johno10661

For anyone considering purchasing a 2013 S8, please read this letter I recently set to Audi.


May 1, 2013

To Whom It May Concern:

I am the owner of the first 2013 Audi S8 to come off of the production line. It has every available option, including a custom color that turned out very sharp (Sepang Blue Pearl). I am very familiar with Audi’s automotive line as I am also the proud owner of a 2013 Q7 and a 2011 R8 Spyder.

I am writing this letter for a single reason: I love my new Audi S8 and do not want to be forced to Lemon Law it. I am taking time out of my busy schedule to detail several of the myriad of software bugs plaguing this vehicle. Thus far, Audi has been unresponsive or has simply not understood the issues, no matter how well described.

For the purposes of background:

1. I am pretty easy about cars. I am not a collector. If they work as advertised, I’m happy. I have never before threatened to return a car.
2. I own a software company and am very familiar with software debugging. Every issue described in this letter is a software issue and not a hardware issue. This is very important as every issue can easily be addressed via a software update.
3. I love the S8. The vehicle is fantastic. Aside from the buggy software, the car is a wonder of modern engineering. If it were not for the flawless perfection of the vehicle sans its electronics, I would not write this letter and would simply drop the vehicle back off at the dealer.
4. Nearly everything in this car is controlled electronically and not mechanically. Audi made the decision to embrace electronically controlled systems. It is therefore Audi’s responsibility to support the electronic systems with as much vigor and professionalism as they support the mechanical systems.

The Audi S8 has the latest implementation of the Audi’s MMI (Multi-Media Interface). The vehicle has cutting-edge features such as night-vision, overhead parking view, warning sensors everywhere, etc. Alas, the new systems are full of bugs. Owning a software company, I consider myself more patient and understanding about software issues. I do expect, however, that there be a path to getting them fixed. Audi cannot expect their consumers to accept non-functioning electronic systems on the chance that upon being a repeat customer some of the issues may be fixed in the next version of the vehicle that they purchase.

As of right now, Audi’s attitude is indeed that: “it may be fixed in the next model release”. I bought a 2013 S8. I expect that car to perform correctly. I did not buy a 2013 S8 to eagerly await a 2015 S8 that may fix some of the issues.

I will start with an extremely easy example and work to more complex. Following is one of my recent e-mails (pardon the typos) to my sales rep and service department. Focus on the last paragraph about the high beam issue – I will address the other paragraphs in more detail later.

I've been back in town for a week and have been testing out the updates done to the S8 while I was away. The boot times are still horrific. Here are the issues that need addressed:

If I want to enter an address in Nav, I have to sit in my garage and wait a full two minutes. If I want to enter, say, my son's school by looking through "past destinations", it is much longer. The car can go from 0-60 in no time, but I cannot leave my garage if I want to use Nav.

Nav favorites are linked to the phone it is using. That was a huge mistake. If it is linked to my wife's phone, all of our favorite destinations are gone. I have to manually link to mine to get back any of the favorites.

Main systems boot is just silly. I can make another video if you wish. The problem is definitely worse in the morning. I am assuming that the system stays in a "warm mode" during the day, cutting down boot time by about 30%.

Here is the new one, that has to be be fixed ASAP. Yesterday the high-beams locked on (I couldn't make that one up if I tried). One push forward turns them on. Another push forward switches them from "auto" mode to "full time". If you are in auto mode and pull back on the bar, the lights do not turn off, but the brights flash if the lights are off at the time or do flash if on at the time. This in itself is a bug - I have to be able to turn off the bright lights no matter the mode they are in. I have figured out that by pressing the bar forward (thus going into manual mode) and THEN pulling the bar back, you can shut the high beams off. That is, until last night!!! THE WAY TO SHUT OFF THE HIGH BEAM, WHETHER IN AUTO OR MANUAL MODE, WENT AWAY! It took a reboot of the car to get out of "high beam" mode. I was not able to immediately replicate after I rebooted the car. This is high priority.

There were two preliminary conversations with service detailing the high-beam issue in addition to the above e-mail, just to make sure that Audi understood the problem. There are four actions for the high-beams controlled by the single bar. The base action is “no action”, in which the high-beams are “off”. One push forward on the bar turns on the high beams, defaulting to “Automatic” mode. Automatic mode senses oncoming vehicles and turns off the high-beams until they pass. That function works splendidly - Audi did a great job with remote vehicle sensing. Pressing the bar forward again switches the high-beam system from “Automatic” to “Manual” mode, forcing the high-beams to stay on like traditional high-beam operation in other vehicles. Every press forward on the bar toggles between the Automatic and Manual modes.

Here is an odd catch. To turn the off the high-beams (which is done by pulling back on the bar) the high-beams must be on. “On” meaning that they are either in Manual mode or Automatic mode and not sensing a vehicle approaching. The way to turn off the high-beams is somewhat difficult to describe and even more difficult to actually do. If the Automatic high-beam mode is active and a vehicle is oncoming in the opposite direction, the high-beams will be off because the vehicle is in Automatic mode and the oncoming vehicle is being protected from your bright lights. Pulling back on the bar at that time will not turn the high-beam system to “off”. Instead, it will flash the high-beams at the oncoming vehicle. This causes an uncomfortable situation as your intent is to turn off the high-beams, but what you actually end up doing is flashing your high-beams at oncoming traffic. To turn off the high-beams, you either have to press forward on the bar to enter Manual high-beam mode (blinding oncoming traffic in the process) and THEN pull back on the bar to shut the system off. The alternative is to wait for the Automatic high-beam mode to sense that no vehicle is oncoming, wait until the high-beams automatically turn themselves back on, and THEN pull back on the bar.

This, in and of itself, is not a safe design. It is not, however, the major bug. On the night described above, the high-beam system got stuck on. Period. No amount of pulling on the bar in any mode would shut them off. Luckily, pushing forward on the bar still toggled between Automatic and Manual mode. Leaving the car in Automatic mode, I was able to get the car home, as the oncoming vehicle sensing in the Audi is splendid. Upon rebooting the car, the system reset and the high-beam system started acting normal once again.

Now starts the service call frustration that I do not expect out of Audi. Armed with all of this data, multiple conversations, and direct access to me, I return home to find my vehicle in the garage “fixed”. The person who dropped it off has no idea what they did, only that it had been fixed. I called “Ed”, the service manager, and he kindly informed me that there was no issue and proceeded to attempt to educate me about how to switch between Automatic and Manual high-beam modes. To top it off, as a courtesy, service went into the MMI system and disabled Automatic headlights, as they were assumed them to be too technical for me to handle. I found myself in an interesting dilemma. Audi’s service department barely understands how the high-beam system works, cannot even comprehend what the serious issues are, and therefore will never escalate the issue. This issue did not make it up the food chain. This letter is the only hope for resolution of a headlight issue. I would like to point out that should this have been a mechanical and not electronic issue, my vehicle would be fixed right now.

I started with the high-beam issue because it brings to light two serious safety issues: one a design flaw and one a bug. Hopefully those issues alone will provoke a response from Audi.

The most frustrating issues with the vehicle, though, center on the MMI system. I want to preface the rest of the letter with one statement, in bold:

THE 2013 AUDI S8 TAKES 2 ½ MINUTES TO BOOT IT’S ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS AND OVER 4 MINUTES FOR THEM TO BE FULLY ACTIVE!

This is confirmed by Audi techs that amazingly see no issue with this. To them, the S8 is all about the driving experience and not navigation, telephone, music, Bluetooth, contacts, or VOLUME CONTROL! To understand how long 2 ½ minutes is, try sitting in your garage for that long after starting your car that can go from 0-60 in 3.5 seconds. It’s like putting a 95-year-old on the space shuttle.

Audi made the puzzling choice to start every car system from scratch at boot time, not remember a single contact, not remember a single favorite, not even remember your home address, etc. from the previous drive. The MMI system proves to be a paradox for connectivity. Should you have an iPhone (a relatively popular phone) your experience with the S8 is horrifying as Audi seems to have gone out of their way to erect insurmountable roadblocks for using it.

Let’s start with the boot time and then move onto the iPhone. When the car starts, it uses what must be the slowest processor that Audi could purchase to start every system at once from scratch:

• If you have an iPod or iPhone connected to the Audi connect cable, the S8 will read every song. Under the “Media” section of the MMI, the status remains “Initializing” for minutes.
• The S8 will search for your Bluetooth phone for 80 seconds. After finding your phone, since it remembers not a single contact, it will re-load all contacts and past phone calls in that order for the next 60 seconds.
• The iPhone contacts are not “fully” loaded for four minutes. While phone numbers are “sort of there”, looking at recent calls reveals only phone numbers, not contact names until the “full load” is done. The loading status can be watched under the “Memory” system. I have 561 “individual contacts”, meaning phone numbers. This is not the number of contacts. A single contact with three phone numbers counts as three “individual contacts”.
• Satellite music “loads” for 40 seconds before defaulting, not logically to your presets, but to the entire 200 stations. That’s “Feature Unavailable” under that section during that time. As soon as that is finished, you can do the obligatory “upper-left” MMI click so that it only shows your presets and not every channel that they offer.
• Navigation would be comical, if it wasn’t so sad. See below.

Navigation is infuriation. Google maps (a wonderful feature) takes a full three minutes to load. This is partially because the 3G system must itself first make a connection to the cellular network. Addresses are loaded from your phone. Since it remembers nothing from turning off the car to turning on the car, it must wait the full four minutes (from above) for the phone to be found, paired, and contacts loaded. Only then will it populate, in excruciatingly slow order, the past destinations and then the favorites.

Getting in the S8 and want to be directed home? Four minutes. No way around it. It gets even better. The OPTION for home is there under favorites, beckoning you to press it. Since the system is still loading, though, when you eagerly click it only to be told that the “Home destination has not yet been set, would you like to assign an address?” Since the last thing it loads are the favorites, it is best to wait the full four minutes to make sure the S8 knows everything about the current driver’s cell phone. Then and only then will “Home” actually be populated with your home address. There is no visual indicator to tell you that the “Home” favorite is actually ready for use. You must try “Home”, answer “Cancel” to the question, and repeat until such a time as the overstressed main processor gets done loading with the excruciating task of starting up.

Let’s talk about volume. Volume is controlled by either the **** on the center console or the control on the right side of the steering wheel. Adjusting either control up or down is supposed to adjust the level of sound coming out of the speakers. Most cars have volume control. This is not that new of feature. The thing about the S8 that makes its volume control unique: it has to boot. I had my wife take video of my inane attempts to adjust the volume while the car was booting. If you happen to be on satellite radio when you boot the car, the music will mysteriously start playing before any of the stations/navigation of stations loads. If by chance you had been listening to the satellite radio with some “gusto”, shall we say, before turning off the car, you may be slightly put off with the message “Feature Unavailable” while the volume **** boots and that “gusto” is rekindled at 5:30 am.

Now, I am a software developer at heart. I decided to roll up my sleeves and get to the bottom of this. I ordered the iPhone Audi Connect cable with my S8. I thought to use that to speed things up and eliminate Bluetooth from the equation. Docking my phone in the center console is not something I want to do every time I get in the car but it is better than waiting four minutes for the systems to come online.

I disabled all Bluetooth, hooked up my iPhone to the cable, and started the S8. Almost instantly I was presented with the music system and could navigate the iPhone media player! Fast audio boot, access to music, the Volume **** even worked after a mere 5 seconds. Life was good. It was time to make a call… “Bluetooth must be enabled to access telephone. Turn on now?” Wait, what?

Audi apparently decided to eliminate telephone functionality through the Audi connect cable. While the S8 understands the iPhone as a media player and quickly accesses it, it doesn’t see it as a telephone through the cable. And now it gets worse. Defeated, I enable Bluetooth in the phone and in the car. Hopefully having access to at least the media side of things via the cable will speed up the boot time. In the Bluetooth setup, I link ONLY the handset function of the iPhone to the S8. The first time I do this, the car is already booted and things work out ok. I think that maybe the boot time won’t be so bad with only the “handset” function to deal with. I turn the car off, pause, and turn the car back on.

“You media player is connected via both cable and Bluetooth. This is not supported. Please disconnect Bluetooth connectivity.” Has anyone with an iPhone that works for Audi ever driven a new S8? Alas, no amount of tinkering can tell the Audi and iPhone to only connect telephone functions and not media functions. Since the cable is plugged in, the Audi senses both the Bluetooth connection and the cable connection. It gets confused and forces you to:

1. Go to the telephone screen
2. Press the lower right button for settings
3. Choose “Bonded Bluetooth devices”
4. Select the Bluetooth device (in my case “S8” for my T-Mobile iphone)
5. Two options will be connected: handset and media; choose the second, press to disconnect
6. Answer “yes, I am sure I want to disconnect”

Every. Time. I start. The car.

I then scour the menus and finally find a way to disable the entire Bluetooth audio system. Problem solved (spoiler: temporarily). The Bluetooth telephone startup, contact transfer, navigation load, etc. boot times have not improved. My media, however, loads quickly. The next day I pick up my daughter from school. She pulls out her iPhone and asks if she can control the music. “Sure”. Oh, wait, I have to enable Blutooth audio, which is buried in the MMI setup. I do it. “You media player is connected via both cable and Bluetooth. This is not supported. Please disconnect Bluetooth connectivity.” It connected to my iPhone Bluetooth audio before I could even think about pairing the S8 with her phone.

Audi, you have created a nearly magical piece of German engineering with the S8. I implore you to release updates for the vehicle to fix the above issues. I would be happy to take time out of my life and talk directly with your software engineers. I have outlined a few “showstopper” issues above, but would be glad to help with the issues that I do not have time to document.

The choice, however, to not act is also available to you. Consider this letter my formal notice that, should Audi decide that it is not advantageous to provide a working vehicle to it’s consumer, I will be returning my 2013 Audi S8 and will expect a full refund. The car has been in the shop senselessly while the Audi service department tries to fix these and other software issues with nuts, bolts, ratchets, and wrenches. Seeing this communications breakdown between the software and mechanical side of your business is sad. Perhaps, in some small way, I can make a difference.

Have someone high up talk with me – my contact information is below. I do not want to return this vehicle and it is fully within Audi’s power to stop that from happening. “German Engineering” is obvious in every facet of the mechanical aspect of the S8. It’s time for that same level of precision to apply to the electronic systems of that same vehicle.

Sincerely,

John



Additional Audi S8 issues not addressed above:

Bug: When the audio source is set to satellite radio and the volume is set to zero, turning off the car and back on sets the volume to anywhere between 5 and 10. This does not happen on any other audio source.

Solution: Upon turning the car off while on satellite radio, store the current volume level and restore it upon starting the car.


Bug: If a Bluetooth phone is connected to any Audi and a private call wants to be made, the S8 will hijack the call and put it over the speakers 2-3 times based on the circumstances on how the call was made.

Solution: Bluetooth telephone integration is documented very well. All other car manufacturers with Bluetooth telephone integration respect when a call is originated from a handset (vs. the car interface) and do not attempt to hijack that call. Audi is mistakenly hijacking the call on the “on dial” event, the “on ring/connect” event, and the “on answer” event, regardless of where the call originated. This bug affects all Audi vehicles. For the complete flowchart on how to handle call origination exceptions, either contact me or use a phone in a Toyota to see how they do it.

aTOMic

Welcome, sorry you're having such a rough go of it with the new car!

I'd like to see some pics of the S8 in that color. Sounds really interesting.

What dealership are you dealing with?

Good luck! Once you get to the right person - and get the right software flash - I am confident your problems will go away.

-Tom

kwoods8

Have you heard from other S8 owners having the same problems?

L0U

It works like mine, and if you don't like how it works, buy a Toyota. I expect Audi to refund you out of charity, not necessity, since you have absolutely no legal case to lemon this car. Any sane arbitrator would shake their head in disbelief.

No one else on the planet has issues with these bugs. We either don't care, work around them, or never encounter them.

Audi would fix it if they thought enough people cared. They have mid year changes all the time. They do not wait a full model year change to update the things they want to update. Unlike the competition.

Your real problem is that no one else sees the problem. I just wouldn't want to give mine up over media issues. The alternatives in this market are grim to ugly.

subterFUSE

Good lord.

I'm picking up my 2013 A8 in the next week or so. Looks like I will likely be in the same boat?


Well written letter, there. If anything is possibly going to help your cause, that firm but polite letter should be the ticket.


My current car, a 2005 BMW 545i, shares some of the software problems you describe. Specifically, the iDrive system takes quite some time to load. During the load period, the radio volume **** does not function for approx 30 seconds to 1 minute. The iDrive system cannot accept commands for about 45 seconds to 1.5 minutes, too.

After some software updates the iDrive system became much quicker than it was originally. But the delays are still an annoyance.

I think hardware is also part of the issue. These car companies are selecting CPU equipment which is grossly underpowered for the processing tasks at hand.

jakematic

I concur.

johno10661

I'll get some pics up. The color really is sharp. I cheated and chose the color of my R8 Spyder. I think they should add it to the line-up.

johno10661

That's one of the reasons I joined the forum - I don't know of any. This forum was recommended by a friend of mine who is an Audi fan. He just got a Tesla - that's a sweet car.

johno10661

Isn't it odd that they skip on CPUs with the prices of the overall vehicle?

johno10661

I own 3 Toyotas. I'm not looking for charity nor an argument from this group. I own two other Audis that do not have these problems. I bought this car for the tech. You can be fine with your car taking 4 minutes to boot - I will politely disagree that it is not acceptable. This is my primary driving car, not my "weekend fun car". I want the electronics to work at least to the level of my other Audis and preferably to the level of my Toyotas.