Remote mechanics

My car, Peugeot 407, has been acting lately. When the winter tyres were changed on, the car somehow lost the connection to the air pressure sensors on the tyres. It complained about the fact every 500 kilometers or so, beeping and flashing warning signs and texts on the displays.

I was always caught unguarded and every single time I first thought that now there is something wrong.

The car was in maintenance after the first 10,000 km, but they couldn’t fix the problem as there were other 407s around and you could pair the car with a wrong set of tyres.

A couple of weeks ago the car informed about the next issue. This time the electronic suspension control system was malfunctioning. This sounded a bit more scary and I had a brief chat with Peugeot maintenance in Finland. They assured me that it is still okay to drive with the car, just keep the suspension control turned off. I hadn’t even used it yet, so there were no problems.

The faults nagged me and finally I phoned Peugeot maintenance again and reserved a time to get things right. Yesterday morning I drove the car to the shop, got a miniscule Renault for the day (boy, it was a pain to drive with it, manual gears and tiny-whiny engine — mere 1.4 liters) and waited them to call me.

Late afternoon I finally got the call and the technician explained that they had spent the whole day trying to figure out the suspension control failure. The tyres’ sensors were fixed or paired easily.

This is the point where things start to resemble a little bit too much of computer business: As they could not spot the failure, they called Peugeot’s factory help desk (in France) and French technicians logged in to my car remotely.

They found the problem quite fast, I was told, and then continued to upload some missing software. That done, the Finnish crew configured the new software to make sure that the suspension control knew enough about car.

Later, I told this to my cousin and she responded that her Volvo’s audio system was behaving badly, radio stations wouldn’t stay in the memory. The solution was to upgrade radio’s software.

This is scary, especially for me as I’m a computer professional and I know what kind of sloppy code everyone writes from time to time, and how bugs slip into production very easily.

Back in the (good) old days, these kinds of failures would not exists. There were no sensors in tyres, suspension was not controllable (except in Citroëns) and radio did not have any memory slots whatsoever. On the other hand, there were no electronically adjustable seats, automatically dimming back mirror, parking radar, panorama window roof, six gear automatic gearbox and a host of other things that I’ve felt in love with my 407.