If there’s one thing you want in any car, it’s a way of stopping. It’s even more important than horsepower, or style, or any sort of flashy gadget. Having your brake pedal do nothing isn’t good, which is why Volvo is warning drivers of select plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles to stop driving until they download the latest software update.
Alright, so the brake pedal in affected models won’t just spontaneously go soft at some point, no matter what you do. According to the recall report, this bug in brake control module programming is part of software version 3.5.14, and it only rears its ugly head under certain conditions and in models you plug into the wall.
Affected customers may experience a temporary loss of braking functionality after coasting downhill for at least 1 minute and 40 seconds with “B” drive mode for PHEV vehicles and “One Pedal Drive” mode for BEV vehicles without applying the brake pedal or (to a certain extent) the accelerator pedal. If the situation occurs, pressing the brake pedal may remove braking functionality entirely.
Well, that’s alarming. While many plug-in hybrid drivers probably aren’t motoring around in “B” all the time, people who live in areas with hills or mountains might, just like how some battery electric vehicle drivers use one-pedal mode religiously. That’s sort of how the defect was found, and NHTSA even published dashcam video of this brake failure mode actually happening.
While running into an embankment is preferable to running off the side of a cliff, this situation could’ve been prevented with software that wasn’t defective. For most of us, this is a new frontier. Brakes used to be just something you got with a car, and only something like a failed master cylinder could cause them to really go out once double-diagonal hydraulic circuitry became mandatory. There’s something uneasy about knowing that a software update can meddle with braking performance, because although it should be fine, what if it’s not?
This recall affects the 2020 to 2026 XC90 plug-in hybrid, the 2022 to 2026 XC60 plug-in hybrid, the 2023 C40, the 2023 to 2024 XC40 Recharge, the 2023 to 2025 S60 plug-in hybrid, the 2024 to 2025 V60 plug-in hybrid, and the 2025 EC40. A lot of models, and they all add up to 11,469 cars in America. While the vast majority have seen this problem rectified since the recall first dropped in June, NHTSA reports that roughly 1,000 vehicles covered under this recall still haven’t been repaired yet.
The fix is to stop driving the vehicle and download the latest over-the-air software update as soon as it’s ready. If an affected car absolutely needs to be moved, ensure that “B” mode on plug-in hybrids and one-pedal driving on battery electric vehicles isn’t selected. Given that it’s been more than a month since the recall dropped, most if not all of the remaining 1,000 or so Volvos should have an update appear as downloadable in their notification section. So, if you own an affected plug-in hybrid or battery-powered Volvo or know someone who does, check in on this recall. One download could make the roads a little bit safer.
Top graphic credit: Volvo
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THIS IS WHY NOBODY WANTED BRAKE-BY-WIRE!!!
I may be tired of every ignorant commenter on most of social media these days calling every new technology in cars, particularly ones meant to be better for the environment, stupid, but this…
This is just common sense. Brakes should always be designed with the fewest possible opportunities to fail, they’re a safety-critical feature! Technology is amazing in what it can do, but you’d have to be insanely delusional to think it’s a good idea to let something as unavoidably failure-prone as a computer control the brakes in your car!
I remember when these hybrids and EVs with brake-by-wire, including these Volvos specifically, were announced and everyone reporting on them claimed there were mechanical backups, and they reassured us that if the software was bricked the car could still be brought to a halt. But THIS? This just proved all of those claims wrong. If your car has brake-by-wire, steer-by-wire, or really anything purely by wire, you can never fully trust that part of the car to work safely and reliably, something can always go wrong and leave you literally powerless to stop or redirect the vehicle. This is not safe.
I’m not saying “all technology bad,” but for the love of humanity, can we PLEASE stop putting too much faith in it? Code has endless possibilities for bugs and gremlins to appear, especially in the modern age of normalizing crappy AI spaghetti code and prioritizing getting more people to pass classes so the school looks good VS only giving degrees to programmers who actually understand what they’re doing. Modern technology has no business taking control of your car away from you.
Mechanical solutions can still break of course, but at least there are usually visible and audible warning signs, which can be spotted before they become a serious problem if you’re having at least basic regular maintenance done to the vehicle. Software bugs on the other hand rear their ugly heads at random. Your driver-assisting vehicle could swerve into a guardrail because the sensors got confused and the computer interpreted that information in a strange new way, and you’d have no warning or reason to expect it to do that, there was just an undiscovered bug in the code.
You wanna pump my interior full of infotainment screens? Fine, whatever, harmless and kinda nice/occasionally useful application of technology. Give the engine a computer so it gets better fuel economy? Again, fine, whatever. Claim technology taking control of safety-critical systems makes the car safer, because the arrogant tech bros think it’s fine to play with people’s lives in the name of promising a techno-utopia they can’t deliver? Someone please make that illegal ASAP.
This is completely absurd to even read about…this should NEVER happen. Brakes should ALWAYS be mechanical…that’s what they are!
Enough w/ all the extra electronic nannies/screens, etc and “disrupting” everything just for the sake of “new”
Any company like that can get the hell outa here and get a life
ABS fails if the wheel speed sensor stop working. Unfortunately the failure is to not allow the brakes to be applied.
It kept happening in me Volvo 740.
There are too many things whose control lands entirely under the purview of software in cars. Life-critical things like braking and steering can have software helping, but if I stab even harder on the brakes then that should issue an undeniable command that supercedes everything else, a direct application of my muscle onto the brake system which transmits, via channels that software cannot shut off, directly to the brakes.
And the BS drive by wire systems we’re seeing in certain vehicles named after famous inventors, that is just begging for comical/fatal failures.
Vital system using long-perfected technology with redundancies that almost always communicates a problem long before major failure that can be repaired by almost anyone and doesn’t need updates? Yeah, let’s make that dependent on software written by hacks from the profession that is held to the least account for failure outside of weather forecasters and politicians. And this is from a company that sells themselves primarily on safety! I can’t wait for everything to go steer-by-wire, too.
Volvo is a good example of everything wrong with the auto industry (in the US at least).
Not unlike VW, they have twisted their ethos and lost their way at the expense of the consumer.
They brought products to market that were like nothing Americans normally buy (e.g. the PV444). They built a reputation on practical, dependable and safe then transitioned to overpriced, oversized and overly complicated. Then moved further and further upmarket to compensate. Eventuality they became like everyone else.
Volvo has always been premium but a replacement keyfob runs like $900. It could just as easily be $80. It could just as easily be $18 (you know, a metal key).
They could have made a car more efficient and better performing by making it smaller and lighter. Instead they just loaded it with tech, tech and more tech. All of which is needlessly expensive and more likely to have these kinds of issues.
Impractical. Unreliable. Unsafe.
Bra jobbat, Volvo!
The big problem here is when automakers poll normies to see what they want in a car, normies keep screaming for more tech, more convenience, and more functionality. At least that’s what my employer gets for polling data.
In my experience that results in trying to make the most appliance type vehicle possible and removing as much actual driving as we can. We don’t really care about making cars anymore (for the most part), we make rolling screens with a wifi hotspot that you lease for 2 years in perpetuity.
At the same time a lot of that data is the result of manufactured consent. In pursuit of profitability, companies keep pushing this kind of stuff in their marketing until it’s an industry average.
It’s like introducing a little kid to McDonald’s, feeding them nothing but Happy Meals for a year and then asking them if they want broccoli.
Absolutely. They also only ask people who are serial new car owners (only our products), both leasees and buyers who turn a vehicle over in 3 years or less. This feedback loop generates wanting all of the tech from the entire market crammed in our cars, and price be damned as long as the payment is acceptable. For some reason, they haven’t figured out that people really want carplay/aa integration like everyone else (for a clue who I work for).
So used car buyers should really mount an “asceticism is sexy” campaign to get what we want?
Somebody should start a business systematically removing features from used luxury cars.
As far as I know that business model only extends to Porsches where people spend a bundle to get rid of electric windows and sunroofs, and all that stuff.
It would be great if that was practical, but you would have to specialize in a specific vehicle due to all the unique architecture spread across a single brand’s vehicles, let alone multiple brands even if they’re under the same corp umbrella. But then you’re still stuck with the ticking time bomb of a used high output, lux engine/driveline. And somehow you have to make money in the process.
I don’t see a fix for the grand canyon size disconnect between what new and used buyers want, until someone such as Slate flips the proverbial table and offers a new car at used prices, with a conventional ICE or Toyota style hybrid powertrain.
Where I live the average home costs 700k and the average car costs 50k. Factor in high taxes, skyrocketing food costs and what have you on top. Only a millionaire can swing the dream comfortably.
They say roughly only 10-12% of the population are millionaires. The powers that be are, whether intentionally or not, creating an economy where 10% of the population must carry 100% of the market on major purchases.
One man owns ten cars instead of ten men owning one car each.
When that stops being sustainable, some company is going to have to come in with Tata Nano and Datsun GO equivalents for the rest of us. You know, like every other third world country.
All that is the opposite of the pre Ford takeover Volvo brand. Volvo wasn’t a luxury car. Expensive, but sort of anti-luxury. Then they turned into Swedish Jaguars.
The electric XC40 is right now the center of attention because of several incidents of sudden acceleration in Norway (where it is a very popular car) which have lead to death of at least one driver and also an ongoing court case. Volvo continues to blame the drivers while independent investigation have showed at least one incident of water damage (due to a build quality issue) of the controller pcb which possibly have lead to malfunction and accidental speeding.This is not good when you have built your brand on safety..
In a Ford Escape Hybrid, if you push the brake pedal all the way to the floor, there’s a hydraulic backup to the regenerative/servo brake control. It’s really a clever way to solve the problem – if everything electric goes totally haywire, instinct is to stomp the pedal, and that action will stop the car.
Original Escape hybrid or the current one? If it’s the former there’s really no excuse because Volvo would’ve been privy to it while Ford owned them.
That was in reference to my first generation 2005 Escape Hybrid.
To an automaker if you have brake by wire, there’s no need to have a conventional braking system at all. It adds weight, cost, and complexity while being redundant. Plus, no automaker ever ships cars with bad programming so it’s never a problem!
Redundant = safe
A friend made some tee shirts a few months ago ago that read
“Efficiency = Death”
You would think people would learn, Boeing is certainly providing plenty of tutorials if the value of redundancy.
Acknowledging that technology has dramatically advanced in the intervening years and further acknowledging that throttle does not equal brakes, my experience with a bad TPS in (coincidentally) a 1998 Volvo XC wagon makes me very weary of any pure brake by wire arrangement. Combine that with the spotty history of some manufacturers’ software updates (I lost count of how many times the cruise control in my 2015 Ram 1500 stopped working immediately following an update), and I reckon I’ll stick with a good old fashioned pedal->pushrod->master cylinder system.
Bad throttle position sensor on the throttle body, or bad accelerator position sensor on the pedal? What was the actual failure, and the ‘experience’ you had?
The one on the TB. Car threw a CEL almost immediately after I bought it, but otherwise got on just fine for several thousand miles.
Unrelated, the rear propshaft bearing went out later that year, so I ended up just pulling the shaft itself until I got around to fixing it, leaving me with a front wheel drive “XC”…it mostly did OK, save for one snowstorm.
Anyway, with continued driving, the CEL would continue to fire up from time to time, and eventually the car started dropping into limp mode. I did the requisite research, and learned that the most affordable fix was (at that time) several hundred dollars for a remanufactured unit – tough to justify on a <$3000 car that still needed a new propshaft bearing and a rebalance. I probably managed another thousand miles until it was permanently stuck in limp mode.
I ended up selling for a grand or so it to a DIY mechanic/reseller who drove way from my house in limp mode with his wife trailing, hazard lights ablaze.
Oh, that’s way more mild than I was expecting based on your above statement. On most vehicles I’ve worked on the TPS is a replaceable sensor on any throttle body. Similar to drive by wire throttle pedals, brake by wire uses 2 potentiometers operating inversely to one another. So if one sensor sees 100%, the other has to read 0%. Or 78/22, 80.5/19.5, etc.
I don’t want brake by wire simply because it requires a bunch of modules and motors that are way more expensive than a common ABS hydraulic system today.
Yeah, nothing too crazy, but dropping into limp mode while doing 75 on the freeway for the first time was startling, to say the least (The fact that the repair would cost ~$800 – money my broke ass could *not* readily afford was even more startling).
In any event, projecting that failure mode from loss of throttle to loss of brakes is where my concern trolling comes from.
That’s where the differential measurement system takes over, enough is broken that you get a christmas tree worth of dash lights, but you still have one working potentiometer on the pedal for function.
In the near future $800 for a repair will be seen as a downright deal, as each of these modules will be a few hundred dollars plus will require vin specific programming to function in the vehicle.
Right to repair laws need a major overhaul.
Unfortunately brakes without electronic intervention been illegal since 2013.
Acknowledged, but there’s a difference between electronic intervention and a stem to stern electronic process. I’m fine with the former, but prefer a purely mechanical fail safe.
This is the same Volvo that wants to introduce software into seat belts, right?
EVs! That’s just how it goes. Complex new drivetrains that nobody knows. Maybe…it’s not too late to learn how to slow without any brakes.
Pedal moves, not working. Life about to drain…
I’m flying down the hill on this Geely train!
/just posting because RIP Ozzy
But EVs were supposed to be “so simple” that all the mechanics in the world would go out of business?
And people wonder why I have no interest at all in any of this bullshit.
Talk about burying the lede. RIP Ozzy.
Considering it’s fairly normal for me to use regen for several minutes on end coming down mountain passes, there’s a good chance I’d be dead if I had one of these vehicles with this flaw. I’ve always viewed regen as a nice backup for the miniscule chance of having a complete failure of the mechanical brakes, but I guess that only applies if software isn’t in the way to screw everything up.
Can we please get some SMVs, software minimized vehicles?
I present my ’74 Triumph Spitfire, that at the moment does not even have a radio in it.
Brakes Broke *Bam* Brick Wall
New Level of Concern: UNLOCKED! 🙂
It never occurred to me until right now that my mental process for downshifting no longer applies if there’s not engine/motor braking available, and/or if the tranny doesn’t want to respond to my commands.
Brakes should always have a hydraulic failsafe, no matter what the vehicle.
Second, what do you think this will mean to Volvo’s reputation for both active AND passive safety? IMO this is one of the biggest active safety failures imaginable.
Even a cable operated e-brake would be a major step forward in safety from this madness.
Austin Seven brakes can fail if a nut and bolt work loose, rod brakes, a niche bit of knowledge.
Brakes shouldn’t be reliant on software to function.
Yep. Definitely reinforcing why I don’t like modern cars when stuff like this happens.
Seems as though the auto industry with software defined vehicles has kidnapped and possibly murdered Captain Obvious. Someone needs to bring him back.
Captain Obvious apparently coasted downhill for 1 minute 41 seconds.
Indeed, lol
He was caught on the KISS cam.
“The brakes on these Volvos might stop working.”
While I agree the altogether is superfluous and doesn’t need to be there, in my head it adds a degree of emphasis, adding power. It’s not unlike saying I’m very angry vs just angry. Is there something that makes it incorrect? Or you just don’t like the redundancy?
It’s from the movie ‘Airplane!’ 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qNtyfZP8bE
Ah ok. I am clearly too short for that joke. Thanks!
“It’s an entirely different kind of flying”
I’m glad somebody posted this, and that it’s the first comment…mwuah!