U.S. (NHTSA) asks Tesla to recall 158,000 vehicles for touchscreen failures | Hacker News Reader

U.S. (NHTSA) asks Tesla to recall 158,000 vehicles for touchscreen failures

reuters.com

6 pointsJustin_K4 comments

Important to note that this problem was massively magnified by the approach that the whole industry (following Tesla's lead) has taken: treating EVs as a "cellphone with wheels".

There's one big huge modern CPUs, everything is software running on the CPU, and you don't worry about what happens when the big CPU encounters trouble because the CPU is the car. There might be two big CPUs, but if there are then (like this situation with Tesla) they're so intertwined that you effectively need both of them to drive properly. The "entertainment CPU" has become entwined with the "powertrain CPU", so it's really not appropriate to use those terms anymore. You can't remove the entertainment system without bricking the drivetrain. If the entertainment system wants to spy on you, tough luck.

I don't want a cell phone with wheels. I want an EV that's like my 2000s vehicles were: two microcontrollers (one for engine control, one for ABS), and no over-the-air firmware updates so software upgrades are painfully expensive for the manufacturer. If there are any other CPUs in the vehicle it should still drive from point A to point B even if I physically rip those out. This isn't asking a lot: even 20-year-old internal combustion engine powertrains are way more complex than any EV powertrain.

The original Tesla Roadster worked like this. I am seriously considering paying the insane price it costs to buy one that still runs. I would love to buy a still-in-production highway-safe car (not a glorified go-kart) with this property. Suggestions welcome, please.

Really well done by the NHTSA demanding a recall on these MCUs. They're ~$2500 a pop to have replaced when they're out of warranty (EDIT: some additional research is showing Tesla might be able to replace a $120 daughter board the eMMC is attached to instead of the entire MCU), and Tesla has been attempting to push the costs onto the owner as much as possible (even though the flash memory longevity issue was Tesla's fault and should've been mitigated long before it was with a software update).

A bigger problem is that they may not be able to do the recall at any price.

TSMC is backed up out the wazoo right now, and has cut off so many carmakers that just last week [0] Toyota and Ford have each had to halt an entire production line solely because they ran out of chips.

Automotive chips aren't commodity products anymore. They all have individually-unique cryptographic keys (laser-fused at the foundry) so they can authenticate each other and lock out tinkerers. The carmakers love this concept, but it just came back to bite them.

[0] https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-bb12adb61060...

Good for Tesla I suppose, as they can point at TSMC as to why they can't perform the recall. If forced to do the recall, they'd be rate limited by TSMC's production capacity. The longer Tesla can extend and pretend, the less painful the expense to them of doing the recall.

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