car crash

[cellio]

No, not hardware.

I had to reboot my car this morning. I still don't know what happened.

My car, like almost every car built in the last N years, has a remote control. There are buttons for "lock" and "unlock"; for the latter, press once to affect the driver's door only and twice to affect all doors. (A single press of "lock" affects all doors.) The car does not appear to preserve state for any significant length of time; I have not conducted experiments yet to determine the timeout between presses of "unlock".

This morning I needed to get something out from the passenger's side, so I pressed twice, retrieved the item, and a few minutes later got into the car and drove off.

Now when you lock the car using the remote control, the car's alarm system is supposed to automatically activate. You know that this has happened because of a little light that comes on. There is no documented way to deactivate the alarm.

When I got to work and locked the car, the light didn't come on. I pressed the lock button again, thinking my car was somehow weirdly stateful after all; no change. I unlocked and relocked; no change. Eventually I unlocked the car, got in, put the fancy electronic key into the ignition, removed it, got out, and locked. That time it worked.

I still have no idea what happened. This is not covered in the manual, nor did the UI provide sufficient hints.

Comments

can we blame Bill Gates for this?

[sethg]

I have this sinking feeling that our grandchildren will consider it perfectly normal that objects they use in their day-to-day lives will just mysteriously fail to work every once in a while ("dang, the front-door lock has hanged again, I'll have to go in through a window and toggle the circuit breaker"), and nobody will seriously consider this a sign that the object is poorly made, because you know, it has some kind of computer with software inside, and everybody knows that software just fails to work every once in a while.

I mean, it's not like any reasonable person would expect a computer program to behave in a way that's predictable.

Grrr.

[zare-k.livejournal.com]

[I have not conducted experiments yet to determine the timeout between presses of "unlock".]

On my car this timeout is relatively short (< 10 secs). Also you may have noticed that if you press unlock and then don't open a door, the car will relock itself after a minute or so.

I'm not so much disturbed by the idea of people learning to put up with flawed design-- as someone else observed, rebooting your PC or thwacking the toaster on the side to unstick it aren't all that different in concept. What I do find disturbing is the move towards everything being disposable. If your printer cost $40, why go to the trouble of repairing it? Just toss it and buy another. A friend went looking for a replacement mop sponge, and found that it was actually cheaper to buy a whole new mop than to get the replacement sponge. As annoying as it is to be forced into finding workarounds for faulty design, I'm not sure that a culture that encourages people to just give up and buy anew when their widget breaks down is really an improvement.

[alienor.livejournal.com]

There is no documented way to deactivate the alarm.

You should be able to get the dealer to do it if you want it off. The cavalier I had a few years ago was bought new in 1996 (when the remotes were just taking off). We had 3 (soon to be 4) drivers in the house, but the car only had the capacity for 2 remotes, so we had to get the remote-tied alarms turned off. I imagine they should still be able to do that.

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

We have a car that has that sort of lock/alarm feature. The alarm won't unless all the doors are shut, so if the alarm doesn't come on when I lock the car, then I know that I have left a door ajar.

I am guessing that your alarm system might have a similar feature, and that when you thought you were rebooting the car with the fancy key, you were actually resolving the "ajar" state.

[jducoeur]

There is no documented way to deactivate the alarm.

Hmm. In my car, there's actually a physical switch. You unlock the car and deactivate the alarm, then throw the switch into the down position; from that point, until you throw the switch to the up position and relock using the remote, the alarm is deactivated.

Of course, this isn't documented anywhere. I found it by accident: the switch is by the driver's left foot, and I simply knocked it by accident. I brought it down to the dealership, and realized that this was a FAQ when the girl at the service desk just said "hang on a second", crawled under the steering wheel, and said "try it now"...