Comment by jlokier

How do you roll back a fatal car accident caused by the faulty update?

Giving user’s control over when the update runs allows them to be in a safe and secure setting when that update happens. Allowing them time, gives them and Jeep the ability to slow roll the update so they can halt it if initial feedback is negative.

I say this as a Mac user who does not allow auto updates for MacOS. I wait a week or so until the chatter validates it as non-breaking. They pushed an OS update several years ago that broke a few things I rely on. So I don’t trust them now, but these things just happen on OS’s with third party software. I expect it. But, I also don’t want to be forced to deal with the headaches immediately. I’d rather let the third parties run updates and advise how to deal, before I have to dive into fixing things. With car firmware, there’s really no excuse for this except poor engineering / processes.

It's not perfect but seems reasonably easy to implement and would certainly help. If the user needs to approve each update and can see what the changes are most updates will either be skipped or delayed long enough that catastrophic bugs will only hit the small subset of cars that update immediately.

I would bet most updates, especially from a company this bumbling, will be more along the lines of increasing telemetry or pointless UI changes than releasing actually useful features and bug fixes.

You might not accept an update with a bunch of changes that didn’t sound relevant to you.

I certainly wouldn’t accept one while I was still driving the car!

NHTSA's power is simultaneously very broad and narrow. They're empowered to investigate potential safety issues after the fact, but this may not be a safety issue in the very pedantic sense often used. NHTSA can proactively set standards, but the standards they've set (FMVSS) largely ignore modern electronics. So on and so forth.