Tesla Recalls Cars with EMMC Failures, Calls Part a ‘Wear Item’
hackaday.com
hackaday.com
1) choosing that particular eMMC, likely not something specced for very high write endurance, or not speccing a larger amount of flash to spread the write endurance out over a period of up to 20, 25 years.
2) linux/operating system/software engineering implementation, for a certain volume of MB of writes per day, that would be known to wear out the flash write endurance over a short number of years. possibly a result of the software team not communicating properly with the hardware team. the software team very well may have been operating in a vacuum of assuming that they could do whatever they wanted within the CPU, I/O, RAM, and disk space limits of the architecture, and weren't even thinking at all of the consequences of their logging setup.
3) not making that a socketed/removable part.
4) asking the owners to pay for the replacement due to tesla's own screwup.
1. Admit you screwed up and apologise
2. Moving forward: make repairability a priority and use durable components
3. Open source some of the software, or allow third parties to scrutinise it
In Model3 you can move front passenger seat forward and up (to clean up in the back) all the way to the point when it pushes on sun visor and cracks the mirror in it. Just by using handles intended to move the seat, no manual pressure or anything, there are no limitation on how far it goes and it's strong enough.. Tesla service centers blame owners for that and charge full replacement cost for the visor :\
It was more of a feeling that I shouldn't be paying for it at all that displeased me :( (and reddit is full of stories when it happened with others (with the same service centers' experience))
White interior and black seatbelts. Despite Musks's promises how durable white interior is, seatbelts they use are dyed with I don't know what and they mar the seats. It's permanently baked in and cannot be removed.. Tesla responded long time ago that they are looking for solution, but whatever they will change will definitely not apply to any existing (screwed-up) white interior owners.
From Tesla's perspective the bet might have payed off, by the time this becomes an actual problem for them, they're already over the hump and weathered the worst of times, and can afford to spec them better (one would hope they learned something from this although I have my doubts). In reality probably the real reason this worked for Tesla is Musk's ability to build a fanatical fanbase that can drown out any other voice.
Toyota does.
Though they did put out ~20yr of great cars (emphasis on cars) to get that.
And then there was that decade where they made trucks and SUVs with ball joints that would pop out with levels of wear that would be inconsequential had they designed them conventionally.
I guess the above are engineering examples. Their QA is definitely spot on.
They've had 40yr to fix the problem. Still not fixed. We'll have to wait a few years to see if they fixed it this year.
Yes the Tacoma is small compared to their global presence.
The Focus is small compared to Ford's global presence and they still got a ton of crap for that transmission. Nissan gets crap for their CVTs that aren't really that bad anymore. Subaru gets crap about head gasket and transmission issues they mostly cleaned up a decade ago.
My point is that Tesla is at say a 5 and the fanboys pump up their reputation so that they look like a 6. Toyota is at say a 7 and the blind fanboys pump it up to an 8. It's not about who's better. My point is that this blind fanboyism that guards a reputation in the face of mis-steps isn't something unique to Tesla or the cult of Musk.
If anything the common factor is upper middle class allure. Nothing rounds out a driveway in a nice school district like a Model 3 paired with a Toyota pickup or SUV. Though I have no idea whether it's the cause or the effect or maybe a feedback loop.
This seems disingenuous to me, as if they're making 2021 Tacomas unchanged since 1980.
I'm not defending Toyota, I'm only attacking your argument, which I hope is fair game. The problem with it is that it fails to clear the bar for basically any major manufacturer out there. Put Renault or Volkswagen in there and the situation stays the same. Everyone has a few problematic models or years that get some (un)warranted criticism but you really have to question a manufacturer's QA when the problems are across the board, as evidenced by Tesla using low grade parts across the board. That's one thing what sets Tesla apart from the competition: they cut costs and corners anywhere they can to ship more units, because that's what drives share prices up.
And you'll never see Renault's CEO claim that their cars will cure cancer starting next year and a cult following of people hyping and believing it, or vitriolically pouncing on any unsuspecting commenter or article criticizing Renault. That's the second thing that sets Tesla apart from their competition: they can afford to consistently ship compromised products because their image can absorb anything.
On any of the rash of EV sites that popped up over the past few years just linking to an NHTSA or IIHS report contradicting the article's premise could get you an instant ban. So the articles stay there with the misleading claims because that's what comes up in an internet search.
I had a 2002 Celica that tried to kill me (gas pedal that got stuck under the floor mat at 90... 95... 100... on the M62) but I loved it too much to hold a grudge.
But I have a hard time taking many complaints seriously. If you have a 600 hp sports car, sure, a stuck gas pedal could kill you before you know what happened. But a 2002 Celica at 90 (mph or kph) - you expect me to believe that the brakes can't overcome the engine, and you can't shift to neutral before it goes into orbit?
I commented on the issue of loose floor mats, on an underpowered car, on a high speed road. Even if it is potentially fatal, I don't see what's specific to Toyota.
If Apple actually makes a half decent EV, it will put a massive dent in Tesla..
If the story from Apple was true, I.e., they actually designed almost all parts of the phone, and give out instructions to implement, then they'll need to be able to design a car as if they were build them, to match iPhone's legendary quality.
Can apple do that? With enough time, sure. But can they catch up Tesla in a meaningful time frame, say 5 years? I doubt it.
It’s a shady company that skirts or ignores the law, that has to live in the edge to survive.
I've owned a Model S since before the Model 3 arrived and have always fretted that the level of service I received wasn't sustainable at scale.
They AGGRESSIVELY attacked any problems and replaced parts, even when that's not what I asked for.
It's kinda nuts. Just the things I can remember:
- All 4 door handles were replaced with newer versions - I complained about a corner of stitching on the driver's seat and got an entirely new driver's seat - Glovebox cover replaced (to address latch) - Steering wheel controls replaced - Driver display unit replaced entirely - Sunroof replaced
Granted, that's A LOT of parts to address, but their attitude was we'll do anything to make it right. Never once pushed back or questioned. Usually told me that they wanted to replace the part (rather than fix) because Tesla had engineered an improved version. And, to their credit, the new parts they put in seemed to have meaningful improvements and have worked really well.
1. Small scale
2. Desire to keep early adopters happy
3. 2x the cost of the Model 3
However, my Model 3 service has been really poor.
In my new 2021 the charge port bolt was loose and wouldn't charge. Known issue that took several days and many phone calls to get fixed while traveling. Eventually a service manager got involved and the fix took 5 minutes.
Then they installed Homelink and forgot to plug the front sensors back in. Full self-driving was unavailable for 3 weeks until they returned to plug in the sensors.
Also ordered snow tires from Tesla and the TPMS sensors don't work in my car (2021 uses BLE sensors). They're ordering new sensors and I will need to take my wheels to a tire store to have them installed.
It's been less than 2 months since I took delivery.
Love the car, love the company, an enthusiastic shareholder, but service needs to be fixed.
Not all of the "legacy" automakers are Toyota.
As a firmware engineer with automotive background, having now seen how the "sausage" is made there makes me stay away from them for the safety of my own life.
I know the rest of he car manufacturers aren't as innovative or as desirable but at least some I worked for have their firmware development quality processes down to a religion, and, as boring as that may be, it's the kind of mentality you want from something you put your family into every day.
Case in point: Audi Concert/Chorus radios used in early 2000s. Turning volume knob worked like that: after every knob turn save updated value to EEPROM, then immediately read EEPROM and send that value to audio chip.
Inevitably, after many years EEPROM cells storing volume died, causing that turning volume knob just set volume to totally random value. It was impossible to repair, as EEPROM wasn't separate chip but was integrated in MCU. And you couldn't easily replace MCU because it contained mask ROM code. The hack that was sometimes done was: add custom microcontroller, connect it to the knob, splice I²C wires to audio chip, and patching volume set command on the fly...
The problem is that there isn't any wear leveling happening at all, so if you have an event that happens at every boot up and is logged, it wears the same block every time.
> not making that a socketed/removable part. It's a very integrated module, I don't think socketed ICs have been a thing in automtive for a long time.
edit: I'm wrong, daughter post has a nice run down
If you're curious the very long forum thread is a lovely read.[1] You can see the chip levels itself, because just soldering in a bigger chip with the same code on it makes a big difference to many customers.
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/consolidated-emmc-th...
This isn't true. Very nearly all eMMC devices have hardware wear leveling. They aren't like MTD (raw flash) devices or very cheap USB/SD where you have to rely on a block remapping layer or special filesystem because there is no hardware wear leveling. But like any flash device, when they are completely full there are fewer free blocks for the wear leveling to operate. Tesla also may have had them grossly misconfigured, but I haven't seen any evidence that it was anything other than good-old-fashioned log churn on a very full filesystem. I also understand Google kind of had them over a barrel with policies related to the caching of map data and aerial imagery too: since they could not retain this for very long, caches were constantly invalidated and the same data was being redownloaded over and over. At this point, I don't even think they cache map imagery to storage anymore.
Regardless of the technical details, it's clear that Tesla gave little consideration to this problem during design and did even further damage by wasting their small remaining space by filling it up with Elon's glorious vision of fart sounds, fireplace videos, and games -- Which are great fun, not gonna lie, but in hindsight a terrible decision that greatly exacerbated this problem.
I'm not a professional embedded systems person by any stretch, but I was watching out for this problem even in my hobby projects back in the 90's which used early flash memory products like DiskOnChip modules. To this day, I still buy SSD's that are a minimum of twice as large as I think I will need for every application? For things like all-flash SAN I double it yet again. Anyone who would like to understand why can look at my fat stacks of dead Intel SSDs that all died basically because they filled up. My point is that this sort of thing is really well known and there must have been hundreds of times people within Tesla had questioned this internally.
What baffles me is that who is reading these logs? Can't they just turn then off (pipe to /dev/null) and then have cars that need troubleshooting put into a debug mode at some point?
Even I wouldn't put an SSD under this kind of stress and I'm just a random developer.
Does an eMMC even know how full it is? If it were designed for write once it could certainly track that, but I doubt they are designed for such little usage. After having every block written once they would need TRIM to know what is in use, but to my knowledge eMMCs don't support that. (Not an expert in the area, just a random software developer.)
(It's not that black and white, all automotive companies have varying degrees of expertise in both software engineering and mechanical engineering. But it's certainly interesting to watch the industries learn from each other.)
Yes! And (3) is potentially: A company who's even better at building and deploying software and hardware enters the market.
I see a lot of speculation that apple will produce a car.
But apple at the moment just designs hardware, doesn't really make it (as in they don't have their own factories), so presumably they would either need to build factory for their cars or hire some other factory(or factories) to build cars for them ?
As far as I understand most cars sold in USA are build in USA (I am not sure if that's only because of shipping costs or if there are any import taxes or something).
Even if most parts were from China finally assembly would probably have to be done in USA, and factory quite big and expensive, and have lots of trained people (to have apple standards).
Given that its apple that we are talking about car would almost certainly be an instant hit, so they would need to produce a lot of them, which again means big factory with lots of people.
How likely is it that everybody missed such factory ? Especially with press so obsessed with apple. Even if some other company like Toyota were building it for them, they would likely need a lot more additional capacity than they have now ?
And we have seen with Tesla, that scaling out is really the big problem here.
I genuinely interested how likely is it that apple cars will be on streets anytime soon.
(Needless to say, we totally would have made the same kind of mistake, and probably do so every day.)
The only meaningful ding on Tesla here is #4 above: clearly this was a design flaw and should have been a recall from the start, not a customer-financed repair.
But I did that way earlier than Tesla in the process.
None of those are particularly boneheaded in isolation. It's just a bug. Bugs just happen.
(But again: design bugs should be recalls and not repairs)
That's the mass production warranty for integrated objects. Calling it "Chinese" is just weird unless you are calling attention to a claim that only china does mass production anymore.
For cars, we have the "extended warranty" which is just a bet that the car won't fail to much on average.
Same for hard drives with 3 vs 5 yr warranties.
I think you're off base here; it's the very fact of Tesla using "consumer grade" hardware that is the (notable) problem. The people who "would have made the same mistake" are qualified to pass judgment if they know they are not qualified to develop automotive grade systems.
And if you stepped up to something with effective wear levelling and a bit more capacity, instead, this bad design could have lasted forever.
Or if you socketed the eMMC, it would have been no big deal.
Uh... the drive train itself is "known to fail". Everything wears out. Everything breaks. You just aren't surprised when your transmission needs rebuilding or your brakes or shocks need replacement because those are "car things" you've been conditioned are normal. Well, electromigration is just another kind of normal wear and tear to be designed into the device.
And it's the design here that was at fault, having incorrectly planned for the replacement rate. But there's absolutely nothing weird about building cars out of parts that fail over time!
Every established company I've worked for seems to have as many processes that get in the way as those that help.
also - nobody mentioned the amount of data collected. Is it good diagnostics or is it hoarding?
I remember the story of the guy who tried to return his tesla under the lemon law thing because of some weird failure. Tesla diagnosed it and found he would pop the trunk before every failure happened, and they used that to prove he was doing it. After that, I can see an engineering push to log more, not less.
Producing for Musk companies is a fucking shit show. Specifications change mid-production on a constant basis, to a ridiculously comical extent. I honestly can’t imagine what the hell is wrong with these people that they change hole locations and part geometry for every single order, knowing full well that 1000 of 1000 units have already been produced and boxed and loaded onto pallets.
As an Elon Musk fan, it was rude surprise that their shit is so fucked.
I tried holding off on production until the last possible nanosecond, but no. No good. Changes happened the day orders are due.
The only Musk work I do at this point is emergency corrections for other local outfits who made parts with rapidly evolving and mutating requirements.
I thought that the designers would settle down as Tesla and SpaceX get through production hell, but they seem committed to mass production of no-two-things-ever-the-same.
I drive a Model S and I figure probably most things people make and do are objectively retarded, I just happen to know more than I want about this particular retardation.
Did you know what their manufacturing process was like _before_ buying your model S?
I had an email from Tesla yesterday about this recall and as far as I can see I will not be expected to pay anything. It even says that if someone had the part replaced at their own cost that they might be able to get a refund. I live in Norway and have a 2015 S 70D.
The email says:
"Tesla har besluttet å frivillig og proaktivt tilbakekalle enkelte Model S og Model X som er bygget før mars 2018 og som er utstyrt med et 8 GB innebygd MultiMediaCard (eMMC) i MCU som kan oppleve en funksjonsfeil på grunn av akkumulert slitasje. ... Hvis du allerede har betalt for reparasjoner som er tilknyttet til denne tilbakekallingen, kan du være kvalifisert for en refusjon."
Google Translate does a good job on it:
"Tesla has decided to voluntarily and proactively recall some Model S and Model X that were built before March 2018 and that are equipped with an 8 GB built-in MultiMediaCard (eMMC) in the MCU that may experience a malfunction due to accumulated wear. ... If you have already paid for repairs associated with this recall, you may be eligible for a refund."
Hackaday's 'article' seems to be conflating what Tesla wanted to happen (and what they actually did before) with what is happening now.
Or is Tesla in the US expecting owners to pay now as well as before?
1) Your car is out of warranty.
2) Your car’s VIN is not listed for the recall.
The side of my Model 3 trim on the inside just fell off for no goddamn reason. I don't even know how to fix it, it looks like the glue wasn't applied properly? This is on top of countless other problems that I've faced over the last 2 years.
It's impossible that Tesla is 3X the market cap of Toyota Why they didn't stop buying of Tesla the same way they stopped GME is criminal.
And they keep failing external quality tests and no one seems to care:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/teslas-failed-every-edmunds-e...
I think maybe a lot of their bad rep came from the all road "Air suspension" era...although the simple fix was to install regular shocks/springs.
I have had mobile service for things like rotating tires and installing a rear spoiler.
Better "initial quality" experience than the VW and Subaru vehicles that I've purchased.
It's still a bargain GM car at luxury prices, you'd be nuts to pay full MSRP for this vehicle. I got a great deal on a used one; tons of great deals were to be had on cars coming off of the first batch of 3-year leases until the battery recall put a stop-sale on everything at GM dealerships.
I know they don't stack up good against other brands comparing MSRP to MSRP, but I have to wonder how bad Tesla's "initial quality" really compares against all of the electric options out now.
Do you get near the 240-mile rated range? I ask because...
https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/electric-car-range-and-cons...
2018 Tesla Model 3 Performance: 256 miles under test. 310 miles EPA-estimated.
It seems like some EPA EV ranges are not very realistic.
--------
Edmunds tested 277 miles on the 2020 Chevy Bolt. But I'm interested in hearing your personal experience.
From what I've read, the 240 mile estimate is pretty accurate - some more spirited driving will obviously have you fall short of that number, and some users have reported getting more than 240 miles.
Not only they fudged the numbers:
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/tesla-tsla-the-inves...
There was also a fatal flaw. They did not perform the testing under the same conditions. They tested the Teslas with temps being 10F (~60F) colder and using the cabin heat.
https://twitter.com/AEONde/status/1359599422733172736?s=20
While other being tested under ~70+F with no heater used. Any EV owner knows that will significantly affect range. I guess they don't really care about being an authoritative source.
Other offenses: https://twitter.com/enn_nafnlaus/status/1331154577387905024?...
Its not just Edmunds who are reporting lower range than expected. Also autocar (of UK) reports lower Tesla range.
> In our tests, the Model 3 Performance achieved 239 miles of real-world driving.
> Tesla Model 3 Standard Range Plus, 181 miles
> (The Model S) is now available in a choice of different battery capacities, with the current entry-level 75kWh model managing 204 miles of real-world range
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All tests have their flaws. But real-world testing by 3rd parties is far more reliable than the government-mandated tests.
Its like they say: any official benchmark will be cheated, gamed, etc. etc. You really only figure out who can beat the test, as opposed to figuring out reality. A series of trusted 3rd party tests (by magazines and smaller communities) is small and unique enough that no major automaker can really "gamify" the tests, leading to more realistic results in the aggregate.
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/tesla-tsla-the-inves...
https://twitter.com/enn_nafnlaus/status/1331154577387905024?...
Your Autocar link did not even give any data on their testing methodology. It's even more vague than Edmunds. What were the conditions? These things matter to an informed consumer who value objectivity. I hope you're not implying that one should just blindly trust that article.
Speaking of 3rd party tests. A realtime one conducted on the same day, like this one has more merit.
Car and Driver only got 200 highway miles on their Model 3
There's plenty of 3rd party review sites. They're all coming in lower than the EPA-estimated-range.
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Carwow, the Youtube-site you linked to, has its article here: https://www.carwow.co.uk/blog/ultimate-electric-car-range-te...
Percentage of claimed range achieved: 78% for the Tesla Model 3
In any case: my point stands. We can't trust the EPA-ranges / government mandated range tests. They seem to be getting gamed.
That's only highway miles... EPA, WLTP and NEDC efficiency tests are highway and city driving. They are standardized to control as much variables as possible. Which is fundamentally essential to anyone who understands the scientific method.
> Percentage of claimed range achieved: 78% for the Tesla Model 3
Same with the other cars on the lineup. The only one that was a clear winner was the Hyundai Kona, at the expense of lackluster performance and driving dynamics.
78% is on the low-end of what carwow tested.
Nissan Leaf 208 239 87%
Audi e-tron 206 255 81%
Tesla Model 3 270 348 78%
Jaguar I-PACE 223 292 76%
Mercedes EQC 194 259 75%
Peugeot e-208 162 217 74%
Actually 76%~ and below. So mid, not low-end. The Volkswagen e-Up and Renault Zoe were not tested on the same day. So temps will vary. Standardized testing is very important. Which is why it's the methodology used by government agencies. It's not perfect, but it's the most scientific.
It's interesting how some are lambasting the EPA but would cite 3rd party tests that don't even try to minimize the effects of variables. Therefore completely skewing the reliability of the results.
They are completely non-controlled with non-standardized conditions. With Edmunds being the biggest offender. Even at one point charged the Taycan to 100%, but the Model Y to only 90% on a "range" test. How can someone defend that?
Shareholders only care about increasing the volume of cars rolling off the assembly line.
Tesla was on my short list of next car purchases... but now that the old guard are getting fully into the game it's very unlikely (unless Tesla is able to pull a Jaguar like quality rebound or they actually deliver on "full" self driving).
You compare eg; a Mercedes or Porsche interior with a comparably priced Model S and it's no contest.
I posted this the other day. I think most people agree the Germans make better interiors. But nobody can deny Tesla has a superior charging network, and for the vast majority of people their battery technology is superior (longer ranger, but more prone to overheating from aggressive driving).
I think Tesla is just riding the underdog wave extremely well - they're new, they're different, they're trendy, and they're eco-friendly. And honestly, if you're not a car person, their cars are fun and different (if you are an enthusiast you will likely have very mixed opinions of Tesla). Combine that with a CEO that can bend the laws of reality while he talks, promises for full self-driving which will absolutely never ever materialize, the fact that the competition is really quite slow to show up...and you get a ridiculous stock price.
I don't think Tesla is going away, but I think in 10 years they're going to be just another car company, especially if they shift their focus towards energy which is where the real money is for them.
They certainly have that image, but I think an eco-friendly electric car would have to be smaller and lighter, even if that means decreasing range.
Going for a long range makes their cars unnecessarily heavy. That makes them require more power and increases tire and road wear.
I also think the competition is timing its entry quite well, arriving close to the moment when it becomes possible to make money making electric cars.
To be honest I don't think they are unnecessarily heavy for evs. Base model 3 is a bit over 1600 kg, while a base audi a4 weighs a bit over 1500 kg. Performance model 3 weighs about 1850 kg while and an audi rs4 weighs 1790 kg. Meanwhile the polestar 2, an ev comparable to a mid spec model 3, weighs almost 2200 kg.
Their energy efficiency numbers are similarly good and almost across the board better than competition evs.
Edit: I might just add that the weight argument has a bit more strength re the model s and x. Even if they're comparable to other evs, they are a decent bit heavier than comparable ICE cars. I think that's a result of the older platform -- I suspect a lot of work must have gone into model 3 to reduce weight.
Pushing air out of the way continuously is a real drain on energy.
https://www.emissionsanalytics.com/news/pollution-tyre-wear-...: “Pollution from tyre wear can be 1,000 times worse than what comes out of a car’s exhaust”
Teslas are about as eco friendly to repair as iPhones, which is not friendly at all.
Unlike Saturn, GM isn't meddling in Tesla's management, but it seems like similar mistakes are being made.
At least Tesla's are more fun to drive.
It isn't the future. There's more investment from more companies going into CCS networks. For example:
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/industry-news/shell-pledg...
I wonder if there's any way to tell if the build quality is going up with their increased volume, down, or remaining even.
Hyundai/Kia are probably a better point of comparison.
A) Traditional automakers becoming good at making great EVs
or
B) Tesla matching the quality standards of traditional automakers.
The traditional automakers are quickly learning how to make great EVs. Tesla may get away with substandard quality for now, but they won't get away with it a decade from now when ever automaker is producing decent EVs. I hope Tesla improves fast.
Not making excuses for the big T, just saying that there's a lot places for things to work out poorly in automotive.
> I had upholstery on the backs of the rear seats (the part that
> becomes the floor of the hatchback when you fold them down) all
> off on my Ford C-Max. It looks like an adhesive failure there.
Disclaimer: I work for a Tesla competitor.
GME wasn't stopped because it was too overpriced. A few brokerages stopped accepting new GME positions because they couldn't afford the deposit requirements. That's it. If you went with another broker (eg. fidelity), you could buy all the GME you want.
...what?
- GME trading wasn't halted. some high profile platforms like robinhood went literally insolvent and had to put a stop to some volatile stock trades and borrow billions in cash to stay legal. other well-capitalized platforms never restricted GME.
- related to above, GME wasn't halted on some platforms because of some market-cap vs actual value mismatch. this is not a thing.
- as for the market cap, well... prevailing wisdom is we're in some kind of bubble. something bad will happen eventually.
I'm not wealthy, but, got enough to be happy... I really wanted to treat myself to a Tesla and went to the local shop a while ago and I went out thinking - I'm not buying this.
The glovebox required such force to close. I put my arm on the armrest and the rear drinks holder opened The centre console was VERY loose.
and so many other problems.
Compare this to a family member's ~£13k Hyundai i10 where the gear selector was SOLID, I just didn't feel like the Tesla (Model S) was good value for money in the slightest.
I don't think anyone can touch them technically (yet), but, they have A LOT to learn about building cars.
"Now they are claiming that the eMMC chip, ball-grid soldered to the motherboard, inaccessible without disassembling the dash, and not specifically mentioned in the owner’s manual, should be considered a “wear item”, and thus should not be subject to such scrutiny."
Usual disclosures: We own Teslas and TSLA.
You absolutely can and should expect good behavior of corporations. You can't rely only on that expectation so agree if it's important, legislate it.
If you don't like the outcome, change the people.
In this case, though, I don't think the rules should be changed. I'm fairly certain that Tesla is not the first automaker to have come up with this kind of money-saving idea. This has to be well-trodden ground in consumer rights.
In this case, people should vote with their wallets, and the occasional class-action lawsuit, or, if things get too far out of line, expect the same kind of regulator intervention that would happen against any other car company. If regulators would not intervene against any other automaker trying this sort of thing, then I don't think they should intervene against Tesla.
If you expect (in the first sense) benevolent corporate behaviour, in the absence of incentives that align benevolence with self-interest, you're generally being naive. But if you expect (in the second sense) benevolent corporate behaviour, and act accordingly, you may be helping to create that alignment -- because corporations and the people who control them usually care about their public image (certainly when it directly affects consumer behaviour), and legislators are usually at least somewhat responsive to public pressure.
So having the first kind of expectation leads to unhelpful complacency; but lacking the second kind of expectation leads to unhelpful cynicism, cashing out as acquiescence to the status quo.
Thnx.
Note that many electronics are designed to last 10 years (i.e. electromigration). Obviously, use cases matter (24 hour use, high temp or lots of heat cycles).
"His vehicle had warned him about having hands on the steering wheel" (... fourteen minutes prior to the accident).
Leave aside the fact that if you have an accident in your Tesla you will need to go to court to subpoena telemetry data. But they'll happily publish your telemetry data without your (explicit, I know, I know, TOS) agreement if they think they're being painted in a bad light.
And if you disclose information about the vehicle, they'll happily force push neutered/old firmware to your vehicle to hide or prevent such activities, lock you from future upgrades, and disable ethernet and OBD ports in your vehicle.
Or a Douglas Adamsesque approach to right-to-repair, where there's a website with parts you can "order" (except everything down to the most commodity bolt says "Call Tesla" and they will tell you its unavailable to order via the website), that's if you know what parts you need, a process which required making an appointment with Tesla to look at the service manual, several months out, which required a fee, had a time limit, and put you in a room where you were not allowed a computer, phone or camera, just a notepad and pencil), all the while touting their "corporate commitment to transparency" as they pulled out of NHTSB testing.
Is this your idea of responsibility?
As a parent/child the first thing that comes from Tesla is a blog post and public statement on how your loved one allegedly was too stupid to use the car while Tesla goes into technical telemetry to grant themselves absolution.
> The currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.
It's in the fine print but it's brought up every time you talk about Autopilot and enabling it in the car (it's disabled by default) requires you accept a disclaimer saying that you need to be paying attention at all times.
It seems highly unlikely that Tesla is close to fully autonomous driving. The “Paint it Black” demo was over 4 years ago and we haven’t seen anything better since then. We were supposed to get an autonomous road trip from LA to NY by 2017. The videos that have come out of the FSD beta release make it clear that you couldn’t leave the car without intervention for 30 minutes without a major crash occurring.
Tesla doesn’t even have any autonomous miles to log in California, unlike dozens of other companies including GM and Waymo.
www.businessinsider.com/tesla-rolling-stones-song-latest-autopilot-video-2016-10
Not so much.
oh let's not forget how they dealt with engineers calling out problems before they actually happened too:
well, i am just going to link to a search because i learned now there were SEVERAL of them https://www.google.com/search?q=tesla+whistleblower
...Also, while we are not-forgetting... TSLA CEO defended trump calling the country to reopen in the middle of the pandemic, just like other CEOs that sell pillows or something. Funny how we only keep one of them accountable.
It’s almost as if you cannot stop a respiratory virus using extremely barbaric non pharmaceutical interventions.
very few countries had effective social isolation, most like the US were having both the economic and health negative side effects of closing and not closing because leadership was disagreeing on everything. For example, some cities had curfews and closed restaurants, but open airports and counted every business that was not a restaurant as "essential".
But the few countries that did things correctly, like NZ, did have a much better outcome with close to ZERO deaths.
Plus combined with the fact Musk was forced to acknowledge that Tesla did not offer anything for FSD on trade ins and "will look into it" makes me wonder just how much they expect customers to put up with.
Still it beats out my previous Ford and even my Infiniti in both reliability and oddly interior quality. Paint wise the Infiniti was far better and paint on my Ford was far worse. Both my Ford and Infiniti also had more than one real recall and a few visits to fix stupid things.
Yes it does. Higher temps will wear out all semiconductors at higher rates.
Here is a pretty thorough page from national instruments that agrees with what I stated: https://www.ni.com/en-us/support/documentation/supplemental/... (look at the "calculating drive endurance" section in particular).
Toyota every year since 1980: "Don't worry guys the new truck frames won't rust out, also sorry last year's truck frames rusted out it was out supplier's fault"
People on the internet: "Warlords in Africa like the Hilux, the only truck they have a supply chain for, therefore every Toyota truck and SUV must be great"
Closest I can find, but I have no idea what point the OP is trying to make.
[0] https://www.toyotaofnaperville.com/80-of-toyotas-vehicles-st...
The OEMs are always creating crafted studies to underlying claims like that for their advertising campaigns. Dodge was running a similiar claim in their ads awhile back.
...the rest made it home. But in seriousness, that's exactly what I've been thinking in general, and especially reading this article: Teslas aren't going to age well. I hope I'm wrong, because I don't wish mechanical failure on anyone's car, but even Toyotas get a little loose with one or two hundred thousand miles. What's going to happen to those one-off production line mods to get the car out the door ten years from now? Now we're seeing eMMC failures for which Tesla is trying to charge the customer (seems those that can afford a Model S could easily afford a lawyer, too; but I digress). I don't have a smoking gun to point to, but much like code smell these just don't smell like devices that you'll pass on to your kid when she gets her license ten years down the road.
Also the people who are most capable of fixing the problem? Probably gave up and work for a competitor.
Tesla made a really serious mistake and didn't take that into account and now the user is "holding it wrong". That needs to be in a place where the user or a technician can service it easily.
They were just trying to save a penny or a second of engineering time and now pretending they knew all along.
If no one complains, sweet. If someone complains backpedal with one of those "We hear you! And while we haven't done anything wrong, we will do right by the customer just like we have always done" PR stunts.
Most everyone forgets, and the people that do remember, well they remember you "making things right." Exploding batteries on your s21? Anyone?
I have seen this repeated in this thread several times - had to look it up, turns out it's BS. There has been one frame recall - in 2008, for cars made between 1994 and 2004 - including the Tacoma and the 4Runners and Toyota extended the warranty for rust perforation and bought back the damaged trucks. [0] In 2012 there has been a recall for Tacomas in a smaller set - produced between 2001 and 2004 - for rusting tire carrier.
The last recall for rust in Toyotas includes cars made up to 2010 [1]. So - if by "semi-annual" - you mean nothing in the last ten years, then you are correct, else it's BS.
[1][https://www.moneysense.ca/columns/ask-moneysense/toyota-truc...]
[0] https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2020/INRL-EA20003-82493P.pd...
It amazes me that people are OK with paying $60k+ only to be constantly tracked everywhere they go by a process that destroys the product they purchased. I don't even like being tracked in a free web browser.
What is the logic behind this? I get that "cars bad" but do they seriously believe they're so bad that tradesmen who lives way out there so they can afford homes should pay more? They're already paying with their time.
The beauty of the free market is that increases in cost of shipping and transportation trickle down to prices paid by consumers, who can then vote with their wallet. If the cost of road usage is factored into the price of a good, I can choose to buy a good that results in less road usage, because it's cheaper.
Gas taxes (as opposed to mileage taxes) are decent enough driver of environmental policy, but they don't accurately capture road usage, especially in a world that's moving towards electric cars.
But it still seems wildly incompatible with the "equity over equality" theme that most other new and upcoming CA government policy is based off of. Especially so considering that road wear is mostly from heavy trucks.
>Gas taxes (as opposed to mileage taxes) are decent enough driver of environmental policy, but they don't accurately capture road usage, especially in a world that's moving towards electric cars.
But the people who are moving to electric cars are already the ones who will benefit most from a mileage based tax since they tend to be wealthier and already have shorter commutes. It's not like CA is going to stop taxing gas.
Wealthier people buy more goods and services, which get delivered to their local store/home on roads. While they personally won't pay more mileage taxes, they will end up paying more of them through their purchases.
I get it, this isn't the most progressive form of taxation, but neither are gas taxes (if they don't come with a dividend, like they do in BC.) If anything, poor people pay disproportionately more in gas taxes, than they would in road use taxes, because they tend to drive longer distances in less fuel efficient vehicles. That's a double-whammy.
Cheaper, less fuel efficient vehicles (like an old work truck) would effectively taxed less than a Prius, although I think weight per axle is also intended to factor into this.
Much cheaper than the tax portion of a year's gasoline consumption.
(amount is from the rough average annual mileage of 13,500mi/year, assuming 30mpg, and the 82c/gallon tax).
Incentivizing the failure to replace wear items is bad policy.
> Incentivizing the failure to replace wear items is bad policy.
I see it as the least bad option out of the ones that we can field. Every kind of taxation policy will have pros and cons, and IMO the tire tax is potentially the one with the least amount of friction to implement and enforce.
except that EVs don't have smog tests
I'd rather they just charged a higher registration fee or something. Maybe pay for road maintenance out of the general fund? (Tire taxes as suggested by a sibling comment is an interesting option.) For the moment it seems like it's mostly a non-issue, until we start having EVs be a much larger proportion of vehicles on the road.
I've wondered if maybe the tracking device is a sort of straw-man proposal so they can propose something less Orwellian and have it be accepted because it's better than the alternative. But on the other hand, the people proposing it may just not care about the privacy implications.
edit to add: per-mile road taxes are also regressive. Paying per mile makes a certain amount of sense, but it's a burden that falls disproportionately on the poor and middle class (unless the policy explicitly has different rates depending on income). That's a good reason to just pay for road maintenance out of the general fund. I'm okay with keeping gas taxes because they reflect some of the environmental cost of burning fossil fuels and they're comically low anyways.
How many other items like that made it into the car and how many of those are a safety risk?
Abstraction is one of those things that makes software development tolerable; we can (usually) treat anything Turing complete as "just another computer". But once in awhile that isn't true, and you have to deal with low-level details.
In retrospect we can say this ought to have been a foreseeable problem, but people are fallible and make mistakes. If not this, then something else. What I find more worrying about Telsa is their level of secrecy around car repair information in general, and their occasional reluctance to own their mistakes and fix them for free.
I had on two separate occasions designed an embedded POS application that worked on a dumb flash (dumb == no wear leveling).
There is nothing special about it. You just need to control where your writes go. You don't resize files (because this updates inodes and directories). You don't create files for stupid things like locks. If you have a database, you create a file and treat is as circular buffer or append only log. If you need OTA, you can split the memory in two and have boot loader boot alternately. And so on.
With wear leveling this is much, much simpler. You run the OS for some time and you capture all your writes at low level to see how much many blocks are being updated. Then you can predict how long the memory is going to last and you just size it accordingly.
I once hit a curb and the whole computer unit fell out of the socket in my 96 ford. There were flames and smoke coming out of the exhaust but it still started up and I was able to drive it to the shop.
Ie places you don’t want to be stranded. Extreme cold or extreme heat. Incoming extreme weather. Bad neighborhoods. Highways, bridges, or around bends where you’re at risk of being hit if you stop.
Responding to this sort of thing would mean acknowledging that TSLA's future is defined by something rooted in reality, as opposed to purely sentiment. As long as it doesn't actually have to stop and deal with these kinds of problems, its valuation is like that of dot-com startup - unbounded.
First, Polycom Studio destroys itself: https://knowledgebase-iframe.polycom.com/kb/viewContent.do;j...
Secondly, all the Edgecore top o' rack switches we have are backed by eMMC and will all eventually go read-only. This is an especially fun surprise while working remotely.
Shit's junk and should never store anything that gets written to regularly (i.e. a log file).
It's definitely something you learn the first time you use eMMC (or any low end storage tech).
does it have some logging features you can't turn off? using as an example a cisco nexus 3064 I have sitting around here, all of the logging is done to an off-system destination over the network.
I can think of very few legitimate or sound network engineering practices that would require 1U, mostly layer-2 feature set switches to be writing anything more than a few dozen KB per day to their internal storage.
I can't say that I'm surprised to hear of something failing in a new and unique way in an edgecore switch, since the company (Accton) has also released a real dumpster fire of a series of outdoor radios in their Ignitenet brand, which have a spectacular failure rate.
Replace Tesla and Elon with any company and their CEO. Every single company that collects data needs a TOS to be able to manage their service without legal trouble.
When you use Ford's SYNC 3 you agree to these terms:
https://owner.ford.com/support/sync-terms-and-conditions-of-...
If they wanted to fix the problem they've had 30-something years to just copy what a different OEM is doing. But why would they fix it if they're still selling trucks and SUVs hand over fist?
Neither of my Teslas operate in the manner described in the manual since late 2019. If Tesla's manual writers can't communicate with the software developers -- is there anything in the manual you can trust? Can we always count on Tesla to arbitrarily loose functionality without anyone telling their manual authors?
Anyway, I gave up telling Tesla about this problem (in multiple iterations of the manuals), and reported it to the NHTSA https://www-odi.nhtsa.dot.gov/VehicleComplaint/
eMMC failure does not put the car in "limp mode". It does disable the touchscreen, making things like the air conditioning controls and backup camera unavailable (in older software versions).
"Limp mode" is when you have severe power restrictions due to very low battery charge, or some other major powertrain fault in an EV. Sometimes called "turtle mode" because a turtle icon will appear on the instrument cluster.
They are building the CyberTruck factory in Austin TX next to the Airport.
He also says that the X is the best model - however, the S is his personal car and his favorite.
Where it currently is assembled into the vehicle requires either:
1) much longer expected service life, make it a non issue
, or
2) greater ease of replacement, and or more graceful, utilitarian failure mode performance.
1) Is tolerable, and still shitty,
2) is, or could be, reasonable, and an annoyance tops.
As things are now, the whole affair is a big dodge. I would be very unhappy.
Fail fast, and all that rapid innovation culture has implications the mature auto manufacturers know well. I have friends with these cars and they are having a lot of fun. When the fun started, I talked about real costs and risks yet to play out.
Well, now they are.
Some of those people can afford the adventure. Ok fine, they got what they paid for. And they have options.
Many secondary adopters may feel the pinch of these things far more. Sad day for them. Hope Tesla recognizes who they are selling to now and ups their game.
I am a fan. The cars are fun, but there is no way I would own one personally. Maybe someday.
Transportation to me needs to be cheap ass dollars per mile and either highly reliable, or easy for me to fix and maintain.
I do not care too much about which it is.
That said, the response is fairly puzzling.
It seems to me to be quite reasonable to consider the EMMC a wear item if they have determined that they don't want to make it survive the expected lifetime of the car. However, if they are going to make that call, then they absolutely should be replacing these boards with ones where the EMMC component is on a field replaceable module that a dealer can swap out and a "hours of operation" metric for swapping it out.
I used to joke that GM would put specific wear items in their vehicles, not because they couldn't design something that lasted, but instead so they could sell you the $500 GM specific tool you had to use to replace it periodically. A way of keeping "amateurs" from fixing the cars and pushing service calls to the dealers. That is what a "major car company" does in situations like this :-)
On the plus side, many people didn't think Tesla would make it this far to have vehicles that had been on the road long enough to wear out. So there is that.
If you're going to sell a product, the Model S, at the same price range as a BMW M5, 7-series, or the equivalent Mercedes S class, it had better be a premium quality product. Start-up or no.
It’s always a trade off. New tech may mean better acceleration or whatnot, but you don’t have 30+ years of reliability data to work from to refine things. The early years of automatic transmissions for example are words apart from what’s available today.
Flash memory was invented in the 1980s, so yeah: we do.
If the metal structure holding the instrument cluster and infotainment unit fell apart after 6 years and the manufacturer charged the customer to fix it?
That also wouldn't be ok.
Less reliable for the second or third owner.
... Hold on, are you suggesting that when this car came out, under a decade ago, no-one knew about Flash wear? If anything, people would have been more conscious of it then than now.
It's more fundamental, to continue the software analogy, it's more "how did they possibly miss that" error like shipping a device that's supposed to have mariadb listening only on localhost, but it actually listens with no authentication on all live network interfaces.
Someone turned on excessive Linux logging and boom an issue shows up early on some a Tesla Models. Chances are it wasn’t even intended to enter production that way.
It is common, perhaps even expected, in startups when an engineer says, "Well this won't last more than 5 or 6 years" to be told by upper management, "Well if we're still around in 5 or 6 years, we'll do something about it."
Given that Tesla is not a startup these days, and is on the other side of that chasm, I was surprised that their response here was "oh we'll replace the board with another board with the same issue."
Perhaps there is not a good understanding about the differences in the legal ramifications of a vehicle failing and resulting in property damage or loss of life from the failure of something considered a 'wear' item versus something that is not classified as a wear item.
I am not a lawyer, one of my friends who does consumer product safety litigation and is a Tesla owner, immediately responded to this news that this was just Tesla trying to avoid criminal liability when a failing EMMC chip kills someone. Sure, they see everything in terms of liability :-)
This was my first thought as well. It feels like they were trying to avoid some implication beyond mere replacement of storage modules. Perhaps they are aware of some other component that will also fail at a high rate before the useful life of the vehicle?
I do recall the Nav/infotainment unit on a 1st gen prius going out, and the problem was traced to the solder between some daughterboard deteriorating after ~4-5 years. Replacement units were hard to come by and expensive on the secondhand/junkyard market...
Tier 1 suppliers deliver high level, ready to install components like radios, seats, electronic control modules, etc
Tier 2 suppliers deliver subcomponents like boards
Tier 3 deliver chips etc
OEMs generally come up with a list of component requirements like temp ranges and wearability/durability. The supplier community then bids based on that spec. Of course once one OEM asks for something, it becomes to other OEMs after a period of time; so there are a LOT of common components and subcomponents.
Engineering for those specs and testing and proving that you conform to those specs both costs a lot of money and is worth a lot to OEMs who have to provide warranties to their customers.
Edit: The supplier contract also makes the supplier responsible for warrantee on that component; the OEM bears final responsibility, but they will try to make the supplier pay for component failures when they can. (This is not precisely correct, I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer)
Disclaimer/source: I work for GM, not on vehicle engineering. Everything in this comment is solely my own opinion
It cuts both ways though. Tesla does have the potential to improve in house processes quicker than going through suppliers, especially since they have access to extremely cheap capital.
Instead, NHTSA has asserted that the component should last at least the useful life of the vehicle, essentially double its expected lifespan. Tesla has significant concerns with the impact tentative conclusion.
Despite popular belief, corporations are in fact not faceless entities.
Let's place the blame and embarrassment squarely where it belongs:
Elon Musk thinks 6 years is the useful life of these Tesla vehicles.
* large skilled labor cost
* use of nonstandard tools
* replacement is an invasive operation that could have other side effects
Hopefully whatever replacements they use after the recall will be better designed.
Any idiot can see, and has a reasonable expectation, that tyres will need replacing at regular interval.
It's less obvious to the average driver that, say, the cabin air filter will need replacing from time to time. A mechanic or vehicle enthusiast should be expected to know this and replace it.
It's a whole lot less obvious your car's "computer memory" will wear out.
They're not even in the same ball park.
The average driver probably doesn't know about flash memory wear-levelling, and shouldn't have to.
I kind of want to unpack this statement a bit more. The number of cycles of a flash chip is the number of times each bit is erased/written to. If you're wear-levelling the device this means that each time you write the capacity of the device to the chip that's one cycle. The affected flash chip is 8GB. This means that Tesla thinks it's reasonable for their software to write just over 11GB of data a day to this device. What the hell are they writing? The endurance of their flash chip may be industry standard but their use of it certainly is not.
"We are programmed to receive. You can check out any time you like But you can never leave"