A screenshot of a portion of the service bulletin that reads: In the interest of customer satisfaction, Subaru of America, Inc. (SOA) is extending the Data Communication Module (DCM) Warranty from 3 years (36 months) of 36,000 miles to 8 years (96 months) or 100,000 miles, whichever comes first. In some rare cases, a customer may experience a dead battery as a result of the DCM continually trying to access the 3G network which is no longer available and has not received a previous DCM update.

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   Terra Field (rainofterra@terra.incognita.net)'s status on Wednesday, 17-Apr-2024 09:50:59 JST Terra Field

   Fallacies of Distributed Computing: Automotive Edition

   So our 2016 Subaru Outback has been having horrible battery drain issues for a couple years now. We got the attached service bulletin recently that explained the issue.

   It turns out that the Data Communications Module that powers Subaru's Starlink service (emergency assistance/safety/etc. service) now causes a battery drain because it is trying to talk to a 3G network that is no longer there, and it just tries its little heart out.

   You can bring the car in to get the DCM reprogrammed to not do this anymore which will fix the problem, and they will also cover batteries killed by the issue.

   But my favorite part about this is that this happened because they didn't account for the first Fallacy of Distributed Computing:

   "The network is reliable".

   A bunch of vehicle computers each connecting to a home network sure sounds like distributed computing to me. 🤷🏻♀️

   https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/tsbs/2024/MC-10251111-0001.pdf
   #Subaru #DistributedComputing #Lesbaru #cars