The Facadeware Problem, But, Also, Help Me Beat My Car to Death
Make no mistake. This is a shitpost.
But it’s also going to be more than a simple shit post. Let me explain.
- I’ve created an IndieGogo campaign to help us do what Stellantis should have done itself: take the dangerous car they sold me off the road and destroy it.
- I’m going to use this post as the start of a series of blog posts where I’ll describe the absolutely bonkers, completely unbelievable Odessey of owning a ’23 Grand Cherokee. But I’ll use those posts to also describe a bigger problem with technology that I’ve come to think of as “the facadeware problem.” And a Jeep Grand Cherokee with “lane assist” that sometimes slams on its own brakes for absolutely no reason is the poster child for the facadeware problem (which I’ll describe later in the post, and more in the series).
But let’s start with the shitpost and the IndieGoGo.
It’s not just me — Consumer Reports has no good things to say about recent Grand Cherokees.
Our Latest Engine Fire
On July 9th, my wife took our 4-year-old to the pediatrician in our apparently normally functioning (that day) 2023 Jeep Grand Cherokee Summit Reserve. After leaving from his blood draw, lollipop in hand, they got into the car, she hit the start button, and both of them watched, bemused, as smoke started billowing from under the hood of the suddenly completely disabled car.
Boom, 0 to Jeep-nuts roasting on an open fire in the literal push of a button.
Amanda stayed calm though. This wasn’t her first rodeo. Far from it.
Our brand new, top-line trim Grand Cherokee has spent about 4 months in the shop since we bought it at the end of 2022, often completely disabled and non-functional in a variety of ways that defy belief. For those keeping score at home, our new car has spent about 13% of its existence being repaired. Heck, this wasn’t even the first time it lit itself on fire at startup and been towed for the same.
Here we are, in 2024, when the same, then 1.5-year-old, Jeep also self-immolated and turned our date night into a frantic scramble to get a tow, locate a cab, and get home to our son who was with a babysitter that graciously stayed until 11 PM. I’m coming to think of this routine mad dash as the “Jeep Scramble.” Maybe they can make a lightly singed one of those stupid Jeep ducks to commemorate it on our dashboard.
So, Amanda knew the deal. Get a ride to Enterprise, because that’s Jeep’s loaner company of record. Open probably our 12th or 13th case with Jeep Customer Care to get our 12th or 13th rental car and do the usual: get everything ready for tow, submit for rental reimbursement and start the ball rolling on the paperwork.
More than a week later, our lemon ’23 Grand Cherokee was still at the dealer lot to which it was towed that day. It was set to remain there, apparently, until August 8th, which is the soonest any Jeep dealership could even LOOK at it.
Jeep’s Defeated Armada of Lemons
I assume this is because Stellantis has spewed a veritable infantry of flaming lemons out onto the roads of America, and they have been mowed down in their battle against the American public as if by General Sherman. So now, as our wounded Grand Cherokee seeks care with nearby hospitals or medic tents for being gutshot, the response from all Stellantis/Chrysler repair facilities is the same:
“Yeah, you and everyone else. Take a number, shut the &$@# up, and try not to die while you wait. We’ll operate on August 8th.”
There are so many mortally wounded, fundamentally defective Jeeps under warranty, needing repairs and clogging dealer mechanics, that “hey, our newish car caught fire again for no reason” doesn’t even raise an eyebrow or merit a looksee within a month by anyone associated with Jeep. “Yep, sounds about right for a Jeep, amirite? Ha!”
Here’s the GM of the dealership, to whom I obviously escalated this absurd lead time on the matter (name and info elided because I actually think the dealership is great, and they don’t make ’em — they’re just stuck fixing ’em). Other cars can get in and fixed no problem, but if it’s a Jeep warranty thing, you’re waiting a month, no matter what or who happens to be on fire.
A Long, Dangerous (If Sometimes Black Comedy) History
Interestingly and amazingly, neither this summer’s engine fire nor last summer’s engine fire is the most dangerous thing that’s happened to us in this Grand Cherokee. Neither fire is even top 5. Here is a non-exhaustive list of even crazier and more dangerous stuff this car has done, in no particular order. At least the engine fires happened when the vehicle was still.
- Brake-checked me on the interstate because it didn’t believe me that my hands were on the wheel despite my hands being on the wheel. (I guess this is a lane assist safety feature or something, but I’ve obviously long-since stopped ever using this homicidal lane assist feature).
- Moved the seat and steering wheel to my profile’s position while my wife was driving on a country highway, preventing her from being able to see the road or reach the pedals. She had to slouch down in the seat and blindly slam on the brakes with no visibility, to stop and adjust the seat. While our toddler was in the backseat.
- Slammed on its own brakes more than once while I was merging onto a highway because it hallucinated… something… in front of me.
- Increasingly struggles to switch into gear on the highway due to faulty transmission computer, often adding a bit of danger to lane changes and passes.
- The speedometer spent a full weekend being about 20 seconds slow, meaning I was always seeing the speed I was going 20 seconds ago. This sounds funny, but it’s actually incredibly dangerous. Imagine that you haven’t yet figured it out that this is happening, so you’re going 100 MPH while trying to get “up to speed” as you merge onto the highway, and wondering why it seems like everyone around you is going 30 MPH. You then watch in horror as you ease off the gas, while your speedometer climbs from 60 MPH to 100 MPH as you slow down. Again, with your toddler in the car.
That’s the tip of the iceberg. For a while I was keeping a detailed log of all of the problems I experienced, thinking someone would care. After a while, I realized they were all software and firmware problems and that I was driving around in the car version of a Windows XP laptop, circa 2005, with like 800 pieces of malware. And the dealership, lacking software engineers on staff, could only “reboot and hope for the best.”
As you can see from the “fixed”, sometimes the dealership reboots worked. For a while, at least. Other times not. The check trailer and service vehicle false positive lights still come on constantly, to this day. The wonky shifting has gotten dramatically worse. The mirrors still occasionally don’t fold in our out until you turn the car off and on 2 or 3 times.
Anyway, litigating the entire, sometimes funny, sometimes dangerous, sometimes surreal history of this car is what I’m planning to do in the follow-up series I’ll post over the coming weeks. For now, I want to get to the salient point of this initial post in the series.
I’m Erik, and I’m A Disillusioned Technologist
While I may be turning into an old man, I’m not a luddite screaming about how stuff was better when I was a kid.
I grew up reading sci-fi and still do, avidly, to this day (recent favorites include Project Hail Mary, Children of Time and The Expanse). Both of my degrees are computer science. I have been a home automation enthusiast as long as I was aware that home automation was a thing and have never really given up on the ~2000 Ray Kurzweil timeline of the singularity.
I LOVE technology, tech, advancement, and building cool stuff.
But I cannot any longer call myself a technologist.
The reason is depressingly simple. We’ve largely stopped building valuable technology. I believe that we have, instead, started building something that I’ll refer to as facadeware.
We Are Starting to Produce More Facadeware than Technology
Real technology is both innovative and a net positive in the sense that if you do the expected value calculation you come out well ahead. Facadewear is the opposite of that. If a score on the spectrum of technology to facadware exists, that score is shown here, and it should be more than 0, ideally a lot more than 0.
TF Score = Value * Success Rate – Detriment * Failure Rate
And what I’m saying is that we are collectively producing a mountain of absolute garbage, with a negative score here, and calling it “technology.” And this is only showing only signs of accelerating.
Facadewear is “our lane assist technology MOSTLY works, and it’s SUPER cool, but, sure, every now and then it mows down an innocent family of 4.” A slight value-add of helping me stay in my lane (when not simply fighting me against changing lanes) minus a horrific externality on failure is not a net positive, Stellantis, and it’s not worth building. It’s certainly not worth forcing on unwitting buyers.
And the stakes don’t really need to be high, either. Loom saying “hey, I’m going to annoy you with endless offers to have an AI type a slightly stupider title in slightly more time than it would take you to type a better one” is also not the value proposition of any technologist or technology.
It’s low-stakes, annoying facadeware. And it’s EVERYWHERE.
But I’ll come back to facadware throughout this post series, weaving in other examples with the full, episodic story of what it’s been like to own a flaming death-lemon. And I’ll talk about how I went, in three short years, from a technologist and a die-hard Jeep fan to a cynical, tired old man just hoping to be rid of a dangerous, feature-rich car before it hurts or kills someone.
Jeep’s Facadeware is a Ticking Time Bomb
By reaching out to the owners and GM of the dealership, CC-ing Chrysler executives, and filing a NHTSA complaint, I was able to finally cut the lead time on servicing my lightly-singed Jeep from a month to two weeks. I still don’t have an answer on reimbursement for the rental, but my latest case manager, Athena, seems pretty nice and responsive, so they’ll probably cover our $500 out of pocket in rental expenses the way they normally do.
If nothing else, they’ve been pretty good about reimbursing me for thousands and thousands of dollars of rentals during the months our Jeep has been disabled. And they’ve, interestingly, done that even when lowballing and stonewalling our buyback requests and lemon law negotiations through a lawyer. Everything but take the torment nexus off the road.
And that’s where you come in, dear reader.
But first, look at this closely.
This is two repair orders from the same dealership, roughly a year apart. Two different intake forms where we reported fire/smoke from under the hood of a disabled car, and one less than 3 years old, even today. Two different diagnoses and two different times replacing the starter, explaining (elided) that a firmware malfunction caused a solenoid to catch fire.
By my calculations, that means that Jeep is putting cars on the road with starters that average an engine fire per year, and the clock is ticking for us on fire number 3. I’m putting the over/under on the next engine fire next March, if we haven’t destroyed the car by then. (More on that momentarily.)
I can’t keep putting my family in this thing. I can’t sell it to anyone in good conscience. I can’t trade it in, because Jeep has demonstrated over and over that they can’t fix it, either.
It needs to be destroyed.
And if Stellantis won’t do the right thing, I’m going to try to do it, with your help.
I’m Asking for Your Help Destroying My Jeep
We have a loan for this car, unsurprisingly. I’m probably a little upside down on it, but I’d willing to eat the negative equity to get my family into something safe, if it were that simple. That’s where my stupid conscience gets the best of me.
I wouldn’t sell this to someone, but the dealerships have also proven again and again and again that they’re not capable of making it safe even briefly. So even on trade-in, it’ll wind up in someone else’s hands. And, as you’ll see in subsequent posts when I tell my story, it will hurt or kill that person on a long timeline or hurt/kill someone with the misfortune to be driving next to them.
So what I really need is a way to pay off the loan balance without collateral. If I could do that and get clean title from the bank, I could do what Stellantis refuses to do: destroy the Grand Cherokee before it centers itself in a seemingly-inevitable tragedy.
When I was in a fraternity, we use to have this madcap rush event called “rage against the machine.” We would buy a disabled junker car from someone for about $400, drain all of the fluids from it for safety, put a tarp under it, lay out an array of sledgehammers, pipes, golf clubs, and bats, and invite rushees and generally whoever wanted over to absolutely smash the thing to bits, setting the entire event to heavy metal. If you’ve never done this before, I 10 out of 10 recommend — it’s a blast.
Raging Against the Machine
So I want to pay off the loan balance, dust off this event idea, and destroy this menace of a car. Assuming I can raise the loan balance through the aforementioned IndieGoGo, higher tier contributors are even invited to help me smash this car to smithereens in my front yard (or somewhere I can get permitting or do it privately).
We’ll have some beers, snacks, and music (maybe actual RATM) and make it an afternoon social event. And I’ll absolutely film it to publish for anyone who can’t reasonably make it to Michigan.
I’m doing this for me and for my family obviously. But I’m also doing it for everyone else who has been done dirty by bad-faith auto manufacturers, given the run-around, faced a Kafkaesque bureaucracy, and generally had their life ground into bleak resignation by this kind of thing. Let’s get together and let Stellantis and other bad faith operators know that enough is enough and have a little live and vicarious catharsis while we do it.
I want to smash this Jeep for everyone that’s been screwed by Jeep, by Chrysler, by Stellantis, or whatever auto manufacturer or oppressive organization has done this kind of thing to you. I want to smash this Jeep for everyone who feels like they have no recourse against life’s indignities. I want to smash this Jeep for everyone who would like, for just a few minutes, to feel a sense of agency, justice, and empowerment in their lives.
So if you’d be so inclined, please donate to the IndieGoGo, and I would be much obliged. I’m setting the funding goal at the balance of what we owe on the Jeep, plus IGG fees, to make it a net neutral payoff. Anything we happen to raise in excess of that I will donate to the Center for Auto Safety since that seems like a good cause and a potential ally in the fight against Stellantis’s bad faith and the broader facadeware problem putting dangerous, flaky cars on the road. If it falls short, all donations go back, and I resume being open to ideas on what to do with the lemon.
If you don’t feel like donating anything, I totally get that — it would also help my cause and frustration if you would just read the rest of the series as I put it out, lending a sympathetic ear to my catharsis and social commentary on facadeware. It also wouldn’t hurt whatsoever if you were to share this with as many people as you could, maybe even tagging this dude on LinkedIn if you share it there and are so inclined. @-mentioning these brands and their key people might be a productive way to send the jarring message “people don’t even think your vehicles are worth the parts they’re made of and would pay to destroy them.”
So that’s the teaser, intro, and call to action. Stay tuned for a series on facadeware and the truly insane story of the ownership experience of a 2023 Jeep Grand Cherokee, in gory detail, with copious receipts, screenshots, and pics. Facadeware — superficially ‘advanced’ gadgetry with a net-negative value proposition — is a much bigger issue than my lemon, but my lemon exemplifies it in a lot of ways. The stories and commentary should intermingle nicely.
Until next time, dear reader.
