Update from dealer on infotainment software update

[El Bunko]

Talked with the service department at my dealer about the update to the infotainment (updates for speed warning, altimeter, etc.). He told me that they had rolled out an update to some dealers as a beta test and it didn't go well. This caused them to pull the update. As of right now there is no timeline.

 

[Phred]

Not according to Bob….LOL.

 

[Clark Kent]

Seems appropriate...

 

[IslandFalconer]

Talked with the service department at my dealer about the update to the infotainment (updates for speed warning, altimeter, etc.). He told me that they had rolled out an update to some dealers as a beta test and it didn't go well. This caused them to pull the update. As of right now there is no timeline.

That’s the exact same thing they said to me at my dealer

 

[parb]

That sounds like an unusual amount of work for a car company.
An external beta requires version unrolling. That's pretty easy to do on a engineering car since you can delete prior settings without care (eg Bluetooth connections, favorite button and other preferences). Also if it's a beta then it implies code that haven't passed final testing. In a car context this is unusual given the potential liabilities involved. I've only heard about this in infotainment software (and Tesla) in the industry. I'm surprised that Ineos would do this with their dependency on tier-1 for their ecosystem.

Historically car companies haven't been very good at versioning this way so it's typically been forward version based upgrading of software. It's not trivial to build downgradable software for end users, that dramatically expands the test matrix. I would seriously caution them from going down this path, and instead of power users test in engineering owned cars.