Yeah. That seems to be a more frequent occurrence these days. My personal theory is that easy patch distribution over the internet has made programmers’ bosses lazy. Screw up in the old days of floppy disks and you have to mail out patches to angry customers. Screw up now and you release a patch this afternoon… But the customers are still mad. So, don’t worry about QA and push the coders to get it written yesterday, and then send it to gold whether it works right or not.
To be honest, I completely agree with you that there’s no such thing as an error free… Well, anything really.
But here’s the difference: My Acura has a bug. It happened once. It wouldn’t shift out of 2nd when I was accelerating in the winter and my wheels spun slightly. I pulled over, shifted to park, shifted back to drive, and everything worked fine.
I suspect it’s something to do with the transmission logic when the wheel speed delta changes rapidly in a very specific way, because a couple of other TL owners have reported the same thing, also happening only once, in similar conditions. It’s never happened again in over 100,000 miles, and I doubt the cause will ever be found.
That’s the kind of bug in a car that’s acceptable. Really, really rare, no big deal when it happens, and you’ll never know why it happens because the specific conditions to make it happen will never happen again.
Contrast that with the BMW, where the center stack goes dark 5 times in 20 miles, the power liftgate routinely fails to close, and the computer once decided the brakes had “a serious problem” when they did not, all on a vehicle with less than 10,000 miles on it, and then I bring it to the dealership for my mother and get regaled with stories from owners and dealership mechanics about how these problems happen all the time and the only thing they can really do is put a new battery in the car because that’s what BMW told them to do. Which is ridiculous a battery that’s good enough to keep the car running and the headlights on, but isn’t good enough to keep the nav screen on, is a pretty weird battery.
The bottom line is that they’re selling cars that can cost more than $100,000 to people, and they have far more “bugs” than much cheaper cars made in other countries. That’s unacceptable. It’s not even acceptable with a much cheaper Volkswagen, because car technology has gotten good enough that anyone who releases a car with electrical issues like this just isn’t trying to avoid them. On purpose.