74 ms·

Burned-Out Flash Trips Up Older Teslas

144 points by JoachimS 7y ago

pkaye 7y ago
> Tesla’s firmware utilizes nearly 100% of that space available, so it’s almost impossible to use wear-leveling for the vehicle logs. Its still possible to do this. You do wear level between the blocks containing the firmware and the logs.
- Skunkleton 7y ago
  Wear leveling isn’t the issue here as eMMC is wear leveled. The issue is probably just that the total volume of writes has literally just worn out too much of the flash.
- Akababa 7y ago
  Firmware doesn't update as often though so it'd have to be static wear-leveling. I'm not sure of the safety of doing this with firmware files though - could it actually decrease the life expectancy by moving critical blocks more often? In any case, if 90% of the space is filled with static firmware files then wear-leveling becomes difficult. Probably best to turn it off and let the physical blocks with the logs fail while keeping the firmware blocks intact, or just stop writing logs after a certain point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling#Static_wear_leveling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling#Static_wear_leve...
  - e2le 7y ago
    Or write the logs to a separate and easily replaceable module/drive. Putting the firmware on the same chip as what you're regularly writing to is probably a bad idea.
  - mlyle 7y ago
    > could it actually decrease the life expectancy by moving critical blocks more often? No. You do normal, dynamic wear leveling. When you notice that the block you want to write to is much more worn than the rest-- say 100 erases extra-- you move a firmware block to it instead and claim that for use. Then that block sits near-quiescent for a long time until it's time to put it back into the rotation of blocks that get actively written. Static wear leveling can just be a tiny, tiny share of write amplification-- a factor of 0.01 or even less-- while keeping all the blocks in play. You only "lose" from static wear leveling if you end up moving something right before it becomes active again. Whatever your strategy, there's always a degenerate write pattern which will cause useless write amplification, but even relatively simple schemes are robust against basically everything except deliberately malicious write patterns, and you can bound this worst case. Incidentally, one way flash fails is by dielectric breakdown increasing leakage causing worn-but-idle-blocks to slowly accumulate error. Moving / occasionally scrubbing static, important data actually helps.
tropo 7y ago
This doesn't bode well for classic and antique car collectors of the future, who will want operable Tesla cars. There are Ford Model T cars that still drive. They were made 92 to 111 years ago. With undocumented and cryptographically signed interfaces between components, it will be impossible to keep a Tesla running that long. The best you could hope for is to graft the body panels of a Tesla onto the innards of a newer car, merely dressing up the newer car to cosmetically look like a Tesla. Such a hack would not be have vehicle title as a Tesla, would not drive like a Tesla, and would not have an interface like a Tesla.
- sliken 7y ago
  Hackers are already ripped apart Teslas and building things from the parts. It's VERY common to use the battery packs (thus their high resale value). Motors are popular as well. Sure there's some crypto/DRM for things like the car's identity (and if it has free supercharging for life). But generally a large part of a Tesla would be usable even 100 years from now, even if Tesla (the company) is dead.
  - olivermarks 7y ago
    This is nonsense IMO. Not to disparage Tesla but I doubt many of the components will last 10 years let alone 100
    - mschuster91 7y ago
      The thing that most definitely needs exchange is the battery pack and IIRC it's ordinary 18650 cells...
- shrubble 7y ago
  My estimate is that 50 years from now that encryption will be crackable. Alternatively there may be holes that can be used--such as a 'boundary scan' of one of the chips yielding the key. I don't have a spare Tesla sitting around to test this theory, however (grin)
huntertwo 7y ago
I thought that Tesla engineers would have thought of this. Guess it’s hard to be an innovator and inevitably you will fuck up pretty majorly. With cars though these fuck ups are more significant than with phones.
- waste_monk 7y ago
  In previous threads I've seen Tesla roasted for doing this; apparently most vehicles that use flash loggers like this make it a user replaceable module. I know it's hard to include replaceable storage due to the vibrations etc. but hopefully the new Teslas will at least start using something like XFMEXPRESS for semi-permanent storage.
- rsynnott 7y ago
  > Guess it’s hard to be an innovator and inevitably you will fuck up pretty majorly. Or, alternatively, hire people who know what they're doing and take their advice? Flash wear isn't exactly an obscure issue, and it would certainly be on the radar of, say, Bosch (who make a lot of this stuff for the industry).
  - huntertwo 7y ago
    Right, but not something you might consider until your OTA updates makes your kernel go from 300MB to 1GB. How many car manufacturers do OTA updates? Still, it seems like an extreme oversight and shouldn’t have happened even in the most rushed conditions.
pbreit 7y ago
This would seem fixable with software update. If not, then a cheap hardware fix. Does anyone know?
- colechristensen 7y ago
  Well the hardware fix would be replacing a likely rather expensive board, and more sensibly, separating the constant-write kind of load onto a separate block device, preferably something like a microSD matched with a significantly larger eMMC. There could be a software update to slow or disable the log-like writing or at least warn when the reserved blocks were running low.
  - lazyjones 7y ago
    > Well the hardware fix would be replacing a likely rather expensive board, "Rather expensive"? Just to give you an idea: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-systems/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-sy...
- jdnenej 7y ago
  There is no such thing as a cheap fix for an incredibly complex and proprietary device. You will have to pay a highly trained expert and hope they have stock left of the part.
  - SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
    Sure there is. It's a mass-produced PCB. Just take the old one out and drop a new one in. Whether Tesla are willing to foot the bill outside of warranty, however, remains to be seen.
castratikron 7y ago
Does anyone report on eMMC wearing out in phones, game consoles, TVs, laptops, etc.? What makes Tesla special? Are there really no other car manufacturers using eMMC btw? Easiest hardware fix would be to replace the part with a larger one which would only be a BOM change. But that doesn't help the units already in the field. I'm sure they've figured something out by now. >Tesla’s firmware size over the years went from a paltry 300Mb to a full 1Gb over an estimated four year period, which consumes much of the storage space in that Flash. Add on the constant vehicle log updates, and the failure rate of those chips increased exponentially. Does it really increase exponentially or does 'exponentially' just mean 'a lot' now? Genuinely curious. Also I think I'm allowed to be pedantic when the source is an electrical engineer.
- sjansen 7y ago
  Most people replace their phones and laptops every 2 to 5 years. Too fast to see any problem under normal usage. Most game consoles and TVs are unlikely to do enough logging to wear out their storage. But if they did, especially if they cost as much as a car, it probably would make the news. Cars tend to last a decade or two. They shouldn't stop working because of something as silly as excessive logging.
  - novok 7y ago
    Most game consoles have a lot more free space, use hard drives and don't do much when in sleep mode.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- Akababa 7y ago
  Assuming it writes log files at a constant rate, the rate of wear is proportional to 1/(1-f), where f is the fraction of storage taken up by firmware. Interestingly, this isn't exponential either - it's infinite at f=1!
  - rightbyte 7y ago
farazbabar 7y ago
There are a ton of gremlins in Tesla just waiting to go off like time bombs. I recently got a very expensive repair just outside of warranty where the car simply refused to charge. Paid nearly 3000 for the diagnosis and repair for the car to start charging again - we are talking about a car with no wear and tear parts for the most part costing nearly 3K because a chip somewhere between the charge port and battery failed. My whole reason for buying it was that this would be the ultimate reliable car without ICE or brake wear, leaving tires as the only consumable. Guess I was wrong.
- Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
  Even in combustion engine cars if ECM buckles up it usually is expensive to repair(at least in my part of the world). I guess with a car like Tesla, rich with electronics & unavailability of parts to 3rd party service centers; repairs can be very expensive.
  - Y-Bopinator 7y ago
    ECUs made in the last 10-20 years don’t really ever fail. Bosch has really figured things out and produces reliable ECUs for most OEMs. The repair on your Tesla will cost more than a motor or transmission replacement on a conventional vehicle. Tesla owners should file a class action lawsuit to force Tesla to extend their warranty to cover this issue. Tesla will try to fight it and make you pay out of pocket.
    - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
      > Tesla owners should file a class action lawsuit to force Tesla to extend their warranty to cover this issue. Why is it Tesla's responsibility to fix the car out of warranty?
      - Marazan 7y ago
        Because their design decision means this part is guaranteed to fail after an unreasonably short time.
Animats 7y ago
It shows Tesla's priorities - collecting data on the customer has priority over keeping the vehicle running.
- t0astbread 7y ago
  Nowhere does this article state that the logs are sent anywhere. And I think we can all agree that logging for the case of failure is reasonable.
ggm 7y ago
The earlier models were premium not economy pricepoints. Why is the ECU designed around low cost on-board, non-replaceable constructs like this? A premium product, would not nickel-and-time the SD card, it would have engineered it as a field replaceable unit, with an insert,format, wait (for download) and go mode. Replacing the entire ECU feels like an admission like Apple and increasingly Lenovo (thinkpad), they have driven premium to the wrong place. "please give us soldered on memory and soldered on SSD" is not actually what we said, on our feedback forms to Apple, or IBM (X1 Carbon). Nobody asked Tesla to shave $1 on the ECU assembly and the incremental cost of recall and fix, along with goodwill now outweighs the cost saving in any sense I can understand it. If the authorities demand he fix for free, it becomes another shit show of the TSLA share price. This wasn't a good choice against all the other choices.
- jchw 7y ago
  Lenovo still makes Thinkpads that are extendable. My P51 has 3! m.2 (2 of which support NVMe,) 4 RAM slots, easily replaceable keyboard and more. But I think most people want thinner laptops, and the thinner ones have less of this. I don’t think this is a headphone jack type situation: people value portability a lot on laptops, and the difference between a rugadized, user expandable laptop and an “ultrabook” are striking.
  - jdnenej 7y ago
    My dell xps is super thin and it still has easily replaceable ram and battery. The massive use of glue, rivets, proprietary screws and cryptographic verification in macbooks is not for slimness but for planed obsolescence
    - Aloha 7y ago
      Unpopular opinion, but from where I sit the serviceable lifetime of a computer is effectively about a decade, so long as all that non-replaceable stuff lasts the serviceable lifetime of the object, then it doesn't matter how repairable or not it is. Apple charges like 200 bucks for a battery and top case, which is pretty competitive for a replacement OEM keyboard and battery combo.
sm4rk0 7y ago
1. Let's go back to the good old HDDs. There are even automotive industry ones (I own one) 2.There's a difference (8-fold) between Gb (gigabit) and GB (gigabyte). Memory chip capacities (and data transfer rates) are often expressed in bits (per second), but memory device (RAM stick, storage,...) capacities and file sizes are always in bytes.
jve 7y ago
There was once a guy that shared instructions on how to resolder that chip (Get dump of software, root it, solder new chip with more memory). It was instruction on how to root Tesla. But oh, he deleted his content and left some comments: > As a result I've taken down my howtos. I'm sorry about this but there is some kind of political problem which I don't understand. https://www.diyelectriccar.com/forums/showthread.php/howto-tesla-rooting-firmware-199457.html https://www.diyelectriccar.com/forums/showthread.php/howto-t... Pity the site is not available on waybackmachine.
- chubs 7y ago
  I'd be surprised if it's any different to modding your BIOS in a PC motherboard: Buy a SOIC-8 clamp, a USB interface and bob's your uncle. Unless the ECU is potted in epoxy.
  - Scoundreller 7y ago
    Doubt it’s an SOIC. More likely a 40 or 48 pin TSOP or the like. But if it was an SOIC... just lift the power pin, power the chip externally and find some other points to tap into the clock and data lines and dump away. Then solder the legs of the new one on one side and connect VCC on the other side.
    - jve 7y ago
      Hehey, archive.is has that page! https://archive.is/kIZpA https://archive.is/kIZpA https://archive.is/Leqih#selection-775.0-779.271 https://archive.is/Leqih#selection-775.0-779.271
m0xte 7y ago
There’s no excuse for this at all. It’s shitty short sighted engineering. Simple as that. The main firmware should have been on a separate physical device if data was write heavy regardless of “enough space” being left. It would have cost a few dollars to make this issue go away. The more I hear about the engineering the longer I will avoid buying an electric vehicle. Iterating big problems away on a tangible chunk of engineering rather than a piece of software is stupid.
- rapnie 7y ago
  A couple days ago I found this link [0] to a Reddit post on HN about the software engineering practices at Tesla. Don't know how accurate the story is, hard to tell, but it sure was worrisome. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/99sbwa/former_tesla_programmers_anecdotes_about_problems/ https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/99sbwa/form...
  - m0xte 7y ago
    Yeah I sent that to my father who is a model 3 owner and former software developer :)
- lazyjones 7y ago
  > The more I hear about the engineering the longer I will avoid buying an electric vehicle. You can look up the nVidia Tegra board on Wikipedia and see for yourself that the "shitty short sighted engineering" board is used in many gasoline cars.
  - leggomylibro 7y ago
    Yes, but those ICE cars were designed by engineers who understood that you only get ~100ks of write endurance with this sort of nonvolatile memory. Tesla's use case is unique because they stuff enormous firmware images into the on-board NVM and write to it constantly with very heavy logging. Of course your Flash/EMMC will wear out quickly if you constantly write to it while your device is on - that is the short-sighted part. The board isn't necessarily a problem, but how Tesla chose to use it sounds like a very predictable problem.
ComodoHacker 7y ago
With such extensive logging and monitoring it's hard to believe they didn't monitor MMC wear and didn't see it coming.
agumonkey 7y ago
SSD wear was known for a while, but that it would cascade into display then charging malfunction.. that's class action worthy.
Tempest1981 7y ago
The Model S and X have 8 GB of flash, according to the article. Does the Model 3 have more? > The MCUv1 units supplied for the Tesla Model S and X, up until 2018, feature an Nvidia Tegra Arm-based SoC with 8Gb of eMMC integrated into the same board, which is hosted on a mainboard.

144 points by JoachimS 7y ago

> Tesla’s firmware utilizes nearly 100% of that space available, so it’s almost impossible to use wear-leveling for the vehicle logs. Its still possible to do this. You do wear level between the blocks containing the firmware and the logs.

Skunkleton 7y ago
Wear leveling isn’t the issue here as eMMC is wear leveled. The issue is probably just that the total volume of writes has literally just worn out too much of the flash.
Akababa 7y ago
Firmware doesn't update as often though so it'd have to be static wear-leveling. I'm not sure of the safety of doing this with firmware files though - could it actually decrease the life expectancy by moving critical blocks more often? In any case, if 90% of the space is filled with static firmware files then wear-leveling becomes difficult. Probably best to turn it off and let the physical blocks with the logs fail while keeping the firmware blocks intact, or just stop writing logs after a certain point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling#Static_wear_leveling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_leveling#Static_wear_leve...
- e2le 7y ago
  Or write the logs to a separate and easily replaceable module/drive. Putting the firmware on the same chip as what you're regularly writing to is probably a bad idea.
- mlyle 7y ago
  > could it actually decrease the life expectancy by moving critical blocks more often? No. You do normal, dynamic wear leveling. When you notice that the block you want to write to is much more worn than the rest-- say 100 erases extra-- you move a firmware block to it instead and claim that for use. Then that block sits near-quiescent for a long time until it's time to put it back into the rotation of blocks that get actively written. Static wear leveling can just be a tiny, tiny share of write amplification-- a factor of 0.01 or even less-- while keeping all the blocks in play. You only "lose" from static wear leveling if you end up moving something right before it becomes active again. Whatever your strategy, there's always a degenerate write pattern which will cause useless write amplification, but even relatively simple schemes are robust against basically everything except deliberately malicious write patterns, and you can bound this worst case. Incidentally, one way flash fails is by dielectric breakdown increasing leakage causing worn-but-idle-blocks to slowly accumulate error. Moving / occasionally scrubbing static, important data actually helps.

tropo 7y ago

This doesn't bode well for classic and antique car collectors of the future, who will want operable Tesla cars. There are Ford Model T cars that still drive. They were made 92 to 111 years ago. With undocumented and cryptographically signed interfaces between components, it will be impossible to keep a Tesla running that long. The best you could hope for is to graft the body panels of a Tesla onto the innards of a newer car, merely dressing up the newer car to cosmetically look like a Tesla. Such a hack would not be have vehicle title as a Tesla, would not drive like a Tesla, and would not have an interface like a Tesla.

sliken 7y ago
Hackers are already ripped apart Teslas and building things from the parts. It's VERY common to use the battery packs (thus their high resale value). Motors are popular as well. Sure there's some crypto/DRM for things like the car's identity (and if it has free supercharging for life). But generally a large part of a Tesla would be usable even 100 years from now, even if Tesla (the company) is dead.
- olivermarks 7y ago
  This is nonsense IMO. Not to disparage Tesla but I doubt many of the components will last 10 years let alone 100
  - mschuster91 7y ago
    The thing that most definitely needs exchange is the battery pack and IIRC it's ordinary 18650 cells...
shrubble 7y ago
My estimate is that 50 years from now that encryption will be crackable. Alternatively there may be holes that can be used--such as a 'boundary scan' of one of the chips yielding the key. I don't have a spare Tesla sitting around to test this theory, however (grin)

huntertwo 7y ago

I thought that Tesla engineers would have thought of this. Guess it’s hard to be an innovator and inevitably you will fuck up pretty majorly. With cars though these fuck ups are more significant than with phones.

waste_monk 7y ago
In previous threads I've seen Tesla roasted for doing this; apparently most vehicles that use flash loggers like this make it a user replaceable module. I know it's hard to include replaceable storage due to the vibrations etc. but hopefully the new Teslas will at least start using something like XFMEXPRESS for semi-permanent storage.
rsynnott 7y ago
> Guess it’s hard to be an innovator and inevitably you will fuck up pretty majorly. Or, alternatively, hire people who know what they're doing and take their advice? Flash wear isn't exactly an obscure issue, and it would certainly be on the radar of, say, Bosch (who make a lot of this stuff for the industry).
- huntertwo 7y ago
  Right, but not something you might consider until your OTA updates makes your kernel go from 300MB to 1GB. How many car manufacturers do OTA updates? Still, it seems like an extreme oversight and shouldn’t have happened even in the most rushed conditions.

pbreit 7y ago

This would seem fixable with software update. If not, then a cheap hardware fix. Does anyone know?

colechristensen 7y ago
Well the hardware fix would be replacing a likely rather expensive board, and more sensibly, separating the constant-write kind of load onto a separate block device, preferably something like a microSD matched with a significantly larger eMMC. There could be a software update to slow or disable the log-like writing or at least warn when the reserved blocks were running low.
- lazyjones 7y ago
  > Well the hardware fix would be replacing a likely rather expensive board, "Rather expensive"? Just to give you an idea: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-systems/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-sy...
jdnenej 7y ago
There is no such thing as a cheap fix for an incredibly complex and proprietary device. You will have to pay a highly trained expert and hope they have stock left of the part.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  Sure there is. It's a mass-produced PCB. Just take the old one out and drop a new one in. Whether Tesla are willing to foot the bill outside of warranty, however, remains to be seen.

castratikron 7y ago

Does anyone report on eMMC wearing out in phones, game consoles, TVs, laptops, etc.? What makes Tesla special? Are there really no other car manufacturers using eMMC btw? Easiest hardware fix would be to replace the part with a larger one which would only be a BOM change. But that doesn't help the units already in the field. I'm sure they've figured something out by now. >Tesla’s firmware size over the years went from a paltry 300Mb to a full 1Gb over an estimated four year period, which consumes much of the storage space in that Flash. Add on the constant vehicle log updates, and the failure rate of those chips increased exponentially. Does it really increase exponentially or does 'exponentially' just mean 'a lot' now? Genuinely curious. Also I think I'm allowed to be pedantic when the source is an electrical engineer.

sjansen 7y ago
Most people replace their phones and laptops every 2 to 5 years. Too fast to see any problem under normal usage. Most game consoles and TVs are unlikely to do enough logging to wear out their storage. But if they did, especially if they cost as much as a car, it probably would make the news. Cars tend to last a decade or two. They shouldn't stop working because of something as silly as excessive logging.
- novok 7y ago
  Most game consoles have a lot more free space, use hard drives and don't do much when in sleep mode.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Akababa 7y ago
Assuming it writes log files at a constant rate, the rate of wear is proportional to 1/(1-f), where f is the fraction of storage taken up by firmware. Interestingly, this isn't exponential either - it's infinite at f=1!
- rightbyte 7y ago

farazbabar 7y ago

There are a ton of gremlins in Tesla just waiting to go off like time bombs. I recently got a very expensive repair just outside of warranty where the car simply refused to charge. Paid nearly 3000 for the diagnosis and repair for the car to start charging again - we are talking about a car with no wear and tear parts for the most part costing nearly 3K because a chip somewhere between the charge port and battery failed. My whole reason for buying it was that this would be the ultimate reliable car without ICE or brake wear, leaving tires as the only consumable. Guess I was wrong.

Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
Even in combustion engine cars if ECM buckles up it usually is expensive to repair(at least in my part of the world). I guess with a car like Tesla, rich with electronics & unavailability of parts to 3rd party service centers; repairs can be very expensive.
- Y-Bopinator 7y ago
  ECUs made in the last 10-20 years don’t really ever fail. Bosch has really figured things out and produces reliable ECUs for most OEMs. The repair on your Tesla will cost more than a motor or transmission replacement on a conventional vehicle. Tesla owners should file a class action lawsuit to force Tesla to extend their warranty to cover this issue. Tesla will try to fight it and make you pay out of pocket.
  - OnlineGladiator 7y ago
    > Tesla owners should file a class action lawsuit to force Tesla to extend their warranty to cover this issue. Why is it Tesla's responsibility to fix the car out of warranty?
    - Marazan 7y ago
      Because their design decision means this part is guaranteed to fail after an unreasonably short time.

Animats 7y ago

It shows Tesla's priorities - collecting data on the customer has priority over keeping the vehicle running.

t0astbread 7y ago
Nowhere does this article state that the logs are sent anywhere. And I think we can all agree that logging for the case of failure is reasonable.

ggm 7y ago

The earlier models were premium not economy pricepoints. Why is the ECU designed around low cost on-board, non-replaceable constructs like this? A premium product, would not nickel-and-time the SD card, it would have engineered it as a field replaceable unit, with an insert,format, wait (for download) and go mode. Replacing the entire ECU feels like an admission like Apple and increasingly Lenovo (thinkpad), they have driven premium to the wrong place. "please give us soldered on memory and soldered on SSD" is not actually what we said, on our feedback forms to Apple, or IBM (X1 Carbon). Nobody asked Tesla to shave $1 on the ECU assembly and the incremental cost of recall and fix, along with goodwill now outweighs the cost saving in any sense I can understand it. If the authorities demand he fix for free, it becomes another shit show of the TSLA share price. This wasn't a good choice against all the other choices.

jchw 7y ago
Lenovo still makes Thinkpads that are extendable. My P51 has 3! m.2 (2 of which support NVMe,) 4 RAM slots, easily replaceable keyboard and more. But I think most people want thinner laptops, and the thinner ones have less of this. I don’t think this is a headphone jack type situation: people value portability a lot on laptops, and the difference between a rugadized, user expandable laptop and an “ultrabook” are striking.
- jdnenej 7y ago
  My dell xps is super thin and it still has easily replaceable ram and battery. The massive use of glue, rivets, proprietary screws and cryptographic verification in macbooks is not for slimness but for planed obsolescence
  - Aloha 7y ago
    Unpopular opinion, but from where I sit the serviceable lifetime of a computer is effectively about a decade, so long as all that non-replaceable stuff lasts the serviceable lifetime of the object, then it doesn't matter how repairable or not it is. Apple charges like 200 bucks for a battery and top case, which is pretty competitive for a replacement OEM keyboard and battery combo.

sm4rk0 7y ago

1. Let's go back to the good old HDDs. There are even automotive industry ones (I own one) 2.There's a difference (8-fold) between Gb (gigabit) and GB (gigabyte). Memory chip capacities (and data transfer rates) are often expressed in bits (per second), but memory device (RAM stick, storage,...) capacities and file sizes are always in bytes.

jve 7y ago

There was once a guy that shared instructions on how to resolder that chip (Get dump of software, root it, solder new chip with more memory). It was instruction on how to root Tesla. But oh, he deleted his content and left some comments: > As a result I've taken down my howtos. I'm sorry about this but there is some kind of political problem which I don't understand. https://www.diyelectriccar.com/forums/showthread.php/howto-tesla-rooting-firmware-199457.html https://www.diyelectriccar.com/forums/showthread.php/howto-t... Pity the site is not available on waybackmachine.

chubs 7y ago
I'd be surprised if it's any different to modding your BIOS in a PC motherboard: Buy a SOIC-8 clamp, a USB interface and bob's your uncle. Unless the ECU is potted in epoxy.
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  Doubt it’s an SOIC. More likely a 40 or 48 pin TSOP or the like. But if it was an SOIC... just lift the power pin, power the chip externally and find some other points to tap into the clock and data lines and dump away. Then solder the legs of the new one on one side and connect VCC on the other side.
  - jve 7y ago
    Hehey, archive.is has that page! https://archive.is/kIZpA https://archive.is/kIZpA https://archive.is/Leqih#selection-775.0-779.271 https://archive.is/Leqih#selection-775.0-779.271

m0xte 7y ago

There’s no excuse for this at all. It’s shitty short sighted engineering. Simple as that. The main firmware should have been on a separate physical device if data was write heavy regardless of “enough space” being left. It would have cost a few dollars to make this issue go away. The more I hear about the engineering the longer I will avoid buying an electric vehicle. Iterating big problems away on a tangible chunk of engineering rather than a piece of software is stupid.

rapnie 7y ago
A couple days ago I found this link [0] to a Reddit post on HN about the software engineering practices at Tesla. Don't know how accurate the story is, hard to tell, but it sure was worrisome. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/99sbwa/former_tesla_programmers_anecdotes_about_problems/ https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/99sbwa/form...
- m0xte 7y ago
  Yeah I sent that to my father who is a model 3 owner and former software developer :)
lazyjones 7y ago
> The more I hear about the engineering the longer I will avoid buying an electric vehicle. You can look up the nVidia Tegra board on Wikipedia and see for yourself that the "shitty short sighted engineering" board is used in many gasoline cars.
- leggomylibro 7y ago
  Yes, but those ICE cars were designed by engineers who understood that you only get ~100ks of write endurance with this sort of nonvolatile memory. Tesla's use case is unique because they stuff enormous firmware images into the on-board NVM and write to it constantly with very heavy logging. Of course your Flash/EMMC will wear out quickly if you constantly write to it while your device is on - that is the short-sighted part. The board isn't necessarily a problem, but how Tesla chose to use it sounds like a very predictable problem.

ComodoHacker 7y ago

With such extensive logging and monitoring it's hard to believe they didn't monitor MMC wear and didn't see it coming.

agumonkey 7y ago

SSD wear was known for a while, but that it would cascade into display then charging malfunction.. that's class action worthy.

Tempest1981 7y ago

The Model S and X have 8 GB of flash, according to the article. Does the Model 3 have more? > The MCUv1 units supplied for the Tesla Model S and X, up until 2018, feature an Nvidia Tegra Arm-based SoC with 8Gb of eMMC integrated into the same board, which is hosted on a mainboard.