• wizzor@sopuli.xyz
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    6 months ago

    Have you ever run a software upgrade to another brand of car? I was once present when a BMW was updated and it took 40 minutes to scan the CAN for all of the control network members, after which the update could start.

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Shitty design is still shitty design, even if all car makers are bad at it.

      And I’d bet it comes down to hardware decisions that ended up saving tiny percentages of the total cost.

      • TechNerdWizard42@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        It’s more the opposite. The hardware level updaters, are usually small pieces of non-updateable code called bootloaders. These are purposefully made small, slow, and ROBUST. They do parity checks on everything, status checks, store local copies of data transfer in weird esoteric ways to not be disturbed during the actual update.

        The issue is that you can make it work 99% of the time without issue way faster. But bricking a car that then has to be towed for free to a service center and flashed is super expensive. So the fix is slow and robust updates that happen when the user isn’t even there.

    • Professorozone@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      LOL my cars are from 1988, 1999 and 2003. I don’t get updates. I do have to do a lot of repairs, but no updates.

      • wizzor@sopuli.xyz
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        6 months ago

        This was a car from early noughties, so some of them do get updates, but yea, probably not anymore.

        Edit: and you need to have factory diagnostics tools to install them.

    • Cort@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Yep, my ford took 25 minutes to do the update that added Android Auto, after 2 minutes of downloading it to a USB stick. The car only has USB 2.0, so that could be a factor though