Software update bricks some Jeep 4xe hybrids over the weekend

Honestly, unsurprising. Jeep and Stellantis/Dodge in general has horrible quality control and extremely poor electrical designs. They have a huge enthusiast community that will be happily apologize away the copious amounts of flaws. Frankly, nobody should ever buy their vehicles, it's just robbing yourself.

I've worked in both IoT lighting and automotive, so I'm comfortable comparing the two. This also isn't offered as a defense.

The big auto OEMs are just as sensitive to absolute BOM cost optimization, regardless of the percentage increases. I don't think this was a bootslot issue though, regardless of the word "bricked". Even as backwards and ill-advised as auto software can be, generally accepted practice is that updates are impossible while the vehicle is in motion. This is usually enforced by systems shared across multiple OEMs through the tier system.

The situation sounds more like a disastrously buggy new firmware.

I wouldn't put either past stellantis though. The auto industry already scrapes the bottom of the proverbial barrel sometimes, and stellantis isn't exactly known for their top of market compensation.

> Now that was a $two-figure USD device, not a $5/6-figure USD electric SUV. Is this a cost-cutting measure? At those price levels, doubling your NAND size is not even half of a percent of the total cost of the vehicle.

Could just be a competence and priorities problem. If it's cost cutting, it feels way more likely that some PM cut some story from a sprint to hit a deadline (and objections were either not raised or ignored), than they did some engineering analysis and explicitly decided to save $3 per vehicle by cutting the NAND size.

Edit: Actually, I don't think that technique would have helped, the problem wasn't a botched update, but a seriously buggy one. From the OP:

> The buggy update doesn't appear to brick the car immediately. Instead, the failure appears to occur while driving—a far more serious problem.

Two points to add:

1) Total cost of the vehicle does not matter. What does matter is the operating margin. Half a percent of the total cost of the vehicle will move them from 2% margin to 1.5% margin. (Ford has operating margin of 2% as an example)

In other words an increase in 0.5% cost of total vehicle will reduce their profits by 25%.

That’s a huge number now! Note also that car manufacturers are in a bad spot because their volumes are fairly low (smartphone = 1M/yr, car = 40k/yr) and have harsher requirements for chips, driving the cost way up.

2)AB updates are great, but they can still fail or get soft locked. Especially important around code when you configure the slot to be good and when bad.

I have heard anecdotally that auto manufacturers are sensitive to a price change less than $5/vehicle. This is better than some industries that are sensitive to $1.

What could easily have happened is that the negotiators didn't include A/B updates in their spec, or they only specced A/B updates at 1GB OTA size.

They do their usual hammering on price, and the head unit or ECU manufacturer gave them some savings by cutting storage space to the bone.

Maybe it was still enough for A/B updates, until the usual software bloat took the updates past the critical limit.

They could still do a safe update by doing an A/B/A update (where B is a shrunken, update-only OS), but that requires development time, and the engineers should already be working on the next vehicle.

Well, on the positive side, at least they were stationary. Don't get me started on botched OTA updates, there are so many ways companies get those wrong it's not even funny.

We used to do that with device that where in difficult to reach places with harsh uptime requirement! Think industrial routers and protocol converters. I think it pays for itself very quickly. Sending someone for such a device can get expensive.

That's a good point.

I'm curious if failing to do that opens Jeep up to legitimate lawsuits.

I've had a bunch of updates break some stuff but since moving to Fedora Atomics/ublue I've never had a system I could not get back into.

You're starting out with an assumption, that this is an OTA update for the infotainment system, and then conclude this incident shouldn't be possible. The problem is the assumption.

This is a OTA vehicle update. It has the ability to update the infotainment, ECU, ECM, TCM, and BCM. Multiple manufacturers have been able to release recalls that fix major vehicle defects (safety, reliability, and performance). That wouldn't be possible without OTA updates that update core vehicle computer systems.

Unclear where this idea that OTA = Infotainment came from. I'd go as far as to say that most manufacturers can do this in 2025.

Because cost. Same reason why dash clusters and infotainment systems are now all monitors - its actually way cheaper to use those than analog gauges. The software is built on a famous bullshit paradigm of "never rewrite, always reuse", and as a result shit gets patched together without any concern of how everything cooperates.

Now with hybrid or electrical drives, a motor controller is basically a package that runs its own software, which then interfaces with the rest of the car. And OTA updates can overwrite its firmware.

The only manufacturer that has avoided most issues is Toyota, since they have been doing hybrids for quite some time. Other companies are just starting on this path and to catch up, they can't be bothered to do software deep dives and figure shit out.

As long as it exchanges information (mundane things like muting the music when parking sensors have to be heard, requesting battery/fuel status for advising the next fill stop etc) the isolation can't be entirely complete.

I had an OTA update brick my Tahoe infotainment system. Now that backup cameras are standard requirements, those were all unusable. Also affected things like the clicking sound you hear when you use your turn signal. That was completely silent. Cost me ~$2k to get it fixed and wasn't covered under warranty. Good stuff. I've disable future "updates".

They're not isolated anymore, Tesla set this precedent and now everyone is trying to copy them. Volvo is having the same set of problems.

I'm guessing that it has features like "remote start" and that these features weren't designed particularly well.

Why does the update even happen while in motion?

I’ve noticed that newer cars seem to get updates that affect performance. Things like how they shift gears.

It is likely an unrelated correction. They are still down -7.92% over five days; this is just making it so they aren't -11.42%.

It's getting priced like an easy-to-fix recall that affects some cars of a specific model for one of their brands.

"no such thing as bad publicity" maybe?

It's a bug. Why should a software bug have an effect on a manufacturer's stock price? It's not like the update caused brake failures or something.

That's what MISRA C [1] is sort of meant to be.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MISRA_C

I worked at a company that did software for these connected infotainment system. They cost cut those things to the bone, minimal ram, minimal cpu, shit screens. Even in the high end models.

Gotta remember that the car radio has always been a cheap gimme.

You get a new device every year and teams of professionals are constantly churning updates for it.

With cars, you don't get to get a new device, it has to be consistent and keep working and you had better make it all work with a skeleton crew.

The cars needs a partition for the running OS, and a second as backup, and "reboot to recovery partition" to fall back to in case the update breaks.

Hah, curious to think that cars now have bootloaders...

The first layer of failure was the decision to make the car computer-controlled.