Software upgrades

[Jeremy]

When I got the latest progress report on my still defunct REx - they mentioned the car log had shown 18 faults, 16 of which were cleared after fixing the 12v battery connection and upgrading the software.

I don't know how many faults there were, other than those caused by a poor 12v battery connection - but, reading various reports here, there seem to be quite a few people with software bugs of one sort or another.

I was only aware of intermittent front parking sensors and one failure to charge.

I asked if there would be a programme to call cars in for software updates - but the answer seemed to be that they will only do that in response to specific complaints or on routine service - which could be two years away.

It may therefore advisable for anyone who has a few niggles that don't actually show up as reported fault conditions - to check in for a "voluntary" SW upgrade occasionally.

 

[Paul1886]

Hi Jeremy,

How long have you been without your car now?....

Had mine 10 days, first Drivetrain error showed up within 6 miles then went away again, yesterday it happened twice (539 miles total now) and stayed on screen all day but was gone this morning.

Just in process of getting it booked in to be looked at.

Paul

 

[Jeremy]

Hi Paul

I had it exactly seven days and it's been with the dealer since April 3rd.

I think the parts are still awaited from Germany.

I find it odd that a company like BMW didn't organise proper UK spares stock backup before deliveries started.

It also seems the original software was quite underdeveloped.

I must admit to being nervous. I live 30 miles from the dealership and wanted a trouble free experience - after 9 years of complete reliability from a Lexus RX400h hybrid (which was also brand new, cutting-edge, technology when I bought it in 2005).

Maybe Lexus reliability was a big ask - but total failure within a week has never happened to me with a new car before.
(Not even in the darkest days of British Leyland - which I'm old enough to remember with a shudder ;-)

 

[calibanjon]

I would echo Jeremy's comments and suggest you ask your dealer to upgrade to the latest software. There is definitely a recurring pattern of software issues and the problem is when you get a message saying don't drive go to your dealer you can't afford to ignore it just in case it is real.

You are then forced into your dealer without notice and you are then at the mercy of them as to wether you get a courtesy car or you are on your own. In my case service was lacking and I had to sort a hire car myself, even if they help you out it's still potentially disruptive. It's very hard to make a judgement on this forum as to how many cars are affected but if the software is buggy it is likely to be all on that version.

I also think BMW need to take a really good look at this because if they are aware of a problem it is not acceptable to wait and allow their customers to suffer. This is an important car to them and I would have a great deal more respect for BMW to be asked to book in at my convienience for a software upgrade than to be stranded on a Monday morning.

I should have mine back tomorrow and will publish the version so all here can check latest and make their own judgements.

Regards

Jon

 

[MikeS]

Can you see what version of software the car has on the iDrive? If so some version info with the apparent software faults would be useful.

 

[Paul1886]

I'm beginning to think there may be some issues they are trying to fix before sending parts, even if the part is in Germany UPS/FedEx get stuff across Europe in 24 hours.

Have to say my dealer was brilliant, mine went in today to have the non-critical drivetrain thing and the odd active cruise behaviour looked at and they let me take their i3 Demo, could not possibly have been any better.

 

[RJSATLBA]

I can't help thinking that BMW haven't got their act together on software upgrades. I'm not an IT person and I'm sure several forumites will be but surely it makes little sense to upgrade software only when there is an issue or a service for each car as it means that there will soon be a plethora of different versions on the road. What's more, there will be unnecessary customer inconvenience, as well as costs for both customer and BMW as a result of call-outs to known problems in older releases that could have been fixed and prevented.

I'd have expected upgrades to be pushed automatically, the downside is that if there is a serious new bug in an upgrade, the entire fleet gets it but this can be avoided by pushing the upgrade to a pilot group first, randomly or to volunteer Beta testers. Also there would have to be some control to avoid an upgrade being initiated when driving or when about to do so. None of this is rocket science!

 

[Jeremy]

Roger

They won't be able to push that much data over the web link - I guess it has to be hardwired to a terminal at the workshop.

Also maybe there would be safety worries if they were upgrading your SW as you drove

But I agree - there should be a regular update arrangement.

I don't think BMW have been very intelligent in putting the right support infrastructure in place.

 

[MikeS]

Jeremy - I agree about the impracticability of an 'over the air’ update and the safety issue. Especially, as in my Z4 it could take hours to update the software. However, given how much this car relies on its software and electronics it is clearly important that it works at its best so I do think BMW need to be more proactive about updating the vehicles. To this end we need to know what version f software our cars are running and what the latest update version is. May be BMW should speak to Apple to see how updates should be done where they are normally free and faultless.

 

[Surge]

Well I believe tesla does over the air updates, so it's not impractical.
Files should not be large - it's code (text), not movies or music.

 

[vmSeattle]

Telsa does not have a dealer network that will be cut out of service revenue by them issuing OTA updates. That's the main reason why auto dealers have been pushing individual state legislatures in the US to ban Tesla (with some success).

 

[Gonville]

This may be similar to Europe but from different motivations. Not sure how IBM i Agents will fare.

Under EU anti-competitive legislation a manufacturer cannot require customer's to use their mandated dealer network. Nor can they void warranties. They have to make all servicing manuals and parts available to the market. The objective was to prevent dealers having a monopoly on pricing of post sales services.

Interestingly it forced manufacturers to open up access to the ODB port - to allow servicing by independent dealers - and inadvertently opened a security loophole that allowed the unscrupulous to recode spare sets of keys. Unintended consequences.

I'd be surprised if US states want monopoly pricing of services and would act against Tesla if they were artificially restricting the market

 

[vmSeattle]

This may be similar to Europe but from different motivations. Not sure how IBM i Agents will fare.

Interestingly it forced manufacturers to open up access to the ODB port - to allow servicing by independent dealers - and inadvertently opened a security loophole that allowed the unscrupulous to recode spare sets of keys. Unintended consequences.

The regulations didn't cause the security loophole, it just exposed one that was there all along. We call that "Security Through Obscurity" and it never works

I like the fact that the OBD port is easily accessible in most cars. It allows us access to more information about the health of a car and even our driving habits.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obdsol/obdlink-mx-wifi-a-wireless-gateway-to-vehicle-obd

 

[jasleinstein]

I am a software guy and a Tesla owner. Any given day I come out to get in the Tesla and it tells me of the latest software update and what it does. This is not rocket science. In fighting this KLE failure issue and being surprised at the BMW email stating "A temporary software solution will prevent damage to the KLE control unit and the charging rate will now be temperature dependant. In some cases the charging rate may be reduced by 30%" is simply false, all charging is lowered to 5kW,,, period. I asked the BMW concierge folks if they could download software over the air. no. I asked if they could track which software version I had over the air. no. I asked if they communicated with dealers to see what software patches they installed in cars. no.
Maybe I should have asked if they use cassette tapes to upload the software?


On second thought maybe I don't want BMW to download software to my car.

 

[I33t]

The idea of OTA updates is enticing.

However, the OTA updates to windows PC's has a brick risk. Thankfully, I no longer manage the stack of PC's that I used to, but I have regularly had the experience of one or two identical PC's out of a building full not recover from an OTA update. I haven't had to manage as many other flavours like unix, linux and Mac but they have been more reliable for OTA updates IME.

My point is, I would rather BMW roll a bunch of updates together and bring the car up to the latest revision when it is in the workshop as they are able to resolve issues with the vehicle connected to the network and presumably experts would have access to it. The owner is not expecting to drive to work or the shops immediately after the upgrade, this is hopefully a scheduled upgrade to the software. In between major updates the only changes needed would be for those cars displaying symptoms that need fixing, again in the shop.

The last thing I want from a car's software is for it to start acting like a windows PC update service. No thanks! What are you going to do when you go to your car in the morning to find it hasn't charged, the software is unresponsive and the screen says 'do not power off your car, BMW is applying software updates 1 of xx'

Tesla probably doesn't have an option how they deliver updates as there are not enough dealers compared to the number of cars out there to do it in a timely fashion. BMW has the capability, but it also sounds like they should lift their game.

My hope is that the turnaround for software updates on the i3 will improve because the dealerships become more proficient, BMW streamlines the process, and the software becomes more robust as the kinks are worked out. Remember this is a completely new car, with completely new software. The longer the car is in production the more problems will be resolved until there is precious little left to fix.

 

[Boatguy]

The idea of OTA updates is enticing.

However, the OTA updates to windows PC's has a brick risk. Thankfully, I no longer manage the stack of PC's that I used to, but I have regularly had the experience of one or two identical PC's out of a building full not recover from an OTA update. I haven't had to manage as many other flavours like unix, linux and Mac but they have been more reliable for OTA updates IME.

My point is, I would rather BMW roll a bunch of updates together and bring the car up to the latest revision when it is in the workshop as they are able to resolve issues with the vehicle connected to the network and presumably experts would have access to it. The owner is not expecting to drive to work or the shops immediately after the upgrade, this is hopefully a scheduled upgrade to the software. In between major updates the only changes needed would be for those cars displaying symptoms that need fixing, again in the shop.

The last thing I want from a car's software is for it to start acting like a windows PC update service. No thanks! What are you going to do when you go to your car in the morning to find it hasn't charged, the software is unresponsive and the screen says 'do not power off your car, BMW is applying software updates 1 of xx'

Tesla probably doesn't have an option how they deliver updates as there are not enough dealers compared to the number of cars out there to do it in a timely fashion. BMW has the capability, but it also sounds like they should lift their game.

My hope is that the turnaround for software updates on the i3 will improve because the dealerships become more proficient, BMW streamlines the process, and the software becomes more robust as the kinks are worked out. Remember this is a completely new car, with completely new software. The longer the car is in production the more problems will be resolved until there is precious little left to fix.

These are good concerns, but Apple has proven than OTA updates are secure and reliable. We are all very reliant on our phones (even if not using the iPhone), probably more so than our cars. If I had a choice of which to give up in the morning it would be a tough call, but I'm inclined to think I'm more reliant on my phone.

In any case a few years of OTA updates to iOS ever 2-3 months has not caused me any problems. Taking my car to a BMW dealer for an update is minimum of a 1 day turn around. I have to drive there, drop it off, get issued a loaner drive home, deal with a loaner which does have any of my programming and won't even open my garage door. Then reverse the process the next day. This has to be very expensive for BMW since they are reimbursing the dealer for all of this.

On the other hand, an OTA update to my iPhone typically takes about 20min from start to finish. Even if BMW pays for the bandwidth on both ends it's much cheaper than going through the dealer. Let's suppose the i3 is wildly successful and there are 500 of them that all need to be upgraded at once by your local dealer. Can you imagine the mess as your dealer tries to process 500 cars as quickly as possible? The current BMW s/w upgrade model does not scale.

BMW's manufacturing on the i3 is way out in front of their support and dealer organizations who are lagging badly. The SA's at my dealer are totally clueless on the s/w aspects of the i3. The Tesla / Apple model, both for OTA updates, and sales/support is far superior to the traditional manufacturer/dealer model in both cost to the manufacturer and customer experience.

Over the next ten years automobile dealers are going to experience the same sort of disintermediation that the internet has brought to many other industries. Remember travel agents? Bank lobbies? Would you rather visit an Apple store or a Best Buy to purchase your next iPhone?

 

[I33t]

No problems with that if BMW implement something like the robustness of the iphone updates, but if they dump us into a world like windows update? no thanks.

It would seem they are set on locking their customers into the dealerships at this stage. It might take a couple of generations of iCars for them to release the customers from their dealer shackles.

Its also possible that the programming will improve to the point that there will not be much in the way of updates to fix software bugs once the first generations of iCars mature. They're still on the learning curve...

 

[Boatguy]

Its also possible that the programming will improve to the point that there will not be much in the way of updates to fix software bugs once the first generations of iCars mature. They're still on the learning curve...

I've been in and around the software industry for almost 50yrs (started coding in 1967). S/W updates are here to stay. To quote Jimmy Buffett "It's human nature to miscalculate."

 

[I33t]

Its also possible that the programming will improve to the point that there will not be much in the way of updates to fix software bugs once the first generations of iCars mature. They're still on the learning curve...

I've been in and around the software industry for almost 50yrs (started coding in 1967). S/W updates are here to stay. To quote Jimmy Buffett "It's human nature to miscalculate."

Sure, but the scope and depth of the updates in a mature platform are generally less severe and more minor in nature. Well, assuming the development team are awake. The changes become incremental, fine tuning rather than urgent rescues of failed calculations.

 

[Boatguy]

Its also possible that the programming will improve to the point that there will not be much in the way of updates to fix software bugs once the first generations of iCars mature. They're still on the learning curve...

I've been in and around the software industry for almost 50yrs (started coding in 1967). S/W updates are here to stay. To quote Jimmy Buffett "It's human nature to miscalculate."

Sure, but the scope and depth of the updates in a mature platform are generally less severe and more minor in nature. Well, assuming the development team are awake. The changes become incremental, fine tuning rather than urgent rescues of failed calculations.

Agreed. But all s/w updates are not fixes, some are enhancements. I'm optimistically hoping that our cars are not maxed out the day we take delivery. Like a 2yr old iPhone 5 migrating to iOS 8, they continue to gain new capabilities.