
“My Car does not start when I buy Vanilla Ice Cream” (2015) - inception44
https://www.digitalrepublik.com/digital-marketing-newsletter/2015/05/10/my-car-does-not-start-when-i-buy-vanilla-ice-cream-said-a-man-to-general-motors/
======
bartkappenburg
On a related note: The case of the 500 mile email [0]

[0]
[https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html](https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html)

~~~
xerox13ster
This immediately came to mind as well and is one of my favorite stories.

------
nottorp
[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-
silence/](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cone-of-silence/)

~~~
bambax
Indeed! From the article:

> _In 2010, the Pontiac Division of General Motors received..._

> _This was a cool act by General Motors especially in this world of Internet
> when news can go viral in matter of seconds_

From Snopes:

> _This legend surfaced in print in 1978, but an anecdotal sighting places it
> even earlier than that, in 1971._

~~~
TorKlingberg
Yes. It's a neat story, but it has that smell of an urban legend. What
engineer would come back for four nights in a row rather than just figuring
out why the car didn't start the first time?

~~~
taneq
Why do you think he came back four times in a row? Not everyone has a complete
and accurate physical model of their car in their head.

~~~
TorKlingberg
The story, as written, says that the engineer want with the father on four
different nights. I would expect an engineer to at least try to diagnose the
problem rather than spending all the effort of coming back on four different
nights outside of work ours. Basically the story feels made up.

------
haecceity
If the car didn’t start then how did he come back the next day to get more ice
cream? Surely he waited a bit and the car would start. And the timing issue
would be obvious from here?

I’m also worried about his health. Should he really be having ice cream
everyday?

~~~
ralfd
The engineer also wouldn't wait until the next day to test again.

~~~
taneq
One of our bug reports was "if we leave the machine for more than two weeks it
doesn't deploy correctly." Sometimes you can't test again until the hardware
is ready.

------
d--b
Reminds me of my wife's macbook air wifi that was always spotty when she was
using it, and always got back to normal when I used it. She thought I had some
kind of magic engineer's touch.

After much thinking, we realized that when she was using the laptop in her
bed, she would put it on her lap with her legs bent, so that the computer was
sitting at a 45 degree angle wrt to the floor, while I would put the computer
flat on my chest. This angle made the wifi antenna much less performant.

~~~
seer
Humans are basically bags of mostly water, and water is not god to radio
signals. Have seen the exact same problem in rooms that are far away from the
router. Massive difference if any of my body parts is in the way of the signal

~~~
aequitas
Wifi is weird sometimes. I once had to help my nephew with his network. He had
2 adjacent rooms, but with half a meter concrete inbetween. Needless to say
the signal would not penetrate from one room to the other, no matter how close
we moved the router and laptop to each other in their respective rooms. But
moving the router and laptop back would make it work all of a sudden. Turned
out, moving them back would position them in front of the windows, and the
signal would then go out of the window and bounce of the neighbouring building
to the other room's window.

------
ksbakan
Why do sites use this crappy scrolling override. I's infuriating and makes
navigating the article a pain.

~~~
jackewiehose
I just thought my ctrl-key was broken because I couldn't change the size with
ctrl-mousewheel. I whish webbrowsers wouldn't allow this shit. There is no
legit reason for a website to fiddle with the basic controls.

------
andreasley
My first car (bought used) had a weird bug: When it had been parked overnight
on a steep slope facing downwards, the driver's electric window sometimes
wouldn't go back up. Rain would increase the chance of the bug occurring.

All other windows were fine and the problem would go away after a few hours of
driving. The bug never occurred if the car was parked on a flat surface.

The mechanics were clueless. I've found that there's a so-called "convenience
comfort module" located under a front seat. This electronic module was
responsible for controlling the electric windows (amongst other things) and
was insufficiently sealed. Water could enter and disrupt certain functions. My
dealer wouldn't even believe me that this module exists. :)

Turns out other people had the water problem, too:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9z7iEbg3qY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9z7iEbg3qY)

~~~
nottorp
You parked your car and left the windows open?

~~~
andreasley
No; after letting them down the following day, the one on the driver's side
just wouldn't go back up again or would even go down by itself once the car
was started.

------
klaustopher
This story comes up once every few months if we get a really, really weird bug
request from support. Issues like „the customer says, the app automatically
buys something while he is sleeping. Please investigate where our app has
automatic buying“ and we just sit there and stare at this in awe

------
ars
The point of this story is not the ice cream, it's to take user reports of
bugs seriously even if they make no sense or you can't reproduce them.

------
crististm
Vapor lock was a thing in the time of carburetors.

This story is from the 70s, when "internet virality" was not yet on people's
minds.

~~~
danaliv
Interesting. Fuel-injected aircraft engines get vapor lock—shutting down to
refuel and then restarting can be a serious pain—but I don’t think I’ve ever
heard of a carbureted one doing it.

~~~
cafard
In Jefferson County, Colorado, the stretch of US 40 up into the foothills from
the plains used have a lot of cars stalled by vapor lock along the shoulders.
But I don't think I've seen a car stalled by vapor lock in forty years.

~~~
danaliv
Neat. Sounds like I’ll be jumping down the rabbit hole to figure out why
carbed cars vapor-lock but airplanes are the reverse. :)

------
krilly
There is a GitHub repo which lists loads of interesting bugs (vanilla ice
cream car, 500 mile email, etc.) with better quality writeups than this. I
think it's been posted to HN before. Anyone?

------
amai
I once had the strange problem that shaking my Apple Magic Mouse helped to
reestablish the lost blue tooth connection to my Mac. This happened quite
often. It took me quite a while to figure out, why shaking the mouse should
help with the bluetooth connection:

The reasons is simply that the batteries in the Magic Mouse are often loose
and so shaking seems to help moving the batteries around:
[https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/15709/magic-
mouse-...](https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/15709/magic-mouse-is-
frequently-losing-its-connection-to-macbook-pro)

------
wildduck
Hmm, got 500 Error code, Internal Server Error. Here is a backup:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20191213101529/https://www.digit...](https://web.archive.org/web/20191213101529/https://www.digitalrepublik.com/digital-
marketing-newsletter/2015/05/10/my-car-does-not-start-when-i-buy-vanilla-ice-
cream-said-a-man-to-general-motors/)

------
lgeorget
I had a similar problem on my previous car. It would start again without issue
after stopping if the pause was shorter than 15min or longer than half an hour
but there was a spot in between where the car had cooled down too much and not
enough at the same time to start. It's nice to see it was not just a fancy
from an old car and to know the reason.

~~~
yetihehe
I still have this problem on my 2004 Opel Astra. When it sits for about
15-20mins I have problem starting, but I just have to start it for about 5
seconds instead of instantly. Longer or shorter pauses are ok.

------
guessmyname
Maybe not important, but I would have put (2010) in the title.

The article was posted on May 10, 2015 but the story is from 2010.

~~~
crististm
more like ~1978

~~~
dsfyu404ed
That's why it took the engineer so long to figure it out. He wasn't expecting
a "solved" problem like heat soak.

------
lwansbrough
Not the point of the story, but I wonder if engineers would reach the solution
faster than non-engineers due to their practice debugging. As soon as I read
the guy was driving to the store to pick it up I knew it had to be timing due
to store layout.

~~~
spuz
If the story is to be believed then a smart engineer took several days to
figure it out while it only took you a minute. I suspect there are other
factors than simply being an 'engineer' that will help you arrive at the
solution. I personally would never have guessed that store layout would be a
factor. However, one question I had immediately was "how do you get home if
your car doesn't start?" and if the reply was "I wait and eventually the car
starts" then I would probably have closed in on the answer after that.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
The situation described is basically a textbook perfect example of heat soak.

If you tell someone with experience repairing vehicles that your car starts
fine when cold and find when you shut it off for a short while (e.g. buying
gas they are going to nearly instantly hone in on "something is hot that
shouldn't be".

------
JoeAltmaier
One for Car Talk!

Actually when I read the title, my first gut reaction was "Vapor Lock".

------
orrymr
Correlation vs causation, eh?

~~~
lordnacho
There is causation, just not directly from ice cream to vapor lock. It's a
diagram with three entities, ice cream -> time to cool -> vapor lock

~~~
perl4ever
That's the nature of all situations in which "correlation is not causation".

