The New Blue Screen Of Death? “Your Vehicle Cannot Be Driven”
December 31st, 2023Via: ZeroHedge:
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Gone are the days of Windows 95; heading into the year 2024, there’s an entirely new “blue screen of death” people apparently need to be watching out for – in their cars.
This week a photo went viral on social media purporting to show a Ford vehicle displaying a “your vehicle cannot be driven” message after a failed software update. “Please call customer support,” the screen urges.
A post on one car enthusiast forum questioned the authenticity of the screenshot, stating: “This is going around on Twitter, but I couldn’t find any mentions of it here.
Is this even real? The phone number, when Googled doesn’t turn up anything official.”
One person responded: “That’s the message you will see on the rare occasion that an OTA fails. It’s a special customer service phone number for dealing with failed OTAs. It’s from a user on Reddit, his car has since been fixed and is back to normal FYI.”
“If an OTA update fails in such a way that this screen would be necessary, they should automatically revert to the last working state and notify the user,” another user posted in response.
“…they should automatically revert to the last working state…” They should manually revert to the last fully driver-controlled model car or truck, maybe 2010 or earlier, and stockpile parts for the future.
Some popular auto magazines around then were listing annually which manufacturers and models had added computerized things and which hadn’t. Your public library can help you get copies. You may have to be persistent.