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Comment by teovall | Hacker News Reader

This is a perfect example of the KISS principle. Since I would never presume to call Woz stupid, let's call it the KISW (Keep It Simple Woz) principle in this case.

Woz is proposing that Tesla take well proven, very reliable, simple, inexpensive fuses that are very rarely even seen by customers and replace them with complex integrated circuits and software that will need a lot of testing, almost certainly be more expensive, and almost certainly be less reliable. For what? Very little benefit for a very small subset of customers.

KISW! Sometimes a small length of wire in a plastic holder is the best answer to a problem.

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Agreed. However, adding a single CAN bus ADC to the fuse PCB (to sense no voltage on circuits with a blown fuse) would cost almost nothing, and would allow the computer to provide information on the blown fuse and instructions on how to replace it. IMHO, breakers = expensive needless feature creep, but user feedback = welcome to 2015.

EDIT: I was thinking of the 12V accessory fuses. In light of the reply from Tesla, I can imagine where if the drivetrain fuse blew you might not want an average user replacing it ... and I imagine that for something like that, it probably already throws a code that gives you an idea of what's wrong.

Blown fuses are one of the rarer issues that car owners face, so it likely is a cost/benefit thing - putting an engineer on that project just isn't worth the time and cost of implementing the idea vs say working on improving battery efficiency. (especially from a marketing perspective)

Adding a new sensor to monitor the fuses would not be cheap:first off, you have to have signal conditioners for the a/ds that can handle esd transients, and >60 v load shed events. In addition, the existing design probably just has fuse holders physically mounted to the holder packaging, which means now your paying for microcontroller, can transceiver, and pcb. This doesn't include NRE costs including development and testing.

Suddenly your "inexpensive" adc had become a $200 ecu that merely tells the driver wheat part of the car isn't functioning, right before they check the most common cause of the problem.

yep getting a shock from the battery pack from a tesla is going to be bad news if not fatal.

That is one of the downsides of ev's whist an electric shock from mains is unpleasant its unlikely to be fatal higher voltage and amperage shocks are very nasty.

I've never interpreted the second S to be addressing the listener. I've interpreted it as a two-item list of things you should "keep it": "simple, stupid"

I like your way better.

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