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I'm going to be a little petty here, so sorry in advance: It's common for Tesla fans to mock other automotive manufacturers for being "old and slow" - as if th

I'm going to be a little petty here, so sorry in advance: It's common for Tesla fans to mock other automotive manufacturers for being "old and slow" - as if they're incompetent because they take so long to develop new features and adapt to changes in technology. It's like a "why does it take 5 years for BMW to update their infotainment system when I can do the same thing with a Raspberry Pi in 5 minutes?" mentality. What I think goes unappreciated by some is the level of testing that normally goes into automotive grade development. That's not to say that modern ICE cars are more reliable than a Tesla, but their electronics are usually designed for a higher level of robustness. Here are my issues: - Why is the car rendered useless if the infotainment system fails? This should be a non-critical component. If it is critical and the critical part can't be isolated, then the system as a whole should have been tested more extensively. - Why does the infotainment system fail if a log message write fails, and why was this failure mode not tested? It is very common knowledge that flash wears out, and log messages aren't critical. - Why were they not using automotive grade flash? This, coupled with the recent story about the non-automotive-grade displays failing really demonstrates that maybe, just maybe, the rest of the automotive industry isn't totally clueless. Maybe they're just more scared of a failure. Who knows - it's probably a mixture of both.

vokep 7y ago
This is giving me deja vu...I'm not alone right? This same comment is posted on the same story but from the past, no?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
alanthedev 7y ago
> - Why were they not using automotive grade flash? Cool. I did not realize there were such products.
- Unklejoe 7y ago
  Well, for a given chip, it usually just refers to a wider temperature range. But there are other types of flash that are better suited for this environment. I see parallel and SPI NOR flash a lot in ruggedized embedded devices (usually with a minimum of 100,000 erase cycles), but they're generally a lower capacity. I don't know the exact cause of this failure, but there are ways to design around unreliable flash too. They could partition it such that the firmware image is in a read-only partition, and it runs out of a ramdisk, with only user settings and log messages stored in a R/W partition. That may be what they're doing, and perhaps the issue is due to the software crashing when the write fails. I'm not sure.
  - mayniac 7y ago
    >I don't know the exact cause of this failure, but there are ways to design around unreliable flash too. They could partition it such that the firmware image is in a read-only partition, and it runs out of a ramdisk, with only user settings and log messages stored in a R/W partition. That may be what they're doing, and perhaps the issue is due to the software crashing when the write fails. I'm not sure. Not in this field so I might be wrong, but I'm guessing they could have also: * Have redundant storage, failover when the first flash chip dies, and log a fault telling the user to get it looked at. Flash is cheap anyway * Use removable storage. PCIe, M.2, proprietary, whatever. If it dies then at least you can replace it relatively cheap. I'm interested in what other problems will surface with Teslas in the next few years. This seems like a huge design failure, I doubt it's the only one.
PossiblyKyle 7y ago
Reminds me of a comment I’ve seen a couple of years ago: “Tesla is not an automotive company, it’s a tech company”
perl4ever 7y ago
In all fairness, if you look at cars preserved from the 80s, when electronics started becoming pervasive, there are a lot of failures there too. For instance, the multi-segment displays tend to fail in little bits. I have a car that doesn't have that problem, but the main ECU tends to fail and have to be resoldered. Of course, mostly people don't care because after 20 years you expect the vast majority to be scrapped, but in any case, you still design for a certain lifespan.

vokep 7y ago

This is giving me deja vu...I'm not alone right? This same comment is posted on the same story but from the past, no?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

alanthedev 7y ago

> - Why were they not using automotive grade flash? Cool. I did not realize there were such products.

Unklejoe 7y ago
Well, for a given chip, it usually just refers to a wider temperature range. But there are other types of flash that are better suited for this environment. I see parallel and SPI NOR flash a lot in ruggedized embedded devices (usually with a minimum of 100,000 erase cycles), but they're generally a lower capacity. I don't know the exact cause of this failure, but there are ways to design around unreliable flash too. They could partition it such that the firmware image is in a read-only partition, and it runs out of a ramdisk, with only user settings and log messages stored in a R/W partition. That may be what they're doing, and perhaps the issue is due to the software crashing when the write fails. I'm not sure.
- mayniac 7y ago
  >I don't know the exact cause of this failure, but there are ways to design around unreliable flash too. They could partition it such that the firmware image is in a read-only partition, and it runs out of a ramdisk, with only user settings and log messages stored in a R/W partition. That may be what they're doing, and perhaps the issue is due to the software crashing when the write fails. I'm not sure. Not in this field so I might be wrong, but I'm guessing they could have also: * Have redundant storage, failover when the first flash chip dies, and log a fault telling the user to get it looked at. Flash is cheap anyway * Use removable storage. PCIe, M.2, proprietary, whatever. If it dies then at least you can replace it relatively cheap. I'm interested in what other problems will surface with Teslas in the next few years. This seems like a huge design failure, I doubt it's the only one.

PossiblyKyle 7y ago

Reminds me of a comment I’ve seen a couple of years ago: “Tesla is not an automotive company, it’s a tech company”

perl4ever 7y ago

In all fairness, if you look at cars preserved from the 80s, when electronics started becoming pervasive, there are a lot of failures there too. For instance, the multi-segment displays tend to fail in little bits. I have a car that doesn't have that problem, but the main ECU tends to fail and have to be resoldered. Of course, mostly people don't care because after 20 years you expect the vast majority to be scrapped, but in any case, you still design for a certain lifespan.