Random headlight failure

[John H]

"I actually have a lot of tolerance for this sort thing. It’s a dangerous fault but it’s obviously due to a branch of code that doesn’t get triggered very often. It’s so infrequent that nobody here has said it’s happened again so a dealer service centre isn’t going to see it either."

That's very true

 

[Bam Bam]

If it has happened at the start of a journey I wonder if it is one of those where the car hasn't gone through its full 'boot-up' sequence.

I once managed to confuse the car by locking it, realising I had done a terrible parking job, and quickly unlocking and driving before it had booted up. Then put into forward and then reverse gear in quick succession. The car couldn't cope with all this and stopped working in the middle of the car park. Switched it off and on again and it came back to life as normal.

It was presumably my fault because I just put it in gear didn't wait until it said 'ready.'

 

[Corindikev]

As someone has already mentioned modern cars and especially EVs are computers with wheels. I spent most of my life in the information technology sector & when PCs appeared in the 1980s with complex graphical user inputs and point and click devices, bugs kept popping up and after a long period of investigation by Tech savvy IT people, switching the system off & rebooting resolved the problem. Now we get software fixes constantly & upload these from the web.

It still happens though and after recently installing 2 new mini PCs at home my wife complained she could not print. Her computer said it didn't have the correct printer drivers. After 15 minutes of uninstalling & reinstalling the printer, re-installing drivers, checking the network, WiFi etc & nothing worked, I rebooted the machine & it was back to normal. This is with the latest version of Windows 11.

So until someone figures out how to prevent bugs 100% we are stuck with this stuff. OTA updates would be good but these issues will always occur until every possible scenario and sequence has been included & this is probably as likely as winning a billion dollar lottery with one ticket.

 

[T1 Terry]

My wife was in IT tech support for BHP and later sold off to CSC when BHP thought breaking up something that was working well was a good move

She wrote doco on all the known problems and a self help newsletter for all the Blue Scope and BHP Billiton mines office staff .... and a separate one for the tech support team ....this was at the top of every newsletter
The first law of tech support, wait
The second law of tech support, ask them to try turn it off and on again
Third law of tech support, look in the doco and see if this has come up before
Fourth law of tech support, if none of those things fixed it, time for coffee

T1 Terry

 

[Anon70]

I wonder how much of ISO 26262 Chinese manufacturers have to comply with to get European certification?

ISO 26262-1:2018

Road vehicles — Functional safety — Part 1: Vocabulary

www.iso.org