All design and engineering of the original Tesla Roadster is now open source
twitter.com
twitter.com
I see 3 circuit boards and a GitHub repo that has an .ISO of the diagnostic software. They include DBC files that define the CAN interface, but that's it.
There's basically nothing here? Or am I missing something? No firmware, no CAD, no design files, no engineering data. It's like they released the service manuals and a couple PCB release files they scrounged up from someone's e-mail, but there's very little in here beyond what you'd get from service manuals or from having a PCB in your hand and following traces around. The PCBs are extremely basic.
I don't get it. Was this just a trick to get headlines from journalists who don't know how to interpret the files on the website? Or was there supposed to be more and it's just not up on the website yet?
You're discussing a Twitter post by the same guy who knowingly committed securities fraud ("funding secured.") in order to protect the share price of his company.
One of the greatest grifters in history.
Do you expect him to be honest and upfront in his PR dealings?
https://service.tesla.com/docs/Public/Roadster/Original/1.2....
One of the Tesla ones is literally a storage cart. Another is a sawed-off 26mm wrench head, the "clip tool" looks like it could be cut out of plywood or a sheet of metal in a few minutes.
Yes.
Must have lost the rest in a big fire or something. Drowned in a canoeing accident.
This is like when MS released the source of MS-DOS 1.0 and crying "this is bullshit" because they didn't include the code for Windows server 2022.
I mean, here's a Tesla article where they emphasize how different the Roadster is from the Elise: https://www.tesla.com/blog/mythbusters-part-2-tesla-roadster...
> To accommodate the battery pack, motor and transmission, Tesla designed a new rear subframe. In order to handle the increased weight in the rear, new rear wishbones were designed.
I don't see any design materials for Tesla's rear subframe or rear wishbones in the materials that Elon linked to though.
Honestly, releasing what they did is commendable. Typically automakers (including Tesla at times) fight right-to-repair type stuff. It's just irritating to read the headline and think "holy crap they open sourced a car!" and then realize it's really "oh, they released some above-average technical documents about the car".
And then even when he posts obvious, verifiable lies, there is a crowd of people who believe him anyway.
It also allows for opportunities for the cult as a whole to get their two minutes of hate in and to punish an enemy/scapegoat/turncoat/etc, reinforcing conformity with what the leader preaches.
It's also a power thing. They have so much power over others that they can say blatant lies and followers will trip over themselves to believe and defend it.
I'd seriously consider paying double that for one which was genuinely open-hardware.
I'd never consider Tesla since the way it works, you buy the physical hardware, but in practice, Tesla controls your car. It's not true ownership. This seems like a 180 degree turn. At least for me, it would seriously increase the odds of buying a car and the price I'd be willing to pay.
It'd be interesting to see a company pull this off with an in-production car. Knowing the crowd, ideal audience would either be a pickup truck or a basic sports car.
This is the same issue that is leaking into phones, TVs, PCs, and other devices:
If you don't purchase the cloud-sub, that piece of hardware is just expensive paperweight.
We keep reading that people are willing to pay for a "Dumb TV", etc. Yet they are not startups or manufacturers stepping up. All words, no action ?
They aren't though. People might be willing to chose a dumb tv, all else being equal. But not pay _more_ for a dumb TV. With subsidies from the smart tv services, it isn't cheaper.
I suspect the problem is more that the possible market share for such products is tiny.
I have 40" 4k one from Lg
Take a look at the linked files before you get too excited. They didn't release much more than the service manuals.
There's very little source material on the page. 3 simple circuit boards and some definitions for the CAN interfaces. They released an .ISO of the diagnostic software, but that's generally floating around on the internet for most cars if you know where to look anyway.
An old American V8 has about a million options for everything, can get parts everywhere for cheap (I got a brake rotor for $8 recently).
It seems that it would be ideal to have the open source cad design files so you could make your own rotor when it breaks, until you realize it would cost you $1k to make one.
If this is your goal get an American car from the 60s. The problem is they're super unreliable, because the things that make internal combustion engines reliable are complicated and not easily replicatable by the average hobbies engineer.
I design this stuff for a living and I just buy a car, don't touch it, get it serviced at the dealer, and get a new one when I reach the right side of the bathtub curve and it's service life is up and is stops being reliable.
I’m curious to get a lawyers take on their brief terms on this service page combined with these patent and “open source” terms [0]. Do these amount to OSD-compatible terms? I don’t see any restrictions to immediately disqualify, but I also don’t see explicit licenses everywhere I’d expect to see them. Also, I’m seeing this on my phone, so I haven’t checked diagnostics software ISO file for source code.
A nit, it’s good practice to remove confusing confidentiality notices on schematics and hardware documents contained in their ZIP files.
Is this textbook open source / open hardware? Not sure.. is it something published without restrictions other than “no warranty”? It appears that way.
[0] https://www.tesla.com/legal/additional-resources#open-source
Other than the 3 simple circuit boards, there's no CAD, no design files, no engineering, nothing.
Either from the Tesla factory safety issues you mentioned, or from the MediaMatters / Twitter allegations and lawsuit. Plenty of reasons for him to want people to look elsewhere.
I was kinda hoping to see actual drawings for e.g. the panels or the seats or whatever. So if I really did want to build one myself or create replacement parts I could do so.
There are some good comparison shots here: https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/articles/lotus-elise-vs-te...
The Elise itself was sold in several forms with a ton of different ICE drivetrains (Rover 4-cylinder, Toyota 4-cylinder, Toyota 6-cylinder, GM Ecotec) and is popular for these kinds of custom drivetrain builds, since it was a highly modular platform - fundamentally the Elise is an aluminum tub with a front composite crash structure glued and a rear tubular subframe bolted on.
that lengthy disclaimer sure seems to disagree with el(on) jefe.
In #devops is turtle all way down but at bottom is perl script. - @devops_borat
Given that this is so heavily based on a Lotus Elise, it feels like the engineering scope is going to be quite different from a normal vehicle. It'll be interesting to see how much of the Elise's design will incidentally also be visible here.
In this case, it's highly likely that one or more components on those PCBs is unavailable now, so you need this source code to update what may need to be updated to be able to keep things alive.
First the Roadster, and then the Model S ... after that it was all downhill.
RIP, Tesla design language and any semblance of taste ... you were but a spark, and a beautiful one at that.
Also the "Parts Manual (EPC)" [0] is interesting since it contains the part numbers of a couple of models (maybe all, I don't know what models they offer) and is very well organized. I'm not sure I'd find this for my VW.
There's an industry-standard set of interchange formats for spare part number listings called PIES and ACES. Unfortunately no vendor I'm aware of openly shares the underlying PIES/ACES data.
https://volkswagen.7zap.com/en/rdw/ has what I think is a scraped version of EKTA (it's supplied by https://levam.net ) and is absolutely infested with horrible ads, but has pretty complete catalogs for ROW cars.
Also, pedantically, this site isn't designed to be Hacker Truths, otherwise the submissions would be way different; it's just news, and it is newsworthy that such a repo was created and populated, even if it's not (currently?) what the tweet claims it is
https://github.com/teslamotors/roadster/blob/main/Diagnostic...
Even if these entrepreneurs were successful, now you have a 20 years monopoly. That's not without cost to the economy at large.
That's even assuming patents are necessary to disclose secrets. We have companies that specialize in benchmarking and reverse engineering products. Then why are the hell we need patents as soon as the product is available on the market and someone can duplicate it?
If you have trade secrets to protect, why the hell would you leak it and hope that the arduous process of enforcing your patent claims would pay itself back? Lawyers are expensive.
To patent something, you must disclose it publicly.
Trade secrets are kept secret, but as a result can't be patented. At least not directly.
IP can be copyrighted, but it doesn't have to be patented. Copyright lasts much longer than patent protection.
There's no practical way of determining which trade secrets "go along with" patents because that could describe literally everything the company does. It wouldn't make sense to force companies to reveal all of their secrets or surrender their copyrights as soon as their first patent expires.