Welcome to 2026, Where a Simple Software Glitch Can Kill an Entire Car
The Drive ·
We're not talking about a cutting-edge EV, either—the humble, gas-powered VW Tiguan is at risk of suddenly stalling due to faulty computer code. The post Welcome to 2026, Where a Simple Software Glitch Can Kill an Entire Car appeared first on The Drive .
You hear it all the time: New cars are complicated. Automakers could make them less complicated, but that’s not really their bag, so instead we can only watch as software sinks its claws ever deeper into every aspect of driving. Long gone are the days when control units were siloed and tied to ancillary features; today, everything from entertainment to safety to propulsion itself runs through code. And when there’s a problem with that code, the effects can be catastrophic. Just ask Volkswagen Tiguan owners.
The Tiguan was completely revamped for the 2025 model year, and, as spotted by CarBuzz , already, just under 50,000 examples of the compact SUV are subject to a recall because of a serious problem with their Body Control Module software. “Body Control” is, at once, both accurate and a simplification what this system entails, because while the BCM does handle various electronics throughout the body, owners might not expect that it also governs the ignition.
Per the official NHTSA report , VW discovered that the BCM unexpectedly reset in a test vehicle, resulting in the loss of all motive power, exterior lights, the rearview camera system and, rather vaguely, “certain controls.” Further investigation uncovered “a small number” of resets occurring in foreign-market cars. Volkswagen of America said it’s not aware of such an event happening in a U.S. Tiguan, but it also can’t rule out the possibility. To make this whole mess even trickier to solve, there’s no specific diagnostic trouble code for this fault when it happens.
Ultimately, dealers will have to update the software on affected SUVs, which were built between March and August of 2025. The BCM runs such critical software—if something goes haywire with it, the result is an engine stall—that it can’t be tampered with through an over-the-air update.
The result of a glitch of this nature this isn’t dissimilar from what a faulty ignition switch might do, like the problem GM wrestled with more than a decade ago in more than 800,000 cars. Of course, those were physical switches, which were found to easily slide between ignition modes with little or unintentional force, whereas this is an electronic module going rogue. The fact that we’re talking about a humble gas-powered Tiguan—not even a hybrid, let alone an EV—means that even relatively traditional cars are becoming increasingly defined by their software, and there are certainly ramifications to that.
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The post Welcome to 2026, Where a Simple Software Glitch Can Kill an Entire Car appeared first on The Drive .