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by themoose8 1952 days ago
This headline is sensationalised, it could have been an oversight, not necessarily an intentional decision.
5 comments

Not true. If you dig deeper, you’ll find Tesla was originally charging Model S and X owners $2500 to replace failed MCUs. Only under regulator scrutiny did they concede and issue a recall.

Owning both a Model S and X, I’ve seen Tesla first hand attempt to evade covering warranty work on these models.

Friendly reminder to opt out of arbitration when you buy your Tesla (when the VIN is issued).

They also deliberately went with a non-automotive grade screen (Innolux G170J1-LE1), knowing that the 17 inch size would make the car stand out.

And, I assume, knowing what that would mean later.

https://www.thedrive.com/tech/27989/teslas-screen-saga-shows...

How?
I read a bit of that. It seems really weird that these letters are sent to Tesla. So if some lawsuit WAS going to happen, Tesla can say they never got the letter. There's something really fishy about Tesla.
Just wanted to say thanks for using the old.reddit link.
There is a letter linked from Tesla outlining why it doesn't consider this a defect:

* The memory should have lasted 6 years not 3.

* The NHTSA is unreasonable when it requires the system to last the expected lifetime of the car (12 years).

It might just be ass covering, but currently the official stance from Tesla is that a car that falls apart after 6 years should be enough for anyone, because anything else is too hard.

That’s an insane hot take.

What’s the point of EV going green if the life expectancy is 1/4 of a normal petrol car.

My Toyota is 12 years old now. Still runs and drives like new with basic maintenance.

My car is about 10 years old and it's fantastic. Granted, it's only done 99,000 km (~61500 miles). I imagine it'll continue to serve me for years to come (unless I get a bad case of the car fever) and then another owner for even more.
The average vehicle in America is sold after 6.5 years. Tesla may consider their duty lies only to that first buyer, not to any thereafter.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimgorzelany/2017/01/04/passing...

The irony is that hybrid/electric vehicles are being owned longer than fossil-fuelled vehicles before being sold.

This is definitely a Tesla mistake, probably simply owing to lack of corporate experience and long-term planning. Could even be poorer access to (specialized auto-grade) parts owing to their small scale in the past.

So telsas "million mile" drivetrain has a a requirement to do those miles in under 7 years - seems legit.
Tesla is also arguing that the eMMC flash is a "wear part". A wear part that they literally soldered on, making the replacement the whole $2500 "MCU".
It's especially bad when you consider one of the main selling points of an EV is simplicity and reliability. Or at least that's one of the main arguments I've heard over the years (there are lots of other reasons obviously).
I don't know what you'd call it exactly, maybe extreme sloppiness, but part of the problem is that the unit is doing excessive logging to the disk without any mitigations. That doesn't seem hard to fix.

But worse than the intentions is the fact that Tesla doesn't treat these things are design flaws that should be addressed even out of warranty. Is it right hat they feel its ok to profit from these flaws?

Flash wear leveling and expected lifetime are pretty basic engineering requirements when you work with eMMC based embedded devices.

Every company I've ever worked at has done this analysis and also set up metrics to catch a component at the system level causing heavy flash wear by excessive logging, caching or other write heavy operations.

Just turning off the enormous amount of crap written to syslog would probably have added years to the eMMC life. Why did it take them so long to do that?

If you drive a car with the Tegra CID and current software, you get the distinct impression that they really wish all those cars were dead.

It's intentional. Tesla wasn't covering these repairs under warranty and are upselling people with failed MCUs to MCU2 upgrades which cost $1500+labor.

If you search around, you will also find countless posts of people being denied warranty work for their Tesla's or fixes only being billed as good will after the customer fights back.

Tesla didn’t care because there was no impact on them for their poor logging configuration until a regulator stepped in (as the costs were borne primarily by the customer).

They probably also do want cars with lifetime supercharging dead (which are primarily MCU1 vehicles).