nytimes.com article: Auto Bugs

[lemming]

there is a funny article in the nytimes.com about the modern automobile's complexity and the associated auto bugs that are increasingly difficult to track down and to solve.



the token anecdote is a mercedes benz.

(but it could be any german marque).

[Jason C]

Not funny. Not funny at all.

[Jason C]

What's Bugging the High-Tech Car?
By TIM MORAN
Published: February 6, 2005


Stephanie Pavisic says her Mercedes shakes and stalls, despite 14 trips to the dealer.

ETROIT

ON a hot summer trip to Cape Cod, the Mills family minivan did a peculiar thing. After an hour on the road, it began to bake the children. Mom and Dad were cool and comfortable up front, but heat was blasting into the rear of the van and it could not be turned off.

Fortunately for the Mills children, their father - W. Nathaniel Mills III, an expert on computer networking at I.B.M. - is persistent. When three dealership visits, days of waiting and the cumbersome replacement of mechanical parts failed to fix the problem, he took the van out and drove it until the oven fired up again. Then he rushed to the mechanic to look for a software error.

"It took two minutes for them to hook up their diagnostic tool and find the fault," said Mr. Mills, senior technical staff member at I.B.M.'s T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, N.Y. "I can almost see the software code; a sensor was bad."

Indeed, the high-tech comfort system was confused. The rear temperature sensor of the 2001 Dodge van had gone bad and was sending a signal that the children were freezing at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. The loyal van was doggedly trying to warm them up.

The minivan's problem was unusual only in the specific form it took. Owners across the country and around the globe have posted anguished cries to Internet forums about electronic gremlins that stop windows from rolling all the way up, that unexpectedly dim the interior lights, that drain batteries or that make engines sputter. While most automakers have had problems, quality rankings for some - particularly technology-intensive German luxury brands renowned for engineering - have plunged.

Not only are the glitches annoying, their root causes can be hard to find. Problems are often fleeting and may not be recorded by on-board diagnostics systems.

"It's these transient things that tend to drive people nuts," Mr. Mills said.

David E. Cole, president of the Center for Automotive Research, a consulting firm in Ann Arbor, Mich., says electronics may be the cause of a third of warranty claims.

"The complexity is increasing," he said. "There's just a lot more electronics."

There is more software, too, and it comes from many sources, noted Thilo Koslowski, lead automotive analyst in San Jose, Calif., for a research firm, Gartner G2.

"It's one of the biggest quality issues the automotive industry is dealing with," Mr. Koslowski said. "The problem is that most of these applications in the vehicle are being supplied by a lot of different suppliers."

Mr. Koslowski said the auto industry was not yet very good at integrating software, so buyers inherit systems that can interfere with one another - just as installing incompatible programs can make a personal computer malfunction. He said a niche might soon emerge for companies that integrate various software systems before they go into a vehicle, in the way that companies like Dell sell PC's with the operating system and programs already working in harmony.

Meg Self says I.B.M. is planning to provide that kind of service. She is the company's director of Embedded Systems Lifecycle Management, its name for a new business venture dealing with automotive software and electronics. Ms. Self said that 32 percent of warranty costs could be attributed to dealership service visits at which no problem was found.

I.B.M. predicts that by 2010, almost all cars will have essentially the same mechanical systems. What will make the cars different will be software that operates the systems in ways specific to the brand of car. With so much of a vehicle's identity riding on computer code, carmakers must get the software right.

That would be fine with one frustrated consumer, Stephanie Pavisic of Elmhurst, Ill., who works for a company that specializes in "information integrity" software that double-checks bank transactions for absolute accuracy. Since she bought a fully equipped Mercedes-Benz C230 in 2001, she has suffered through a string of hard-to-diagnose electronics problems.

She recounts episodes of her car shaking uncontrollably and sounding as if it's stalling. In October, on a freeway, it simply shut down. "I take it down the street and it just shakes," Ms. Pavisic said. "People are looking at me, wondering what I'm doing."

Ms. Pavisic has kept a log of the problems, which sent her to the dealership 14 times in three years. Despite all that scrutiny, technicians haven't found a digital explanation. "Probably I'm just not used to driving the car," she says she was told.

She has made friends online with five or six other C230 owners, including one in South Africa, who are trying to diagnose shared problems. While she has considered legal action, she says what she really wants is simply for her car to work.

"Everything is a sensor," she said, reading a list of attempted fixes: "They replaced the fuel-level sensor three times. Replaced the main fuel filter two times. Replaced crankshaft position sensor two times."

Among the electronic flaws on her car, the software-based service system that sends out maintenance reminders went haywire, telling her at 8,000 miles that the car needed its 10,000-mile service. At 17,000 miles, it requested the 20,000-mile service. There have been no more reminders, though the mileage is now 39,000.

As more electronics and software make their way into all sorts of vehicles, hard-to-diagnose problems have cropped up repeatedly. Late last year, Ford warned its dealers that software might disable the continuously variable transmissions in some 30,000 of its new Ford Five Hundred sedans and Freestyle sport wagons. The mechanical parts are fine, but a computer control meant to detect dirty transmission fluid was putting some cars into sluggish "limp home" mode. Ford had to rewrite software to fix the problem, which it says was caught before any vehicles reached customers.

But luxury cars packed with electronic features suffer more because they adopt new technology earlier, said Chance Parker, executive director for auto quality surveys at J. D. Power & Associates. And the gremlins may be especially galling to luxury buyers who expect their cars' pricey "surprise and delight" features to delight them, not to surprise them in unpleasant ways.

Some complaints turn out to be not failures, but features that are difficult to use, said Brian Moody, road test editor for Edmunds.com, the auto information site. Systems that combine many tasks into a single controller, like BMW's iDrive, draw lots of complaints in Edmunds's online forums. "It feels broken to them because they can't figure out how to use it," Mr. Moody said.

BMW says it takes an ordinary driver about a month to become comfortable with iDrive. To help new owners, the company suggests that they bring their cars back to the dealer after two weeks for an intensive training session.

Mercedes-Benz had to replace many of its early Comand integrated control systems because of failures, and has since worked to simplify the controls. Stephan Wolfsried, vice president for electronic systems in Germany, told Automotive News last year that the company had eliminated 600 electronic functions in its cars, starting with the 2003 models, to improve quality and make the remaining functions easier to use. Mr. Wolfsried was quoted as saying these were features that "no one really needed and no one knew how to use."

A spokesman for Mercedes-Benz USA, Robert Moran, said it was important to distinguish technological leadership in safety features from high-tech convenience features. "We are not in a race to out-tech the competition, but do embrace new technologies" that result in better cars, said Mr. Moran, who is not related to this writer.

He said Mercedes had gained 10 points in the latest J. D. Power Customer Service Index, which measures satisfaction with warranty repairs and service, and also showed improvement in Power's Initial Quality Survey, which measures complaints about brand-new cars.

Complex systems that are hard to learn can frustrate early users, but are ultimately accepted. Other systems, though, tend to crash, just like computers. When that happens, drivers can be maddened by failures that force them to stop the car, then restart it; that illuminate the "check engine" light; or that send the car into limp-home mode.

One common problem comes not from software, but from pollution controls. On cars with second-generation diagnostics, a sensor often interprets a loose gas cap as a failure of the evaporative emissions system, tripping the "check engine" light.

Often, problems that seem like electronic failures are owner oversights, said John M. Robison, a BMW and Mercedes enthusiast who often posts to electronic forums.

"People don't read the owners' manual," said Mr. Robison of Vancouver, Wash., a retired manager of large scale computer systems for United Airlines and Bank of America. "When you've got all this complexity, the first thing you have to do is spend half a day with the book."

On the other hand, when he bought his most recent car, a 2002 Mercedes-Benz C240, he made sure to get one without a lot of extra features. It has fewer things to go wrong, he said.

Electronics problems are the bane of luxury cars, he said, and owners often don't know if they have the latest version of the software that runs crucial systems.

He mentioned the drivetrain software in his own Mercedes. "I know there are four different versions of the software," he said. "I don't know which one I've got. If I went to the dealer, I'd ask him to update it, because I'm sure I'm two or three generations away from being current."

Bwahahahaha! The only good thing I can see is that I won't be unemployed for long.