Software OTA Update 3.7
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GeoffHants
- Posts: 1
- Joined: Thu Nov 14, 2024 7:10 pm
I started my update on Tuesday, it is now Thursday and still waiting for it to complete, local dealer is not interested, I have had enough, three days with no transport, I am sending it back….well they will have to pick it up because it is a brick.
Mine went OK. Like a few others have reported I had some weird things happen with the doors, but they resolved and now the car is back to normal.
I have to say I'm really impressed.
From V2.1 to 2.4, 2.4 to 3.0, 3.0 to 3.2 and now 3.2 to 3.7 it's really been a major achievement to deliver each of those with a 3 hour update so about 12 hours of upgrades in all, and to still present the ID4 as having no discernible difference from the day I bought it.
Kudos to VW for sticking to the concept of "don't tell them what the changes are and make sure they don't notice them". Not for VW the approach of introducing flashy features that would be fun, or useful or helpful. They have stuck to "nope - we aren't even going to put up a note or a splash screen to tell you what we did" from day 1.
I mean they could so *easily* have been lulled into doing things like linking the key to the profile, getting rid of the stupid feature that prevents you from doing anything in the app if your wife / partner / child has been using the car on their profile, improving the touch screen response, linking the VW light to Android Auto for Google Maps etc. Not for them flashy features like Dog mode and Christmas mode. Just stuff that is un-noticable and unremarkable. Why copy the Tesla model of 30 minute updates with notes on the touchscreen afterwards, when you can just pretend nothing happened after 3 hours.
To be fair, they did introduce 5 more mediocre games for the fairly unresponsive touch screen at one point, and they do claim to have linked things like mirror profile to the user profile - maybe that one is more useful if you have the top spec ID with the electric seats that were apparently too expensive for the £50k ID Pro but standard in the £50k Tesla 3.
It's just a remarkable achievement.
I have to say I'm really impressed.
From V2.1 to 2.4, 2.4 to 3.0, 3.0 to 3.2 and now 3.2 to 3.7 it's really been a major achievement to deliver each of those with a 3 hour update so about 12 hours of upgrades in all, and to still present the ID4 as having no discernible difference from the day I bought it.
Kudos to VW for sticking to the concept of "don't tell them what the changes are and make sure they don't notice them". Not for VW the approach of introducing flashy features that would be fun, or useful or helpful. They have stuck to "nope - we aren't even going to put up a note or a splash screen to tell you what we did" from day 1.
I mean they could so *easily* have been lulled into doing things like linking the key to the profile, getting rid of the stupid feature that prevents you from doing anything in the app if your wife / partner / child has been using the car on their profile, improving the touch screen response, linking the VW light to Android Auto for Google Maps etc. Not for them flashy features like Dog mode and Christmas mode. Just stuff that is un-noticable and unremarkable. Why copy the Tesla model of 30 minute updates with notes on the touchscreen afterwards, when you can just pretend nothing happened after 3 hours.
To be fair, they did introduce 5 more mediocre games for the fairly unresponsive touch screen at one point, and they do claim to have linked things like mirror profile to the user profile - maybe that one is more useful if you have the top spec ID with the electric seats that were apparently too expensive for the £50k ID Pro but standard in the £50k Tesla 3.
It's just a remarkable achievement.
tl;dr: 3.7 bricked my '21 ID.4. A main dealer took five days to fix it. Volkswagen UK supported me well.
Longer version: -
I didn't get an email telling me 3.7 was ready to be installed.
The car told me there was a update available so we kicked it off. Of course it didn't tell me what the update was - why would it bother to tell me that?
Next morning, about eighteen hours later, the driver display screen was saying "Over-the-Air update not complete. Observe the warnings! Vehicle wallet!
I'm not sure what VW think "wallet" means in English, I think maybe it's a mistranslation of "bricked".
The car was refusing to leave Park.
I rang VW Customer services. It took quarter of an hour of being passed around people who didn't speak particularly intelligibly before I was put through to a woman who did.
She said she was going to arrange for a technician from VW Breakdown to come to me. I said that my VW breakdown cover had expired and I now used somebody else, and also that my warranty had ended. She said that didn't matter she could sort that, and reassured me that if the technician couldn't fix the car on my drive they would arrange recovery to my main dealer and deliver a loan car to me. I'm guessing I wasn't the first person to need such help.
A very friendly and knowledgeable technician arrived about three hours later. He spent over two hours with his laptop and OBD, downloading and installing software to each component in turn. He'd clearly had to do this before.
He managed to get most components updated and the car could at least be put into drive and reverse. However it was still telling him the car was unsafe to drive. He tried to get permission to drive the car himself to the main dealer, but it was decided a ride on a truck was safer.
Before he left he told me that the component(s) which he had been unable to update had version/part numbers which didn't match the ones the updates were aimed at. I said I'd read a reports about VW software not being of the finest quality and he said normally he'd advise people not to believe everything they read on the internet, but in the case of VW software he thought perhaps you could.
He initiated the delivery of a loan car and my car was soon on a breakdown truck.
The main dealer was at first hostile, but once they realised that, even though the car was out of warranty, VW UK were picking up the bill, giving me a free loan car etc they became friendlier. Incidentally, I had a similar experience when the 3.2 upgrade also left my car undriveable, but that's another story.
They eventually confirmed what the breakdown technician had told me - that there were component(s) which didn't match the updates which were being pushed out to them. They said they might have to replace those components.
The loan car was initially only for two days, but this was extended by VW UK on advice from the dealer. I had it in total for five days; I wasn't asked to pay for fuel, not that I used much
When I collected the car from the dealer the person who had most knowledge of my case wasn't available, but apparently the reversing camera had had to be replaced to get the software update to complete. Apparently it wasn't faulty, it just wasn't updateable for some reason.
Although the car was now driving normally, a minor update which followed the major one (something about Digital Manual and Shop) also hung, leaving the car permently offline, but at least it was driveable. After a few days I did the fuse 19 thing. If that fixed it it didn't do so immediately, but after the car had been driven a few miles the next day the update completed and the car was back online.
I could be very sarcastic about VW needing to get software competency to match their undoubted engineering skills. I agree completely with the person who said on this thread that all the hours and hours of updating (and, in my case, two breakdowns) have made no distinguisable difrerence from a driver's perspective.
I still love the car and I was impressed with the way VW UK took ownership of the problem, but I would seriously consider opting out of any future major OTA software updates.
Longer version: -
I didn't get an email telling me 3.7 was ready to be installed.
The car told me there was a update available so we kicked it off. Of course it didn't tell me what the update was - why would it bother to tell me that?
Next morning, about eighteen hours later, the driver display screen was saying "Over-the-Air update not complete. Observe the warnings! Vehicle wallet!
I'm not sure what VW think "wallet" means in English, I think maybe it's a mistranslation of "bricked".
The car was refusing to leave Park.
I rang VW Customer services. It took quarter of an hour of being passed around people who didn't speak particularly intelligibly before I was put through to a woman who did.
She said she was going to arrange for a technician from VW Breakdown to come to me. I said that my VW breakdown cover had expired and I now used somebody else, and also that my warranty had ended. She said that didn't matter she could sort that, and reassured me that if the technician couldn't fix the car on my drive they would arrange recovery to my main dealer and deliver a loan car to me. I'm guessing I wasn't the first person to need such help.
A very friendly and knowledgeable technician arrived about three hours later. He spent over two hours with his laptop and OBD, downloading and installing software to each component in turn. He'd clearly had to do this before.
He managed to get most components updated and the car could at least be put into drive and reverse. However it was still telling him the car was unsafe to drive. He tried to get permission to drive the car himself to the main dealer, but it was decided a ride on a truck was safer.
Before he left he told me that the component(s) which he had been unable to update had version/part numbers which didn't match the ones the updates were aimed at. I said I'd read a reports about VW software not being of the finest quality and he said normally he'd advise people not to believe everything they read on the internet, but in the case of VW software he thought perhaps you could.
He initiated the delivery of a loan car and my car was soon on a breakdown truck.
The main dealer was at first hostile, but once they realised that, even though the car was out of warranty, VW UK were picking up the bill, giving me a free loan car etc they became friendlier. Incidentally, I had a similar experience when the 3.2 upgrade also left my car undriveable, but that's another story.
They eventually confirmed what the breakdown technician had told me - that there were component(s) which didn't match the updates which were being pushed out to them. They said they might have to replace those components.
The loan car was initially only for two days, but this was extended by VW UK on advice from the dealer. I had it in total for five days; I wasn't asked to pay for fuel, not that I used much
When I collected the car from the dealer the person who had most knowledge of my case wasn't available, but apparently the reversing camera had had to be replaced to get the software update to complete. Apparently it wasn't faulty, it just wasn't updateable for some reason.
Although the car was now driving normally, a minor update which followed the major one (something about Digital Manual and Shop) also hung, leaving the car permently offline, but at least it was driveable. After a few days I did the fuse 19 thing. If that fixed it it didn't do so immediately, but after the car had been driven a few miles the next day the update completed and the car was back online.
I could be very sarcastic about VW needing to get software competency to match their undoubted engineering skills. I agree completely with the person who said on this thread that all the hours and hours of updating (and, in my case, two breakdowns) have made no distinguisable difrerence from a driver's perspective.
I still love the car and I was impressed with the way VW UK took ownership of the problem, but I would seriously consider opting out of any future major OTA software updates.
tl;dr Based on my experience, it seems that completion of the update to 3.7 can take a long long time - in my case probably around 20 hours. So probably wise to only schedule when you won't need the car for the next 24 hours.
I started the update at 1600 yesterday afternoon. As of 0845 this morning the car was completely "bricked" - wouldn't unlock, couldn't start preheating on the app either. I called VW assistance and they arranged for a VW technician to come and have a look later that morning. I checked again at 1015 and there was no change to the car - still completely dead.
VW technician arrived at 1345, and - lo and behold - the car seemed to be working completely normally again.
He checked on the infotainment and after several minutes this confirmed that the vehicle was now on 3.7, so the software update had been successful. Conclusion from this is that the software update was still running this morning, 18 hours after it started.
So in the end, it worked. But only after a very extended wait.
I presume this is another consequence of VW's cost-cutting with under-powered processors?
BTW vehicle is a Dec 2022 ID4 Pure. As we have the small battery, we don't even get the V2L / bi-directional functionality which is apparently the big thing in 3.7 (if you have the bigger battery). So quite frustrating!
I started the update at 1600 yesterday afternoon. As of 0845 this morning the car was completely "bricked" - wouldn't unlock, couldn't start preheating on the app either. I called VW assistance and they arranged for a VW technician to come and have a look later that morning. I checked again at 1015 and there was no change to the car - still completely dead.
VW technician arrived at 1345, and - lo and behold - the car seemed to be working completely normally again.
He checked on the infotainment and after several minutes this confirmed that the vehicle was now on 3.7, so the software update had been successful. Conclusion from this is that the software update was still running this morning, 18 hours after it started.So in the end, it worked. But only after a very extended wait.
I presume this is another consequence of VW's cost-cutting with under-powered processors?
BTW vehicle is a Dec 2022 ID4 Pure. As we have the small battery, we don't even get the V2L / bi-directional functionality which is apparently the big thing in 3.7 (if you have the bigger battery). So quite frustrating!
STOP PRESS: I got a notification yesterday for another software update. I read the notes and AFAIK, it’s just some minor bug fixes and improvements and it says it won’t change the version number from 3.7. My battery was too low to implement it. Battery charged overnight so I’ll do it later today.
ID.4 1st edition
All good, 15 minute minor update, no obvious changes as expected.
AndyF wrote: ↑Sun Dec 08, 2024 7:19 am STOP PRESS: I got a notification yesterday for another software update. I read the notes and AFAIK, it’s just some minor bug fixes and improvements and it says it won’t change the version number from 3.7. My battery was too low to implement it. Battery charged overnight so I’ll do it later today.
ID.4 1st edition
