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Auto makers are dealing with an increasing number of lawsuits growing out of malfunctioning technology: dashboard screens that flicker or go black, faulty backup cameras, sound systems that die or suddenly blast at high volumes.
In 2019, Ford paid $17 million to settle a suit brought by owners who complained about flaws in the vehicles’ My Touch systems, which allows drivers to issue commands by tapping a dashboard screen.
In 2020, Subaru paid $8 million to settle a class action suit over broken-down technology; in December, Honda and its Acura subsidiary shelled out $30 million for defective electronics and extended the warranties on affected components.
Mazda and Volvo are thought to be targets of one or more lawsuits now being developed, according to The New York Times.
Many of the problems seem to stem from vehicles’ confusion over how to interact with Apple AutoPlay and Google’s Android Auto programs.
It seems that passenger cars and trucks have larded on more technology than they can handle.
“The game has completely changed” for conventional auto makers, Axel Schmidt, a managing partner overseeing the automotive practice at tech consulting firm Accenture, said to the NYT.
Auto companies aren’t used to having to bolt on technology created by outsiders “that are much stronger and bigger than themselves,” he noted.
Both sides are finding out that just because a technology works on a tablet or smartphone, it’s not going to be smoothly inserted into something as complex and multifaceted as a computerized car.
Part of the problem is that major changes to vehicle designs take three years or more, an eternity in the digital world.
However, consumers have come to expect that their vehicles will have GPS, respond to voice commands, and manage information about the vehicle, the current trip it’s making, the driver’s emails and phone messages, and play a movie for the kids on the rear-seat video screen.
“Carmakers face the nearly impossible task of designing entertainment systems that work flawlessly with software and devices that haven’t been invented yet,” the NYT noted.
Just as carmakers struggle to integrate new versions of software into vehicle designs already in progress, software companies such as Apple have failed to work closely enough with auto companies to make sure their software works in the vehicles as intended, the NYT said.
Tesla has avoided problems with Apple and Google: its cars don’t use the companies’ software. Instead, Tesla has developed its own as an integrated component of its electric cars.
However, even Tesla hasn’t escaped troubles.
In 2018, it recalled 100,000 cars for touchscreen troubles, which are the subject of a lawsuit now working its way through the courts.
TRENDPOST: The flaws in vehicles’ software point to an underlying issue: cars have become too complex not only for engineers to manage, but also for drivers.
Recent studies have found that as dashboard screens have become more common and more complex, accidents resulting from distracted driving have increased.
The finding reflects a U.S. Air Force investigation in the 1990s into why its new state-of-the-art fighter jets were logging more pilot errors and why the crash rate increased. The probe found that cockpit screens were giving pilots so much competing information at a time they didn’t know what to pay attention to at any given moment.
As newspaper columnist David Kittredge wrote recently, “Perhaps auto manufacturers should negate some of their overly wrought designs to instead create no-frills models.”
A market analysis likely would show there is a universe of car owners who would welcome a vehicle that had no voice, no digital screen, no automatic parking assistant, and few or none of the other bells and whistles now adorning cars and sending their prices over $40,000, not including future repair bills.
A bold auto company might partner with Indian automaker Tata to tweak some of its no-frills runabouts for Western markets or even test those markets with a model of its own making.