound positive and good and consumers will nod their heads and shrug. "For Your Protection." "Safety." "Authentication." "Copyright Protection." i.e. assumed guilty offline until proven innocent online
Not if those components eventually get included as part of other core chips you can't remove. At some point, you'll have to completely redesign your cars electronics system to do so.
Think again. Imagine a scheme where the car won't start (or only operates in limp mode) if it has not been able to connect to the network (and therefore backhaul surveillance logs) in say 30 or 90 days. And this kind of scheme actually seems likely to arise from standard corporate incentives like wanting to make sure critical safety recalls actually get fixed.
However, a second update has now been pushed that reportedly reverts the software to the previous version, and Jeep Cares cautioned that customers will not be able to tell which version they currently have by looking at Uconnect, because the problematic package doesn’t make any changes to the infotainment suite itself, meaning the version numbers will appear the same.
What kind of complete amateur hour operation are they running there at Jeep/Stellantis?
After working with them for nearly a year, it’s even worse than you think.
Half the team didn’t have basic understanding of git, and exactly none of the team designing the “smart charge” scheduling had or even had driven an EV.
The complete incompetence of every vehicle OEM team I worked with outside of Tesla and Rivian is part of the reason I left that job.
You are just confirming my suspicion on that car manufacturers have terrible software divisions. Outside of some new EVs which have software one of major selling points.
Why don't classic manufacturers not ramp up their software quality side? I mean it's 2025, they lag behind at least a decade, but software development (infotaiment) practices seems like dark ages.
Except for MCU - from user perspective they just work.
>Why don't classic manufacturers not ramp up their software quality side?
VW is now at their second billion dollar attempt to fix their software. It's not like they aren't trying.
Also consider how software development works at hardware companies. It is all outsourced, inside the company you have "engineers" who are "managing" the requirements" and in "best cost countries" you have the dev teams, communication is hard and the actual devs are not particularly skilled and definitely not paid to care, they just have to do the requirements.
Tesla was revolutionary because they had Software developers, which they paid normal software developer salaries. VW has just sunk Billions into Rivian to have them do the software.
> Why don't classic manufacturers not ramp up their software quality side?
Because they use the fight-club metrics for software too:
A x B x C = X, where A is the number of vehicles in the field, B is the probable rate of failure, and C is the average out-of-court settlement.
The company does not initiate a recall (or fix) if the calculated value X is less than the cost of the recall itself.
Edit: If anyone from a car company wants competent software engineering management to build a better team, HMU, I can put you in contact with someone. It'll never happen though.
Because everyone is making $300k+ at MAGA and they're offering half, if that.
You don't need 300k FAANG workers to make competent and reliable software. Companies in China and Japan manage just fine and half the tier 1s actually writing anything are outsourcing it to places where 300k USD is unthinkable.
It's more important to start with an organization that cares about quality in the first place.
Yes, but you do need a few really good senior people. If your salary table has a hard cap at 150k (and no equity to make up for it), you can’t hire those people.
You also have a hard time hiring good mid-levels because you can’t possibly pay them as much as the top people, right? You also have the problem that some of your SWEs might make more than their managers, and that’s just unconscionable.
So what do you do? Have a “secret bonus” program that even most people in HR don’t know about? Hiring becomes tricky: Better make sure you don’t have a live one on the line when the only HR with need-to-know is on vacation.
One of the points I'm trying to communicate is that there are skilled people in most parts of the world. They're less common outside SV, but that doesn't matter unless you're trying to hire at big tech campus scale. So you focus your much smaller efforts on recruiting those people with a good environment, give them the tools to produce work they're proud of. If you pay what they'll be happy with, it's almost always going to be vastly less than big tech pays.
That even works in the bay area, which is how places like Oxide keep fantastically skilled people despite paying below market rate.
Is it the easiest way to hire? No, but I never said it was.
Who in Japan is good at this? I can only imagine the R&D division at maybe Playstation and thats it.
China has so many people that EE and CS are a dime a dozen, thats why they have a competitive market thats low cost. People are in a jungle trying to survive.
[0]: https://youtu.be/ljOoGyCso8s?t=101
The video is (Supposedly) EEs doing customer support roles thus allowing Cheap PCB for hobbyists, the equivalent in the US does not exist.
Side Note: I hear this is also why SASS never really took off in China. Why pay someone else for software when you can get a dozen people to make your own cheaper.
One of the best engineers I know works for [1] Woven by Toyota, Inc. They do care about getting software right, arguably more so than the german automotive sector. Don't get me wrong they all want good software, but wanting good software and putting the right systems in place while resisting the urge to chase the next hype wave are quite two different things.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woven_by_Toyota,_Inc.
>They do care about getting software right, arguably more so than the german automotive sector.
How so? All 3 major German Car Groups have invested substantially into software. VW Group set up an entire company with the core goal of allowing different operating practices for software development, which doesn't sound too dissimilar to Woven, at least in its goals.
VW had CARIAD, but it was a massive failure, and they moved on in spirit:
"Instead of developing software for cars independently, Cariad will act as a coordinator for externally developed technologies – primarily software from Rivian and Xpeng."
Most Japanese companies doing firmware are happily working like it's still the 90s. Nikon and Omron are examples. Sure, they don't have working networking, but some would say that's a good thing in automotive software.
By all accounts, rakuten is dealing with absolute horror shows of internal codebases, but they're generally competent at delivering reliable software without a lot of surprises in my experience.
it's the culture
of course places that value good software engineering and have the cash flow to pay them do so
There are plenty of countries with very competent software engineers making more like $100k. Basically anywhere except America is less than that.
> Why don't classic manufacturers not ramp up their software quality side?
Because MechE are even worse than EEs at doing software (and yes, having worked at EE companies it was 90% cluelessness)
(also let's not pretend that HW companies ran by SW people don't have multiple issues neither ;) )
And as per other commenter
> Because everyone is making $300k+ at MAGA and they're offering half, if that.
Yes. That as well
I have a theory that most companies run by people who had harder education programs than CS... will misunderstand software engineering, underappreciate the difficulty of doing it well, and undervalue the people who can do it well.
Not only EEs, and not only any real engineer, but the hard sciences, as well.
> Why don't classic manufacturers not ramp up their software quality side?
I've wondered this but it does seem to me that the companies that do the best software also seem to be the newer companies that were driven by investors instead of sales/profitability.
Can classic manufacturers afford the kind of spending it takes to overcome inertia and make quick strides on the software side when it likely won't move the needle on sales anywhere near as much as it costs them?
Edit: for me, it's similar to what we see in the "flying taxi" maybe-autonomous eVTOL field: Airbus gave it a shake, but there are at least half a dozen startups bankrolled by VCs outspending them on a prayer they'll be the one to succeed.
>Can classic manufacturers afford the kind of spending it takes to overcome inertia and make quick strides on the software side when it likely won't move the needle on sales anywhere near as much as it costs them?
Look at how much VW has spent. They built up entire Software company and they are now giving billions to Rivian.
It’s not how much they spent, but how they spent it. Their CEO was bragging about how many SWEs they were hiring.
Quick question for HN: Would you rather work with 1000 mediocre SWEs or 10 really really good ones?
Doesn't that kind of confirm my point though?
VW's having to invest huge amounts of their revenue while Rivian's going around burning VC/investor cash without a care in the world for profitability.
>Doesn't that kind of confirm my point though?
I was just answering your question. VW clearly has the money and is willing to spend it.
>Rivian's going around burning VC/investor cash without a care in the world for profitability.
I believe that a huge part of the VW deal with Rivian was that they needed more money. Making cars is expensive and Rivian can not succeed on investments alone.
[dead]
Who have you worked with? Any thoughts on Toyota or Mazda? I heard that while Mazda is quite conservative in car design (still use buttons, less futuristic design) they appear to have a extensive data collection operation which surprised me given their conservative nature in literally everything else.
Sounds like Microsoft designers working on Windows, while using MacOS.
What youre likely seeing is the inevitable endpoint for corporate growth.
Money over all. Safety should never impact profits, quality control is a cost not a benefit, poor design due to rushing something out the door, and lowest bidder for everything.
It will change once they realize they are a IT company first and a car manufacturer second. Whether they agree or not this is their future.
I planned on keeping my Wrangler for life when I ordered it, and so optioned it as mechanically simple as possible, including roll-down windows, manual trans, and no keyless entry. Stuff like this is, in part, why. Threw an aftermarket wireless CarPlay head unit in, and that is all the tech I need and more.
I bought my 2018 Wrangler with the same idea... keep it for life. That was also the last year they offered the "lifetime" warranty. Glad I went for that.
So far, the Jeep has been fairly reliable, with my issues being:
- Electric door locks and mirrors stopped working
- Radiator leaked
- CV Joints
The Lifetime Warranty has now broken even (~$2500).
Unfortunately, now my issue is rust, and the warranty doesn't cover that.
Check out woolwax or similar products for rust prevention
Rust. I live in the north half of Ohio, so my stuff gets bathed in salty brine for several months out of the year and rust is a real problem for me.
What I've found that works (for me):
For stuff that isn't yet rusted, Fluid Film. It's easy to buy (it's on the shelf even at Wal-Mart). It's made primarily from lanolin, which is a product of the wool industry and is how sheep stay dry. If I were Very Serious about it, I'd find a shop that would cover the whole bottom of the vehicle (and anything that can be reached through holes) in the stuff and pay them to get that done. (I buy it in spray cans; some shops buy it in 55 gallon drums.)
For stuff that is definitely already rusting, Corrosion-X. It's some kind of oily chemical soup that is supposed to prevent existing rust from getting worse, and also prevent new rust. One interesting feature is that it's available in 3 different viscosities; vaguely speaking, those viscosities are thin, medium, and elephant snot.
The thin one does a fantastic job of creeping around to cover even unseen surfaces, but it washes off the fastest. The thicker ones hang around longer and creep less. (Tradeoffs, I guess.)
I prefer Fluid Film just because it's more natural than some other things are and that makes me feel good in some way that I don't care to rationalize, but Fluid Film is not very good at recovering from existing rust.
Corrosion-X, though? I can get the thin version of that worked into the joint of a completely rusted-stuck pair of box-jointed pliers and have them working very well (and looking fairly decent, though not "new") in a few minutes with a shop rag. I've heard stories of it being used to hose down whole electrical rooms in ocean-going boats. It's amazing stuff. (And it's expensive.)
The practical downside is that these products all feel greasy, and they all turn black with enough time and enough miles. They're all ugly.
For visible painted body panels, the best way I know to deal with small spots of rust from rock chips and stuff is to go full-ass on it. Get the Dremel out, pick an appropriate abrasive stone, and start grinding those little pinholes out until there's nothing but clean, shiny metal surrounded by paint. And then: Fill in with touchup paint that matches the factory paint code. (It's never perfect, but it does get easier to do a job that looks better than little rust spots do with some practice...and the little spots then don't turn into big spots.)
Rust never sleeps. Good luck.
Fluid Film is inferior to Noxudol.
There are many shops in the US which will apply Noxudol both underneath and inside body panels and frame rails with special 360 degree applicators. I believe it is a formula developed in Scandinavia.
All of my cars are sprayed with the stuff for over a decade with no other maintenance.
Thanks for the tip. I hadn't heard of that one before.
~3 minutes of homework just now tells me that this is something I should probably have on the shelf in the garage.
Thanks for the suggestions! Unfortunately, I have it on top and under the paint. I'll take a look at these for the uncovered portions.
You just need to bedliner your undercarriage
Perhaps, but: I don't want to deal with avoiding permanently-affixed overspray on parts that don't want to be coated.
I also don't want to work with fasteners that are coated in bedliner: I'm already not having a fun time of things when I'm crawling under an old car doing some manner of repair. I want every possible advantage while I'm down there, and a well-stuck layer of bedliner seems like a big disadvantage.
As a point of comparison, stuff like Fluid Film [and the others that have been mentioned] can be applied to just about anything under the car that's metal (including bendy things like springs), and can be scrubbed off sometime later if it accidentally gets on body-colored parts using just soap, water, and some elbow grease.
Fasteners that are both rust-free and oily usually come apart like a dream when the time comes, and oily coatings that stay goopy tend to self-heal after being abraded by whatever the tires might kick up from the road.
Fluid coatings seem like the right set of tradeoffs in this non-ideal world compared to something like bedliner.
They're not perfect, but nothing is.
(Ideally, I'd live in a place that doesn't require driving through brine... but my world isn't ideal.)
...how do you know the consistency of elephant snot?
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["elephant snot"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.
:)
There was a car mechanic who lived next to where my dad grew up in rural Sweden. He spent enormous amounts of time on the cars he got in to fix and took out automatic locks and all electric wiring to the point of the car being basically invincible to time and very simple to repair again. Some cars he never managed to finish fixing and they were simply left forever in his front yard... My grandma drives a 25 y o Suzuki Alto that is basically this car. It even has the old school non powered steering. Runs great still, has no issues since she only drives in summer.
There is really something to be said for old mechanics and simple electric solutions.
These days _everything_ has an embedded microcontroller and a touchscreen. I'm more on the luddite edge myself...
If anyone is interested I can try to dig up an interview with the car mech on youtube (in swedish) :)
What year is your wrangler?
OTA firmware updates for a vehicle should not exist. A car is an appliance that should do what it does. There are up upgrades to four rolling wheels. If there are, roll them into the next model year. Let the dealers upgrade older vehicles or recall the model.
Customers demand Software upgrades.
>Let the dealers upgrade
And every single customer will hate you for this.
Customers do NOT demand firmware updates. Customers demand reliability, they may demand FAST resolution for an issue but that doesnt translate to demand for forced OTA updates.
Actually my customers are customers BECAUSE I shun the internet.
Which customers? I definitely do not demand software upgrades on any of my vehicles and in fact if I could easily pin a certain version and upgrade only after seeing the changelog or diff that would be best.
There is no reason they couldn't offer a way to firmware upgrades through customers too if they actually cared. But most upgrades to any firmware should already be essentially "done" within the dealer service window.
If worked fine in the em early 2000 for cars with service plans or recalls.
But they only did like 3-4 upgrades total while the model was still being produced.
(Bmw experience)
This. if you can update is by software it becomes a dynamic characteristic.
If Honda could have OTA updated 90s Integras or late 90s model Accords they would closed open programming ports on PCM modules that actually added to the value of those vehicles (see HONDATA and HONDASPEED OBD2 and other programmers that unlock the entire engine behavior profile and still work on some modern vehicles)
>If worked fine in the em early 2000 for cars with service plans or recalls.
If you are telling customers today that their car will not receive updates or that the only way to receive updates is with an appointment at a dealership, they will not buy your car.
It is not the early 2000s anymore, customers expect and want software support for their vehicles.
You've been drinking too much corporate coolaid. Zero percent of consumers care about having forced OTA updates. They want their vehicle to turn on, go, stop, and stream music from their personal tracking device.
Next you'll tell me co-pilot is the best part of office 365
In the context, it would take an ignorant consumer to choose a vehicle that could lose engine, steering, and braking - and complete bricking - while at highway speed, over a dealer appointment that's included in your maintenance program.
Frankly, this incident seems like an active nhsta would regulate away ota updates on its own. The best interpretation is that this single update is worse than the failed keyed ignition issues that led to push to start regulation.
No customers demanded this. Tesla did it because it means they don't have to verify their software to as high quality (and because they want to use their user base as beta testers).
I don't think anyone wants software upgrades to require a dealer but that's not the sane alternative.
The first question for any dev to ask themselves before rolling out any software update: do you know how to roll it back?
This ought to be the sort of thing that management is there to remind the developers of, but in practice it seems like the opposite is true.
> This ought to be the sort of thing that management is there to remind the developers of, but in practice it seems like the opposite is true.
In my experience, management does remind developers of this. Usually after an incident that ultimately boils down to management having incentivized everything else at the cost of good operational practices.
That used to be easy, until the security mafia entered the room with their anti-rollback requirements.
Yeah, In application programming over the air is frankly terrifying because when it goes bad it goes really bad.
I remember a firefox dev commenting that the updater code was the most dangerous part of the app to touch because if you break it, it's game over, you can't push a fix.
100%. How you manage updates and software configuration in general in remote embedded systems is near to my heart for the same reasons. I keep having to fight at work because none of my coworkers or management understand that outsourcing updates is basically hiring a third party to sometimes brick your equipment.
I already feel this with an app that only serves a few thousand people. Even with the paranoia I managed to mess up the updater once, a year+ later and still have people who haven't updated from that version.
Always good to have a few redundant systems to help with this. Minimum being some way to push alerts to specific versions.
It's been a decade now, I guess, since Charlie Miller figured out how to hack into Jeep Grand Cherokees and remotely disable the brakes.
https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...
The funny part is one of Chrysler's "mitigations" was adding a "security gateway module" to "protect" all the communications (read: lock out diagnostic tools).
The call still came from inside the house.
There's no recall yet? That's strange.
Usually minor firmware recalls make headlines (at least for Tesla), this is a major issue without even a recall announcement?
Tesla isn't the best proxy for what is normal. While Tesla has had a lot of issues and the critiques and articles are valid, it definitely seems like the media coverage was much more widespread and pervasive because 1)Anti Elon sentiment sells ads and clicks 2) it was somewhat agenda based. I am not making a political statement, but I think what I said is objectively true.
After years of development, Jeeps can now break down faster and more efficiently.
Also: “power terrain”? For an auto mag, that’s a mistake on par with a software developer deploying to production without a backout plan.
> Jeep wrangler owners waiting for answers week after an update bricked their cars
Don't worry. It will be fixed in a future update.
Does Microsoft entered the Automotive business ? Because this surely looks like a lot of the issues with Windows, where an update breaks something and Microsoft needs a couple of succesive updates, until they acknoledge and fix the problem.
"So, if you’re a Wrangler 4xe owner, here’s your order of operations for the time being:"
Do not use the vehicle under any circumstances and have the dealer take it away and keep it until it is safe to drive again.
I have friends who ignored my advice and bought Jeeps.
I told them, don't expect reliability --- and this is an example.
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just another reason among many for why I refuse to own a car with an internet connection.
Or anything made by Stellantis, in my case at least.
My dad's old joke was FIAT stands for: Fix It Again Tony
https://www.web-cars.com/humor/acronyms.html
For some reason BMW is missing a very good one.
Which one?
How does it work in this case? The car has an esim and can connect to cellular network?
People on hn and I assume car forums will remove the radio antenna or otherwise disconnect the relevant hardware.
I don't think that's always possible anymore
Yeah it's really hard, my 2025 Toyota Sienna is always connected. You can't just pull a fuse or rip out an antenna, I have to take the entire dashboard apart to reach the Data Communication Module (DCM) module. If anyone's curious what that looks like, it's a little bit easier on the Toyota Tacoma, here are some pictures of the process: https://www.tacoma4g.com/forum/threads/disabling-dcm-telemat...
It's complex enough that I haven't done it yet in my Sienna, but I plan to!
It must be possible given the understanding of:
- there must be a physical mechanism providing connectivity to cellular networks
- this mechanism cannot be required to handshake in order to start the car (not everywhere has cell service!)
Manufacturers can certainly increase the difficulty to remove the offending hardware, but given these two axioms is can’t be determined to be impossible.
"- this mechanism cannot be required to handshake in order to start the car (not everywhere has cell service!)"
In 2025, this is true. At some point in the future, I predict this will be false. Maddening.
It's the We Must See You Online Or We Don't Owe You The Service You've Paid For Principle. Sure it starts with software (e.g. Adobe) and content (e.g. Spotify) but I can see it extending to home appliances and vehicles. Because they can.
Word to justify this principle will be used and the words will sound positive and good and consumers will nod their heads and shrug. "For Your Protection." "Safety." "Authentication." "Copyright Protection." i.e. assumed guilty offline until proven innocent online
Not if those components eventually get included as part of other core chips you can't remove. At some point, you'll have to completely redesign your cars electronics system to do so.
Think again. Imagine a scheme where the car won't start (or only operates in limp mode) if it has not been able to connect to the network (and therefore backhaul surveillance logs) in say 30 or 90 days. And this kind of scheme actually seems likely to arise from standard corporate incentives like wanting to make sure critical safety recalls actually get fixed.
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