Jeep Wrangler Owners Waiting for Answers Week After an Update Bricked Their Cars
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Jeep Wrangler owners are frustrated after a software update bricked their cars, sparking concerns about the reliability of modern vehicles and the risks of over-the-air updates.
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So far, the Jeep has been fairly reliable, with my issues being:
- Electric door locks and mirrors stopped working
- Radiator leaked
- CV Joints
The Lifetime Warranty has now broken even (~$2500).
Unfortunately, now my issue is rust, and the warranty doesn't cover that.
What I've found that works (for me):
For stuff that isn't yet rusted, Fluid Film. It's easy to buy (it's on the shelf even at Wal-Mart). It's made primarily from lanolin, which is a product of the wool industry and is how sheep stay dry. If I were Very Serious about it, I'd find a shop that would cover the whole bottom of the vehicle (and anything that can be reached through holes) in the stuff and pay them to get that done. (I buy it in spray cans; some shops buy it in 55 gallon drums.)
For stuff that is definitely already rusting, Corrosion-X. It's some kind of oily chemical soup that is supposed to prevent existing rust from getting worse, and also prevent new rust. One interesting feature is that it's available in 3 different viscosities; vaguely speaking, those viscosities are thin, medium, and elephant snot.
The thin one does a fantastic job of creeping around to cover even unseen surfaces, but it washes off the fastest. The thicker ones hang around longer and creep less. (Tradeoffs, I guess.)
I prefer Fluid Film just because it's more natural than some other things are and that makes me feel good in some way that I don't care to rationalize, but Fluid Film is not very good at recovering from existing rust.
Corrosion-X, though? I can get the thin version of that worked into the joint of a completely rusted-stuck pair of box-jointed pliers and have them working very well (and looking fairly decent, though not "new") in a few minutes with a shop rag. I've heard stories of it being used to hose down whole electrical rooms in ocean-going boats. It's amazing stuff. (And it's expensive.)
The practical downside is that these products all feel greasy, and they all turn black with enough time and enough miles. They're all ugly.
For visible painted body panels, the best way I know to deal with small spots of rust from rock chips and stuff is to go full-ass on it. Get the Dremel out, pick an appropriate abrasive stone, and start grinding those little pinholes out until there's nothing but clean, shiny metal surrounded by paint. And then: Fill in with touchup paint that matches the factory paint code. (It's never perfect, but it does get easier to do a job that looks better than little rust spots do with some practice...and the little spots then don't turn into big spots.)
Rust never sleeps. Good luck.
There are many shops in the US which will apply Noxudol both underneath and inside body panels and frame rails with special 360 degree applicators. I believe it is a formula developed in Scandinavia.
All of my cars are sprayed with the stuff for over a decade with no other maintenance.
~3 minutes of homework just now tells me that this is something I should probably have on the shelf in the garage.
I don't know if that's a blessing or a curse for Noxudol as an agent of longevity, but I'll try to see all of that in a positive light. :)
I also don't want to work with fasteners that are coated in bedliner: I'm already not having a fun time of things when I'm crawling under an old car doing some manner of repair. I want every possible advantage while I'm down there, and a well-stuck layer of bedliner seems like a big disadvantage.
As a point of comparison, stuff like Fluid Film [and the others that have been mentioned] can be applied to just about anything under the car that's metal (including bendy things like springs), and can be scrubbed off sometime later if it accidentally gets on body-colored parts using just soap, water, and some elbow grease.
Fasteners that are both rust-free and oily usually come apart like a dream when the time comes, and oily coatings that stay goopy tend to self-heal after being abraded by whatever the tires might kick up from the road.
Fluid coatings seem like the right set of tradeoffs in this non-ideal world compared to something like bedliner.
They're not perfect, but nothing is.
(Ideally, I'd live in a place that doesn't require driving through brine... but my world isn't ideal.)
There is really something to be said for old mechanics and simple electric solutions.
These days _everything_ has an embedded microcontroller and a touchscreen. I'm more on the luddite edge myself...
If anyone is interested I can try to dig up an interview with the car mech on youtube (in swedish) :)
- there must be a physical mechanism providing connectivity to cellular networks
- this mechanism cannot be required to handshake in order to start the car (not everywhere has cell service!)
Manufacturers can certainly increase the difficulty to remove the offending hardware, but given these two axioms is can’t be determined to be impossible.
In 2025, this is true. At some point in the future, I predict this will be false. Maddening.
It's the We Must See You Online Or We Don't Owe You The Service You've Paid For Principle. Sure it starts with software (e.g. Adobe) and content (e.g. Spotify) but I can see it extending to home appliances and vehicles. Because they can.
Word to justify this principle will be used and the words will sound positive and good and consumers will nod their heads and shrug. "For Your Protection." "Safety." "Authentication." "Copyright Protection." i.e. assumed guilty offline until proven innocent online
It's complex enough that I haven't done it yet in my Sienna, but I plan to!
What kind of complete amateur hour operation are they running there at Jeep/Stellantis?
Half the team didn’t have basic understanding of git, and exactly none of the team designing the “smart charge” scheduling had or even had driven an EV.
The complete incompetence of every vehicle OEM team I worked with outside of Tesla and Rivian is part of the reason I left that job.
Why don't classic manufacturers not ramp up their software quality side? I mean it's 2025, they lag behind at least a decade, but software development (infotaiment) practices seems like dark ages.
Except for MCU - from user perspective they just work.
It's more important to start with an organization that cares about quality in the first place.
China has so many people that EE and CS are a dime a dozen, thats why they have a competitive market thats low cost. People are in a jungle trying to survive.
[0]: https://youtu.be/ljOoGyCso8s?t=101
The video is (Supposedly) EEs doing customer support roles thus allowing Cheap PCB for hobbyists, the equivalent in the US does not exist.
Side Note: I hear this is also why SASS never really took off in China. Why pay someone else for software when you can get a dozen people to make your own cheaper.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woven_by_Toyota,_Inc.
How so? All 3 major German Car Groups have invested substantially into software. VW Group set up an entire company with the core goal of allowing different operating practices for software development, which doesn't sound too dissimilar to Woven, at least in its goals.
"Instead of developing software for cars independently, Cariad will act as a coordinator for externally developed technologies – primarily software from Rivian and Xpeng."
By all accounts, rakuten is dealing with absolute horror shows of internal codebases, but they're generally competent at delivering reliable software without a lot of surprises in my experience.
You also have a hard time hiring good mid-levels because you can’t possibly pay them as much as the top people, right? You also have the problem that some of your SWEs might make more than their managers, and that’s just unconscionable.
So what do you do? Have a “secret bonus” program that even most people in HR don’t know about? Hiring becomes tricky: Better make sure you don’t have a live one on the line when the only HR with need-to-know is on vacation.
That even works in the bay area, which is how places like Oxide keep fantastically skilled people despite paying below market rate.
Is it the easiest way to hire? No, but I never said it was.
of course places that value good software engineering and have the cash flow to pay them do so
I've wondered this but it does seem to me that the companies that do the best software also seem to be the newer companies that were driven by investors instead of sales/profitability.
Can classic manufacturers afford the kind of spending it takes to overcome inertia and make quick strides on the software side when it likely won't move the needle on sales anywhere near as much as it costs them?
Edit: for me, it's similar to what we see in the "flying taxi" maybe-autonomous eVTOL field: Airbus gave it a shake, but there are at least half a dozen startups bankrolled by VCs outspending them on a prayer they'll be the one to succeed.
Look at how much VW has spent. They built up entire Software company and they are now giving billions to Rivian.
VW's having to invest huge amounts of their revenue while Rivian's going around burning VC/investor cash without a care in the world for profitability.
I was just answering your question. VW clearly has the money and is willing to spend it.
>Rivian's going around burning VC/investor cash without a care in the world for profitability.
I believe that a huge part of the VW deal with Rivian was that they needed more money. Making cars is expensive and Rivian can not succeed on investments alone.
Quick question for HN: Would you rather work with 1000 mediocre SWEs or 10 really really good ones?
Because MechE are even worse than EEs at doing software (and yes, having worked at EE companies it was 90% cluelessness)
(also let's not pretend that HW companies ran by SW people don't have multiple issues neither ;) )
And as per other commenter
> Because everyone is making $300k+ at MAGA and they're offering half, if that.
Yes. That as well
Not only EEs, and not only any real engineer, but the hard sciences, as well.
Because they use the fight-club metrics for software too:
A x B x C = X, where A is the number of vehicles in the field, B is the probable rate of failure, and C is the average out-of-court settlement.
The company does not initiate a recall (or fix) if the calculated value X is less than the cost of the recall itself.
Edit: If anyone from a car company wants competent software engineering management to build a better team, HMU, I can put you in contact with someone. It'll never happen though.
VW is now at their second billion dollar attempt to fix their software. It's not like they aren't trying.
Also consider how software development works at hardware companies. It is all outsourced, inside the company you have "engineers" who are "managing" the requirements" and in "best cost countries" you have the dev teams, communication is hard and the actual devs are not particularly skilled and definitely not paid to care, they just have to do the requirements.
Tesla was revolutionary because they had Software developers, which they paid normal software developer salaries. VW has just sunk Billions into Rivian to have them do the software.
Money over all. Safety should never impact profits, quality control is a cost not a benefit, poor design due to rushing something out the door, and lowest bidder for everything.
This ought to be the sort of thing that management is there to remind the developers of, but in practice it seems like the opposite is true.
Always good to have a few redundant systems to help with this. Minimum being some way to push alerts to specific versions.
In my experience, management does remind developers of this. Usually after an incident that ultimately boils down to management having incentivized everything else at the cost of good operational practices.
Usually minor firmware recalls make headlines (at least for Tesla), this is a major issue without even a recall announcement?
https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...
The call still came from inside the house.
>Let the dealers upgrade
And every single customer will hate you for this.
But they only did like 3-4 upgrades total while the model was still being produced.
(Bmw experience)
If you are telling customers today that their car will not receive updates or that the only way to receive updates is with an appointment at a dealership, they will not buy your car.
It is not the early 2000s anymore, customers expect and want software support for their vehicles.
Next you'll tell me co-pilot is the best part of office 365
Frankly, this incident seems like an active nhsta would regulate away ota updates on its own. The best interpretation is that this single update is worse than the failed keyed ignition issues that led to push to start regulation.
If Honda could have OTA updated 90s Integras or late 90s model Accords they would closed open programming ports on PCM modules that actually added to the value of those vehicles (see HONDATA and HONDASPEED OBD2 and other programmers that unlock the entire engine behavior profile and still work on some modern vehicles)
I don't think anyone wants software upgrades to require a dealer but that's not the sane alternative.
Actually my customers are customers BECAUSE I shun the internet.
I told them, don't expect reliability --- and this is an example.
Do not use the vehicle under any circumstances and have the dealer take it away and keep it until it is safe to drive again.
Don't worry. It will be fixed in a future update.
Does Microsoft entered the Automotive business ? Because this surely looks like a lot of the issues with Windows, where an update breaks something and Microsoft needs a couple of succesive updates, until they acknoledge and fix the problem.
Also: “power terrain”? For an auto mag, that’s a mistake on par with a software developer deploying to production without a backout plan.