I own a 2021 Volvo and the blinkers doesn’t blink regularly. They may blink fine for a awhile but then stops for a period, and then suddenly all missed blinks blinks in a rapid succession. It’s extremely annoying. There are other bugs, like when you are using the auto pilot where it sometimes may suddenly jerk the wheel even though there is nothing wrong with the road. Scares the shit out of you. That has happened thrice now.
Same experience here. The new Volvos are extremely buggy and unsafe to drive.
Even annoying shit like media controls randomly not responding (including not being able to turn off or change volune), autopilot suddenly wanting to commit suicide, autopilot randomly shutting down, random error messages of stuff not working, random messages for things that were unchanged (child lock engaged, even though it was already engaged)
I really like the design choices, and i like the software and audio quality, but once you actually start using the car, it goes downhill fast.
I’m glad I got rid of mine. After 3 horrible Volvos and horrible shit service, i’ll never get another one even though I still think they look great.
Now driving a Mazda CX-5. Absolutely fault-free, no software issues, runs perfectly.
Most if not all development still takes place in Sweden. I think any perceived quality loss is more likely to be because of the increased complexity both in modern cars in general, and because Volvo wants to be more upmarket and premium which leads to more features and therefore bugs. Although I wouldn't consider indicating lights to be a premium feature.
Precisely. It was only after I’d purchased a 2020 Volvo that I realised that they’re trying to compete with the luxury car manufacturers on a fraction of their budget.
It shows.
I have nearly every safety feature turned off in the car because they all generate false positives at an astounding rate.
> I own a 2021 Volvo and the blinkers doesn’t blink regularly.
Same here (V60 2021), it skips a beat from time to time (now happy to know that I don't have problems with my brain nor ears :) ). Luckily so far I didn't have issues with the autopilot but thanks for the heads-up.
On the other hand a few months ago the radio volume got stuck for 15 minutes (couldn't even switch it off) while I was on a pass road with nowhere to stop, luckily it wasn't too loud => this made me think "ok, the media device is not directly a safety-critical subsystem, but what if the volume suddenly goes up to max, and maybe it stays there? Or if the trunk automatically opens? Etc... => tricky to define what is important from a safety perspective in a car...".
Similar experience in a subaru. After fighting the lane keep assist feature a couple of times when it got confused and jerked the wheel all of a sudden, we just turned it off permanently.
It's not a technical problem. We knew this was going to happen if we transform cars into computers. It just take some management change to make your car unsafe or misbehave.
My FIAT Panda from the early 2000s has none of those problems. I need no updates, and every problem it has can be fixed by any car worshop, or even myself.
Relays and basic electronics that don't handle anything important, that's all it has.
It is lightweight (fuel efficient), agile in town and on dirt roads, cheap and easy to maintain.
Lane keeping in my Subaru has been amazing. Better than any non Tesla I’ve tried. But sometimes the PID loop is really nasty and while I want to bias to the left of the lane it keeps fighting me. If I let go it throws me into the next lane. It hasn’t happened ever since I learned how the car reacts to that behaviour.
But it’s still very, very bad and I hope Subaru’s controls engineers are addressing it.
Indeed! For a base model car it’s pretty amazing. Now that I’m aware of this PID problem I just avoid it (but it’s still shamefully bad, Subaru…)
The rest of the features, however, make this the safest car I’ve driven so far. Adaptive cruise control, reverse automatic braking, and collision avoidance will make all cars safer.
I should write about it but the collision avoidance saved me from hitting a cyclist that flew out of a parking lot with a reaction time I wouldn’t be capable of.
I hear you. Every generation of technological evolution has hold-outs who can’t come to “trust” the new thing. I can’t come to trust smart home stuff, for example.
It seems rather derogatory to call people "hold-outs" because we don't trust buggy, novel technology.
On the other hand, we have a term for people who are always installing the latest beta updates and purchasing shiny gadgets: we call them "heatseekers". It's the heatseekers who tend to have unreliable tech and lose control of the gadgets that are supposed to make their quality of life better.
It seems pragmatic and wise to take new technology with a grain of salt. Since I have used computers and other technology for over 40 years, I have developed a good sense for what will be reliable and proven, and what should be avoided until it has been given a chance to mature. Often there are things in the latter category that can be taken up by scammers and hucksters who are eager to make a quick buck.
As always, keep in mind the adage that those who won the Gold Rush were selling the shovels and supplies. I personally enjoy selling shovels.
Yeah, I'm in it with Home Assistant, so at least it's open ish and not on the cloud, but there's still more maintenance than I'd like. Still, motion sensor lights are cool.
Same with Toyota. The LKAS is utter garbage, does not work on normal roads, and I find it distracting/dangerous to use. This is regarding TSS 2.0, I know there's a 2.5 and I think 3.0 just released but I don't believe the overarching issues have been fixed. I tried park assist only once and it hit a curb...
However, the collision avoidance is excellent. It works great, never had unwanted breaking, it assists breaking in emergency, and the rear cross traffic frequently senses incoming cars we can't see.
In older cars things like blinking lights was done with a dedicated circuit. By putting everything in software, we've actually made this class of bug appear more often.
For example, you could have a dedicated "do this thing at this time" processor. It can't be blocked, and if it accepts a job, then it is able to do it on time.
The main processor then tells this processor to do all timed tasks.
I don't imagine any class of bugs will ever completely disappear. Sure, we know how to write software that is extremely unlikely to suffer from certain classes of bugs and we have better tooling for testing, but ultimately it's dependent on humans.
First thing that came into my mind when I read the title, there's a reason why even stuff like infotainment was being done by whatever QNX flavors. If i hit the unlock button, I really don't wanna have to wait because of some IO stuff that's preventing the context switch.
I'm not so sure anyone actually wants fad buzzword salad frameworks du jour driving their multi-decade lifespan appliances - not a ton of upside in your fridge running fullstack cuberentes docker react node restful AI SAAS on bay area RSUs
Ok the RT thing is clearly a joke, but the unit test comment hopefully similar, or was that meant seriously? Likely no, otherwise please url for logging a ticket
I once fixed a bug where the blinkers were drifting on a bus. If you activated the warning blinkers and waited some 15 minutes it looked insane with the lights blinking left then right. Really annoying to watch.
I own 2022 Volvo XC90, bought in May. Not a single issue like that. Is there an update of sorts to the software? I remember when I was taking my car from dealership they did update ‘somthing’. Car is awesome btw.
I’m driving rental MB C-class this week (after 4months of Hyundai Kona EV) and holy smokes it is obnoxious. No bugs per se, but touch-everything is horrible. Tons of warnings, panic breaking, limp mode. Top it with horrible throttle response and this thing reeks of legacy. Sure ride quality and steering is good, but I can see now how people hate touch interfaces.
I had a rental MB a few months ago and while the build quality and ride were excellent, it remains by a very wide margin the absolute worst car I have ever driven. There were dozens of buttons and knobs and touchpads (so many touchpads!) in the cabin, none of them with any meaningful information about how they are used, much less an obvious use. The interior was utterly barren of visual contrast, so I couldn't discern important information even when it wasn't shouldered out of place by the implacable clutter. It was a car for a hoarder with means. I'm also not exaggerating for effect: I hated it, and I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of stuff I was supposed to operate.
They may blink fine for a awhile but then stops for a period, and then suddenly all missed blinks blinks in a rapid succession.
Clearly, it's a software issue, not a hardware issue. Hard to believe that software is really cheaper than a 555 timer. I wonder why this decision was made.
A modern car has >100 ECUs, blink is distributed to a few ECUs, think: front body, rear body, left door, right door plus instrument cluster and maybe a trailer control ECU. It does not look premium if they do not blink in phase so you send CAN command for blinking. (A separate cable introduce cost, weight and faults due to corrosion that are tricky to diagnose, in total you want to avoid that.)
If something disturb CAN or an ECU reboots you would get the described behavior. But it is not obvious (at least not to me) that it must be a software error - could easily be hardware designed with too small margins.
(I have not worked with this issue at Volvo and do not know the actual cause of the problem.)
Alternatively, you could design the system to fail in a way that was less dangerous.
For example, an ECU that controls blinkers does it with a 555 timer, based on a "start blinking" CAN bus command. It resyncs on each new "start blinking " command. It times out after 50 blinks, if no "stop blinking" command comes.
This makes each ECU autonomous and responsible for doing "the safe thing", once it has been commanded to.
Finding all the new subtle horrible timing problems in this design is left as an exercise for the reader. :)
Because blinkers aren't on a mechanical switch anymore. You have the "lane change mode" where it blinks a few times, they also blink when the alarm goes off it or when hazard lights go on.
3 different controllers or software becomes an easy choice when CAN is already running everywhere
My Ford Mach-E has a bunch of similar timing glitches, including blinkers. Sometimes the touch screen doesn’t detect inputs for a second and then all the touches fires at once.
I tell myself it’s some component busy GCing for a bit :)
People (I assume Ford managers included) underestimate the essential complexity of the systems required to do something as simple as process touches and display a low-latency response to them. Apple makes it look easy.
Given that Rust prevents invalid memory accesses and enables fearless concurrency, this is probably caused by some kind of memory leak or deadlock.
In this case, the older blinks are possibly not deallocated and slow down the processing of newer blinks. Fortunately automotive software has all sorts of watchdogs and at some point the blink watchdog must kick in and it kills the blink manager which is then restarted and it processes the blink queue in quick succession.
People who say "fearless concurrency" have clearly never debugged a bad concurrency problem. Those strike fear into the heart of any honest hacker, and no amount of nagging from the compiler or good marketing can make concurrency fearless.
I understand what the marketing means. But grep your codebase and dependencies for "unsafe"... That should put paid to your fearlessness.
memory safe - correct. But "fearless concurrency" is mostly plain propaganda. Lots of deadlockable code in Rust. You still need to pay close attention to structuring code for concurrency and some libs are deadlock prone in async.
This seems like a real safety flaw. When someone glances over their shoulder before a lane change, they're looking for maybe 0.5s tops, and they'd expect to see at least one blink from a nearby car's blinker if it were about to change lanes. Yes, people shouldn't rely on everyone signaling, but signaling does make the roads safer and therefore a lack of signaling makes them more dangerous.
I drove an XC90 for a few days a couple of years ago — it was by far the nicest car interior I’ve ever been in, and very thoughtful ergonomically in a lot of ways — little things like the side indicators warning lights being big amber triangles in the A-pillars instead of tiny amber spots in the mirrors.
I think it’s more likely the Danish cops got some big fundage.
My dealer just said classics like “we can’t reproduce the issue”, “it’s new software, some bugs still need fixing, we can’t do anything about it”, “weird, we looked at it but couldn’t find anything” and “we changed $something and this should fix $issue” (and it didn’t)
I’ve been at the dealer 6 times in 7 months to fix random shit on a brand new car and they managed to fix only two things: the ticking sun roof, and the charge port not opening. (Which is kinda annoying on an EV).
Some EV fans like to claim EVs are more reliable because they have less moving parts. These people obviously never owned a computer.
For what it's worth, as an auto tech we are limited in what we can do. For a vast majority of car makes, we have no access to anything that happens on the back-end of the control modules. We can look at some data stream on a scan tool, but that is limited at best. There is no debug access or anything of that nature. It's also well outside the skillset of most technicians to delve into software. Also, If you look into the pay plan of most dealer technicians, (flat rate/paid per job) then you understand why we don't want to spend all day looking at your turn signal. We won't get paid for most of the diagnosis time.
Your comment perfectly matches the overal attitude of the dealer, and it really pissed me off.
I bought a 60k eur car in the same building. I do expect you to waste a day finding an issue on a brand new car. If you don’t want to, don’t sell the POS cars.
The exact same thing was happening to a Volvo I've driven around 5 years ago (I have never chosen Volvo again since then because of it). I don't think they're going to help now.
