Flash Memory Wear Killing Older Teslas Due to Excessive Data Logging: Report
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
It's common for Tesla fans to mock other automotive manufacturers for being "old and slow" - as if they're incompetent because they take so long to develop new features and adapt to changes in technology. It's like a "why does it take 5 years for BMW to update their infotainment system when I can do the same thing with a Raspberry Pi in 5 minutes?" mentality.
What I think goes unappreciated by some is the level of testing that normally goes into automotive grade development.
That's not to say that modern ICE cars are more reliable than a Tesla, but their electronics are usually designed for a higher level of robustness.
Here are my issues:
- Why is the car rendered useless if the infotainment system fails? This should be a non-critical component. If it is critical and the critical part can't be isolated, then the system as a whole should have been tested more extensively.
- Why does the infotainment system fail if a log message write fails, and why was this failure mode not tested? It is very common knowledge that flash wears out, and log messages aren't critical.
- Why were they not using automotive grade flash?
This, coupled with the recent story about the non-automotive-grade displays failing really demonstrates that maybe, just maybe, the rest of the automotive industry isn't totally clueless. Maybe they're just more scared of a failure.
Who knows - it's probably a mixture of both.
Cool. I did not realize there were such products.
But there are other types of flash that are better suited for this environment. I see parallel and SPI NOR flash a lot in ruggedized embedded devices (usually with a minimum of 100,000 erase cycles), but they're generally a lower capacity.
I don't know the exact cause of this failure, but there are ways to design around unreliable flash too. They could partition it such that the firmware image is in a read-only partition, and it runs out of a ramdisk, with only user settings and log messages stored in a R/W partition. That may be what they're doing, and perhaps the issue is due to the software crashing when the write fails. I'm not sure.
Not in this field so I might be wrong, but I'm guessing they could have also:
* Have redundant storage, failover when the first flash chip dies, and log a fault telling the user to get it looked at. Flash is cheap anyway
* Use removable storage. PCIe, M.2, proprietary, whatever. If it dies then at least you can replace it relatively cheap.
I'm interested in what other problems will surface with Teslas in the next few years. This seems like a huge design failure, I doubt it's the only one.
For instance, the multi-segment displays tend to fail in little bits. I have a car that doesn't have that problem, but the main ECU tends to fail and have to be resoldered.
Of course, mostly people don't care because after 20 years you expect the vast majority to be scrapped, but in any case, you still design for a certain lifespan.
Ultimately Toyota recalled about 7 million cars (some twice). Dealers were installing the wrong floor mats, and these were trapping the accelerator pedal. This problem was well-documented as the cause of "unintended acceleration" incidents, including at least five deaths. Additionally, there was a lack of "brake override" system to idle the engine when the brake and accelerator were both applied (Toyota added one at the government's request), and some pedals manufactured by a supplier were well-documented as "sticky" (they recalled these cars and fixed this).
See the NHTSA report, pages 4-10 (PDF pages 15-21): https://one.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/nvs/pdf/NHTSA-UA_report.pd...
In summary, there were real "stuck pedal" problems with these cars that led to unintended acceleration and fatalities and, eventually, recalls and fixes. And, yes, some or many incidents were probably related to "pedal misapplication."
This sounds like an illusory problem to me, not because I doubt the facts, but because it's all about framing. I got floor mats for an old car, with anchors to hook to the seat rails, and I couldn't figure out how to fasten them. So I took them to a dealer and asked them to do it. After a while, they came loose and the mat shifted several inches in the direction of the gas pedal. Now, it didn't especially matter, and I didn't crash, and eventually I repositioned it. But this is really about multiplying large numbers by small probabilities. There are probably only a couple hundred cars like mine on the road. If there were millions, perhaps it would be a major problem. But why should we all worry about Toyotas just because the floormat issues are mentally grouped together?
Non-floormat issues are different, but I think I would have to experience it to believe it when it comes to the brakes not being able to override the engine on a typical Toyota.
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/toyota-pay-12b-hiding-deadly-...
https://mashable.com/2014/03/19/toyota-lied-aceleration-reca...
https://www.rs-law.com/unintended-acceleration/
And here's an article by one of the experts who reviewed Toyota's code and found the smoking gun: https://embeddedgurus.com/barr-code/2013/10/an-update-on-toy...
I sure hope Tesla has figured this out for 3 and the Y. (It has. According to the FA, this has to do with MCUv1 Tesla Model S and Model X units up to 2018.)
You are absolutely right in that this failure should not have happened, because they should use some other medium to store their logs that is not getting cramped by increasingly bigger firmware versions and that is appropriately sized and engineered to withstand at least a century or two of heavy usage. But since cloud thermostat and media player box vendors also get away with just stuffing some embedded Linux distro on a single chip of the cheapest Flash they can find on the spot market, Tesla probably didn't put much thought into why they shouldn't just do the same. After all, this system is just a media player box mounted in a car, right?
(Except that for some totally absurd reason, the car ceases to function entirely if its media system breaks, which is the next big WTF in this story...)
Who didn't assume this to be the case? Teslas are automotive iPhones, and I've always assumed they would be scrap in 3-5 years rather than 15-20. This is why I don't think it was ever valid to compare the purchase price to a regular car.
It is strange no one performed back of the envelope calculations on flash life vs logging size.
I've worked in embedded, we had a time series based rolling log. Flash life calculation was done at regular intervals.
IIRC with what we shipped, the flash chip would outlive the battery by 3x or 4x. And that was without wear leveling!
We were smart enough to continue the rolling log at the last point on flash we uploaded from, avoiding the mistake I've seen some products do of starting over from the very "beginning" after every log sync. Do that and you end up with 10% of your flash worn down to nothing and 90% of your flash going unused.
Also, unless needed, please stop using JSON. Use a binary format instead. Protobufs is trivial to get up and running almost anywhere. Other binary encoding formats may serve a product's needs better. JSON is fine if everything is low bandwidth web services talking now and then, or low friction HTTP APIs, but for other use cases... use something else.
Worst I ever saw was XML being used to RPC invoke every single function call, even local ones. All params got packed up in XML, sent over to the destination, who'd then unpack the XML, execute, and package up the return value. A double digit % of the CPU was being used on XML serialization and de-serialization. (If your choice is that or JSON... probably go with JSON!)
Logging flash being same as storage flash is super weird though. Though if their MCU only supports hanging a single flash chip off of it, I could see it happening.
Assuring yourself that under no circumstance is that possible can sometimes be tricky.
Sure, but sensor error reporting frequency should also be documented and calculated somewhere. Embedded requires more planning, this stuff isn't like AWS instances where the worst case is a larger bill.
And from the sound of it just general usage is causing problems.
Reminds me of some people's aversion to auto-killing processes when the OS runs out of memory, as though it could ever be better to lock up completely.
This was a no-brainer IMO: Tesla wanted their cars to be superior and time to market was key. Why do handwringing about the cars that might be still on the road in five or ten years when that's beyond the warranty and beyond Tesla's life in business if they don't deliver a Model S with the target specs? They made the right tradeoff. This is probably one of dozens of design weaknesses that Tesla cars have, ones that allowed them to get way ahead of the competition.
Now that we have arrived at five or ten years later there is some nonzero risk to their brand. Do they have unreliable cars? How many Tesla owners still own the original car and how many of these were purchased second-hand? Folks who bought the original car and they encounter this failure mode might think about this expensive out-of-warranty repair when they go car shopping next. If there are a lot of them, Tesla could consider the financial tradeoff between extending the warranty to cover this failure mode and the impact on future sales.
And which will have spare parts available for that long?
I'm thinking about buying a new car, but I'm worried.
Old cars with four or six speakers can have all their speakers replaced with off-the-shelf models pretty easily, but I expect replacing all 15 speakers in a Model 3 in a dozen years to be fairly nightmarish.
Comparison of some old car speakers: https://www.crutchfield.com/S-FPB2k6hbguH/learn/mad-science-...
That said: I still do every scheduled maintenance, which helps tremendously. The main problem with older vehicles is that people stop following the recommended services as the car gets older. Which is of course the opposite of what you should do with an old car.
exactly this. I've been driving my Toyota for 15 years, never had a problem with it. But I still, to this day, have it maintained. The cost of that maintenance is pennies compared to purchasing a new car. If you can afford it, it's foolish not to.
Toyota is great about that. There was something in the steering column that needed replaced on my '95 T100 and and 15 years later they sent a notice offering to fix it for free. I never did get it replaced, it was a 'we gotta keep the vehicle for a couple of days' and we'd been driving it since it was brand new without issue so I decided to keep on since the risk seemed incredibly minimal.
>Toyota is great about that.
after you sue them https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-01/toyota-faces-class-ac... https://www.caradvice.com.au/780759/class-action-filed-over-... https://autoweek.com/article/recalls/toyota-will-settle-truc...
I see the .au domains and while I don't know how stuff is in Australia, the United States it looks like more than 10,000 class action lawsuits are filed a year [1]. Hell I just got an email about one this weekend where apparently Audible was sued for not making it more clear that credits expired if you didn't use them... I mean, as long as I can remember (and I've been a member over a decade) Audible has explicitly stated that you can only accumulate so many unused credits and that if you cancel any outstanding ones are nullified. Lawyers make BANK if they win a class action.
So did they get sued and then issue a recall, yes it looks that way but in the case of my recall it was voluntary and involved no lawsuit that I know of. They found some defect that happened under extremely specific (and unrealistic for 99.99% of drivers) conditions and issued a voluntary recall. When I got the notice the Truck was 15 or even 16 years old and we hadn't had it at a dealership in 2 address (I'd never had it at a dealership under my name) yet they found me to tell me and then sent the notice every few months for a couple of years until I notified them I no longer owned the vehicle per the instructions in the mailings.
[1] https://gettingthedealthrough.com/area/82/jurisdiction/23/cl...
From an article on the Toyota - BMW Supra/M4 collaboration,
"...BMW couldn’t believe how extensive some of our quality and efficiency studies were as parts came into shape one by one. We would take every bit down to a fastener or rivet, and put it through our stringent quality control and a dozen other testing, we’d ship thousands of parts back to Japan for analysis. That is normal to us."
http://club4ag.com/chief-engineer-tetsuya-tada-reveals-the-a...
I think you mean Z4
* I almost started to think if they had an infinite budget funding to the task of design. *
And it seemed like the opinion from Toyota was that Toyota has a body style in mind at first but BMW lets the body style be influenced its contents.
BMW's fundamental difference in approach was that they wanted to design a package, and from there they would naturally evolve a shape and size of the body from that packaging, a functionally oriented goal. ... Our company (Toyota) with my tenure and experience, the focus was always design elements being the priority. We would first spend a lot of time on the shape and appeal of the car from visual perspective ...
But let the article speak for itself. I kept my quotes short.
But you know what? That damned thing ran like a beauty. It literally ran until their son started driving it and wrecked it.
I was impressed enough with it, that when it was time for me to purchase a vehicle, I went with Toyota. 15 years later and that thing has never left me on the side of the road, not even once (I do keep up maintenance on it). I'm considering purchasing another vehicle because it's time to get something larger, and when I do it will most likely be Toyota.
I've seen so many people say that at 200k miles Toyota is just getting warmed up, and there's some truth to it. You obviously have to keep up with maintenance on the vehicle, but if you do I can guarantee it will treat you right. And I'm not saying other manufacturers are any worse, but I am saying Toyota is a great vehicle to buy.
Then I took my father's '95 Toyota t100 from my mother when she got a new vehicle, drove it until 2013 and gave it to my half brother. It has 130k or so when I gave it to him and aside from having a really squeaky bed was in great shape, the only remotely major work I'd had to do was replace the fuel pump bracket due to rust which involved dropping the gas tank (2 man job). The ball joints and pitmans needed replaced in the next 10k miles probably but that's just a special tool rental and an afternoon sitting on the ground.
Then take my 2013 impala... I've got 68k miles on it now. I've had a wire harness malfunction which would randomly trigger ABS and traction control while you were driving, I've had to replace the evap sensor THREE TIMES and it is now throwing codes again, the factory rotors have already had to be replaced due to severe rust, any time humidity gets above 70% or so it throws another engine code because of more fuel/emissions sensors.... pinches bridge of nose
I had that exact same problem in a 2002 Buick. I can't believe GM hadn't fixed that yet.
When I put the key in the ignition position for on (without starting it) so I could read the codes, it complained that the battery was low, and to start the truck soon.
Oddly enough, my dad's 2001 Silverado always had the same problem (just a red battery light back then), 2 years of ownership so far and it's battery is still fine, same warning right before you start it that goes away once it's on.
When I told this to her she told me her old Jimmy did the same thing.
The code her truck was throwing was coincidentally the same code as my dad's 2001 truck, about the evap canister.
I was flabbergasted, 13 years age difference and this truck was no different.
When they went back, the car was still there. Still being used day in, day out, for 10 years. It still had the crack on the engine.
RAV4 for instance is plagued with faults while my 2013 Avensis ran quite ok the first 90000 kilometres I drove it before getting a tesla.
It did have to change brakes, a spring in one of the keys failed and the open/close window button on the passenger side broke. It also rusted under the chrome strips..
But compared to other cars I think it did quite well :)
https://autoweek.com/article/recalls/toyota-will-settle-truc...
Spare (electronic) parts shouldn't be an issue with major brands. I've seen the same sensor used on a dozen models from several manufactures produced over 10+ years. As Takata exposed, there aren't that many parts suppliers around the globe, so a lot of commodity components are shared across the industry.
For long-term part replacement, I'd be far more concerned with construction techniques like plasma-transferred wire arc sprays used for creating cylinder linings. This technique cannot be replicated outside of the factory, thus, they kind of make engine blocks disposable (they can be sleeved, but they won't perform the same and will require different piston heads).
Except this article is specifically about solid state components failing in a much shorter timeframe.
Most modules with flash in 'em are programmed once at the manufacturer, reflashed once or twice during assembly, maybe reflashed once more at the dealer before delivery, and that's it. Maybe again post-sale if there's a recall or TSB or something that can be fixed in software.
Flash quite happily lasts 25+ years if you don't abuse it far beyond any flash manufacturer's wearout specs. Go figure!
concievably a big capacitor or watch battery could keep a 4 or 8k RAM going for quite a long time.
For Toyota ~57 million vehicles from '02-'09 https://www.toyota-global.com/company/history_of_toyota/75ye...
For Honda ~23 million from '02-09 https://www.statista.com/statistics/267276/worldwide-automob...
Volkswagen group looked to be in between the two.
Didn't look for Ford or GM.
To say that there's "tens of millions" of perfectly operational cars on the road in the US is really an understatement.
Even if the above isn't an issue, storing electronics not on a circuit board is not easy, but I'm probably not supposed to talk about those issues. (You can research them)
This isn't a trivial cost
It's a significant up front cost to consider against a purchase price.
I believe the only semiconductors in the car are in the timing circuits for indicators and wipers, the tach and fuel gauge amps, and the radio.
Past results do not guarantee future performance: no new cars are this simple.
If there is ever a nuclear apocalypse, the giant mutant cockroaches that survive will be driving around in style in 80’s diesel Mercs.
Electricity was strictly optional on those cars.
Sale price plus maintenance divided by time owning it currently has me at $275/month and dropping.
$275/month is $3300pa, so you're already at a minimum of $6600 for a near 20 year old car, which doesn't sound particularly cheap.
I'm on a lower monthly cost of ownership for 3 years ownership of a 6 year old car.
Also, it's not a car - it's an SUV - so it's going to cost more than a car. I bought it because I really wanted an old 4Runner, not because I wanted the cheapest car.
Your mention of costs seemed to imply that it was cheap which didn't seem to me to be the case.
However, anecdote vs data:
"Used car payments hit record $400 per month as prices top $20,000" [0]
So I still think I've done pretty good with my purchase.
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2018/11/08/used-ca...
You can argue the risk comparison between an old airbag and no airbag, but the thing that sways me is, beyond a certain point, the manufacturer just doesn't care if it works or not. When 95% of the cars have been scrapped, nobody cares if it doesn't work right anymore.
I also consider that on an old car without an airbag, I still have a seatbelt that I will wear, and on an old car with an airbag, I still don't have modern crumple zones and reinforcements.
So I'm sticking with either relatively new vehicles or pre-airbag ones.
Because this is a decently upscale crowd on HN everyone is going to tell you Toyota/Honda. I'm not going to write the mini-novel it takes to explain why but it suffices to say that is one filter bubble's opinion and other bubbles will have other opinions. As someone who has fairly extensive experience with vehicles that most here would consider far beyond end of life I assure you the badge on the grill matters far far less than what you use the vehicle for and how you treat it. Anything will "last" 25yr if you're willing to baby it there, put a bunch of money into it or just deal with it having all sorts of NVH issues in years 20-25. Trying to predict what vehicle and configuration will last 25yr with the least work (the unstated assumption in these discussions) is a complete and total fools errand because the equation is dominated by variables outside, or mostly outside your control.
The word online is that these cars take a lot of maintenance, but I haven't had any trouble with mine (2012 model, 90K miles, original electronics) aside from needing a new fan belt and a new battery. And of course the Countryman line is basically just a BMW SUV with the Mini branding and dealership network.
If you want a vehicle that's less 'will the parts be available' and more 'will it just last forever', though, you can't go wrong with a Toyota Hilux.
(I can probably still get new mechanical parts for my 23 year old Ipsum, but I doubt the in-car electronics are replaceable except from the second-hand market)
The design life for the Ford EEC IV, used in 1980s Ford vehicles, was 30 years. My 35 year old Ford Bronco is still using the original electronics.
Source: I used to repair cable boxes for CTDI. While everyone else is using their Metcal station and wasting 5 minutes, I've got the BGA off, board deballed, and a new BGA package installed and ready for PKI in less than 45 seconds with a heat gun.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190621052637/http://teslaservi...
It's not just a matter of "oh just go get a Hynix NAND part from DigiKey and reball the PCB". At minimum you need to copy the data over. At worst you need to bless the part with whatever secret sauce Tesla is using at the factory.
That said, if there is a systemic problem with this part failing faster than it should, which certainly seems to be the case, Tesla should be pushed to either recall the affected vehicles or waive the service costs for those owners who are impacted. But that isn't any different than if there was a design flaw in a critical part of an ICE cars manufacturing.
But we're well aware that flash memory degrades, corrupts and gets a bit screwy. Flash memory chips are also dirt cheap and quite small - couldn't Tesla of baked in a bit more redundancy in this case?
In our transmission example, any fault in the transmission is not catastrophic, but with electronics, a single bad joint or bridged trace can take the whole thing down.
I am not defending Tesla here. I am simply pointing out that this is being covered in a fundamentally different way than other cars. My last car was recalled twice for electrical wiring issues. One of the problems could have resulted in a fire and the other one would have resulted in the exact same "bricking" that you see here. Neither of those issues would be covered or dissected like this Tesla issue.
That would be like if the CD player in my ICE car broke, suddenly I can't drive my car. Absurd.
This is not an apt analogy at all. In a Tesla, there is no separate dashboard or control so it's not an optional part like a CD player. It would be more like saying that your transmission failed. It just happens that, because it doesn't need all the other mechanical parts, an EV's "transmission" is the same box that runs the radio, AC, etc.
A good engineering team would have decoupled them. In an ICE car half of your dashboard could be non functional (climate control completely broken, etc) and the car will still drive because the two systems are decoupled.
It's not the infotainment part that causes the failure, though. It's the firmware flash chip which happens to be in the same board as the infotainment array. It's not like the radio breaking would cause the car to stop working. Again, this is more akin to the transmission going out. It's just easy to make this sound like an engineering failure because of that. It's similar to saying that the new Google Pixel has a "massive engineering failure" because the "Ok, Google" voice assistant breaks. It's disingenuous to say that because all that happens on the security module. You wouldn't want someone to have access to your phone if the security module breaks but, if that breaks, it also breaks the voice assistant functionality. This phrasing makes it sound like a fault in the voice assistant can block access to the entire phone which is intentionally misleading.
Diagnostic logging should be stored on a separate (re: decoupled) flash chip. If that flash chip wears out, the car should still drive.
Something is too tightly coupled right now, as evidenced by the existence of the article.
That's why Toyota isn't releasing updates to transmissions every few weeks, that are changing it's behavior and using off the shelf parts without proper attestation and testing in all possible configurations.
Tesla moves fast, which is great for progress. But extremely risky for long term reliability of complex machines.
The main difference is that the probability of a typical ICE ECU or TCU failing is much lower than a Linux-based infotainment system running on non automotive grade flash.
The on-board systems have become very tightly coupled, if not monolithic to the point where a broken info unit will prevent the car from starting.
I had the infotainment system replaced in my e-Golf a few weeks ago, it took two technicians three days to install and configure to work with all the car's on-board systems.
Edit: If I _had_ to guess, I’d say this is because the car industry (especially electric) has been pushing to innovate features so rapidly that the time hasn't been available to engineer, test and prove decoupled systems.
The primary reason the car is made, in the first place, is to be sold at a profitable price. That is priority #1.
[1] - there's currently a class action settlement about how terrible it was
That's how my 2011 BMW is. It's not exactly the most reliable car, but I'd imagine things would be much worse if it weren't designed that way.
For example, my body control module (FRM) just recently died, but the engine still runs and the car can still be driven, just none of the lights work.
The non-critical systems communicate with the powertrain bus through a special CAN gateway in an attempt to isolate the systems.
My understanding was modern flash memory wear levelling would swap regularly-written and seldom-written sectors around, allowing for even wear across the disk even if it was 95% full all the time. Is it established that Tesla doesn't have this feature?
I want the firmware working, I don't much care if data logging stops working.
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/preventive-emmc-repl...
And a doc the OP put together on replacement.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZH8oP4AgdVxmCN0saKA1Dxc2...
Any other car manufacturer would issue a recall notice and repair it for free, regardless of warranty status.
I smell a class action lawsuit -- Tesla installed software that invisibly destroys user-inaccessible hardware throughout the entire warranty process and then fails afterward, and then charged people to fix it.
I don't buy this one bit. E.g. GM ignition switches, Ford Focus transmissions, LR coolant crossover pipes. They don't do this by default, and mostly get away with it.
If you're not running it, you absolutely should be, precisely because it is a security issue.
Build-in Microsoft stuff will get you way further, that's also why anti-virus apps are now bloatware and spyware on their own.
Ps. Downvoted above you because it really is just a terrible example.
It's also a lie recent years.
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/376037/tesla-mcu-emmc-memory-issu...
[2] https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/likely-mcu-failure.1...
Cluster the consumable components together. Flash and battery. Attach the storage via iSCSI or something similar, have the car's main computer perform encryption/decryption (rather than trusting a component expected to be swapped).
In the case of a battery swap the bulk contents of the (encrypted) external storage can also be cloned. That can probably happen in the timespan that a battery is topped up to charge, but would be more difficult for automated swaps at refueling points. A home/cloud backup and transferring only the new data might be sufficient.
This is ridiculous. Can we all agree that this is ridiculous? Because that's what it is. If we can at least all agree that this is indeed ridiculous, perhaps the collapse of modern civilization can be avoided.
The method of replacing entire MCU? Maybe not, flash is likely not the only component in there that has an age limit.
> Maybe not, flash is likely not the only component in there that has an age limit.
The MCU itself should outlast the lifetime of the car in the vast majority of the cases.
The issue with the flash memory resides in the MCU (media control unit), which has nothing to do with the electric drivetrain. Cars with combustion engines can have this issue too.
> once the flash memory in a Tesla’s infotainment unit goes bad, it essentially bricks the entire car.
Essentially, yes. But as far as I am aware (correct me if i'm wrong) a Tesla with a bricked MCU will still drive.
I am annoyed that articles like this make it sound that these types of faults are only happening to electric cars, which it is not. It might be a Tesla issue, as they are both ambitious and inexperienced in car component design, but it could have happened with other brands as well.
> Fortunately, Jason Hughes, known as a ‘Tesla hacker,’ can service these units at a much lower cost.
Yes, many people can, there is no secret technique to it. Just like a local garage can fix any part with any brand of car for much cheaper than the dealership. That is because dealerships have to replace parts, rather than repair them. There are many good reasons why they do this, I wont go into details here.
Sure, a conventional car mechanic probably can't do it, but anyone with electronic repair experience can. That is a shift that is happening with all car brands. As cars are shifting towards computers on wheels, we must learn to distinguish mechanical repairs from electronic repairs.
For me this is a trend Tesla has been showing. (e.g. https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows... stuff is trying to use off the shelf but aren't designing for what their cars will actually be experiencing. It -could- happen to other brands, but it is happening with Teslas. This combined with their reported code practices (https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376) generally put in the camp of recommending people lease, don't buy and definitely don't buy used. These first/second gen Teslas are going to be trash is a few more years.