Tobold's Blog
Friday, July 26, 2024
 
Rebooting an electric car

Over 20 years ago a joke circulated on the internet about a fictive dispute between Bill Gates and General Motors. Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: "If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.". To which GM reportedly replied with a whole list of what if a car worked like MS Windows statements, starting with "For no reason at all, your car would crash twice a day." and ending with "You would press the 'start' button to shut off the engine.". Today I felt as if that joke had caught up with reality. And not just because both of the cars in our household have a start button that you press to shut off the engine. 

Yesterday the whole dashboard of my wife's electric car crashed due to an unknown bug. And it took us two days to find somebody to fix it, with the fix being to "reboot" the car. The first guy who had tried that did disconnect one battery, which didn't work. Apparently there are two separate batteries in the electric car, and you needed to disconnect both for 5 minutes to get the car to reboot. The first guy was an experienced road assistance mechanic, but the skills he had acquired during his career obviously weren't all that helpful when dealing with a computer bug in an electric car.

- posted by Tobold @ 5:07 PM Permanent Link
Comments:
For those of us lucky enough to live in households with multiple vehicles we can accept that level of unreliability. I couldn't imagine being a single parent in a rural environment with young children and suffer through that though. Or someone with health issues. I recently bought another car - it's a 2012 though so I don't think I'll have many reboot issues. Good luck!
# posted by Blogger Janous : 26/7/24 19:47
 
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