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65,000+ Land Rovers Recalled Due To Software Bug
An anonymous reader writes with word that owners of Range Rover and Range Rover Sport SUVs (model year 2013 and newer) will need to get their cars' software updated, which means a visit to a dealer. The update will fix a bug in the cars' locking system, which occasionally resulted in car doors randomly unlocking and opening themselves (in one instance, when the car was moving). This is not the first time that a car manufacturer asked customers to contact dealers for a security update. In July, Ford has recalled over 430,000 cars in North America because of a bug that prevented the engine from shutting down even after the ignition key was put into the "off" position and removed.
I wonder how many issues like this have been silently fixed on models that have mobile data service for OTA updates.
Only makes sense that car called the Range Rover would have either an off-by-one or Out of Array Bounds error.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The other one was ok though.
This is the 'fail safe' option.
Is this the new incarnation of Lucas electrical systems?
http://www3.telus.net/bc_trium...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Well, given that companies in the UK seem to think they can get a degree qualified senior embedded software engineer for GBP 35-40k, I'm not surprised they have a bunch of incompetents working on this stuff. If you are a good embedded dev you can easily move into mobile or enterprise but engineering companies seem oblivious to this connection.
Does the software in cars fall under any particular standard for quality? Like actual engineering standards?
Or do we really have auto makers doing little better than people making apps for phones?
It just seems like if it controls any part of a car it should really be required to be subjected to much more rigorous verification.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
And with a high price tag commands a lot of 'prestige'. Ever sit inside one? They are very, very mediocre internally. Also extremely unreliable cars historically.
I still don't understand why people buy them, but I chalk it up to an issue of more money than sense. Or they might be rappers...
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
a car that's not got more computers than the Apollo 11?
Sig. Sig. Sputnik
Chelsea tractors. Not real Land Rovers :)
Tesla's OTA updates to fix lots of battery fire problems springs to mind.
http://www.plugincars.com/tesla-responds-fire-ground-clearance-software-update-128910.html
And the charging fire problem was another OTA update:
http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/news/a6536/tesla-software-update-fire/
Hardly silently though, each of these fires made news. As did the various range fix updates Telsa have issued.
Doors unlocking, that's one thing. Doors opening and engine not halting when ignition switched off, that's horrible design. Always, always keep physical means that override any other possible means to do things like opening doors and disabling engine. Person approving those designs should be shot and then sent to the Russian front. Stuff can go wrong mechanically, but why would you ever add yet another possible point of failure?
At least in general if its a software issue you might see a ability to fix it. But its just another added set of problems down the road and the more computers you add to vehicles. The more costs someone will assume down the road. Might not be the first owner of a vehicle, but the second or third might find themselves with a high bill just to get heat in the vehicle again. Its not like the old days, when you had a cable attached to a valve. Now you have complex stepped motors, software and control screen to do the same thing. This is just one example of many systems controlled by complex systems in vehicles. All of which seem great, until they break. I guess if your someone who can afford a new vehicle every 5 years or less. Then you have little worry. But if you keep your vehicle to the end of useful life. You may want to consider how much technology you want in a vehicle.
...never buying a new car again. Only cars old enough not to have this crap.
because of a bug that prevented the engine from shutting down even after the ignition key was put into the "off" position and removed.
I guess it's too difficult to leave the physical connections in place. They had to be replaced by shiny, just because.
There's a reason light switches work every single time. Physical connections are superior to digital connections.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The industry should consider hiring former engineers from NASA and Roscosmos. Oh, I forgot that the private industry doesn't want to touch former public sector workers with a long stick, as they are all too uppity and cemented in their public sector ways.
That's range rover, the original Chelsea tractor and prototypical suburban assault vehicle.
The Ford bulletin listed in TFS says: "This is a compliance issue with FMVSS 114 regarding theft protection and rollaway prevention." One would think the issue would simply be shutting off the engine when turned off so, you know, it doesn't keep running. I understand that software controls allow for more features and save the vendor money on hardware, but I don't think they actually makes things simpler, better, safer or more reliable. I know that, historically, whenever I have turned the engine off in my cars, the engine has always turned the fuck off.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Kardashians die in Range Rover when unable to unlock doors. Kanye's last words were "fish filet."
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Light switches certainly do not 'work every single time'. They are mechanical devices, and as such are subject to failure. And the failures can be quite spectacular, such as burning down the house. Many places now require 'anti-arcing' circuit breakers to prevent the fires caused by arcing switches.
As an automotive SCADA programmer, its the hillarity of a marketing driven product that causes outright lethal problems like this. We finish coding important things like o2 and knock profiles, 3d cylinder maps and such into the engine and give the vehicle the ability to start or stop with ease in damned near any environment. we also write in cockpit code that handles fun stuff like TCS and ABS for the driver. Then, suddenly, our competitor one-ups us in either horsepower, torque, or some other mundane argumentative ego stroke brought up at the dinner table of automotive shows and product spotlights. And just like that, some marketing drone instantly tasks us with a new, untested, and wholly remarkable feature we are to provide.
so another project is created in git, branches are furiously spawned, we're given a deadline to make this new system work with everything (including the legacy stuff thats 10 years old) and things like lighting controllers as well. We're told we will deliver this feature on time or all hell will rain down from above, and so we do. Its another set of servos, and because we dont have a 2 year test cycle we have to use the same ones you have to close the trunk, but this time we bolted it to keiths new handler code based on a fork of the trunk code that he spent 90 hours hacking. Sure, the newest vehicle comes out and all is well, but we just do not have enough time to make sure everything works before some talking head gets up on a stage and rails about our latest "innovation." And chances are the average driver with more brass than sense is too old to understand the technology, how it works, or when to use it so it gets disabled at the dealership for them along with a half dozen other bells and whistles that confuse and bewilder the OAP.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Putting so much software in cars is not engineering anymore, it's a science experiment and we're the guinea pigs.
Software is an absurd mish-mash of half thought out ideas and poorly implemented concepts.
Doors opening and engine not halting when ignition switched off
Gees, does Range Rover have to include Drivers Seat Extreme Side Tilt as an option in next year's model for people to get the hint? The car has places to go, get out of the damn car and let it have a little space of its own!
If monkeys are people then why can't cars be too? All these people and their bias against steel-based life forms.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you only want to make one car, have it consume only 500Watts, generated from a plutonium RTG, work for 40 years and travel 20 billion kilometers then NASA is a great place to get your engineers.
It's not clear to me how an anti-arcing *circuit breaker* will solve the problem of the light switch in my wall arcing. Does this mean the breaker counts the number of circuit-start current surges per time and trip if it's too large or something? Is this related to the switch in my current panel that has a little inductor coil wound on the neutral?
That said, I have had a breaker itself fail by corroded contacts (CSB: One day I took a long shower and suddenly the water stream was bursts of warm/cold. Finished, walked out to the garage, and before I turned on the lights I realized there was an actinic light-show coming from the circuit breaker panel. One "dafuq?" later, I found the dual 50A breaker running the heater sparking about 1-2x per second). Mechanical switches are not infallible, they're differently fallible.
It seems like a lot of the car manufacturers are having some major software issues. This Range Rover issue certainly isn't the worst one.
For instance, see this blog post (which links to US court testimony documents) where an embedded software expert (Michael Barr) reviews Toyota's code and finds numerous flaws:
http://embeddedgurus.com/barr-...
Did Toyota fix these flaws? Who knows? Toyota still denies that there's even a problem. They released an update to the Prius last year which corrected a problem with premature engine shutdown, but that was only for limited number of Priuses. Accorrding to Michael Barr, these software issues affect Toyota, Lexus (and possibly Scions) made in the last ten years.
The only way in my mind to be pretty sure our cars are safe is for the manufacturers to release their software as open source, where it can be reviewed and any flaws are found. While folks wouldn't be able to find *every* bug, it sure would be a lot better than we have now.
So I have to drive my Cayenne or X5 for a while. BFD.
We published a report recently at the NHTSA's Enhanced Safety of Vehicles (ESV) conference that surveys many recent electrical/electronics (E/E) problems. Software defects fall into electrical/electronic systems in the ISO 26262 lingo. This includes a statistical analysis of recalls (classifying into those due to E/E problems) and ancedotes of many software defects resulting in recalls, including several examples of unintended braking, unintended acceleration, etc.: A Survey of Electrical and Electronic (E/E) Notifications for Motor Vehicles (PDF warning)
While writing this, we found a nice overview from Dr. Dobbs that's still fun to read: But I Never Did That Before!.
The Dr. Dobbs overview has a related recall from about 2 decades ago, where a car would not let occupants leave the vehicle:
"BMW 535i 1994: The double-lock feature can engage with occupants and the door/ignition key inside the vehicle. The occupants of the vehicle would be unable to exit either from the doors or from the windows of the vehicle. Drive-away protection would prevent the engine from starting. Dealers will replace the general control module with one containing the revised software to permit window opening with the double-lock engaged and key in the ignition."
Most stop lights have (or, 20 years ago, had) a graceful fail-safe mode: When the software is confused or there is a hardware fault like "incompatible green lights detected" the systems go into a failsafe mode, which is usually an all-way stop.
A reasonable fail-safe mode for a car door lock would be that it could be locked and unlocked using purely mechanical means from the inside and at least one door (typically both front doors) could be locked and unlocked using purely mechanical means from the outside.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Also if you want to do in-field software updates
Bad idea roaming fees can cost more then the cars cost.
as 1GB of updates when roaming can cost $15,360 - $20,480.
The OP is referring to an Arc Fault Circuit Interrupter (AFCI), which are now widely mandated in residential buildings by electrical codes in the US. The breaker has an embedded signal processing circuit which analyzes the power waveform and cuts power when patterns that look like excessive arcing caused by a faulty device, damaged cable or frayed cord are observed.
Pure genius! Turns out that 65,000 Land Rovers make an excellent continuous integration server. BTW the build is broken.
So you program the software to not pull the update if the car is roaming (or use data at all, for that matter).
Of all the reasons OTA may be a bad idea, I think this is one of the least concerning ones (as in, not at all).
They'll just slap in a new AE-35 unit, and you're good to go. I wouldn't even bother with a helmet.
Bad idea for who? The car manufacturer gets a cut of your data bill for your car.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
"The update apparently will not solve the well-known vulnerabilities in the keyless ignition feature, which reportedly allow thieves to easily unlock the cars with the help of a hardware device that can be bought online .. it's generally believed that the industry is still far from creating a reliable system that can't be hacked and abuse" ref
Is it really impossible to design a keyless ignition system that can't be compromises, or is it the case that the car manufacturers are not allowed to design such. The doors to your house can be picked with the right system, so as to allow the locksmith back in if you lose the keys.
Had a rental car that would randomly lock all the doors, sometimes right after unlocking them.
When returning the car, they had a sign that said, leave keys in the car. Did so, and click. Locked in. I bet they had fun with that one.
captcha when talking about a rental car: owners
That sounds like a rather nifty device - there is no UK equivalent.
OTOH if you folks moved on from using wirenuts :)
Why can't women be like Hedy Lamarr - beautiful, talented and inventors of frequency-hopping spread-spectrum techn
And software is less prone to failure somehow?
My '89 Ford Escort was a lemon. I was the last American car I'll ever buy. In any case, from memory I was able to remove the key with the engine running. One of the many mechanical engineering defects with this vehicle. It was a horrible product.
because of a bug that prevented the engine from shutting down even after the ignition key was put into the "off" position and removed.
I guess it's too difficult to leave the physical connections in place. They had to be replaced by shiny, just because.
Its a Land Rover, people buy them because they need the shiny to justify their inflated ego's. They aren't cars for people who want reliable, trouble free or sensible motoring.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I seem to remember that a small team of private industry embedded systems experts (4 guys from Barr Group) found defects in Toyota's engine control firmware that a whole team from NASA couldn't find (they literally out-performed the so-called "rocket scientists"). So yeah, I think you're right, often public sector employees often fall short of the mark.
Close the driver's door, Hal.
I'm afraid I can't do that.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.