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I 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 st

I 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 ago
  That 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.
    - Retric 6y ago
      Steel has been in mass production for well over 100 years and people still make the same mistakes today with new mechanical systems. Flaws often seem obvious after the fact, but that’s when your looking at actual failures. If it never occurs to you that something could fail, well good luck.
      - rcxdude 6y ago
        An embedded engineer which is unaware of flash wear is incompetent. It's the number one failure mode of flash and more often than not drives the design decisions around it.
        Retric 6y ago
        Aware of and accounted for are different thing. I mean metal fatigue is hardly some deep secret, yet it’s constantly causing issues.
      - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
        So something like: If the metal structure holding the instrument cluster and infotainment unit fell apart after 6 years and the manufacturer charged the customer to fix it? That also wouldn't be ok.
  - ryanlol 6y ago
    > BMW’s more expensive cars for example are simply less reliable. Less reliable for the second or third owner.
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    > but you don’t have 30+ years of reliability data to work from to refine things ... Hold on, are you suggesting that when this car came out, under a decade ago, no-one knew about Flash wear? If anything, people would have been more conscious of it then than now.
- ChuckMcM 6y ago
  Wow, I guess I touched a nerve :-) Have you ridden in an early model S? Tried to repair a Roadster? I am a big fan of Tesla and impressed at what they pulled off, but I don't forget that when they started they cut all the corners. It is common, perhaps even expected, in startups when an engineer says, "Well this won't last more than 5 or 6 years" to be told by upper management, "Well if we're still around in 5 or 6 years, we'll do something about it." Given that Tesla is not a startup these days, and is on the other side of that chasm, I was surprised that their response here was "oh we'll replace the board with another board with the same issue." Perhaps there is not a good understanding about the differences in the legal ramifications of a vehicle failing and resulting in property damage or loss of life from the failure of something considered a 'wear' item versus something that is not classified as a wear item. I am not a lawyer, one of my friends who does consumer product safety litigation and is a Tesla owner, immediately responded to this news that this was just Tesla trying to avoid criminal liability when a failing EMMC chip kills someone. Sure, they see everything in terms of liability :-)
  - jsight 6y ago
    > Perhaps there is not a good understanding about the differences in the legal ramifications of a vehicle failing and resulting in property damage or loss of life from the failure of something considered a 'wear' item versus something that is not classified as a wear item. This was my first thought as well. It feels like they were trying to avoid some implication beyond mere replacement of storage modules. Perhaps they are aware of some other component that will also fail at a high rate before the useful life of the vehicle?

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 ago
That 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.
  - Retric 6y ago
    Steel has been in mass production for well over 100 years and people still make the same mistakes today with new mechanical systems. Flaws often seem obvious after the fact, but that’s when your looking at actual failures. If it never occurs to you that something could fail, well good luck.
    - rcxdude 6y ago
      An embedded engineer which is unaware of flash wear is incompetent. It's the number one failure mode of flash and more often than not drives the design decisions around it.
      - Retric 6y ago
        Aware of and accounted for are different thing. I mean metal fatigue is hardly some deep secret, yet it’s constantly causing issues.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
      So something like: If the metal structure holding the instrument cluster and infotainment unit fell apart after 6 years and the manufacturer charged the customer to fix it? That also wouldn't be ok.
- ryanlol 6y ago
  > BMW’s more expensive cars for example are simply less reliable. Less reliable for the second or third owner.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  > but you don’t have 30+ years of reliability data to work from to refine things ... Hold on, are you suggesting that when this car came out, under a decade ago, no-one knew about Flash wear? If anything, people would have been more conscious of it then than now.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
Wow, I guess I touched a nerve :-) Have you ridden in an early model S? Tried to repair a Roadster? I am a big fan of Tesla and impressed at what they pulled off, but I don't forget that when they started they cut all the corners. It is common, perhaps even expected, in startups when an engineer says, "Well this won't last more than 5 or 6 years" to be told by upper management, "Well if we're still around in 5 or 6 years, we'll do something about it." Given that Tesla is not a startup these days, and is on the other side of that chasm, I was surprised that their response here was "oh we'll replace the board with another board with the same issue." Perhaps there is not a good understanding about the differences in the legal ramifications of a vehicle failing and resulting in property damage or loss of life from the failure of something considered a 'wear' item versus something that is not classified as a wear item. I am not a lawyer, one of my friends who does consumer product safety litigation and is a Tesla owner, immediately responded to this news that this was just Tesla trying to avoid criminal liability when a failing EMMC chip kills someone. Sure, they see everything in terms of liability :-)
- jsight 6y ago
  > Perhaps there is not a good understanding about the differences in the legal ramifications of a vehicle failing and resulting in property damage or loss of life from the failure of something considered a 'wear' item versus something that is not classified as a wear item. This was my first thought as well. It feels like they were trying to avoid some implication beyond mere replacement of storage modules. Perhaps they are aware of some other component that will also fail at a high rate before the useful life of the vehicle?