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Comment by ivan1783 | Hacker News Reader

Opening up wire harnesses introduces corrosion - I would not trust an autopilot car with hand soldered wire harnesses. There is a reason Tesla would replace all of the harnesses if they were to do this...Sure its fine now but in a few years those connections will start to fail.

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Disconnecting or cutting the wiring harnesses does not introduce corrosion. Assuming the connections are made well using the correct methods it will not be an issue. From the pictures it looks like they soldered and heat shrunk the connections which should be a long lasting repair.

It absolutely does. A wire inside of a harness is a closed system. You have water tight sealing on the end of the connector on both ends of the cable. As soon as you open the sheath and expose the bare copper to atmosphere, corrosion starts. You cannot splice an automotive harness and keep the same characteristics as when it came from the factory.

None of this is true. Wiring harnesses aren't water tight, primarily to prevent corrosion. If you have a totally water tight harness, and water some how gets in, it has no way to dry and will cause corrosion. You absolutely can splice a harness and have it have the same characteristics, I do it every day.

We are talking about two different things. Notice I did not say wire harnesses are water tight. Each individual wire inside the harness - the copper inside - is sealed to the environment. You will get corrosion on copper if you expose it to atmosphere - exactly what happens when you splice it. By the way - I do development / testing of automotive electronics and am well aware of the specs / test procedure and design decisions of wire harnesses...

Most automotive wiring harnesses have crimped connectors, these leave the ends of the wires open to the atmosphere. Connectors used under the hood tend to have seals these effectively seal the wires as well. Wiring used inside the cabin (or anywhere not exposed to the elements) generally don't have any seals to save cost. As long as you're alright at soldering and heat-shrink the wires they'll be fine, this really isn't much of a problem.

The main reason is that they would value the time taken to modify the harnesses much more highly. As long as the modifications were done well, I wouldn't be concerned. Plus, one would hope that the autopilot system was designed so that in the case of a loose connection it fails in a sane manner.

> one would hope that the autopilot system was designed so that in the case of a loose connection it fails in a sane manner.

I honestly wouldn't be surprised if that was not the case. Tesla is not exactly known for its rigorous approach to programming.

Hand soldered wire harnesses are still used heavily in the industry. If you do not have the right crimper, J hooks and direct soldering are probably even more reliable than crimps (hence why official crimpers are so stupidly expensive). I think IPC has some standard about hand splicing. That being said, I would of probably used the heat shrink solder combos.

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