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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

The earlier models were premium not economy pricepoints. Why is the ECU designed around low cost on-board, non-replaceable constructs like this? A premium product, would not nickel-and-time the SD card, it would have engineered it as a field replaceable unit, with an insert,format, wait (for download) and go mode.

Replacing the entire ECU feels like an admission like Apple and increasingly Lenovo (thinkpad), they have driven premium to the wrong place. "please give us soldered on memory and soldered on SSD" is not actually what we said, on our feedback forms to Apple, or IBM (X1 Carbon).

Nobody asked Tesla to shave $1 on the ECU assembly and the incremental cost of recall and fix, along with goodwill now outweighs the cost saving in any sense I can understand it. If the authorities demand he fix for free, it becomes another shit show of the TSLA share price. This wasn't a good choice against all the other choices.

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> "please give us soldered on memory and soldered on SSD" is not actually what we said, on our feedback forms to Apple, or IBM (X1 Carbon).

I don't know why you are lumping Lenovo ThinkPad in there. Their units are still highly repairable.

Even their thinnest model (X1 Carbon) still has the replaceable SSD. It accepts any standard NVME M.2 drive - https://www.windowscentral.com/how-upgrade-ssd-lenovo-thinkp...

A lot of t400 series have soldered DIMM's, but i agree with you.

Lenovo still makes Thinkpads that are extendable. My P51 has 3! m.2 (2 of which support NVMe,) 4 RAM slots, easily replaceable keyboard and more. But I think most people want thinner laptops, and the thinner ones have less of this. I don’t think this is a headphone jack type situation: people value portability a lot on laptops, and the difference between a rugadized, user expandable laptop and an “ultrabook” are striking.

My dell xps is super thin and it still has easily replaceable ram and battery. The massive use of glue, rivets, proprietary screws and cryptographic verification in macbooks is not for slimness but for planed obsolescence

Unpopular opinion, but from where I sit the serviceable lifetime of a computer is effectively about a decade, so long as all that non-replaceable stuff lasts the serviceable lifetime of the object, then it doesn't matter how repairable or not it is. Apple charges like 200 bucks for a battery and top case, which is pretty competitive for a replacement OEM keyboard and battery combo.

I think that's about the typical life span of a modern car, too. Anything older than a decade tends to be quite an awful drive. Unless it was built in the days before we decided everything needed to be so expendable.

You'll find the average age of vehicles on the road is around 11 years, and continues to grow longer and longer. Cars cost more, and last longer, so we tend to keep them longer and longer now too.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/261877/average-age-of-pa...

A car can be maintained well as long as parts for it are available. That people don't want to spend on maintenance of >10 yo cars is a different issue.

... if you live somewhere they don't salt the roads.

I mean.....in Poland the average age of a car is 14 years, and we have very harsh winters with plenty of salt being used. I don't think there's anything weird about driving a car that approaches 20 years old, or anything particularly tricky about maintaining one either.

I think it depends on the quality of sheet metal. I live in a place where it's all mud and salt throughout the winter, and somehow my car doesn't rust even where the paint is scratched. I think it's because of a good-quality galvanized coating under the paint (it's a boring normal non-luxury car made in Korea, if someone's curious).

The frame is what I worry about more than the body. I'd be happy to keep repairing my ~15 year old truck, but the frame is getting to the point where I'm not sure how much longer it's going to pass inspection.

Some poorly-designed models are particularly prone to rusting, but most cars can put up with this for more than 10 winters without losing any structural integrity.

It's true they don't look great underneath...

I (literally) beat the crap out of my car; it’s going on 13 years and a quarter of a million miles. The engine mount is wearing out so it shakes a lot but other than that it drives great. I’d imagine people with similar cars that actually maintain them have even better experiences.

> I think [a decade is] about the typical life span of a modern car

Stop buying bad cars.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward%27s_10_Best_Engines

That engine list is about driver-pleasing performance, not reliability. It states "The selection takes into account power and torque output, noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) levels, technical relevance, and basic comparative numbers."

Which engine(s) that have made Ward's do you have an issue with, from a reliability perspective?

I'd suggest the Cadillac Northstar would be on that list - they pretty regularly need a rear end seal at around 100k, which is something that requires removing the entire engine.

Conversely, there are many engines on there noted for their reliability, Ford Modular V8, for example, GM LS1, Ford Model T engine, VW Air-cooled Engine.

In Canada the AVERAGE car is 14 years old. That means half of them are older than that.

Don't forget, just because a typical owner may sell a car after 5-10 years, doesn't mean it goes away into the aether :).

[FWIW, I have a 2004 Subaru WRX; I make the dealership rounds every year looking for replacements, and cannot find anything that handles better in that price range - in fact, by all accounts modern WRXs are a softer drive]

Your argument is correct, but you might want to retake statistics. b^)

A long tail on only one side (no car has a negative age) means that more than half would be older than the average. You were thinking of the median, not the average.

And of course I got it wrong too... b^)

You can also replace the battry on the X1 carbon (RAM is soldered, though). Lenovo even provides videos showing how to remove the battery and other components: https://support.lenovo.com/us/en/solutions/ht508716. No glue, rivets, or weird screws.

It's really mostly the macbooks that are terrible in this regard.

Lighter maybe, not thinner. I There's no reason for laptop to be thinner than ethernet or VGA ports. Give me full size mechanical keyboard instead (minus numpad).

And serviceability!

I don't want thinner, but I want the 13 inch form factor. I could change the memory, the HDD and the keyboard by removing a single screw on my old x220, and with zero risk of breaking little plastic legs.

> . Why is the ECU designed around low cost on-board, non-replaceable constructs like this?

What's not replaceable or too expensive about a $400 or so nVidia Tegra board in a $100k car?

> Nobody asked Tesla to shave $1 on the ECU assembly

Are you suggesting it would have cost Tesla $1 per car to go from an industry standard board used in many cars to a custom solution with all parts tested in-house?

Why doesn't any other manufacturer of cars have a similar problem? Did I miss the story where BMW or Mercedes demand $1200 to replace this part? Tesla knew it wanted a highly digital logging investment and they didn't design for use life. Doesn't feel like a sensible place to be.

But to your main point, no. The actual cost per board of getting a design done for replaceable parts would have been higher. Once they hit volume the amortization would kick in. But for the earliest, yes,expensive. Strangely in the world of eg routers, the first gen often has more hackabilty, more removable parts and it's the later ones which shrink down, gets the bill of materials down.

Seriously, they should comp all the replacements for the life of the car, just for p.r. value.

No other manufacture does over the air software updates. This problem stems from the fact that the firmware image got bigger with each update as incredible new features were added leaving the logs to be written over a smaller area. Also soldered on eMMC is probably less prone to failure than removable microsd under typical automotive conditions.

Jaguar's I-PACE has OTA updates.

Barely you still have to manually update the nav system. I pace only implemented partial updates recently due to competitive pressures from Tesla. Frankly I’ve heard mostly horror stories about ipace.

BMW also does OTA updates now as well.

Why are logs (which I assume is not something the car needs in order to function) written to the same eMMC as the firmware?

von Neumann architecture strikes again!

Just drove a rental Dodge Durango last week, and it was asking me to do updates each time I shut it down.

I think Tesla were the first, but everyone does it nowadays.

> Why doesn't any other manufacturer of cars have a similar problem? Did I miss the story where BMW or Mercedes demand $1200 to replace this part?

This particular issue may be unique to Tesla, but obviously other car manufacturers have a whole host of issues which their customers deal with and can result in service bills even staggeringly higher than this.

My last Infiniti G35 has an issue with the Bose head unit, where a single resistor would come loose and the radio would lose power when you hit a bump. The problem was the whole center console stack of buttons all were powered through the radio and so you would also lose the ability to change the temperature or turn on the defogger.

Cost was $2400 to replace the unit, and they would typically fail again ever few years. The problem was extremely widespread and despite a campaign to get Infiniti to extend the warranty, they never did.

I ended up putting in an after-market unit but I had to replace the module with all the climate control buttons as well with one from the Japanese market version of the same car, because that one could work independently from the radio.

> What's not replaceable or too expensive about a $400 or so nVidia Tegra board in a $100k car?

https://developer.nvidia.com/embedded/community/lifecycle

Tesla needs to have stock relative to replacement rate purchased before nVidia's last ship date. So if they used eMMC built in to a part like this then they should be raising problems for their parts logistics.

Wouldn't be surprised if spare parts logistics turn out to be a pain for Tesla.

Not anymore in this case since they replaced this with their own design. Upgrading older cars should be possible, but is rumoured to be prohibitively expensive for Tesla as the moment, since other components have to be swapped as well.

At the rate they were rushing to design and build that hardware. I'm absolutely not surprised they chose not to go through the extra steps of qualifying a connector/mount for a flash daughtercard.

It's very likely the hardware designers didn't expect the software living on that flash to iterate that many times.

In too many ways, Tesla was and still is a hardware startup.

Every write up I've seen indicates the amount of stuff being put into /var is inappropriate for flash, beyond that, those logs should be kept in RAM until shutdown then you commit them to disk.

I'd have no issue with this stuff bricking if Tesla replaced it free (even more galling that they won't on a 50k+ vehicle), you'll have a hard time convincing anyone that a ECU should last less than a decade under normal operation, Nor should you need to replace the ECU before you replace the battery pack on an electric car.

If storage space was alone an issue, then they shouldn't have extended the features of those firmware loads so much - as far as I know the owner has no choice on if you update or not.

Owner absolutely has control over installation of firmware updates.

I wonder how many dealers do updates without your notice/consent when you bring the car in for repair/warranty/recall work.

They probably plug in their dongle for diagnostics and hit « yes » if it prompts them for an update.

Can I still use the supercharger is I've not upgraded my car?

Yes

> chose not to go through the extra steps of qualifying a connector/mount for a flash daughtercard

are there such connectors suitable for automotive environments ? you don't want your flash to fall off while driving

Yes, absolutely. The automotive electronics industry has been going strong for decades and has a well-established library of components.

Finding (or customizing) the right one is the hard part...

If you buy an expensive car, produced in low volumes, with little competition in the independent repair shop and aftermarket parts industry, expect to pay through the nose for maintenance, repairs and body work.

That also applies to other expensive consumer durable goods.

I think normally for automotive components you are obligated to use electronic components that have already been stress tested and are rated for more violent environments (like next to an engine).

I wonder if Tesla maybe skirted this (like "oh this computer isn't in the car it's an attachable add-on).

Source: I interned at an electronics component company back in uni as a chip tester. Mostly same chips to everyone but ones rated for automotive or space tended to get a lot of extra testing (since failures on electronics are bimodal, running tests in extreme environments just for a bit catches a lot of the bad apples).

This particular problem had nothing to do with temp rating however. A simple case of wearing out by exceeding the specified number of erase cycles.

It's worse. Elon Musk used to be bragging that they used consumer grade electronics instead of automotive grade (which is higher than industrial grade).

And it's already caused more issues: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...

This + the horror stories I read about getting replacement parts when you damaged the car is what keeps me from buying a model 3.

They used an industrial rated screen years ago, because no one in the world made an automotive rated screen large enough at the time. They did accelerated wear tests on it and worked with the manufacturer to make some customizations to try to improve the heat resistance, as well as adding cabin overheat protection into the software. Yes, this was not enough to entirely prevent the yellowing issue on some screens.

Look at, for example, what Sandy Munro says about the electronics quality specifically on the Model 3, and you will appreciate they have come a long way since then.

There is no automotive company I would trust more when it comes to quality of the electronics. This is a group which taped out their own custom silicon for their APv3 hardware, designed by famed chip designer Jim Keller, and will field upgrade it into existing cars. What other manufacturer sells hardware upgrades to their late model year vehicles?

Munro said the Model 3 had the best powertrain of any EV on the market.

He had negative things to say about the quality of the rest of their electrical components, noting that based on the cost of the components Tesla should have an 18% markup...because Tesla is using consumer grade parts, not automotive grade parts.

What other manufacturer sells hardware upgrades to their late model year vehicles?

Almost every car sold to consumers in the US today allows you to replace most parts of the car, which includes upgrading nearly every component, if you so desire. Sometimes the automakers sell upgrade parts; usually they leave it to third parties (i.e., the "aftermarket"). It's actually not a good thing that Tesla is the only source of upgrade parts for their vehicles.

> He had negative things to say about the quality of the rest of their electrical components...

That is simply false. Here he is talking about the Model 3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVnRQRdePp4&t=10m11s

Their margins are better than their competitors because Tesla is vertically integrated, allowing them to do things like reduce the number of harnesses by 40%, and design solutions like the "SuperBottle" which Munro once said is his favorite part of the Model 3:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACdvsfZH-4w

And there's a world of difference between after-market upgrades (of which there are plenty for Tesla) and the manufacturer taking their latest generation technology and manufacturing and designing it so that they can slot it into late-model cars, all while constantly shipping firmware upgrades to their entire fleet which make the cars better in every possible way from speed, handling, range, efficiency, user experience, safety, entertainment, etc.

>> on our feedback forms to Apple, or IBM (X1 Carbon).

Whoa Whoa Whoa ;-)

As somebody who has 9 ThinkPads around his house, including the controversial T25, don't forget Lenovo completely bought and owns all Thinkpad design production branding etc for the last decade.

Would IBM have maintained their priorities if they owned the product today? Not sure. But Applezation of the ThinkPads has happened strictly under Lenovo :-<

The P series is still pretty good; X1 was never about modularity but strict portability; it's the devolution of T series that bothers me personally the most - the T420s was barely thicker than modern T490, but had swappable battery and hard drive. Not "user replaceable", literally push a button and swap it out.

[Disclaimer: IBM employee, but in a completely unrelated part and a ThinkPad fan before my IBM employment; I work in software consulting on large ERP projects and haven't seen an IBM hardware person in my 15 years of service:]

The worst trend is the non hot swappable batteries. I used to carry an extra battery pack and it used to be so convenient for travelling.

Now with USB-C PD you can just plug in an external battery to just about any laptop.

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