Salvaging your way to a working Tesla Model S for $6500 | Hacker News Reader

Salvaging your way to a working Tesla Model S for $6500

hackaday.com

51 pointspeteforde22 comments

Reminds me of the guy on the Cummins Forums (Dodge RAM diesel trucks) who bought the salvaged flooded RAM 3500 that had rolled into a river a few days after it was purchased new. He paid some small but still risky amount of cash for a truck that was almost brand-new but presumably destroyed. With the help of people on the forums, he got it cleaned up and got the motor and electronics working again and ended up with a $80,000 truck for less than $10K.

“The RAM 3500 that the Internet fixed”.

http://www.cumminsforum.com/forum/2013-general-discussion/19...

edit: fixed link. Sorry, Cummins Forum is a crappy AutoGuide site. Bring your ad blocker.

I wonder how often this happens. Something like 25 (? god, I'm old!) years ago a friend of mine bought a new Jeep that had been vandalized on the dealer lot for some ridiculously low price. We helped him get it back in shape and it ended up being a pretty nice project vehicle.

So he bought a water damaged Tesla, deemed the electronics as being unreliable. But, then managed to sell the unreliable water damaged electronics for the original price of the Tesla?

The batteries are sealed up pretty well.

He did have to dismantle the pack to test which cells where good and bad.

He found a few bad ones, but found good ones too.

The market for OEM Tesla parts is locked down by Tesla, so it has become driven by people dismantling wrecked cars like this. Even questionable parts can command a high price.

He could have bought cells and put them in this car, but he would be paying for someone else's labor to dismantle the pack, and he needed additional parts anyway.

His plan was to acquire another wrecked car and do the work himself.

> Was all of the effort worth it? We certainly think it was! The car was deemed road worthy and even has functioning Super Charging capabilities which according to [Rich] are disabled by Tesla if such a Frankenstein build is detected.

Isn't that inevitable?

And then what recourse will/should be available?

> And then what recourse will/should be available?

Apparently you can pay Tesla a few thousand $ to "re-certify" the car and restore updates and supercharging.

I watch this guys youtube channel. What he did was awesome. He still has issues with tesla updates. I guess telsa won't update his vehicle because it's a salvage. I think supercharging still works. Best of luck to the guy hope he can make more progress with his vehicle.

I'd like to know what he did that disabled Tesla updates. I might actually start to develop some interest in owning a Tesla, if there were some procedure I could follow to disable all the remote backdoors Tesla has left embedded in their rolling computers.

Do you have a plan for installing safety-critical updates?

If the firmware in that car is so fragile that any such thing as a truly safety-critical update could still reasonably exist after they've been out on the road this many years, then I definitely don't want to drive one, and I'd prefer not to share the road with them either. On the other hand, if there actually were some epidemic of Tesla crashes due to faulty firmware, the intense media scrutiny they've experienced would almost certainly have turned it up by now; so I'm willing to believe that any updates they'd be trying to push would not, in fact, be safety-critical.

Tesla has made a couple of things public which were safety critical updates, such as this one:

http://mashable.com/2017/06/09/tesla-ota-airbag-fix/

which also refers to an earlier incident where they made charging at home more tentative to avoid faulty plugs causing fires.

Thanks for the link. Ok, that's pretty clear, no Tesla for me.

Iirc they disable updates for all cars when they're junked, so they would have been disabled by the time he got it.

You can pull the SIM in the car to disable access.

Reminds me of Microsoft's need to handle security updates on pirated copies of windows. It is more dangerous / costly to their legitimate users and the rest of the internet to have pirated copies without the updates floating around than the cost of the freeloaders.

I believe there were points with windows xp where this was not the case.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-pirate-bootleg-secu...

Anyone interested in this sort of thing should also check out this page. They swapped the electric drivetrain of a tesla roadster into a Lotus Evora. It was not a smiple swap and included the help of Motec(they make aftermarket ECU, popular in the race world) to control everything.

http://www.onpointdyno.com/bluelightning/ Lots of videos on youtube also with the builder Sasha https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8rYXBYqPX8

My nightmare is DRM cars--it's exactly what has become of almost all consumer electronics and it totally sucks not just from a hacking perspective but from a recycling and re-use perspective as well. Watch some of the Apple laptop repair videos on Youtube.

Cars are flat out too expensive these days, and then to make them "disposable" on top of that? No way. I like fixing my cars, I like having a fighting chance at self rescue if stranded far from help. Accessibility and flexibility is necessary for survival.

I am afraid that people like you and I are the minority!

It seems that corporations have decided to pursue DRM, and people are either knowingly or unknowingly accepting it. The cars are still selling- and I don't see many people at the junkyard with me pulling motors out of cars from 1993.

People like us are pretty much being forced to DIY everythig from whatever parts we can find. If I wanted the look of a Tesla, I would find a body only tesla (somehow), and then stick a 95 toyota camry's motor and trans in it.

Everyone else will just continue spending all of their money on a car whose utility drops more and more every day.

Mostly unknowingly, I would wager. The consequences of deciding to buy a car with DRM are too far removed from the time of purchase. Also, because the mass market isn't knowledgeable enough, it has a higher tendency to simply accept the rising cost of maintenance as inflation, rather than a concerted attempt to raise costs to the consumer.

I completely and totally agree.

Most people have no desire to look at a wiring schematic, troll around a junkyard, plasma cut, sand body panels, etc.

I do these things on a weekly or monthly basis when I am working on a new project car for myself or to sell or for my friends.

Maybe other people value their time and effort differently from me, but they don't realize just how much money and freedom they are sacrificing by buying a DRM car.

They either don't know that they are signing up to be exploited, or they feel they have no other choice.

I'm OK with it is only it is like music where you can pay a little extra and get the DRM free version. Or more accurately (hopefully) pay less for the version with DRM since it is the company that gets the benefit.

I would absolutely live it (and pay a premium) if a car company had completely open source flashable firmware. At least on the non-safety systems like navigation.

Whoever downvoted me... it's bad form to downvote someone just because you disagree with them. I personally upvote people I disagree with all the time. Downvoting is for people who aren't being constructive. Now if you felt my comment was not constructive... carry on downvoting

Edit: To clarify, downvoting people you disagree with just turns up and downvotes into a popularity contest where saying things that might be minority opinion... DRM may not always be bad... are censored. One of the things I like about HN is someone can have a different opinion than the majority and not get downvoted to oblivion. I for one do not want to see downvotes weaponized.

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