Oh, perfect — now our cars can BSOD. At least that’s how it looks from a forum post showing a Blue Screen of Death on a Ford Mustang Mach E, warning that an over-the-air software update failed, and now the car can’t be driven. The BSOD includes a phone number to reach Ford’s Customer Relationship Center and even presents a wall of text with specific instructions to the wrecker driver for loading the bricked vehicle onto a flatbed. Forum users questioned the photo’s veracity, but there are reports of other drivers getting bricked the same way. And we’ve got to point out that even though this specific bricking happened to an EV, it could just have easily happened to an ICE vehicle too; forum members were particularly prickly about that point. It would be nice if OTA software updates on vehicles could always roll back to the previous driveable state. Still, we suppose that’s not always possible, especially if memory gets corrupted during the update. Maybe the best defense against a bricked vehicle would be to keep a beater around that doesn’t need updates to keep running.
How about a nice game of chess? WarGames may have asked that question in 1983, but three years earlier, you could have played a text-based version of chess on the earliest known ancestor of MS-DOS. A 5-1/4″ floppy bearing version 0.1C of 86-DOS — serial number 11 — by Seattle Computer Products has been located and uploaded to the Internet Archive. It’s about as rudimentary as an OS can be, including the familiar COMMAND.COM and SYS.COM, plus two files devoted to the chess game; the whole distribution consists of nine files. By the time version 1.00 came around, that had swollen to 19 files — talk about feature creep! See it in “action” below.
A high school friend of ours used to brag about his father, who ran a commercial print shop, being able to look at any color and tell you the exact recipe for mixing inks to match it. We never tested him on that skill, but if you feel like you’ve got the RGB equivalent of perfect pitch, check out Hexcodle. It’s like Wordle, but instead of figuring out the word of the day, you have to identify the hex RGB values that make up a color swatch. Each guess will tell you which digits are wrong, both in direction and magnitude. We needed all five guesses to get to Blueblood (#0F5184), and given how bad we are at colors, it should be easy for you to do better.
Back in our lab-rat days, we ran a lot of samples through centrifuges, and we always wondered what it looked like in there. Well, Maurice Mikkers figured out how to get a camera inside a centrifuge, and the results are pretty amazing. Is there a YouTube channel, we hear you ask? Why yes — yes, there is. You’re welcome.
And finally, we’ve always been impressed by just how complicated musical instruments are and the processes used to create them. Repairing them, though, turns out to be just about as fascinating, especially when you watch someone who has been in the trade for 30 years do it. Wes Lee’s repair of a battered Boy Scout bugle initially caught our eye mainly because we had an instrument just like that back in the day, much to our parents’ chagrin. Watching Wes bring the tortured instrument back to life is amazing; we’d never have guessed an instrument as simple as a bugle would have so much complexity. It’s strangely soothing to watch him gently massaging the dents out of the brass, especially in places where it looks like the metal is on the verge of tearing. It’s always a treat to watch a craftsman at work.
“Maybe the best defense against a bricked vehicle would be to keep a beater around that doesn’t need updates to keep running.”
2004 Honda
My Model T will Survive an EMP Blast.
But will your forearm survive a backfire blast?
B^)
The BSOD is plausible to me, given my truck’s current state. 2016 GM, went in for routine service in september. It has had issues since new with the windows refusing to close (fully open and close, and if that doesn’t work the turn vehicle off and restart twice. Not a good solution coming out of a toll booth in february…) for which the dealer did a body module software update. Since then, the window problem persists, but there is a check engine with no code. Cleared it with a scanner, got through inspection, and it came back starting the vehicle leaving the inspection site. Dealer is clueless, GM is clueless, I am disheartened.
Now go back a year to the Rivian issue with BSOD failures, and….
Just don’t use windows, use Linux instead :p
I enjoyed watching both the videos of instrument repair and centrifuge channel!
And the Centrifuge Camera Channel did not have ads!
Or, just keep two beaters around and never purchase the new vehicle with incompetent software.
Even the little things in poorly designed modern vehicles are a pain; we have a 2020 Chevy Colorado whose radio actually has a knob for volume, but it reports to software, likely in the BCM. Previous driver shuts off the vehicle with the radio on and LOUD, then the next driver gets in, turns the key and gets their eardrums blown out for 45 to 90 seconds while they helplessly crank on the volume knob before the controller even acknowledges that it HAS a volume knob.
Or the cars with presettable electric seats which auto adjust when they see a specific ignition key, a mischiveous ‘last user’ of the key has set the seats to crush you into the steering wheel
“… the next driver gets in, turns the key and gets their eardrums blown out for 45 to 90 seconds while they helplessly crank on the volume knob …”
^^^ This, exactly. My wife has a 2019 CRV, and I swear at it every time that happens. In fact, I swear at the car probably every time I drive it. It’s never a running or drive-train issue that I swear at – it’s always the electronic ‘features’ designed by clueless engineers at Honda, most of whom seem never to have driven ANY car, much less the ones resulting from their flawed thinking and lack of foresight.
My 2018 Cruze has a setting to limit the audio startup volume to prevent exactly this. Menu dive through your settings to see if you can find the same.
Found
On
Roadside
Dead
Fix
Or
Repair
Daily
Alternatively:
Funky
Old
Rebuilt
Dodge
First
On
Race
Day
Fourth On Race Day (at a time when there was only “The Big 3”, coming in 4th would be pretty bad).
Sigh. My ‘beater’ is a 2007 Saturn Vue in need of a rebuilt transmission… and a rusted out subframe causing the entire engine block to sink.
They just don’t make them like they used to.
Sadly, I was forced to buy a new car last year, because of GM’s sad lack of rustproofing of important structural components. While I’m happy I now have an EV, I also get all of the lack of privacy that comes with a modern vehicle.
The hex code one is fun and interesting, except you can just do a binary search across all the digits and always get the right answer.
They should create one where it treats it as just 3 values (RGB) instead of 6, that way you have to actually make informed guesses.
I have a Mach E and I was at the dealer for a recall (not a big deal, but I decided to be proactive and have it done because I like the car), and the service guy said he had one too and his had done this in his garage and he had to have it towed. He said he had turned off automatic updates after that. I might do so too. I have yet to get an update in the two years I’ve owned the car that really felt like a useful update. I’m eagerly awaiting an update that will automatically change lanes with the self driving feature when you hit the turn signal though.
Otherwise, the car is fantastic – one of the best I’ve ever owned. I’m sure my opinion would go rapidly downhill if it were stuck in my garage though.
I’m amazed this is news, I thought it was well known?
I’ve had the BSOD on Fords all the way back to the Focus I had back in 2008 and on a few others after that…
” It would be nice if OTA software updates on vehicles could always roll back to the previous driveable state.”
I’d phrase that a little differently. I’d say “It would be nice if OTA software updates on vehicles could always be disabled by whoever holds title to the vehicle”. Ownership confers certain rights of control and disposition. In my opinion, any alterations made to the vehicle without the owner’s express and informed consent constitute vandalism.
“Ownership confers certain rights of control and disposition.”
That’s true, but what makes you think you own the vehicle? We live in the age of long term rentals.
I think when restoring a battered bugle you should really consider why it was battered in the first place, some things are done for a reason.
And it could have been done in by someone who didn’t know any better, like your 2 year old little sibling who used it to bang on frying pan
Then there is that song from the movie “This is the Army”;
“I’m going to murder the bugler”
I think it was sung by Irving Berlin
The irritating part is that it is NOT that hard to have a device that can’t be bricked by an update. One of my old employers did it with their video test equipment – you put all the stuff that can be updated into one block of flash. Now you add a second block of flash, same size, and way to switch between the two. Updates download into the block that IS NOT the one you booted from. If the update seems to succeed, you flip the switch and reboot. If it doesn’t, well, you don’t.
And if boot fails, boot watchdogs can try flipping the switch to get to a bootable chunk of flash.
Not, actually, that complicated.
BSOD … Begs the ‘question’ of why we have all the electronic garbage on our vehicles in the first place! Bricking a car should not be possible other than if something ‘mechanical’ goes wrong. My new Forester has a ton of unneeded junk. Eyesight, warnings (road my be icy, look in back seat, etc.), beep for this, beep for that, blue tooth, Starlink, talk to home office, etc…. Yuck… I like everything about the vehicle, physically, but not the added overhead that isn’t necessary to get you from point A to point B. Keep your ‘tech’ in your hand-held phone if you like this stuff… Not in the vehicle.
There’s a YouTube video that Toyota announced a $10000 pickup.
They said it was for small businesses and wouldn’t have ll the extras that have pushed the price of pickups out of the reach of us mere mortals.
I will believe it when I see it.
I spotted a Fisker Karma (or so I thought) one day when a friend of mine and I were heading out to lunch.
We just happened to be going to the same building where the driver went (restaurant strip-mall) and I saw where the driver went. I’ve loved these cars since I first saw a picture of a prototype, so I wanted to go express my appreciation. I approached the guy and apologized for the intrusion, and told him that I saw him drive up in the Fisker and told him how much I loved those cars. He happily told me that it wasn’t his, but a loaner, that his was in the shop getting a firmware update and the one he was driving was actually a Karma Revero (the company that bought the remains of the original company renamed the company and the car).
We had a great chat about the cars, but the one point I made sure I made with him is that he made me love the cars even more for the sole reason that *they cannot push an OTA update to the car!*