Another anti-Tesla article from thedrive.com on the front page of HN. The turfers have upped their game.
A Single Component Can Brick Older Teslas
51–60 of 106 posts
Re: A Single Component Can Brick Older Teslas
#52As is so often the case with articles about Tesla the headline is completely misleading. No cars are getting bricked. Tesla fixes that problem by replacing the bad board but they won't replace the bad chip on the board and they won't sell the chip separately. Other manufacturers don't generally do that either.
> they won't replace the bad chip on the board There is no bad chip on the board. A full chip is not a bad chip, and there is no reason why the board should stop working on account of a full memory chip which contains a syslog that is not used for anything. Hacker News is riddled with shills and apologists for atrocious corporate behaviour.
Apparently the issue is the eMMC storage wearing out and failing, not simply getting full. Since it’s soldered on it is not a feasible repair at the shop.
Re: A Single Component Can Brick Older Teslas
#53This is rather disingenuous. Of course Tesla doesn't replace the eMMC; that's a soldered on chip. No car manufacturer in the world does chip level electronics repairs. Instead you replace the entire board, and I have no doubt you can get this repair from Tesla. That's not to entirely excuse Tesla. If you have a modern operating system running from flash that needs to work for 20+ years as people expect from a car, it…
According to the video, the log is not used for anything and is basically unnecessary for the most part. Why a full memory chip logging data which is never used should brick a car is simply price gouging. There is no need for it whatsoever. Thousands of dollars to replace a board because of a full memory chip? That is even worse than Apples repair racket, at least in Apple's case some other circuitry besides memory i…
Erm, not full exactly. This is more like a rechargable battery that cannot handle being charged anymore. The old battery is not "empty", it's dead. This chip is not "full", it is dead. The lifetime physical endurance limits are exceeded, and functionality is lost.
Re: A Single Component Can Brick Older Teslas
#54The orphan car problem is a serious issue with non-Teslas, too, but I will personally stick to repairable vehicles. You know what you'll never, ever have trouble finding parts for? A Mustang or an F150. Corvettes. Carollas. All of the ubiquitous cars will have parts produced for a seriously long time.
XJ cherokees here. Love em. Room for elbows whereever you need to wrench, and highly reliable heavy parts. The electronics are meh, and rubber degrades with time, but you can replace all that stuff with a simple screwdriver.
Re: A Single Component Can Brick Older Teslas
#55The orphan car problem is a serious issue with non-Teslas, too, but I will personally stick to repairable vehicles. You know what you'll never, ever have trouble finding parts for? A Mustang or an F150. Corvettes. Carollas. All of the ubiquitous cars will have parts produced for a seriously long time.
have fun with that. enjoy your breakdowns.
Re: A Single Component Can Brick Older Teslas
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a bit baffling that a company which enables “autopilot” OTA does not do this as well...
If this anonymous coward's characterization of Tesla is true and accurate, it's not surprising https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/99sbwa/form...
The wording makes it sound like you're calling the parent comment an anonymous coward. I also suspect a lot of people didn't catch the Slashdot reference.
Re: A Single Component Can Brick Older Teslas
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
This report is both impressive and frustrating. I’m sorry your AP is not functioning and their fix was not permanent, that must be incredibly frustrating as a huge benefit of the car is the AP system. At the same time, it is pretty amazing they are remotely logging into your car to review system logs and diagnose the issue, and then pushing firmware updates to try to remedy the problem. There may be no choice but to…
> At the same time, it is pretty amazing they are remotely logging into your car to review system logs and diagnose the issue, and then pushing firmware updates to try to remedy the problem. It really isn't if it didn't fix the problem and they used it as an excuse to not follow up with their scheduled appointment. This would be like if I was fixing a bug, SSH'd into a live instance, didn't fix anything, then filed t…
But that's not what happened.
nemosaltat didn't provide a complete chronology, but did say they had a service appointment on 4-13, received a FW update on 4/4, and a rep contacted them on 4/5 saying they reviewed the logs and the new FW fixed the issue.
Then nemosaltat responded to Tesla;
> Ok- I’d still like to understand what happened....It’s significantly less understandable, that the issue mysteriously resolves it self...
Tesla responded,
> It was found to be a software bug in the last update that was performed causing your cruise control not to function. That was resolved in the last update you performed.
Then,
> The issue returned yesterday (5-13) and now the earliest appointment is mid June.
So the issue was fixed, and then it returned. It's unfortunate but hardly sketchy.
Re: A Single Component Can Brick Older Teslas
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to the video, the log is not used for anything and is basically unnecessary for the most part. Why a full memory chip logging data which is never used should brick a car is simply price gouging. There is no need for it whatsoever. Thousands of dollars to replace a board because of a full memory chip? That is even worse than Apples repair racket, at least in Apple's case some other circuitry besides memory i…
Erm, not full exactly. This is more like a rechargable battery that cannot handle being charged anymore. The old battery is not "empty", it's dead. This chip is not "full", it is dead. The lifetime physical endurance limits are exceeded, and functionality is lost.
Except Apple batteries die because of physics, Tesla has this issue because Tesla decided to:
1. Log something they never read back
2. Use a soldered down chip (they use a SD card in other locations)
3. Crash the media controls when the unused logs cannot be written
4. Disable certain car features, potentially immobilizing the vehicle because the media center is off.
There are several ways that Tesla could have prevented this issue, and the fact that they've never bothered to resolve the issue in later iterations is just baffling.
Re: A Single Component Can Brick Older Teslas
#59This issue is best explained on Rich Rebuilds' recent video here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=o-7b1waoj9Q&t=525 This has been a known issue for some time, and it's amazing Tesla hasn't fixed it yet. As explained in the video, the issue is simply the base linux OS has full syslog's still enabled, which over time burn own the eMMC chip used for storage. Currently Tesla just replaces the entire media unit when this happ…
"Replacing a tiny part" is trivializing the work necessary to do this, in my opinion.
eMMC flash is typically a ball-grid array part and it's soldered down hard to the motherboard of the processor. Almost every mobile device has the same setup and it's tricky and expensive to rework this chip.
You need to carefully desolder it off the board, reball the part with the correct masking stencil, then reapply it without torching the rest of the board, missing a solder connection, or zapping any other component with static electricity.
You can see a similar process done on an iPhone here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4M9uAZlbK4
You can understand why Tesla would rather replace/refurbish the board than try to field-repair it.
Re: A Single Component Can Brick Older Teslas
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except they don't if the car is out of warranty, which (at least in Canada) is 4 years or 80,000 km. I don't think this is just me but I believe cars should be able to last longer than 4 years and not get bricked by fault of the manufacturer and then not at least easily give me the ability to fix it myself if they won't.
Do they not replace it out of warranty or simply don't pay for it out of warranty? There is a huge difference between those two options. If it is the former, I would imagine it is just a matter of time before a lawsuit. If it is the latter, then isn't this functionally the same as a particular model of car having a bad transmission or similarly critical ICE component that regularly fails much earlier than expected?
Powertrain components are required by EPA to have a 10yr/100k miles warranty, I thought? So it's not exactly the same situation because fundamental parts of the powertrain are covered by a longer warranty.