It's been joked a few times that a Tesla is a computer with a car attached. I guess things like this make that very obvious, and not in a good way.
– Robert Cringely.
"If the automobile had followed the same development as the computer, we would produce a billion rolls royces a year, get a million miles per gallon, can transport 10000 people per car and explode once a year, killing everyone inside. Oh and it would cost $3.50 per car."
Try to find somebody willing to pay you more than half of original MSRP for some random Compaq PC from 1990.
In the past, not even distant past, just ~15-20 years ago, I'd confidently say that would never fly without hesitation.
It's definitely not the case today. Just look at how willing people are to delegate control over their lives to Tesla's "Autopilot". Even well-educated software engineers are being killed by putting 100% confidence in this glorified cruise control.
Also, in traffic, I’ve been finding Autopilot/adaptive cruise control to be really great for enabling me to pay more attention to the cars around me, because I spend a lot less energy worrying about the speed of the car in front of me and following the curves of the road.
Nobody would get in a car that kills you once a year.
But it would be an amazing tool for pulling things. So they might get in a carriage behind it. And people would definitely use that tech to make unmanned truck tractors.
Sure, PEOPLE wouldn't, but I'd bet that we'd have autonomous driving perfected for deliveries if every car only cost $100 and was essentially free to run.
If you mean the person who died when his car hit the crash attenuator on the way to work at Apple in California I think you are misrepresenting the situation.
As far as I can tell from the media reports on this case he had reported to Tesla that the autosteer misbehaved at this junction yet he still used it at that place and he was exceeding the speed limit. That's not confidence, it's foolhardiness.
In addition the crash attenuator had been hit by a conventional car a week earlier and had not been repaired.
I have a Tesla S, 2015 autopilot 1, and I use the autosteer feature pretty much every time I use the car. I am also a well educated software engineer but my degree is physics and my career has been in test equipment, embedded controllers, and design software.
I am well aware of the limitations of the feature and I pay attention to the times and circumstances in which it does not behave as well as I would like it to and adjust /my own/ behaviour accordingly. I suspect that most Tesla drivers do the same.
Reminds me of the Netflix quote from seven years ago: 'The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us'
https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/29/3930560/netflix-wants-at-...
Seriously, what is the use case? YouTube and Netflix ought to have a native app. Do I desperately want to browse HN but I don't have a phone on me? I don't understand.
Your passenger can use it to find a place to eat while you are driving.
Not everyone, not even every Tesla owner, has an always online mobile.
Hmm, is this a regional thing? Prepaid mobiles here typically have 20GB to "unlimited" (note; not actually unlimited; they'll certainly throttle you if you take the piss) per month data.
> which makes referring to it while driving much safer
Eh? You shouldn't be using it while driving! Does it even work while driving?
> Not everyone, not even every Tesla owner, has an always online mobile.
They might be better spending the money they're spending on data service for their car on data services for their phone...
Also, they block all video and sounds, you can't watch youtube while you are driving or even stopped. They recently added netflix when you are supercharging only.
Why would anyone combine those key elements with the “second” system?
I mean that sounds reasonable, it’s not like a web browser has ever been compromised before.
The fact that this one can be rebooted (by the end user, as a matter of course, and it's no big deal) without any hackery whatsoever, and the car can still be driven, makes the system look very good actually.
The joke fits better with the other computers in the car, which were not the subject of the article.
It may be a generational thing. It sounds terrible to me, but I have a car whose computer lasted 30 years before needing attention, and then it was for failing solder joints.
So you take out the computer here and it's still a perfectly safe and drive-able car.
...with absolutely no instrumentation? Sure, the wheel and pedals still work, but everything else is not controllable.
I've done some custom car stuff so I've had short drives without a dashboard, and while you could argue it's drivable, I wouldn't say safe.
Like they did when there was a Jeep remote vulnerability. "Haha. Way to do OTA totally wrong!".
> There are numerous problems with other cars and it doesn't receive any coverage
It's simply a result of much more attention and scrutiny of Tesla on HN because it's a popular car/company in the Silicon Valley.
"the approximate speed" is not good enough. I challenge you to go on the highway without looking at the speedometer for 30 minutes and guess what speed you're driving in. I don't think a lot of people know what the speed would be, unless they regularly train it.
So, it doesn't make any sense that you are talking about the time starting from when the crash was induced by the hacker, to the time when the reboot finished. You must be talking about what all the above comments were talking about, which is the time to do a reboot.
Well, it was probably a hard reboot. Which can only be done while stopped and with foot holding the brake down. And which takes longer than a soft reboot. So how long was it, exactly, since you claim it was well over a minute?
I checked the video to see what you could possibly be talking about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsSYyg4-3dg
The reboot starts at 2:09. The UI comes back at 2:24, which is being conservative... we could easily call it 2:23. 15 seconds. For a hard reboot. Again, soft reboots are even faster.
So, yeah. Saying it took a minute or more is a wild exaggeration. Fifteen seconds.
During these 15 seconds you are missing out on the ability to see your speed, which was shown continuously in the largest font at the closest part of the screen right up until the moment of the reboot. (Except in this case the car was in Park, so it's super odd that anyone would worry about driving safety here). And you miss out on the ability to open the trunk, the frunk, and the charge port. And the ability to look at maps. And possibly voice commands. I don't see any safety issue here. If this bothers people, they can just refrain from rebooting their MCU while driving. And if they really do get hacked, just look at the screen, note the speed, and reboot. Soft reboot should be fine, and can be done while moving or not, it's up to the driver, free choice. Don't like rebooting while driving? Fine, pull over. You don't need to though. Fifteen seconds. Tops. Of not having your screen. Soft reboot probably more like ten seconds.
This is how people form mistaken opinions about Teslas. Lack of personal experience, ignorance, presupposition of facts that do not exist, gullible acceptance of anything you read or hear, and exaggeration of perceived problems to a bizarre level.
> Well, it was probably a hard reboot. Which can only be done while stopped and with foot holding the brake down.
If this is true, then it seems like it is impossible to (hard) reboot the MCU while driving? So they definitely should pull over.
> This is how people form mistaken opinions about Teslas. Lack of personal experience, ignorance, presupposition of facts that do not exist, gullible acceptance of anything you read or hear, and exaggeration of perceived problems to a bizarre level.
You seem to be letting your Tesla fanboy/girlism blind you. I'm not "forming an opinion" about Tesla over this event, simply arguing that should this happen to you the safest and best thing to do is pull over. I would do the same thing in a normal (non-Tesla) car should the speedometer or other important part of the dash fail in those.
But yeah this is an annoying hack if it hits an average driver. I'd say whether it's dangerous or not depends on how the driver responds. Just as you say, if any important part of the dash fails, the actions to take are largely the same as for a regular car, except I'm adding that there is that additional option of the soft reboot, in the meantime, which may fix it completely before a pullover can even happen.
If they are not aware of soft reboot, they should just drive safely and pull over to call service to ask what to do. If they don't do this, it's just like anyone in any car driving with something non-functional; the responsibility falls on the driver.
>I'm not "forming an opinion" about Tesla
OK, fair enough. If not for you, it can stand as a general comment about the nature of comments often seen in discussions about Tesla.
I do think most cars can reach 120 (kph) without starting to shake though, and your case is an outlier.
Unless you’re seriously impaired or driving the car for the first time, it really shouldn’t be very difficult to control your speed without a speedometer.
You might get a ticket or two, but if the lack of a speedometer puts you in dangerous situations you shouldn’t be driving in the first place
It doesn't really matter which point of view is more correct, as long as there's agreement that it's not safe and drivable.
Let me summarize my point of view again, very simply:
You are allied with userbinator in saying that it is not "perfectly safe and drivable", despite the quibbles about exactly how it fails that test.
Especially because you're saying "It's safe assuming you won't keep driving it." and they're saying "If you keep driving it, it's not safe.", and both of those can easily be true at the same time.
My only concern would be getting a speeding ticket, but I wouldn’t have trouble driving safely.
In the rebooting state it's probably still safer than any other car. You aren't missing any critical information that you can't see by looking out the window (the approximate speed). There is no gear shifting, no fuel, and you would have been warned well before this if your charge was low enough to cause alarm. I can really think of nothing you need on the screen that you would seriously miss as a matter of safety while it's rebooting for a few seconds, as long as you're being attentive as a driver, which you should be.
Unless, for but one example, it's raining, heavily.
Because the wipers freeze.
The wipers do not freeze when the MCU crashes or restarts. They continue working on the speed they were running at when the MCU crashes or restarts.