Tesla Autopilot retrofit on a classic P85 (2016)
skie.net
skie.net
If we were talking about removing the safety valves on a steam locomotive so it could run hotter and faster you would see similar pushback from people who know what boiler explosions can do.
If he was testing at the track, at least he's only risking people that he knows.
If it gets something as small as a fender bender, and his insurance gets a whiff of this, you'll bet that they'll try hard to null-and-void the coverage.
Zero risk often achieves zero results - you have to balance your risk with other factors.
Tl;DR the subject matter and the user-base of HN react in a way that brings out more negativity than each one could normally on its own.
In my opinion literacy at all is optional for 99.9% of automotive work but the kind of people who will pearl clutch over an enthusiast rebuilding calipers in their garage will probably not be all that pleased to learn that it's not uncommon for someone who can barely read the service literature to be servicing vehicles and I thought it was worth mentioning.
But seriously I find the backlash so interesting and I think it is mainly for the reasons you describe. We all know how bug-laden much of the software that's shipped is, but it doesn't really matter because (for the most part) it's easy to iterate, issue an update - to the point that people who run un-updated software are considered foolish, etc etc. I think we should remember that actual _engineers_ are out there who design and make the bridges, cars and buildings that keep us alive who don't have this luxury. This guy seems like one of them and is clearly skilled (you can see that his workmanship looks good and he's taking care in these photos) and should be respected in my opinion.
I think your assessment is correct. Adding even more negativity to the mix, a lot of HN users are skeptical of Tesla in general and Autopilot in particular.
With autopilot in particular we know how that sausage is made.
That said this guy is brave, not for the mod, but for posting pretty much all of the vin, the name of his car, and showing the color. Will not be hard for tesla to find it and blacklist charging, updates, parts, etc. Musk's ban hammer will be swift and harsh.
The idea of buying a car and being afraid to modify it because of how the manufacturer might react feels entirely dystopian to me.
Also, I wonder if all Tesla’s have a God Mode that unlocks at the sound of Elons voice or will come get him if needed.
So if he is ever running away from a villain in a major city he can access a getaway car anywhere he sees a Tesla.
They don't need to cover any damage done by the modifications, but they can't deny warranty coverage to anything else.
I'm not an expert, but I think the relevant law is the Magnuson-Moss Act.
A friend of mine is highly regarded engineer at one of electric car manufacturer. He supposed to be getting 8% corp discount for buying their vehicle. He doesnt so I asked him why since he’s so lucky. He told me eventually the day will come that local government or LE will force them to update their car’s OS to report continuesly on the speed you drive, similar to how tachometers work on trucks where cops stop you and can review your speed for the last 14 days you drove your rig nd either report you to your employee or guve you a retro-ticket for speeding. This update, he says will come and nothing you can do to stop it. I take my friend’s word very seriously although getting EV is as tempting as never before!
I think the car recording the historical data and the police using this as evidence is the much more likely future scenario.
Let’s not forget speeding fines are a revenue generator...
As for life saving, maybe, but I’d need to see a lot of evidence. Modern cars are vastly easier to drive and safer at speed than cars 40 years ago, but we still often keep largely the same speed limits. 155mph in your modern German luxury car practically feels serene.
:/
The difference between showing off and publishing research, I guess.
We’d better not discuss methods. Hackers might pick them up.
Some people might feel fine with the knowledge that their work might be used for evil, some not.
I am suprised it actually worked. Probably required some good connections at a Tesla service facility / input from someone who knows these cars in and out.
If you try to fix a car and fail, you could end someone's life.
While I'm not against these kind of projects, to equate these things is ridiculous. Where is the line drawn? Vehicles are far more dangerous than your own PC.
Vehicles are dangerous to the few people around you, but a PC can be dangerous to millions.
How many people slap a turbo on their car without touching the wheels or brakes?
Nevermind if the upgrades or tune are sound to begin with.
I honestly wouldn't be surprised if that was not the case. Tesla is not exactly known for its rigorous approach to programming.
Still pretty interesting though.
When you leave the envelope of normal on a vehicle, it rarely increases the value.
As others have noted, this seems like a terrible idea. One small mistake, and it could kill his wife, himself, or someone else on the road. All the other self driving Teslas have at least gone through testing to make sure they are road safe.
I know I'll be avoiding any yellow Teslas from now on!
People like me drive highly modified cars day in, day out. Though I'd honestly trust the handiwork of someone who can figure out the sophistication behind a tesla and it's electronics more readily than I'd trust your general backyard mechanic.
It's not uncommon to see 40 year old cars driving around with stock suspension and brakes, that have had a 6.2L LSx engine fitted (as an example). I'd be more concerned with those kinds of conversions before I'd worry about the one Tesla in the united states that has a jerry-rigged autopilot.
But it was done by an experienced mechanic, and pretty much every failure mode resulted in harm to the driver, not to others.
This guy is a hobbyist and he's mucking with hardware that is controlled by software, which will magnify any problem he may have created.
Manual mods to a car are wholly different than modding hardware that supports a complex software system that he can't modify or even read.
Case in point: years ago I took my (modified) pickup truck to a transmission shop because it was leaking gear oil. I had the Factory Service Manual and knew exactly what the problem was, but didn't have the tools or interest in doing this particular repair (required dropping the transmission and I knew from experience what a pain in the ass it was without the right tools).
The transmission shop refused to believe me when I told them what the problem was: "in all my years, I've never seen that happen" etc. They even made me sign a document to guarantee that I'd pay them after they pulled the transmission and I turned out to be wrong.
Result? The shop manager came out shaking his head, "sonofabitch, you were right. I have never seen that before. It's an easy fix, but we need to keep the truck overnight so we can order the part."
There are many, many cases of an untrained individual whose self-interest leads them to research and become deeply educated on something important to them that the so-called experts have only a passing familiarity with. Usually it's something medical-related, in this case it was automotive.
That's the fundamental difference to me between this kind of mod and the more traditional soup up etc modifications.
Other cars in full working order drive into stationary vehicles and lane dividers every day. Nobody’s freaking out about DIY mods for those.
I see what you're getting at though, that the modifications made it less safe on the road. I don't disagree. It was unsafe. I shouldn't have been allowed to drive it.
Sarcasm is hard to pick up via a written media so i'm going to assume you're legit. Where is this thing even legal to drive??
Racetracks, mainly. While I'm keeping the car registered, I'm sure the first time I have a problem with a police officer the car will receive a defect notice and won't be legal on the road any longer until it passes an engineering inspection. I'd need to be doing something pretty silly to get pulled over though, as it's all in a mx5 (miata) and it's a bit of a "sleeper" - i.e. it doesn't appear to be modified when looking from the outside.
Interestingly enough though, the work I'm doing should be able to pass an engineer if required, but that's an investment I'll make when the defect arises. In Australia it's pretty commonplace to daily drive your race car until it gets defected, haha.
It should be noted though, that in certain states in the United States, it appears (to an outsider) that some extremely powerful drag cars etc can be driven on the streets. Or, it's a similar scenario, in that they shouldn't be driven on the streets but are anyway...
But yeah my insurer knows everything right down to the brand of main bearings I bought.
They'll happily take your money, the true test is whether they'll pay up if you have a significant claim (e.g. totaled a Bentley :) )
Here's one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_Atom
EDIT: And another: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazda_MX-5_(NA)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hennessey_Venom_GT
Edit, and a more serious note, this is the flip side of the kinds of things we're discussing though. Not all modified cars are built to equal safety considerations, and not all modified car stories end well.
https://jalopnik.com/man-dies-after-crash-in-home-built-hond...
'merica!
Also parts of Europe if you're willing to jump through hoops, probably also street legal in less developed nations that don't regulate that sort of thing.
I believe you have just described driving in general.
Ergo, the guy can be much more alert than most people on the road and STILL crash into others without any sort of warning, simply due to a software bug.
For various reasons, in regular cars, this should not happen.
Jokes aside, yes my point was that the driver could be the best in the entire world, if the software has a critical bug the car could crash on its own volition. That just doesn't happen with regular cars.
Even critical bugs like the "enforced uncontrolled acceleration while on the highway" scandal in the years 2005-2010s were eventually proven to be self-prophecy cases of human error meets FUD.
It also looks like his workmanship was reasonable so he probably did everything correctly.
That is completely inevitable. Humans are just not capable of behaving rationally in such a system.
These modifications increase that risk. These modifications do not increase the attentiveness of the driver. Step 3 ... Step 4: profit?
Reusing delicate parts from a salvage wheel that had a blown airbag does not seem particularly safe to me. Then again, at least it only endangers his presumably consenting wife and not third party drivers/pedestrians on the road.
Why not? The one part that matters for safety in a wheel is not delicate at all: it's the connection to the axle. Even if all power is suddenly dead, the vehicle can still be manually controlled.
As for the airbag, I guess (and hope) that the author did replace it.
Well the existence of the entire used car parts industry seems to indicate otherwise. For some parts, especially out of production control modules over various kinds, used is the only option. Mechanical failure is a drop in the bucket in terms of road safety. Mechanical failure as a result of substandard parts (as opposed to deferred maintenance/repair) is such a small fraction of that drop I've never heard of anyone even trying to measure it specifically.
He has his own fancier Tesla, you would think that they would swap so she has the better car. The yellow colour is just a wrap, he could have had things cosmetically correct for her by wrapping his P95(D). Plus she would not have been off the road waiting for the homebrew modifications to happen.
I am okay with people modifying their cars, in fact I like to go to the race tracks where people go at actually ludicrous speeds in their modified cars, repairing them between races. But it is a different thing modifying a car for someone else in an experimental way. On a track where the driver is a 'racing driver' is one thing but, on the highway when the driver is a 'civilian', well, that is something else.
A small rattle means something to the guy who built it and knows what that rattle can be from, another 'civilian' driver won't necessarily know the problem space.
Like the one that ran directly into a lane divider at highway speed? Or the one that ran into the side of a semi trailer?
Citation needed. In the history of lane assist, Teslas are the only cars that have actually run into center dividers and killed their drivers while lane assist was engaged, because other automakers are sensible enough to disable lane assist where the lane markings are ambiguous.
I own a Ford Mondeo (the 2008 high end variant) and it would not disengage when marks on the right side disappear, left is enough - but that is a problem because it'll resist if I try to go to the right (if there is a split) and I guess that a very similar accident to the Tesla one could happen but we have no places like that around here so I can't test. I don't use the system.
I can't comment on the Volvo, since you don't say what model it is.
I don't know what model the Volvo was, something recent from around 2015. It's not my/my family's car.
Also expecting it to be blacklisted by Tesla next week.
And I doubt there will be more than a handful of copycats, if that.
I would not be surprised if there is not one single person at Tesla that would be confident in knowing each possible pitfall from doing this. And I would certainly not expect anyone from the outside spending a few weeks on this to gain that knowledge either.
Very impressive, but in my eyes he have ruined a perfectly fine Tesla.
Tesla has _all_ the reasons in the world to find this car and take it out of service. On top of that, he killed the resale value.
Police as well. For sure it's going to be suck getting hit by this and having their insurance refuse to cover the damage
> For over a year, Waymo has been offering trips to the 400-plus members of its Early Rider program who use Waymo’s ride-hailing app to summon the minivans for free trips to school, the mall, the gym, or elsewhere within its suburban Phoenix service area. Soon, Waymo will make that service available to the general public and it will start charging money for it, too.
People have been modifying their cars since there have been cars. Sometimes the modifications are problematic. Sometimes problems result in accidents. Those cases are rare. Moreover, since the modifications are all bespoke, the odd erroneous one affects only that single vehicle.
On the other hand, the modifications let people learn. It's how we get new ideas. That improve safety. For more than just one car.
This rings hollow as a novelty. If you replace the transmission with one that has higher gear ratios, it may raise the top speed past the maximum rating of other components. Any modification that makes the vehicle heavier may cause the brakes to be insufficient. Any modification that changes the weight distribution may have a number of difficult to predict consequences for steering and stopping. Tires that are better on a track may be worse in the rain. Tires with a different diameter may cause the speedometer to mislead the driver. Tuning the engine to reach higher RPMs may cause excessive hydraulic pressure and damages the brakes or steering. Anyone making any modification or repair may use non-OEM parts with arbitrarily different specifications.
These are all complicated engineering decisions that depend on the assumptions made by the OEM. Maybe the brakes are sufficient with an extra 700 pounds, maybe not.
Hardware isn't simpler than software, the assumptions are just less explicit. And encoding the complexity in software rather than hardware can make them less error-prone because software is more adaptable. It can read sensors and make realtime calculations. The assumptions encoded in hardware are static.
Do you remember the hardware that existed before it was replaced by software? Thick bundles of wires everywhere, mechanical switches operating relays and solenoids, intricate clockwork mechanical parts rotating in synchrony. There were early vehicles with mechanical anti-lock braking systems, cruise control, airbags, etc.
Most of that complexity has been moved into software but the software wasn't what created it.
And before it was software you had the full complexity that comes with the systems not only being designed by humans but also made out of atoms and molecules subject to all the intricacies of physics and chemistry, with no checksums or error correction to detect or correct a failure when something is operating out of spec.
This is new technology; laws and regulations need to reach a stage where they're able to protect against the worst from happening.
People have to take driving tests. Is there an equivalent safeguard for an autonomous vehicle?
Literally everything has the potential to kill members of the public. A bug in your mobile device app could interact with a bug in the hardware and cause the battery to catch fire in the middle of the night and burn down an apartment building. If you install casters on the office copy machine, it may slide down an incline, through a 10th story window and kill someone in the street.
> This is new technology; laws and regulations need to reach a stage where they're able to protect against the worst from happening.
There are two classic methods of discouraging harm. The original, which works fine for low volume modifications, is that if you do something reckless you get held liable after the fact.
The method you're proposing is to do safety testing ahead of time. But that is only reasonable for products that are mass produced. If you're going to make a million of something, it makes sense to analyze it ahead of time because the high fixed cost of doing that can be amortized over a million units whereas the amount of harm prevented is multiplied by a million units. That method is highly inefficient for one off modifications where the opposite is true.
I write embedded firmware for robots for a living. I've got a fairly good grasp of the complexities of a system like this. These modifications terrify me.
How does he know that one system isn't talking the n-1 protocol which is incompatible in subtle and weird ways from the current one? How does he know that there isn't calibration data hiding inside one of the systems he installed which assumes a different dynamic response?
Systems engineering for a system of this complexity is really really complicated. Bugs develop in the interactions between systems even when every part is working fine. If you start glueing stuff together which isn't designed to work together and is relying on unpublished unversioned APIs for communication, you're going to get all sorts of problems.
By doing so you are putting out toxic chemicals because you removed the muffler, this is not legal in states where an emissions test is done.
I think there's some misunderstanding here - even in the super-strict-and-bad EU you can build a car in your shed and get it registered and drive it. But you can't build/modify your car to be against regulations, be it emissions/noise/pollution or whatever else. As long as it's within the allowed parameters, then knock yourself out - there's a thriving modding scene even in countries with insane regulations like Germany.
Despite the billions of $ being poured into autonymous vehicles I've yet to find anyone who actually sees the need, or even less so would buy one.
These are just some of the use cases. But also people who are fully capable of driving get advantages, particularly regarding commuting - instead of sitting in the car for an hour, one can rest, or if the job allows it, work on the way to the office.
Additionally: we, as humans, suck at driving. And whilst it's a valid question whether machines can currently do a better job at it, I'm glad that there's time and money spent towards a future without human drivers (apart from driving as recreational activity).
People are not good at driving efficiently. Over-braking, over-idle, under-steer .. all of these things contribute to fuel waste at scale.
I can't do that. Well, I can, but I don't. When I'm driving, I like to get up to speed fairly quickly, and I tend to drive at or just above the posted limits in most cases. It's a flaw in my character.
But in a self-driving car, not only am I not in charge of those decisions, I'm okay with it. Because I'm not preoccupied with the road and traffic, it's an out-of-sight-out-of-mind situation as I watch my movie or edit my spreadsheet.
Just like it doesn't bother me when the train or bus is slow to get up to speed.
And electric vehicles are already relatively efficient in energy use even if driven badly, particularly if charged using renewables.
And, the next obvious step: private car ownership becomes a distant memory.