EVs still have major quality problems, and it’s mostly about the software

I own a Mach e. Seeing Ford that high is terrifying to think how bad it can get because as high as Ford is on that list, it sucks pretty bad.

Thanks to badly written software, you can literally design "planned obsolescence" into your products.

"The computer says you need to replace your 15,000 dollar battery pack."

"But my car is only six months old!"

"Yeah, but the Computer SAYS-"

I think a big part of the issue is that the Chinese market is fucking huge, and the Chinese market also seems to love gimmicky software crap in their cars, and often emphasizes that over hardware features and other general aspects of, you know, being a car. It’s an unfortunate and obnoxious case of carmakers following the money.

Maybe if they'd focus more on making them functional vehicles instead of smartphones on wheels, it would simplify that problem.

Exactly! Like, take a basic car, and make it an EV. It doesn't need to be a spaceship. I just need speed, charge level, maybe a tach or electrical load indicator, and a range estimator, all of which already exist on a basic car's dash. The head unit can remain a separate device that connects to my phone for navigation and phone. That's it.
- Yep!
  
  I've seen enough EV conversions to know it's not rocket science. The instrument cluster just displays the values relayed to it over CAN bus, most of the sensors are the same as they are on a conventional ICE vehicle, and the only real difference is the powertrain. There's some consideration for the battery placement and management, but that's pretty much it. Leave the touchscreens in the backseat for the kids, and give me physical buttons to operate the vehicle.
- Like the Ami, but just enough bigger and faster to accommodate out of town commutes?
...but then how will they rent you services like heated seats?

They need to be able to turn cars into a glorified gacha machine so that they can make money from Whales, too! /s
- Unless there's major pushback from car buyers in the next 10 years, I'm going to be holding on to my 2017 hybrid for as long as possible. May even look into doing an EV conversion on it or possibly some aftermarket way to make it a plug-in hybrid (there is a plug-in hybrid version of my car, and I've been looking to trade-in for that, but I cannot find any within 250 miles of me).
I've been calling them McMansions on wheels, but considering how much tracking they do, I may start using your analogy.
- Wish I could take credit for the term, lol, but I heard it elsewhere.

Turns out making drivable iPhones is a shitty idea compared to the highly simplified electric motorcycles that work well? Huh. Who'da thunk?

We are locked into the big heavy vehicle paradigm. People have become so accustomed to moving around in a 2t vehicle they have forgotten about the alternatives. Lithium batteries are not a good fit for this type of vehicle and most of the time the use case is single occupant, where the bicycle is king of efficiency.

Nissan leafs and toyota Prius have been around in big numbers for more than a decade.

It's the enshitiffication that all modern cars are doing: cramming way too much tech into something that is for moving people around, not entertaining them

Yup, I drive a Toyota Prius and am looking at Nissan Leafs. My wife and I hate all the smart crap in cars, and it's pretty much everywhere now...

Software that is completely unnecessary. There is zero reason a battery powered vehicle needs to be much different software wise than an ICE. They do not need 20" touchscreens packed with a custom infotainment system written by hardware focused developers.

The Megane E-tech has functionality in its satnav that lets you plot a route with charging stations on the way, showing how much capacity you will have left when you get to them. Not essential, but very useful for somebody who is new to EVs.

Software that communicates with power companies to allow the car to charge overnight at advantageous rates, or even feed energy back into the grid. Again, not essential, but good for the customer and helps with the transition to green electricity.
- I have that in my ICE car and I never use it (map of gas stations correlated with remaining fuel). That's not specific to an EV.
  
  Any of those features can be in a smartphone attached to your dashboard. Sure you have some benefits in accessing the car data, but they are small.
Electric cars need software to smooth out motor output to create an enjoyable driving experience. They also need to manage battery health and regenerative braking.

Edit: cars like the Ioniq N seem to be the exception while most cars have problems like the Mercedes EQS that people report has unpredictable braking which means you can't learn how to control it.
- The first thing is something ICE vehicles also do. A BMS, figuring out regenerative braking, and maybe one or two other things are the only things that need to be different. Car makers have shoved all the software they can into EVs without the experienced developers to do it on the hopes that they can fix shit in the future and charge subscription fees for it.
- battery controllers and motor controllers are available as cheap, simple, stable, off-the-shelf dedicated hardware and there's no reason budget evs would need to do any coding for them, maybe just some variable adjustment. those things are not controlled by the user facing software being talked about here.

don't make them into smartphones. problem solved, you are welcome auto industry.

And since when have you known any computer to be problem-free?

Software that's not made from overworked engineers working 80 hours a week pressured to work even faster to complete this week's sprint.

I'm so tired of "computers are buggy and everyone accepts that". No! Computers don't have to be buggy, you just have to not shove trash software on it made by morons doing the bare minimum.

I have software that's been running on servers for literal years, not a single bug. The hardware's been sized appropriately and I wrote good, sustainable and maintainable code. My computers all can easily do weeks and months of uptime. I pick up my laptop and open the lid and 100% of the time it wakes up from sleep and it's ready to go.

The overwhelming majority of "production" and "enterprise quality" code I work with is total garbage that should never have been written and its author never hired in the tech space. We repeatedly get reports on how X car manufacturer was pwned for not following best practices that are a decade or two old.

Corporate greed makes EVs suck because it's developed for as cheap as possible and the target is "good enough customers tolerate it". Shit barely works properly when going through the happy path and the error path just... usually crashes your car.

I've had to reboot my car at red lights way too fucking often and it's not even an EV. 2020 model and the infotainment reliably crashes if I have a Slack or Zoom call going because it tries to read the phone number off my phone over Bluetooth and doesn't know how to handle a null phone number = the radio crashes.

It's not fucking rocket science.

Seriously.

Yes, there's an element of complexity that makes it hard to completely avoid bugs. But there's way more arbitrary complexity that doesn't serve a purpose and unnecessary dependencies that create more problems than they solve causing issues than there is just the inherent difficulty of what software actually needs to do.

Also, maybe just don't copy paste code from 20 different tracking tools wherever they tell you to.

Edit: also cloud everything. The amount of overhead it takes to put 100 million users in the cloud when there's nothing they need that can't be done locally is stupid as hell.

The good news is programming everywhere is garbage.

The headline is very misleading.

This is NOT just about build quality of EVs or engine problems or problems inherent with EVs, it includes minor annoyances that aren't quality problems. Also, this is from reported problems on a SURVEY, not actual problems taken to a dealer to fix. Dodge has the worst rating here while Ram has the best, because Ram owners don't report problems on surveys and not because Ram has better quality (though it likely does as well).

And most of the issues are with tech that is included in higher end cars (rear collision avoidance, rear seat safety belt alarms, lane keeping assist, automatic braking assist, etc), and almost all EVs in the US are higher end cars that are chock full of these up-sells. People are also complaining about entertainment system software and phone pairing, which isn't different from EV to ICE.

Finally, Tesla is one of the worst on the list while also making up the majority of EVs. So the company that has notoriously bad quality and bad design choices strongly skews the metric, since they ONLY make EVs. If Tesla made an ICE it would be just as bad.

Volkswagen just paid Rivian a truckload of money because VW couldn’t figure out how to write EV controller software. It’s ridiculous.

This isn't software that is exclusive to EVs.

Look into used Bolt EVs, many are in the 12-14k range after tax credit, 230 miles on a charge, no bells and whistles, drives great. Many have new batteries after the recall that happened a few years ago.

How many clues have been spilled here to show s/he is american?
- The article specifies a JD Power study, which is an American institution. Seems obvious enough...

I just want an EV company to make the equivalent of a shitty Toyota Prius.

A Nissan Leaf?
- They're discontinuing it in 2026.
Chevy Bolt EV/EUV
- General Motors accidentally made a good car so that's why they had to kill it.
- Which has been discontinued. They have said they'll bring back a EUV for the 2026 model year, but we'll see if that comes to fruition.
- I bought one just before the end. No ragrets. There are definitely some software quirks (the rear cross traffic alert always points the wrong direction) but overall I like it.
- FYI you can get these relatively cheap from Hertz if you don't mind the base model. Sure it was a rental, but many of them have <15k miles
Sorry, theyre banned here because china made em

A friend bought a new BMW, with all the bells and whistles. The app for the car is like a game, where you have to subscribe to get the juicy content.

You can subscribe to different feature-packs. They sure made the effort, that the $$$ system works flawlessly.

Like, the app surely is buggy and things may not work as expected, but you only get to try it out, when your money is on their account anyway.

Another quality VERGE article i see..

Wow, Dodge is worse than Telsa and almost down to Polestar.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Like in past versions of the survey, battery-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles performed worse than their gas equivalents in just about every repair category measured by JD Power.

“Owners of cutting edge, tech-filled BEVs and PHEVs are experiencing problems that are of a severity level high enough for them to take their new vehicle into the dealership at a rate three times higher than that of gas-powered vehicle owners,” Frank Hanley, senior director of auto benchmarking at JD Power, said in a statement.

JD Power attributes this to major design changes in Teslas, such as the removal of traditional feature controls like turn signal and wiper stalks.

And when car owners try to find relief from terrible native software experiences by mirroring their smartphones, they run into even more obstacles.

Someone who buys a Ram truck every few years is going to report way fewer problems with their experience than someone who is taking a risk on a new brand — or even a new powertrain.

We’re in the midst of a huge shift from traditional gas-powered vehicles to high-powered computers that run on enormous batteries.

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Why is the preview pic two politicians kissing aggresively