Tesla issues 5th recall for the new Cybertruck within a year, the latest due to rearview camera
Tesla issues 5th recall for the new Cybertruck within a year, the latest due to rearview camera
We gotta stop calling software updates recalls. Yeah I get that it’s fun to bash on the Cybertruck but this isn’t really that interesting.
Now that sticky accelerator pedal… yikes.
Recall is a legal term for the car industry which includes stuff like reporting obligations. So if the defect meets the severity level of a recall it should be called as such, even if it is 'just' a software update. Ambiguous terms for safety violations are dangerous and may cost lives.
Recall is also the plural term for a group of Cybertrucks.
Rear view cameras have been federally required on passenger vehicles since module year 2018 in the US market. So yeah, regardless of the error, it's a recall because the result makes the vehicle noncompliant.
I can't imagine the threshold here isn't different though. If each of these recalls required hardware modifications Tesla would either hide the data or lawyers would be able to argue they weren't major safety violations. I think it's a plus that many things can be fixed expediantly with software updates and the threshold to do so is low.
I’ve had software recalls for Toyotas and Hondas, both of which involved physical recall paperwork and required me to visit a dealer to install the new software.
Just because a software recall can be remedied over the air it doesn’t make it any less of a recall. As others have said, there’s a legal definition to a recall. They are issued by the NHTSA and require specific legal responses from the manufacturer.
On the one hand I agree, but also just because it can be fixed over the air doesn't mean it's not a major problem.
Plus imagine if a car manufacturer put VERY shitty software into their cars. If a manufacturer has 100 recalls a year, I want to know why. If they have 1, I want to know why.
Just because they are more easily fixed, doesn't mean the recall isn't important.
There are also plenty of dumb, nearly inconsequential recalls on regular cars too. Including things like "place this warning sticker in your manual". That's a recall.
If the vehicle was sold broken and has to be fixed, it’s a recall.
If it’s just software, why can’t it be downloaded?
It can be? You literally just download the OTA update and the vehicle installs it from your own home. “Recall” implies that you have to go into the shop but that’s simply not true.
Some can be, some the manufacturer doesn't want to risk it so they make you take it into a dealership to update from a USB.
I recall when I bought my first hybrid that the dealer said there were something like 15 different computers controlling things, from the ICE engine to the transmission to the charging of the battery, etc. They weren’t networked together.
I also once ran afoul of a software bug in the ECU of a Honda CR/V. That’s the embedded system that manages the whole operation of the engine - from fuel injection to timing to emissions etc. As they progress through model years they use different ECUs that require different software. Even though I work in IT, I wouldn’t feel comfortable trying to update it myself, given the different models, firmware revisions, etc. I was more than happy to take that car to a dealer to have them confirm my car had buggy software and to upgrade it to the right new version.
Tesla engineers managers treating it like software. "Ship it and we can patch it in production."
You know it's never the engineers and always the managers even with software, right?
always the managers even with software
You know, I want this to be 100% true, but it's not.
I've been in software development for over a decade and while the managers are definitely high up there on the list of causing problems, I've also worked with enough shitty developers that don't care enough. Then not everyone provides the same level of code review, some people are pretty bad at it and just rubber stamp things, and then a problem gets through.
Ah you speak the truth. Fixed.
One of these days, an engineer, the best and the brightest of us, will invent a way for it to be technically impossible to fix in production. They will be a hero, and save hundreds of companies from bad decisions, and they will never become famous or wealthy for it.
What’s funny to me is there is nothing new in it. It’s trumped up garbage. It still has a chassis and 4 wheels. Nothing new. It’s stuffed with old tech that doesn’t work. These losers are guinea pigs and probably get scammed annually.
As much as I think the cybertruck is a stupid vehicle and agree that teslas are built like shit, from what I understand this isn't an atypical amount of recalls for a new vehicle platform.
Without even paying much attention the two I know of, the gas pedal and the finger slicer are unacceptable however.
Never let critical thought get in the way of our 2 minutes hate. This is about interpreting it in a way to justify our dislike, rather than whether the current thing actually does justify it.
Just dropping a link to the relevant, most recent upload from Some More News aka Cody's Showdy. TL;DW: the cyber truck is an oversized, overpriced, unreliable, terrible design that's dangerous to everybody in and around it.
Thanks. I'm glad someone did it. I was going to.
Tesla? Making shoddy vehicles?
shockedpicachu.jpeg
I see Cybertrucks all the time. Everything about it is so ridiculous that I am genuinely embarrassed for the driver. I think it is the scale. If it was the size of a Hyundai Santa Cruz, the aesthetic might work...maybe. It just looks silly, gawdy, unfinished, and cheap.
The folks at Some More News made a really great point: The truck segment is ripe for disruption. People who need trucks hate the monstrosities that truck companies are putting out. The Cybertruck, however, isn't disrupting the market. It just looks weird. It's just as heavy and big as other trucks.
Imagine if a company put out a small truck. Not too powerful, not too big, good sight lines and a nice, big bed. That would be disruptive.
Then again, I'm a Harbinger of Failure and listening to me is probably a bad idea. I assume people aren't fucking idiots so maybe just build bigger and bigger trucks that are less and less useful
At this rate, they are better off just scraping the Cybertruck and issue refunds to everyone who was stupid enough to buy one.
or build in a return-to-factory-by-yourself feature into them.
Are you suggesting that they get sent on route with no drivers in them and have the risk of running over pedestrians and cyclists on the way back to the factory?
Oh yeah, here's Some More News on that.
My new Hyundai did this, sorta, and it also had to be recalled. Shifting into reverse would immediately display the rear view camera (good) but then about 25% of the time it would flash a dialogue box on top of the display with instructions on how to operate the display (bad). You could select “Dismiss” or “Don’t Show This Again”. Selecting “Don’t show This Again” did nothing (worse). With the dialog present you could not see the rear view camera display and if you are one of many drivers with muscle memory, the car was already rolling backwards when you realize you cannot see (unacceptable).
Elon sucks and I would never buy a Tesla but just adding this as a reference point that software in cars generally sucks.
At least your Hyundai had a working rearview mirror so you had another way to see behind you.
Good point
design shoulda gone into the circular filing system at the beginning
I've never heard of something even getting recalled more than once before they aren't being sold and nobody has one anymore; how the fuck do these ugly fucking things get 5 recalls and are still seen regularly on the road? 😬
Most cars have recalls, usually for benign shit. My Honda had to go in for a fuel pump. Now it needs to go in for some infotainment cable. I'm pretty sure there were a couple others, too.
5 in a year is a lot though. Even for a new model.
Ford just got named the "Racall King" last month.
My wife's Edge had a faulty backup camera too, but Ford didn't issue a recall, so I had to shell out hundreds of dollars for a new one and install it myself.
They also have defective ABS modules that corrode when in contact with brake fluid. They did issue a recall for it with the Fusion and MKX but not the Edge. Hers lost complete braking pressure while driving because the ABS valves stick open and bypass the line going to the brake calipers. Luckily, she didn't crash, but once again, I had to shell out $800 to get a new one and spent two days replacing it myself.
Okay.. so I knew this would be posted here when I saw it, and I knew there'd be a circlejerk of people dumping on Tesla/Elon because oh no a recall! One that can even be fixed with software.
How many of these other recalls did you see in the past few weeks though since Sept 18th? How many of these landed on the technology sub at that? These are all also EVs (with 1 PHEV)
VW (100k) - https://electrek.co/2024/09/18/volkswagen-halt-us-id-4-production-100k-vehicle-recall/
-Door handles leaking causing electrical problem, stop production until 2025
KIA (12.4k)- https://electrek.co/2024/09/24/kia-recall-12400-ev9-suvs-faulty-remote-parking-assist/
-Remote parking systems might not stop the car.
Jeep [PHEV] (194k) - https://apnews.com/article/jeep-recall-park-outdoors-fire-risk-d201d4a90b271da96724f77ec034e459
-Battery Fire Risk - STOP CHARGE AND PARK OUTSIDE.
BYD (96.7k) - https://cnevpost.com/2024/09/29/byd-recalls-evs-fire-risk/
-Fire Risk - Bad capacitor on PCB (not a battery specific issue)
Do you know how many of those that you linked have had multiple recalls on them? Clearly some are more significant than a malfunctioning backup camera, but one of the reasons the cyber truck story has more bagging on it is because the number of recalls. It's a larger indicator, imo, or a poorly made product where the others may be one missed QA or engineering issue, not systemic issues.
Well, the ID4 has had 18 since 2021.
Tesla started doing Cybertrucks in late 2023 though, so in that same time frame it's 4 for ID4, and 8 for all of 2023/2024 (Edit: and the initial start of ID4 in 2021 had 4, and then 6 in 2022)
https://www.cars.com/research/volkswagen-id.4/recalls/?page=1
The EV9 has had 4, all in 2024.
https://www.cars.com/research/kia-ev9/recalls/
The site doesn't have BYD, and while the site has jeep, I can't seem to find the specific PHEV variant as nothing shows in 2024,but the Cherokee has 4 in 2023
As a second note to my main post - I was tracking these since the VW recall because I read awhile ago that recalls happen in clusters, and someone did a paper on it once (and i actually found the paper back then to confirm). When a company is working through a recall and knows there might be an issue, they'll often hold onto it for awhile if they can (there's probably some statutory limit) and wait for someone else to announce a recall. The person who announces the first recall in a cluster will often get more headlines/news and a greater impact on their stock.
I thought that was interesting when I read it last time and started keeping track on my VW post on the electric vehicles community when I saw the VW one which was the first I'd seen for EVs in awhile and wanted to see how many we'd get clustered together. It's still going with this new CyberTruck one, but I'm not 100% sure that VW was the first.
You know, in some ways, I appreciate Musk. He has gone out of his way to demonstrate, for all to see, how billionaire parasites get to fail upward no matter how irredeemably incompetent and vile they happen to be.
Scumwads like gates and Bezos hides it all behind walls of pr propaganda, but not Musk.
I wonder what a cyberguillotine would look like.
The Cyberguillotine is the door of the Cybertruck's trunk, which famously has no sensor to block closing it when something is in the way, and is powerful and sharp enough to cut fingers.
It can sense when something's blocking it from closing all the way. It was just foolishly programmed to only pop back open a few times. Think it was the third or fourth was where it went into guillotine mode.