A Single Component Can Brick Older Teslas • Hacker News Board

Re: A Single Component Can Brick Older Teslas

#91

Post by zaroth » Wed, May 15, 2019, 12:28 AM UTC

nemosaltat wrote: post #81

zaroth wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I think gatherhunter hit it dead on. It’s metrics thing and they wanted to close tickets. I sincerely doubt the FW update they pushed had anything to do with the issue being resolved. It is common practice (according to Tesla forums) to push FW before a service appointment just to be sure the car has the latest version before it goes in. The sketchy part for me is the inconsistency between the Service Tech and the re…

Presumably they know more about the root cause through looking at the logs. It would be so great if they could be more transparent about it.

On the surface it doesn’t make sense that a FW issue would be causing an issue with your TM3. What about the other ~200,000 cars on the road?

But to answer your last question, yes, it’s layers of incremental software functionality on the same hardware stack. Without knowing at which point it’s failing it’s hard to say if cruise could be enabled without AP.

As a point of comparison, I had my TM3 wrapped in protective film. As part of that process they removed trim including the side cameras to lay the film flat with fewer cuts. The shop (not Tesla affiliated) left the side cameras disconnected. Upon starting the car it reported an issue with side cameras. AP worked but degraded — wouldn’t change lanes, and cruise still worked fine. Some some hardware faults do not fully disable the feature.

Re: A Single Component Can Brick Older Teslas

#92

Post by RickJWagner » Wed, May 15, 2019, 1:50 AM UTC

Bummer. The value of a used Model S (they are becoming attractive) has just dropped a few notches in my eyes.

Re: A Single Component Can Brick Older Teslas

#93

Post by whenchamenia » Wed, May 15, 2019, 1:51 AM UTC

cheez wrote: post #80

wcunning wrote: post #15

The 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.

Isn't this more of a network effect than something inherent to Teslas?

Nope, tesla will not allow you to order parts, or even look at a service manual as a mere owner. Its crazy that people on HN of all places defend their customer-antagonistic practices.

Re: A Single Component Can Brick Older Teslas

#94

Post by village-idiot » Wed, May 15, 2019, 2:21 AM UTC

silversconfused wrote: post #73

village-idiot wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 preve…

I read your argument, but I do not understand what you are taking exception to.

Smart phone batteries degrading is inevitable, these issues with Tesla’s cars aren’t, therefore it’s a bad comparison.

Re: A Single Component Can Brick Older Teslas

#95

Post by PhantomGremlin » Wed, May 15, 2019, 3:51 AM UTC

nm2259 wrote: post #33

pfortuny wrote: post #10

Earlier 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...

Wow. Thanks for that link. Some amazing inside stuff. My favorite anecdote:

most of the time me and the other firmware folks were chasing elon's whims about what to do with firmware. where i should have been fixing critical issues in the system i was pulled off to do shit like add farting unicorns

Re: A Single Component Can Brick Older Teslas

#96

Post by nemosaltat » Wed, May 15, 2019, 3:52 AM UTC

m463 wrote: post #87

nemosaltat wrote: post #18

Model 3 owner here. Having same issue as back in March. No AP, no FSD and most frustratingly, no cruise control. Multiple TS steps over phone with no resolution. The earliest appointment was months out so I drove into a service center. A frazzled, yet personable, tech assured me that the issue was NOT from the recent FW update but rather a hardware malfunction with the left repeater. I pressed for details- is it wiri…

I don't think you have the issue mentioned in the article. If they could pull your logs, your emmc did not fail. (not that they are handling other issues well)

Oh I definitely don’t. Just more of a commentary on Tesla’s “right integration” and customer service.

Re: A Single Component Can Brick Older Teslas

#97

Post by m-p-3 » Wed, May 15, 2019, 4:06 AM UTC

solarkraft wrote: post #65

joezydeco wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 to…

Luckily Tesla isn't very space or money limited with this pretty ciritcal component. An SD card would make life easier for everyone, as the logs could be easily read out and the booting OS changed - yay for actually owning the device you paid for. But wait: That's not something Tesla wants.

Or just add an SD card reader on the board and output the logs there if they need it so much, and keep the rest on the EMMC.

Re: A Single Component Can Brick Older Teslas

#98

Post by nemosaltat » Wed, May 15, 2019, 4:08 AM UTC

fucking_tragedy wrote: post #37

zaroth wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

Reminds me of of one my first projects. It was a basic contact entry form for a Dog Rescue. It was a PHP form dumping to FileMaker. I had updated been testing the form and forgot to update the FileMaker connection strings back to the prod DB.

My boss called me around 9pm saying WTF. I started stalling, put him on speaker, then remoted in and fixed the strings (this was on my Samsung Blackjack running Windows 5- I think). I told him to check again because it was working for me. He gave an incredulous “huh” and said see you tomorrow. I thought I’d gotten away with it. He called me in first thing the next day- told me straight up: I get that things break, they don’t tend to fix themselves. He gave me a chance to own up, and I didn’t. I was young, and dumb. Said I don’t know what happened. Couple years later I realized he knew. I’ve since learned that it’s almost always better to own up. Even if you’re never caught, most people will respect the honesty. Those that don’t probably have their own issues.

Re: A Single Component Can Brick Older Teslas

#99

Post by pfortuny » Wed, May 15, 2019, 6:45 AM UTC

zrobotics wrote: post #19

pfortuny wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right but at the same time one does not expect a component of the dashboard to actually brick a car. I guess.

While counter-intuitive, I have actually encountered this issue with other cars as well, specifically a Ford f150 where an internal problem in the APIM module (accessory protocol interface module, essentially the dash touchscreen controller) essentially bricked the truck by spamming the canbus with erroneous signals. Remember that modern automobiles are rolling networks with multiple interconnected controllers, some…

Wow! Unbelievable. I mean, just SEPARATION.

Thanks for the anecdote!

Re: A Single Component Can Brick Older Teslas

#100

Post by zrobotics » Wed, May 15, 2019, 7:10 AM UTC

pvg wrote: post #64

zrobotics wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While counter-intuitive, I have actually encountered this issue with other cars as well, specifically a Ford f150 where an internal problem in the APIM module (accessory protocol interface module, essentially the dash touchscreen controller) essentially bricked the truck by spamming the canbus with erroneous signals. Remember that modern automobiles are rolling networks with multiple interconnected controllers, some…

bricked the truck by spamming the canbus with erroneous signals. Wasn't preventing this one of the design goals/selling points of CAN?

Yes, that is one of the strong points of CANBUS. Like I said in the original post, this was a very rare failure. However, the APIM managed to spam the bus in just the right way where it de-synced modules; when I initially connected to the vehicle w/ a snap-on scan tool it was throwing codes for BCM and TCM non-comm, as well as codes that implied the ECM was seeing different speeds on the CKP & CMP (crankshaft & camshaft sensors). The CKP/CMP disagreement was what caused the vehicle to be 'bricked', since the engine management had no idea where the crankshaft & valves were in relation to each other.

Near as I could tell from my scope, the APIM was spamming the bus with exactly the right frequency to interrupt the ECM during it's scan of critical sensors. It was an extremely rare failure, and to Ford's credit they covered both the repair as well as my shop's diagnostic time.

edit: To make it clear, I have seen 2 vehicles that still operated with a direct CANBUS short to ground, as well as a vehicle that had CANBUS shorted to 12V+. In these cases, aside from expected failures (such as the BCM systems not responding, or transmission limp-home), modules were able to fall back into either safe states (limp-home, in the case of the TCM) or just a dashboard warning light (in the case of BCM no-comms).