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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

Wait. They're not fixing this with a firmware update?

So, any radio station intern will be able to take out a city's worth of Mazdas moving forward?

Nice.

I've never seen a car stereo get a firmware update. Manufacturers seem to treat these as throwaway components. They're made once and forever sealed. Kind of crappy from the perspective of consumers and the environment.

I guess what I've heard about eg. Tesla is a counterexample.

My ford focus did! For free! Shocking, I know. They added Android Auto and CarPlay support.

There's at least a little bit of a spectrum between Tesla and the total dinosaurs.

Jeep Cherokee does so periodically, but Mopar is relatively well known for having a high quality infotainment system. This may be generally true for any infotainment systems running Android Auto / Apple CarPlay because they need to keep up with the features there, which almost necessitates having a developer team which will almost necessitate putting them to use sometimes

tesla doesn't have wonderful software updates though...

The fixes they make are controversial and many times make things worse especially wrt the infotainment system.

for example, the current system is just SO broken I don't know where to start.

Ok, the USB audio system. You can listen to audio off of a USB flash drive. This is great because they came out with an expensive high fidelity sound system a few years back, and allowing FLAC or ALAC supported high quality uncompressed audio.

otoh the USB software is horrendously broken, and updates have frequently made things worse. reference: https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/comprehensive-usb-bu... (a thread with > 2000 comments)

This is really not true at all anymore. Mazda definitely does update their infotainment system. I actually upgraded my wife's 3 year old Mazda with CarPlay.

Well hang on there! When the Camaro v5 first came out (2009) there was a pretty decent online community and what we discovered was dealers were completely unready to handle software updating and versioning. At the time, iPod/ iPhone/ general mp3 player software kept having breaking updates, so being able to obtain car stereo updates was important but impossible for large portions of the user base.

Which is how I wound up downloading 2 files from a person who apparently wrote the C# code for the radios and was saddened by the situation. The weirdest part was doing the upgrade: stick the files on two usb keys, turn the car on, stick the first key in the one port, remove it, open the driver side door as an indicator and then finish with the second key.

I've thought about that level of ... security every time I read about some malicious car hack.

> turn the car on, stick the first key in the one port, remove it, open the driver side door as an indicator and then finish with the second key

I'm reminded of the farcical firmware reset procedure for C by GE Light Bulbs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BB6wj6RyKo

Though, in GE's defense, light bulbs do have a pretty limited interface.

Such a crazy process heh. I'm guessing it would cost too much to add a physical button for factory resetting?

That video made me laugh. It almost sounds like a parody of a reset procedure. Every time you expect it to be done, he comes back with another cycle of off for 2 seconds and on for 8 seconds.

It's also unfortunate that the dislike button stopped working on YouTube because I'd love to see how many people disliked that.

Using the Return Youtube Dislike extension tells me that it is sitting at 12k dislikes to the 11k likes.

-.-.-.-.-. or 1010101010, sounds right to me when you only have a 1-wire control. Though 10 signals/bits may be a bit excessive?

Though .-....-, Morse for RST, should have been enough.

When your input device is a car door...

> Kind of crappy from the perspective of consumers and the environment.

This is also how you get subscription services to keep it updated.

I worked at a place that did headunit software for like 15m. My understaning, most of the headunit software updates happen over cellular and aren't covered under the customers billing, the company eats those costs so they like those updates to be as small and as infrequent as possible.

Tesla maybe gets around this by using wifi when it's in the garage? Or perhaps the contracts on the tesla says that customers bare the cost of firmware updates that happen outside the service center setting.

> Tesla maybe gets around this by using wifi when it's in the garage? Or perhaps the contracts on the tesla says that customers bare the cost of firmware updates that happen outside the service center setting.

Tesla uses Wi-Fi when possible, but for urgent updates they will push them over cellular at their own expense.

Also, they somewhat have users paying for this by having the monthly $9.99 "premium connectivity" feature package. Though, it isn't required for the cellular connection to function for basic maps.

I just got a firmware update, actually. It was categorized as a recall, which spooked me before I realized what it actually was.

My Subaru has received at least two OTA firmware updates.

I think the reason most people don't think their cars get firmware updates is because a lot of cars hide the wifi connection dialogs and update download controls behind three or four layers of menus, so if you don't know to look for it (and aren't especially interested in poking around through the menus of your head-unit), it's off by default and you don't know it's there.

The side effect of this is that many people won't set up the Wi-Fi, so OTA would be reliant on LTE releases, if the car has one.

My 2017 Ford Fusion does over wifi.

My Land Rover got an over-the-air update to add support for Amazon Alexa just the other day, completely out of the blue. It's not just luxury or tech cars that do this kind of thing these days.

FWIW, I would consider all Land Rover vehicles luxury vehicles.

The Defender is an off road work machine. I don't know if they have some new shiny model to drive where a normal car would do.

I guess if you're in the UK they're just domestic vehicles you see everywhere, and they're treated as workhorses not luxury.

Wouldn't that be the Range Rover now?

Range Rover is a type of Land Rover.

I get that but I don't think of Land Rovers as luxury oriented. It's specifically their Range Rover line of vehicles

Well, they're undoubtedly marketed differently, but IMHO it's a double-bluff.

Range Rover markets directly to upper-middle-class suburbanites, and show off the leather seats, fancy touchscreens and alloy wheels of shiny, clean cars.

Land Rover markets 'adventure', shows cars fording rivers and crossing deserts, and offers optional winch, expedition roof rack and ladder. But they still offer leather seats, fancy touchscreens and alloy wheels; and mostly sell to upper-middle-class suburbanites.

To me they seem like extremely similar products, predominantly targeting the same demographic, just with different marketing.

My Kia's infotainment system got a firmware update, but it was not OTA. I actually had to pay to order an SD card with the update - but it was well worth it as it added CarPlay support.

What size was the SD card? Was it read only, or could you format it and use it for something else later on? Just curious :)

my focus RS had an infotainment upgrade. it even dropped a file back on the USB stick which i then sent back to ford and it registered that the unit had been upgraded.

Wow, hold on a second... This also means random changes won't be forced upon you and they need to make the effort to get it right the first time.

You’d hope that’s what it means but in practice they ship whatever they have by the deadline and often whatever they have means… “obscure bugs”

Can't or won't? Is it really impossible for them to develop a process to do a firmware update at the dealer? Even if that involves removing the radio... How do they program the radios at the factory?

Mazda owner here. When I go in for standard maintenance the firmware will get updated if there's something available.

What Mazda seems to discourage is owners bringing in their cars for the update only. They also can't really diagnose issues with the Connect hardware (they didn't build it) so doing a complete unit swap was their only established procedure for a system problem. They eventually added more diagnosis when all of the people hacking their units were bricking things and then asking for a free replacement.

It doesn’t even have to be an intern. You could set up a pirate radio station with a DAB/HD Radio transmitter on a frequently-listened station at an overpass and see what happens.

Risk was already there. Have you seen the way interns drive?

> So, any radio station intern will be able to take out a city's worth of Mazdas moving forward?

Well if the server exploded because someone passed a wrong get parameter I'm not blaming whoever that did it.

Apparently a normal firmware update isn't possible for anyone who already got hit by this, because it gets stuck in a reboot loop which prevents the firmware from being updated.

I think "take out" is unnecessarily hyperbolic language. It seems they're stuck on a radio station, not inoperable or dangerous.

Indeed, it seems like an effective way for a radio station to "capture" more listeners!

WKW 93.4 FM, all ads, all the time.

Also, nav is broken, and presumably emergency broadcast features are hosed as well. I wonder about backup cameras, and various driver assist things.

If a Model 3 had an analogous bug, then everything from the windshield washers to the climate control and rear view mirrors would be borked (I'd guess phone-based unlock would be too, at a minimum.)

Many Priuses integrate parts of the power train into the radio. I suspect they'd have serious issues too.

Of course, what matters is how integrated all this stuff is in a Mazda. That, I don't know.

> Many Priuses integrate parts of the power train into the radio. I suspect they'd have serious issues too.

I’m sorry, they do what now? Why would you even do that?

Well I used to be able to control the ABS on individual wheels with VAG cars (Audi, Bentley, Skoda & VW) in the mid 00's.

I could make a VAG car hand brake turn going into a corner all from a computer remotely, just by switching on the ABS braking on the rear wheel on the opposite side to a turn. I could control the throttle remotely as well.

Why are people shocked at the way these global corporations are treating security and privacy?

Its only their lawyers that are protecting them.

> Many Priuses integrate parts of the power train into the radio. I suspect they'd have serious issues too.

Priuses can display powertrain data on the screen (such as which engines are operating, whether regen is happening, etc.) but I have never seen anything in the screen on any Prius that actually sends control data to the powertrain.

> If a Model 3 had an analogous bug, then everything from the windshield washers to the climate control and rear view mirrors would be borked (I'd guess phone-based unlock would be too, at a minimum.)

Actually it's possible to phone-unlock and drive a Model 3 with the screen completely turned off or broken. I've done it.

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