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Tesla Recalls Cars with EMMC Failures, Calls Part a ‘Wear Item’
- nickthegreek 6y agoTesla's response is ridiculous. "Now they are claiming that the eMMC chip, ball-grid soldered to the motherboard, inaccessible without disassembling the dash, and not specifically mentioned in the owner’s manual, should be considered a “wear item”, and thus should not be subject to such scrutiny."
- toomuchtodo 6y agoTesla's response is of course self serving. It should be expected from their legal department as a cost control measure. You cannot expect corporations to act benevolently or morally, hence the need for legislation (right to repair, warranty periods set by statute as is done in the EU) and regulation (NHTSA forced Tesla's hand to issue a recall, which they were strongly attempting to avoid). Usual disclosures: We own Teslas and TSLA.
- ska 6y ago> You cannot expect corporations to act benevolently or morally You absolutely can and should expect good behavior of corporations. You can't rely only on that expectation so agree if it's important, legislate it.
- ouid 6y agoYou absolutely can't and shouldn't expect this. Corporations are your adversary.
- salawat 6y agoCorporation are tools wielded by committees of people. If you don't like the outcome, change the people.
- vkou 6y agoYou can't change the people owning or running a corporation, but you can change the rules they operate under. In this case, though, I don't think the rules should be changed. I'm fairly certain that Tesla is not the first automaker to have come up with this kind of money-saving idea. This has to be well-trodden ground in consumer rights. In this case, people should vote with their wallets, and the occasional class-action lawsuit, or, if things get too far out of line, expect the same kind of regulator intervention that would happen against any other car company. If regulators would not intervene against any other automaker trying this sort of thing, then I don't think they should intervene against Tesla.
- ska 6y agoI think this is too binary. By all means don't count on it, but we can and should expect better.
- retsibsi 6y agoThis disagreement happens often, and I think that's partly because there are two meanings of 'expect': to regard something as likely, or to regard it as the rightful or obligatory standard of behaviour. If you expect (in the first sense) benevolent corporate behaviour, in the absence of incentives that align benevolence with self-interest, you're generally being naive. But if you expect (in the second sense) benevolent corporate behaviour, and act accordingly, you may be helping to create that alignment -- because corporations and the people who control them usually care about their public image (certainly when it directly affects consumer behaviour), and legislators are usually at least somewhat responsive to public pressure. So having the first kind of expectation leads to unhelpful complacency; but lacking the second kind of expectation leads to unhelpful cynicism, cashing out as acquiescence to the status quo.
- pelliphant 6y agoI seriously hadn't considered the second definition of the word. Thnx.
- abfan1127 6y agowhy shouldn't they cover their butts when people will look to extort? I'd much prefer a situation where companies take responsibility and customers show grace and courtesy, but that's not the world I live in...
- toomuchtodo 6y agoExpecting reasonable product longevity from a durable good is not extortion.
- abfan1127 6y agoI wasn't speaking specifically to this situation. The previous comment was about knee jerk legal reactions, which is what I was referring. On that note, flash memory isn't a durable good though.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoCan you provide a citation to another automobile with an infotainment system that is only spec'd to last 6 years (due to flash wear)? The one in our 14 year old Toyota SUV is still working without issue.
- abfan1127 6y agonope. But I can cite expectations for vehicles' parts that should last longer, but don't. It only takes a viewing of Consumer Reports to see that. Note that many electronics are designed to last 10 years (i.e. electromigration). Obviously, use cases matter (24 hour use, high temp or lots of heat cycles).
- FireBeyond 6y agoTesla will actively throw you under the bus to defend themselves. "His vehicle had warned him about having hands on the steering wheel" (... fourteen minutes prior to the accident). Leave aside the fact that if you have an accident in your Tesla you will need to go to court to subpoena telemetry data. But they'll happily publish your telemetry data without your (explicit, I know, I know, TOS) agreement if they think they're being painted in a bad light. And if you disclose information about the vehicle, they'll happily force push neutered/old firmware to your vehicle to hide or prevent such activities, lock you from future upgrades, and disable ethernet and OBD ports in your vehicle. Or a Douglas Adamsesque approach to right-to-repair, where there's a website with parts you can "order" (except everything down to the most commodity bolt says "Call Tesla" and they will tell you its unavailable to order via the website), that's if you know what parts you need, a process which required making an appointment with Tesla to look at the service manual, several months out, which required a fee, had a time limit, and put you in a room where you were not allowed a computer, phone or camera, just a notepad and pencil), all the while touting their "corporate commitment to transparency" as they pulled out of NHTSB testing. Is this your idea of responsibility?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rootusrootus 6y agoI expect both. We have regulations because oftentimes corporations need a little inspiration to stay honest. And I expect a good corporation to stand behind their product, and not overtly attack their customers at every opportunity. Tesla's culture strongly reflects Elon's personal ethics, and it shows.
- foepys 6y agoI didn't expect other from a company that is immediately blaming the victim when their self-driving car once again drives somebody into a stationary object or lane divider instead of showing compassion first and launching an investigation later. As a parent/child the first thing that comes from Tesla is a blog post and public statement on how your loved one allegedly was too stupid to use the car while Tesla goes into technical telemetry to grant themselves absolution.
- shiftpgdn 6y agoTesla at no point anywhere advertises they have a full self driving car ready to go. FSD optioned onto the car when you purchase is for "future delivery."
- foepys 6y agoTesla lost the right to call their drive assistance "Autopilot" in Germany because Tesla couldn't stop implying that their cars were already very close to FSD and more capable than they actually are.
- camjohnson26 6y agoYou can buy a car with a full self driving package but they don’t imply they sell full self driving. That’s some mental gymnastics, even if they say it’s for future delivery. After all cars have a limited life span, what good is the package if it isn’t delivered within the life of the car?
- iamatworknow 6y agoYeah, by that logic any car that came with a tape deck had "future aux cord capability": https://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/312120241135-0-1/s-l1000.jpg https://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/312120241135-0-1/s-l1000.jpg
- judge2020 6y agohttps://www.tesla.com/model3/design https://www.tesla.com/model3/design > The currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous. It's in the fine print but it's brought up every time you talk about Autopilot and enabling it in the car (it's disabled by default) requires you accept a disclaimer saying that you need to be paying attention at all times.
- Shivetya 6y agoAs an owner there are times when you just shake your head at some of their decisions. I like my TM3, I won the quality raffle and have no issues, but I do worry when Tesla takes a stance about a part like they did here. Plus combined with the fact Musk was forced to acknowledge that Tesla did not offer anything for FSD on trade ins and "will look into it" makes me wonder just how much they expect customers to put up with. Still it beats out my previous Ford and even my Infiniti in both reliability and oddly interior quality. Paint wise the Infiniti was far better and paint on my Ford was far worse. Both my Ford and Infiniti also had more than one real recall and a few visits to fix stupid things.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago> reasonable average daily use of 1.4 cycles, the expected life would be 5-6 years. NHTSA has not presented any evidence to suggest that this expected life is outside industry norms or that the eMMC flash memory device itself does not comport with that average lifetime estimate. Instead, NHTSA has asserted that the component should last at least the useful life of the vehicle, essentially double its expected lifespan. Tesla has significant concerns with the impact tentative conclusion. Despite popular belief, corporations are in fact not faceless entities. Let's place the blame and embarrassment squarely where it belongs: Elon Musk thinks 6 years is the useful life of these Tesla vehicles.
- CameronNemo 6y agoI'm pretty sure that is not what they are saying. They are saying the component should not need to last the full vehicle life cycle.
- mikeyouse 6y agoTo be clear - the component controls the entire media console which has climate controls, the backup camera, defrost settings, all the media, etc. etc. etc. You can't replace the component without disassembling a huge portion of the interior of the car. So either "the component should not need to last the full vehicle life cycle" and people are expected to drive their $100k Teslas without the giant center console working, or it's not actually a "wear" component and they should be responsible for fixing it.
- easton 6y agoHow is it any different than a tire? You pay to get a tire replaced when it’s worn out, and it is therefore considered a wear item. eMMC is the same, just on a longer timeline (and honestly, shouldn’t be expensive to replace. It really shouldn’t be more than $50, and if it is, the car should be able to use some kind of external storage for writing all the telemetry to that’s separate from the computer needed for the car to work)
- unethical_ban 6y agoNot much to add. I hope they get their stuff together and make a wear item easily replaceable, with proper health monitoring or redundancy.
- saluki 6y agosounds like something that inexpensive they could add redundant ones to the board to exceed the expected lifetime of the vehicle, plus to have a backup failover since it causes some serious issues. Or just have a location where they can be swapped out like on a camera.
- soganess 6y agoThe silly thing about all this is eMMC is a wear part. Tesla made a really serious mistake and didn't take that into account and now the user is "holding it wrong". That needs to be in a place where the user or a technician can service it easily. They were just trying to save a penny or a second of engineering time and now pretending they knew all along.
- FireBeyond 6y agoIt is. But its wear is almost exclusively for Tesla's benefit, not the customers. That's what's galling to me. Capturing extensive logging data so Tesla can do product improvement is NOT something I should be hammered hundreds of dollars for service on because it impacts the ability of me to use my vehicle.
- MPSimmons 6y agoThey should eat the cost on these cars, and re-engineer the part to be easily replaced on future vehicles so that it actually is a user-serviceable replaceable part.
- amznthrwaway 6y agoTSLA never does the right thing by their customers. They’ve learned, over time, that you can sell a few horrible cars and be worth a fortune, so long as you create a cult-like following for your stock. So that’s the focus. Who gives a shit about building a good, useful, reliable car, if you can just throw 1.5 billion of BTC on your balance sheet, and add 15 billion to your equity value, because your investors are _that_ absurd?
- soganess 6y agoI always think this type of bad first step is a "test the waters" move. If no one complains, sweet. If someone complains backpedal with one of those "We hear you! And while we haven't done anything wrong, we will do right by the customer just like we have always done" PR stunts. Most everyone forgets, and the people that do remember, well they remember you "making things right." Exploding batteries on your s21? Anyone?
- sschueller 6y agoI don't know how this ever went into production. At least someone should have known that writing logs files to eMMC is a disaster. Anyone who has worked with any flash for a bit knows about this issue. How many other items like that made it into the car and how many of those are a safety risk?
- elihu 6y agoIt's at least plausible that there was some good engineering analysis up front to decide whether the flash endurance was good enough for what they were doing and it was, and then some time later after the hardware designs were in production the software was changed by some other engineer who wasn't aware of the earlier analysis or the fundamental limitations of the hardware. Abstraction is one of those things that makes software development tolerable; we can (usually) treat anything Turing complete as "just another computer". But once in awhile that isn't true, and you have to deal with low-level details. In retrospect we can say this ought to have been a foreseeable problem, but people are fallible and make mistakes. If not this, then something else. What I find more worrying about Telsa is their level of secrecy around car repair information in general, and their occasional reluctance to own their mistakes and fix them for free.
- walrus01 6y agoI see four failures here on the part of tesla: 1) choosing that particular eMMC, likely not something specced for very high write endurance, or not speccing a larger amount of flash to spread the write endurance out over a period of up to 20, 25 years. 2) linux/operating system/software engineering implementation, for a certain volume of MB of writes per day, that would be known to wear out the flash write endurance over a short number of years. possibly a result of the software team not communicating properly with the hardware team. the software team very well may have been operating in a vacuum of assuming that they could do whatever they wanted within the CPU, I/O, RAM, and disk space limits of the architecture, and weren't even thinking at all of the consequences of their logging setup. 3) not making that a socketed/removable part. 4) asking the owners to pay for the replacement due to tesla's own screwup.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoI'd argue you've put those points in the reverse priority. 1. Admit you screwed up and apologise 2. Moving forward: make repairability a priority and use durable components 3. Open source some of the software, or allow third parties to scrutinise it
- pound 6y agore 4) - this is what Tesla does a lot :( In Model3 you can move front passenger seat forward and up (to clean up in the back) all the way to the point when it pushes on sun visor and cracks the mirror in it. Just by using handles intended to move the seat, no manual pressure or anything, there are no limitation on how far it goes and it's strong enough.. Tesla service centers blame owners for that and charge full replacement cost for the visor :\
- jbob2000 6y agoHaha, if you think that's bad, try driving a jeep. You don't even have to drive it for it to break!
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
- mrfusion 6y agoThe vehicle Should still be able To operate without this at some level. I once hit a curb and the whole computer unit fell out of the socket in my 96 ford. There were flames and smoke coming out of the exhaust but it still started up and I was able to drive it to the shop.
- ouid 6y agokinda sounds like you shouln't have driven it to the shop though.
- mrfusion 6y agoI didn’t know any better at the time but there are quite a few cases where a car defaulting to not working isn’t the ideal choice even if the car is further damaged. Ie places you don’t want to be stranded. Extreme cold or extreme heat. Incoming extreme weather. Bad neighborhoods. Highways, bridges, or around bends where you’re at risk of being hit if you stop.
- qazxcvbnmlp 6y agoTesla: “People keep buying our cars, must not be an issue” Fan People: “Tesla is the future” Silent Majority: “Yeah, I’m just gonna keep waiting for a normal car maker to release an electric car”
- walrus01 6y agoNissan, a normal car maker, released a huge number of Leafs with improperly implemented battery cooling and battery charge/storage voltage management systems, which resulted in terrible cycle life and drops in range capacity in the 1st and 2nd generation Leafs.
- mikestew 6y agoThey warranted those, though, right? Meanwhile, I'm still driving our first-gen Leaf here in the mild weather of the Pacific Northwest (granted, ten years later that battery isn't at its best anymore). EMMC doesn't care about what the weather is like in your neighborhood.
- reportingsjr 6y ago> EMMC doesn't care about what the weather is like in your neighborhood. Yes it does. Higher temps will wear out all semiconductors at higher rates.
- mikestew 6y agoYeah, you're right. Which only makes it worse. My original point was that those in Anchorage suffer just like those in Phoenix. But perhaps those in Phoenix have comfy, air-conditioned batteries but persistent storage that fries in the heat.
- formerly_proven 6y agoYou got it backwards. Flash like this is going to wear out several times faster at -20 °C versus, say, 50 °C or 70 °C.
- etcet 6y agoI've been burned by bad uses of eMMC twice this year. First, Polycom Studio destroys itself: https://knowledgebase-iframe.polycom.com/kb/viewContent.do;jsessionid=107B6D61459857EF5A7D8C4DBEE629BA?externalId=43068 https://knowledgebase-iframe.polycom.com/kb/viewContent.do;j... Secondly, all the Edgecore top o' rack switches we have are backed by eMMC and will all eventually go read-only. This is an especially fun surprise while working remotely. Shit's junk and should never store anything that gets written to regularly (i.e. a log file).
- superkuh 6y agoI've had a couple eMMC go bad on single board computers. I initially only noticed the off-by-1 read errors when the radio data that was being recorded by the computers (8kB/s for 2+ years) as comma separated values started sometimes getting commas turned into the next character up in ascii which broke my visualization python script. It's definitely something you learn the first time you use eMMC (or any low end storage tech).
- walrus01 6y agowhat volume of writes per day, in MB, should you be expecting on a top of rack switch, though? does it have some logging features you can't turn off? using as an example a cisco nexus 3064 I have sitting around here, all of the logging is done to an off-system destination over the network. I can think of very few legitimate or sound network engineering practices that would require 1U, mostly layer-2 feature set switches to be writing anything more than a few dozen KB per day to their internal storage. I can't say that I'm surprised to hear of something failing in a new and unique way in an edgecore switch, since the company (Accton) has also released a real dumpster fire of a series of outdoor radios in their Ignitenet brand, which have a spectacular failure rate.
- therealbilly 6y agoOh man, Tesla is not covering themselves in glory on this issue. C'mon Elon, step up and do the right thing. Don't burn your goodwill.
- vkou 6y agoWhy would he worry about concrete things, like customer service, when he can add three billion dollars to his on-paper wealth by sending two tweets about bitcoin? Responding to this sort of thing would mean acknowledging that TSLA's future is defined by something rooted in reality, as opposed to purely sentiment. As long as it doesn't actually have to stop and deal with these kinds of problems, its valuation is like that of dot-com startup - unbounded.
- ChuckMcM 6y agoI don't think it is fair to consider this unit to have been designed by a "major car company" as, at the time the design decision was made, Tesla was still a startup. That said, the response is fairly puzzling. It seems to me to be quite reasonable to consider the EMMC a wear item if they have determined that they don't want to make it survive the expected lifetime of the car. However, if they are going to make that call, then they absolutely should be replacing these boards with ones where the EMMC component is on a field replaceable module that a dealer can swap out and a "hours of operation" metric for swapping it out. I used to joke that GM would put specific wear items in their vehicles, not because they couldn't design something that lasted, but instead so they could sell you the $500 GM specific tool you had to use to replace it periodically. A way of keeping "amateurs" from fixing the cars and pushing service calls to the dealers. That is what a "major car company" does in situations like this :-) On the plus side, many people didn't think Tesla would make it this far to have vehicles that had been on the road long enough to wear out. So there is that.
- walrus01 6y ago> at the time the design decision was made, Tesla was still a startup. If you're going to sell a product, the Model S, at the same price range as a BMW M5, 7-series, or the equivalent Mercedes S class, it had better be a premium quality product. Start-up or no.
- Retric 6y agoThat seems logical, but expensive niche cars tend to be worse in many ways than the mass market equivalents. BMW’s more expensive cars for example are simply less reliable. At the extreme Bugatti Chiron skips a lot of modern car tech. It’s always a trade off. New tech may mean better acceleration or whatnot, but you don’t have 30+ years of reliability data to work from to refine things. The early years of automatic transmissions for example are words apart from what’s available today.
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago> you don't have 30+ years of reliability data Flash memory was invented in the 1980s, so yeah: we do.
- naebother 6y agoJust write to the blockchain, problem solved.
- 34679 6y agoWhat percentage of writes are coming from the consumer's normal use of the vehicle and what percentage comes from Tesla's telemetry collection? It amazes me that people are OK with paying $60k+ only to be constantly tracked everywhere they go by a process that destroys the product they purchased. I don't even like being tracked in a free web browser.
- gscott 6y agoCalifornia is designing a Road Charge program to track you everywhere you go so they can charge you a fee per mile. https://dot.ca.gov/programs/road-charge/faqs https://dot.ca.gov/programs/road-charge/faqs
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoBecause the people slogging out commutes from places they can actually afford don't have it bad enough? What is the logic behind this? I get that "cars bad" but do they seriously believe they're so bad that tradesmen who lives way out there so they can afford homes should pay more? They're already paying with their time.
- vkou 6y agoThe logic behind it is that someone should pay for road construction and wear and tear, and it should probably be heavy road users, as opposed to, you know, light road users. The beauty of the free market is that increases in cost of shipping and transportation trickle down to prices paid by consumers, who can then vote with their wallet. If the cost of road usage is factored into the price of a good, I can choose to buy a good that results in less road usage, because it's cheaper. Gas taxes (as opposed to mileage taxes) are decent enough driver of environmental policy, but they don't accurately capture road usage, especially in a world that's moving towards electric cars.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago>The logic behind it is that someone should pay for road construction and wear and tear, and it should probably be heavy road users, as opposed to, you know, light road users. But it still seems wildly incompatible with the "equity over equality" theme that most other new and upcoming CA government policy is based off of. Especially so considering that road wear is mostly from heavy trucks. >Gas taxes (as opposed to mileage taxes) are decent enough driver of environmental policy, but they don't accurately capture road usage, especially in a world that's moving towards electric cars. But the people who are moving to electric cars are already the ones who will benefit most from a mileage based tax since they tend to be wealthier and already have shorter commutes. It's not like CA is going to stop taxing gas.
- ddingus 6y agoWell it is a wear item. The real trouble comes from a poor wear spec not aligned with the overall car service life expectations.
- walrus01 6y agoBut in automotive terms a 'wear item' is something that a reasonable person could expect to replace or maintain, and is accessible through normal tools in a repair shop that works on multiple makes of vehicles. Such as tires, brake pads, brake rotors, belts, hoses.
- ddingus 6y agoAbsolutely. Where it currently is assembled into the vehicle requires either: 1) much longer expected service life, make it a non issue , or 2) greater ease of replacement, and or more graceful, utilitarian failure mode performance. 1) Is tolerable, and still shitty, 2) is, or could be, reasonable, and an annoyance tops. As things are now, the whole affair is a big dodge. I would be very unhappy. Fail fast, and all that rapid innovation culture has implications the mature auto manufacturers know well. I have friends with these cars and they are having a lot of fun. When the fun started, I talked about real costs and risks yet to play out. Well, now they are. Some of those people can afford the adventure. Ok fine, they got what they paid for. And they have options. Many secondary adopters may feel the pinch of these things far more. Sad day for them. Hope Tesla recognizes who they are selling to now and ups their game. I am a fan. The cars are fun, but there is no way I would own one personally. Maybe someday. Transportation to me needs to be cheap ass dollars per mile and either highly reliable, or easy for me to fix and maintain. I do not care too much about which it is.
- ping_pong 6y agoI have a Model 3 that is less than 2 years old. The build quality is terrible. The side of my Model 3 trim on the inside just fell off for no goddamn reason. I don't even know how to fix it, it looks like the glue wasn't applied properly? This is on top of countless other problems that I've faced over the last 2 years. It's impossible that Tesla is 3X the market cap of Toyota Why they didn't stop buying of Tesla the same way they stopped GME is criminal. And they keep failing external quality tests and no one seems to care: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/teslas-failed-every-edmunds-ev-222022183.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/teslas-failed-every-edmunds-e...
- draw_down 6y agoI mean, they got your money... and people are still falling all over themselves to give Tesla their money... their stock price has gone extremely high... so I guess I wonder how much of a problem this really is for them. Doesn't seem to affect their brand, even if one thinks it should.
- smmnyc 6y agoFor what it's worth, my Model 3 from December 2018 with 35K miles on it has only had one issue (with squeaking upper control arms) and they replaced it under warranty, coordinated through the mobile app. I haven't had any other issues that would indicate build quality is terrible.
- tristanb 6y agoSame here - I have a 2018 model 3 and its gone in once to get a warning for the seat belt fixed. Its got 45k miles and had no other issues. Best car I've owned.
- kalium-xyz 6y agoThe best car I ever owned is my current car, a 16 year old Audi that had many prior owners and has nearly 300.000km on the teller. Its never given me trouble and anything you run into you can fix yourself with volkswagen parts. The build quality comes into play sooner than later.
- localhost 6y agoI wound up paying ~$1600 to replace the entire MCU1 in my 2015 S last year. I’m waiting for the refund of that amount in March and will likely just apply the proceeds to upgrade to MCU2. No way I want an ancient Tegra3 computer that isn’t made anymore in my car.
- delecti 6y agoTesla strikes me solidly as a "software company" that happens to make cars. And having worked in software for software companies, and in software for car companies, I would definitely never get a car made by a software company.
- lmilcin 6y agoThis is certainly not a "wear item" but incompetence. I had on two separate occasions designed an embedded POS application that worked on a dumb flash (dumb == no wear leveling). There is nothing special about it. You just need to control where your writes go. You don't resize files (because this updates inodes and directories). You don't create files for stupid things like locks. If you have a database, you create a file and treat is as circular buffer or append only log. If you need OTA, you can split the memory in two and have boot loader boot alternately. And so on. With wear leveling this is much, much simpler. You run the OS for some time and you capture all your writes at low level to see how much many blocks are being updated. Then you can predict how long the memory is going to last and you just size it accordingly.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoI'm a big believer in "everything is a wear item on a long enough timeline". You won't catch me hurring and durring and getting my panties in a bunch because somsone's gonna wear out the ball joints on their lifted truck in 80k instead of 100k. But spending 50k to have the display on your Tesla or the frame on your Toyota crap out in under a decade is unreasonable.
- walrus01 6y agoI thought Toyota replaced those frames at no cost, some people even got entirely new trucks.
- throwaway0a5e 6y agoThey replace just enough of them on a rolling basis to keep their brand reputation where they want it. 4Runner owners tend to get more shafted (shorter if any recall) than Tacoma owners. If they wanted to fix the problem they've had 30-something years to just copy what a different OEM is doing. But why would they fix it if they're still selling trucks and SUVs hand over fist?
- averynicepen 6y agoStories like this regarding almost all of automotive manufacturing history makes me wonder if the only reason Tesla is being highlighted on all these issues is just because they have significantly more publicity.
- caycep 6y agonot being well versed in the embedded/industrial field, I wonder if there is any group of automotive specific engineers/suppliers looking at how electronics are made for these things. I assume there is expertise over the decades electronics esp infotainment systems being a "thing" in cars, not to mention aerospace, etc. I do recall the Nav/infotainment unit on a 1st gen prius going out, and the problem was traced to the solder between some daughterboard deteriorating after ~4-5 years. Replacement units were hard to come by and expensive on the secondhand/junkyard market...
- csours 6y agoYes, automotive manufacturing is a tiered system with the OEMs (Tesla, GM, Toyota, Volkswagen etc) at Tier 0. Tier 1 suppliers deliver high level, ready to install components like radios, seats, electronic control modules, etc Tier 2 suppliers deliver subcomponents like boards Tier 3 deliver chips etc OEMs generally come up with a list of component requirements like temp ranges and wearability/durability. The supplier community then bids based on that spec. Of course once one OEM asks for something, it becomes to other OEMs after a period of time; so there are a LOT of common components and subcomponents. Engineering for those specs and testing and proving that you conform to those specs both costs a lot of money and is worth a lot to OEMs who have to provide warranties to their customers. Edit: The supplier contract also makes the supplier responsible for warrantee on that component; the OEM bears final responsibility, but they will try to make the supplier pay for component failures when they can. (This is not precisely correct, I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer) Disclaimer/source: I work for GM, not on vehicle engineering. Everything in this comment is solely my own opinion
- blueblisters 6y agoDoes anyone know what % of Tesla parts come from Tier 1 suppliers? It appears that Tesla has the most vertical integration among all OEMs, leading to problems like this due to lack of experience or engineering depth.
- csours 6y ago
- yawaworht1978 6y agoTesla will get away with terrible manufacturing practices and quality until the established or new car makers come up with an equally viable electric car and charging network solution, not just the compliance cars they produce at negative margins(almost makes you think it's a reverse marketing thing to make people buy petrol cars). Also, how can anyone think Tesla or Elon are good people with those self serving contracts and terms and conditions is unexplainable to me.
- judge2020 6y ago> Also, how can anyone think Tesla or Elon are good people with those self serving contracts and terms and conditions is unexplainable to me. Replace Tesla and Elon with any company and their CEO. Every single company that collects data needs a TOS to be able to manage their service without legal trouble. When you use Ford's SYNC 3 you agree to these terms: https://owner.ford.com/support/sync-terms-and-conditions-of-use.html https://owner.ford.com/support/sync-terms-and-conditions-of-...
- indus 6y agoTesla and LinkedIn (in chorus): "We are programmed to receive. You can check out any time you like But you can never leave"
- powerbroker 6y agoFor well over 12 months, the Model S Owners Manual (p. 40) and the Model X owners Manual recite, "When you finish speaking the command, tap the voice button again or simply wait." Neither of my Teslas operate in the manner described in the manual since late 2019. If Tesla's manual writers can't communicate with the software developers -- is there anything in the manual you can trust? Can we always count on Tesla to arbitrarily loose functionality without anyone telling their manual authors? Anyway, I gave up telling Tesla about this problem (in multiple iterations of the manuals), and reported it to the NHTSA https://www-odi.nhtsa.dot.gov/VehicleComplaint/ https://www-odi.nhtsa.dot.gov/VehicleComplaint/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hg35h4 6y agoGood thing they aren't making rockets with this stuff. Or if they are they have controls to take over. Oh wait....
- Waterluvian 6y agoThis got me wondering. Is there much storage space in other vehicles with intelligent driving systems like my Forester for its Eyesight system? Does it have a black box with Linux or something? Or is it going to be some hardened RTOS that does all the optical work in memory with no history?
- Reason077 6y ago> "This leads to widespread failures in the car, typically putting it into limp mode and disabling many features controlled via the touchscreen." eMMC failure does not put the car in "limp mode". It does disable the touchscreen, making things like the air conditioning controls and backup camera unavailable (in older software versions). "Limp mode" is when you have severe power restrictions due to very low battery charge, or some other major powertrain fault in an EV. Sometimes called "turtle mode" because a turtle icon will appear on the instrument cluster.
- soupysoupysoup 6y agoI'm interested in seeing how this plays out. I've seen such a volume of smartphones die in give or take five-year-old waves from "sudden death syndrome" EMMC failure. Right now the Note 4/S7 series are really peaking. New industry standard for planned obsolescence, or just a few bad caps?
- samstave 6y agoElon's latest appearance on Joe Rogan was really interesting - and he specifically says that the manufacture and production is the hardest part - and that they are still learning. They are building the CyberTruck factory in Austin TX next to the Airport. He also says that the X is the best model - however, the S is his personal car and his favorite. https://open.spotify.com/show/4rOoJ6Egrf8K2IrywzwOMk https://open.spotify.com/show/4rOoJ6Egrf8K2IrywzwOMk