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Comment by cyphar | Hacker News Reader

One of the really disappointing things about Tesla is how incredibly proprietary all of their products are. For a company that has such lofty goals as "saving the world", it feels wrong to me for them to then sell DRM cars and unrepairable black boxes. Maybe I'm just too idealistic, but surely if we have an opportunity to create a new market for solar devices why would we decide to recreate the proprietary world of the 1980s? Creating your own powerwall from recycled batteries is a pretty neat hack, and I'd hope that people are publishing free (as in freedom) hardware designs for said battery banks.

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My annoyance with Tesla is somewhat related. I don't like that I can't simply buy a Powerwall or solar roof tiles. I would have to hire one of their approved installers, which increases the cost remarkably. I don't know the markup, because you can't get flat materials pricing data from Tesla, or couldn't last time I checked, but I know labor for solar installation and electrical work is quite high.

I understand why they do it, but it means that for the segment of the population that enjoys that kind of thing, and knows how (I've done my own solar installations, and helped others, on multiple RVs) I have to use much less awesome components. I wanna play with the tech and save a few thousand dollars, but that's not an option for Tesla solar and Powerwall gear. I also want to use it in ways Tesla won't allow (Powerwall can't be installed in RVs or manufactured housing like a tiny house on wheels, for example, even if one were to design the house around safely doing so).

Imagine the bad PR you would get when your product kills your customers.

The other car manufacturers seem to cope, it's not particularly obvious why Tesla should be unique in that respect and why they need to lock everything down to such an extent.

I've heard way too many Volt-on-fire related jokes to agree, unfortunately. Tesla had a very aggressive response to the Tesla accident a few years back, and still suffered as a result of it.

Big retailers like Lowes cultivate a reputation of catering to construction workers while also being approachable to weekend warriors, which insulates them from the downside of product safety issues, somewhat.

I can go to Home Depot or Lowe's, right now, and walk out with a breaker box, conduit, a bag of breakers, a couple hundred pounds of copper, and install my own household 220V/150A electric service. Local codes or the electric company may require an electrician to sign off on my work before I grid tie, but the companies who make the stuff aren't going to refuse to sell to me. Nobody seems to think me killing myself by making mistakes with that would be the fault of Home Depot or the manufacturers, and I'm reasonably confident that is more dangerous than installing a battery box (unless Tesla has built an inherently dangerous device, in which case it won't matter who installs it).

I can also go to the same store and walk out with a roof-sized pile of roofing tiles. No one will stop me from putting on my own roof.

Hell, Tesla sells cars. The single most deadly consumer product, by far, in the world. Admittedly, people have tried to sue them about their autonomous features, but still, cars are really deadly and no one blames manufacturers for those deaths (though, we do, as a nation, impose some safety standards...but, it doesn't stop tens of thousands of deaths every year). Tesla is arguably much better about not killing their customers than some other manufacturers, but they already operate in the most deadly industry (aside from, say, coal or fossil fuels, but the deaths caused by those industries are generally an amorphous statistical blob of health problems rather than distinct deadly events).

My point is: Unless Tesla has built a dangerous product, there's no safety-related reason it should be treated differently than other home improvement items that require the same types of skills to safely install them. Electrical and solar power are well-understood by plenty of non-professionals. I do see the appeal of making it turn-key; they're aiming for average home owners, particularly at the time of construction or roof replacement, when there are already contractors involved and a mortgage to pay for everything. A large-scale solar power installation is expensive, and it makes sense for most people to work it into their mortgage.

But, it's frustrating for me; when I build a house (and I'm kinda shopping for land now in a casual way), I plan to self-fund it and do a lot of the work myself because I enjoy that sort of thing. There won't be a mortgage, and I won't be paying for contractors to do things I can do myself. Electrical work is well within my comfort zone. So, it's frustrating that when I install solar, it'll have to be the somewhat less attractive panels rather than nice-looking tiles.

It's certainly Tesla's right to sell their product however they like. But, I reckon I can complain about it, too.

Humans are bad at separating novel risks from familiar likely ones. News is what's novel - not what's likely, so we have this horrible situation of putting our attention and efforts on the wrong thing.

Everything you said is 100% correct, but just look at all the extra news and scrutiny that's given to every Tesla crash. Or the people warning of the dangers of fidget spinners:

http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/parenting/news/a44415/m...

Unless you're an EE and an expert in power supplies, this is way more dangerous than splicing some copper wires and following some building codes.

Which ppl manage to f. up all the time anyway (missing ground, neutral and live swapped, splices used in lieu of a longer length of cable, improper gauge, poor cabling technique)

This community takes it as a given that "email is too hard" for an amateur to do right. Then how is wiring a house considered easy when the electrical code books are thick as bricks?

"This community takes it as a given that "email is too hard" for an amateur to do right."

I don't.

I work on software (http://www.virtualmin.com) that helps over 100,000 people manage mail servers (and web servers, and databases, etc.) for themselves. So, I disagree with the premise that email is too hard.

"Unless you're an EE and an expert in power supplies, this is way more dangerous than splicing some copper wires and following some building codes."

Is it? I don't understand how. It is a battery bank. You hook up your charge controller (two wires) and your inverter (again, two wires). Same as you would for any battery bank...it's just a better battery bank, and battery installation aint rocket surgery. (Here's a diagram: http://i.imgur.com/jXuag5l.jpg )

If one can understand a solar panel installation in the general case, it seems pretty clear that one can understand Powerwall installation. In fact, building your own battery bank is more complicated than the Powerwall, since you have to wire up all of the batteries, and figure out how to protect them from over-charging and over-discharging. Tesla provides the smarts and bundles up all of the batteries for you.

Some people like to be self-reliant and understand how things work.

Again, I can't stop Tesla from selling their products this way. It's certainly their right, and I'm still pleased with Tesla's existence (and I have a standing buy order for TSLA if it ever drops low enough, as I regret selling the TSLA I was holding a few years ago). I believe in Tesla. I just wish I could buy Tesla products and use them the way I want to.

Difference between messing with mains wiring and messing with high capacity batteries and/or solar panels is that mains always has some kind of fuse somewhere on the power company side and thus you will not see circuit that is completely unfused and will supply high currents until something blows up spectacularly and dangerously. This holds for significantly smaller things than DIY powerwall, eg. car batteries and even batteries for desktop UPSes.

Edit: for instance accidently shorting net 30 to ground when working on car electrics might well end in the car being completely destroyed by ensuing fire (I have friend who totalled his car in this way, he is licensed electrician). On new cars the fuse between 30 and 30a is usually placed directly on the battery to prevent exactly this issue, but even 30a will supply enough current to wreak havoc.

I can't imagine Tesla would ship that battery bank without fuse protection inside (and I imagine it is a "no user serviceable parts inside" kind of design...it looks like a black box device). Every solar deployment design has fuses on either side of the batteries.

One neat engineering trick in tesla battery packs is that the last resort fusing is part of the battery pack construction itself (the spot-welded connection to the actual cell is intentionaly surprisingly weak to act as a last resort fuse)

On the other hand, the difference is in that for the mains there is always going to be some kind of fusing, that is not part of what the tinkerer owns and probably does not even know where it is located. For solar and huge battery packs you own the whole thing and can mess with anything in the system, even more so when you build the thing from individual cells instead of buying COTS solution with bunch of "no user servicable parts inside" labels.

If you know what you're doing go ahead. I certainly won't stop a hacker from hacking. Don't expect your insurance company to share my general liberalism towards DIY.

If you don't know what you're doing, go right ahead anyways. It's not my house and my family in there.

But this is hard.

Did you know that DC can't use AC switches rated for the same voltage?

How about cooling the packs? whats the appropriate distance between the packs as the geometry of the heat dissipation changes from 1D to 2D to 3D?

Are you going to cool with forced air or passively? If forced, what if there's a power outage during battery bank failure (highly correlated know that you wired the bank to the mains). If passive, how do you ensure that the environment is always providing suitable cooling?

That's a bit of domain knowledge that most ppl who know how to wire a socket don't know. That's also a house fire type mistake when your dealing with a battery bank.

You're talking about building a Powerwall from scratch. I'm talking about installing a pre-fab Powerwall as sold by Tesla.

>tesla sells cars

and its headline news whenever their cars kill someone

Tesla supported Kevin Mahaffey and Marc Rogers when they were hacking at their friends model S and trying to get root access. The model 3 repair support guide just came out and has diagrams of the battery pack down to the cells. Yes, they dont put the design of the car on github. They are hardly "incredibly proprietary" though.

Yeah but if you hack your Tesla even to change the color theme of the display, you'll probably loose warranty, loose certification status or whatever it is called (so you can't have any new parts installed unless it is expensively recertified), you'll get a call from Tesla asking what the hell you are doing, and so on.

On the other hand, I can replace almost every part in my conventional car without ill effects from the manufacturer.

Not for long. You can still do this with older cars, but newer ones really restrict you. I just bought a new car and am not even allowed to jump start someone else's battery without risk of voiding my warranty.

In large part thanks to the CAN bus and how jump starting is likely to cause enough spiking to fry the boards.

Was trying to help a relative with some issue with their car the other day, and the wiring diagram for the part and related controls almost seemed to run in reverse depending on how the switch was set.

I don't know what car you've got but I have a brand new Mercedes-AMG and I can do a surprising number of things with it without voiding the warranty. It's certainly as easy to work on it as on older cars, I don't need to go to the dealership to replace the brakes, the battery, the bulbs, filters, engine oil, transmission and diff oil. Manual explains how to jump start the car but certainly doesn't prohibit it. I've heard some horror stories with newer cars (especially French and American) but it's not like all new cars are horrible to work on.

doing work on your car always voided your warranty, with good reason. That's not a realistic thing to ask. It's realistic to ask for the UI and apps to be open-source (say, something like android), but even that would be an incredibly open thing for a non-software company to do. I still think it's very unfair to call them extremely closed.

However, I really do wish they'd adopt a more android-like ecosystem.

Unrepairable black boxes? This isn't really true of Tesla.

Sure, it would be nice if they could make service manuals and service parts more freely available, but the same could be said of all car manufacturers.

There are guys on YouTube who have re-built entire Teslas from near-scratch using salvaged parts from multiple vehicles. Guys with no formal training and no previous experience with EVs. Tesla does not do anything to make their cars hard to repair.

Tesla does not do anything to make their cars hard to repair.

I'm not in the EV or Tesla communities, but I remember reading something about "activation" being required?

You're probably thinking of activating for supercharger access. Tesla may not let vehicles connect to their superchargers if they've been reported as written off. It also won't be able to connect to Tesla's servers for OTA software updates, etc.

If you can prove that the vehicle has been appropriately repaired (by a qualified body shop, since it's a safety issue in the case of structural damage), it can be re-activated.

But Tesla does not remotely disable vehicles or anything like that. Even if it's been written off, theres nothing to prevent it being driven just like any normal car once repaired.

This could be because of the packaged services that come with the Tesla?

Going the salvage titled Model S route is, from the accounts I've seen (likely featuring the same videos from YouTube), is thoroughly unsupported by Tesla, to the point that Tesla will refuse to sell parts to people if Tesla knows they are trying to rebuild vehicles that have a salvage title.

There's making parts "more freely available" and then there's "you can't have this from us, for any price". Fortunately the ludicrous amount of power in the Model S and people's inability to control the car (or themselves) means there's a good sized underground market of salvaged Model S' bodies and parts, even if there's no office service manual available to amateurs.

Meanwhile, Chevrolet will just sell you the engine from a corvette in a crate. (Okay, it's ~$12k, but they're willing to do it.)

I say this as someone with a Model 3 reservation, mind you. Tesla wants to build the iPhones of the electric car industry - no user-serviceable components inside, and the battery isn't removable by us mere mortals who don't work at Tesla. (Abandoned battery replacement tech demos from a few years ago aside.)

From what I've heard the Model 3 will be a bit different.

But certainly on the Model S, the battery is not that difficult to remove/replace - again, there's plenty of YouTubers who have done this.

You can even, in many cases, swap a higher capacity pack into older/lower-spec models if you're so inclined. There is no DRM or software checks that prevent this from working!

"even if there's no office service manual available to amateurs."

They do actually make the manuals available to anyone, just for a hefty fee if you're not Tesla-certified:

https://service.teslamotors.com

This isn't unique to Telsa, all vehicles are becoming more difficult to repair as computers and software replace what used to be handled by mechanical systems. I would actually much prefer to drive next to a Tesla knowing that the guy behind the wheel (potentially staring into space as it drives itself) hasn't implemented any "hacks".

A similar argument exists for why DIY battery banks are not ideal. It's not inconceivable that some dedicated hobbyist engineer pulls it off in a safe way. But how would you feel if you were over in your neighbors garage and noticed he had haphazardly wired 600 18650 cells together based on a design he found on the internet?

About the same as I feel about 95% of software running on the internet being copied from StackOverflow. Rather Meh. I would worry if the engineers at Boeing did it, but a bunch of crappy javascript apps running on the web? No. As for the neighbor, I don't live on a zero lot line, so let him burn his house down all he wants.

>About the same as I feel about 95% of software running on the internet being copied from StackOverflow. Rather Meh. I would worry if the engineers at Boeing did it, but a bunch of crappy javascript apps running on the web? No

This is exactly the type of attitude that leads to the proliferation of vulnerabilities on the web.

"It's not like we're using it to fly planes, so who cares if we're not checking every SQL statement for injection vulnerability"

Then the code gets used on some ecommerce site, the site inevitably gets hacked, and customers' PII gets leaked.

I blame deadlines for most of the shortcuts taken, not necessarily "taking someone else's code".

"all vehicles are becoming more difficult to repair as computers and software replace what used to be handled by mechanical systems."

Don't forget John Deere tractors!

This stuff isn't black magic, it's science and engineering. As more hackers participate in this space, the open source components and techniques will get better and better (I'm not familiar with open source battery management systems but I would bet there is already some good stuff out there). I think there are a lot bigger dangers to hand-wring over than nerds needing out over this stuff.

I think there are as many or more car hackers than ever - CAN bus opened car hacking from the world of the gear head to the world of the computer geek.

> As more hackers participate in this space, the open source components and techniques will get better and better

I so strongly disagree with this assumption. We got a nascent not even close to open source scene on x86 and a few hobbyist tweak boards. They still use proprietary hardware, the firmware is still almost always proprietary, the drivers are often proprietary, and for general users 99% of their OSes are proprietary.

And the consequences of that world that doesn't care about right to repair or software freedoms or having control of computers impacts me. I can't get an x86 pc now without a hardware backdoor, I can't use 802.11an wifi without proprietary code, I can't display visuals to a screen without proprietary code. The screen itself is running a ton of proprietary code. My hard drive has a computer in it and thats wholly proprietary.

And that was in an ecosystem where moddability was handed to us on a silver platter with ACPI which only existed for IBM and Microsofts sake, not for anyone elses. It was not a charity. That is why we still have no mobile platforms that use a standard hardware abstraction layer that you can run a generic OS on.

The Internet of Things never developed an open source ecosystem. SmartTVs never developed an open source ecosystem. Set top boxes and consoles never devleoped an open source ecosystem. Cars almost certainly will never develop an even remotely functional open source ecosystem - companies will use open source code, because someone else did the work for them and they can save money. They won't contribute back, they won't respect their users, and they won't respect the developers that put in thousands of hours of free labor by sponsoring them. That isn't open source winning, that is corporate profits winning.

Look at John Deere. That is where we are going. This is not going to be a simple matter of find the ethernet jack, telnet into a shell, and start running code. This is signed payloads, read only rom, and no way to access the firmware.

If there is an open source car ecosystem, it will be like the open source phone OS world. A joke, that cannot practically run on anything, that at best is ripping half of the Android equivalent out of itself to even run. And I guarantee Ford et al will never be as philanthropic as Google was in open sourcing Android to release their car OSes middleware like that.

Firmwares will always be dumped. The crackers can always catch up. If you really care about this, vote with your debugger.

The barrier of entry is ownership of a modern vehicle that you are willing to brick at your own expense.

You can't 'throw hackers' at something like that.

The car manufacturers have all of the control, and in a sense, it is black magic.

Well, what can I say. A lot of people are apparently taking that risk.

I know this industry well. Who is 'a lot' of people?

Security precludes freedom. The trend from just about anyone being able to build their own home a half century ago to not being able to even make your own battery pack just shows the trend away from the freedom to experiment.

The right to repair died once magic computers came into the world. Before that trying to tell anyone their mechanical / electrical systems were undocumented proprietary and warranty breaking if you tried to repair them would have caused a riot. But since computers were sufficiently magical that a critical enough mass of people wrote off trying to understand them, the industry and all resulting industries undermined the right to actually own anything related to them.

This opens Tesla up to an immense amount of liability with no benefit.

If you want to build your own open source battery storage system, battery management system firmware, and distribute it online (think Backblaze), I'd encourage you to do so. But Tesla has enough to worry about as it is.

Tesla‘s are literally killer machines. Accessing the high voltage cables is not difficult (they are only covered by a plastic cover which is easily removable). Those power lines can easily kill you. Even if you are very careful, even a small mistake with the wiring can have fatal consequences. There is a reason why you are not allowed to do wiring and a lot of electronics in your house by yourself.

I certainly hope that Tesla will provide manuals to highly trained electricians at some point, but if Jone Doe tries to fix his electric vehicle by himself and makes a fatal mistake (or maybe even starts a fire), that will only make national news and scare more people into thinking electric vehicles are inherently more dangerous then traditional cars (which they are not).

I can understand why Tesla does not want to take that risk.

They may also want to click this link:

https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you

>Tesla‘s are literally killer machines.

So are all cars. Under-skilled people routinely (and legally) repair and maintain the systems that make these vehicles drivable (brakes, steering, suspension, etc).

Some folks are killed in doing so, much like any activity, but not any number that is out of proportion and typical with any activity where small mistakes can cost lives.

>There is a reason why you are not allowed to do wiring and a lot of electronics in your house by yourself.

That's not true in many places, much of the United States included. Only inspection is mandatory in most cases, barring specific regional laws. Again : Those that do their own work aren't just dropping like flies. A few accidents occur, but nothing of any proportion to require legislating more strict laws regarding such things.

>I can understand why Tesla does not want to take that risk.

My understanding of why Tesla acts the way they do has nothing to do with the complexity in their systems and danger in working around such complexity, but rather their interest in more protection for their IP, their desire for keeping customers within their own 'walled garden' of service options, and for controlling public perception of their product, all to the disservice of the customer (much like John Deere's behavior these past decade or two).

We aren't strangers to 'killer machines'. This isn't any new phenomenon. It's being framed that way by some to rationalize over-protective and controlling corporate behavior towards the consumer, and Tesla isn't alone in exercising such power.

> There is a reason why you are not allowed to do wiring and a lot of electronics in your house by yourself.

I've found that a few people here really don't understand some industries; yet are adamant about their opinions on said industries.

A few weeks back I was just in an argument with someone (may have been another account, though) about high-voltage lines in the US used for dryers, and how "magically converting a 120V line" (paraphrasing) to 240V was just super dangerous and a death sentence. Point is, arguer had no knowledge of two phased 120V lines in US electricity and combining the two was sure to burn a house down. But they sure did have an argument.

FWIW, this form is so much more argumentative than others online about other topics not understood. I think that's part of the IT/techy/hacker culture.

I can tell by your post that you never did any sort of meaningful repair on a car.

Yet, for some reason, you seem super concerned about what other people might do.

Is there a term for this kind of bizzare nanny behaviour?

Why pretend that you know what you are talking about and then take a step further and not only suggest ridiculous 'solutions' but push for regulations.

> I can tell by your post that you never did any sort of meaningful repair on a car.

Or their house. Especially with blanket statements that prohibit "working on" your own home.

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