I wonder what Tesla think is the expected service life of their vehicles? I would imagine the average person on the street would expect to see a service life of >20 years.
My worry with a large number of modern tech heavy cars will be that while the centralisation of a lot of these controls and features into one panel may be convenient to the user, when these inevitably fail (as in this case) - what can the owner do when the parts are no longer available, or if the manufacturer is out of business? Mechanically the car may be sound - but if the system responsible for the interaction between the vehicle and the owner is borked and impossible to replace does that mean the car is a complete write off?
I think back to some of the beaters my friends owned when they started driving, with broken HVAC switch gear, burned out audio head unit wiring harness, etc... while mechanically sound (enough to be road legal...), issues like this didn't hinder or prevent driving the car, and they continued in service for years in this state.
> My worry with a large number of modern tech heavy cars will be that while the centralisation of a lot of these controls and features into one panel may be convenient to the user
Centralization of controls into a single touchscreen is most certainly not convenient to the user, because touchscreens suck [1]. What is convenient is the thoughtful deployment of physical controls in ergonomic locations.
[1] Touchscreens are really only a good choice in situations where there's extreme space constraints, or as an enhancement to existing controls for very specific interactions where they make sense.
Just image if this happens on the new Model S Plaid and Model X. Both are suppose to have the gear selector on the touch screen with the car guessing weather you are in drive, park, or reverse based on your surroundings. If you screen dies and it guesses wrong they you are stuck.
My guess is that the hardware engineer that originally designed the board picked a reasonable part for a traditional auto OEM. Then at some point software engineering decided to log all the things. Nobody actually looked back at what the storage system longevity would be with this new lifecycle.
It's a dumb mistake, but not exactly an uncommon one. I made the same mistake early on and I have contract engineers that propose inappropriate storage solutions to me still on projects. Some very insistently. I think a whole lot of people that work on the embedded side of engineering treat storage as a magic perfect box.
> I would imagine the average person on the street would expect to see a service life of >20 years.
For a car? Are many people driving around in a car from 2000 or earlier? When I search for cars that old or older it's 0.4% of the used market. Clearly the vast majority of cars do not last this long and I think you have an unreasonable expectation.
The fact that newer cars are more complex and seemingly expected to have a shorter life has lead to an odd situation where parts availability and price may actually be far better for older cars than newer ones, especially due to the aftermarket.
If Tesla doesn't come up with a diplomatic way of allowing third-party repair they will be the company that forces regulators to add regulation. It's one thing to be out of a personal computing device due to vendor policy but when enough people get burned by a bricked car then all hell will break loose.
Random aside, I wonder which is better in an apocalypse, gas or electric?
At first I thought "gas wins" because there will be no power grid. But then I thought "maybe electric wins" because getting more gas might be impossible where as getting electricity I can get from solar cells, water wheels, hand cranks, etc... Maybe I takes 2-3 days of charging for every N kilometers of travel but that's better than zero when you run out of gas.
Maybe Mad Max is showing the age of its source material. All their cars should be electric. They'd even go faster!
I have a 2013 Nissan Leaf. If I could shove a Tesla Model 3 sized battery in it I would drive it until every last molecule dissociated. I dread the expensive, spyware riddled, buggy, and probably shorter lived future of the automobile.
Same goes for appliances, which are becoming encrusted with features and less reliable.
It is normal for cars to outlast many of their parts, which are replaced through periodic service (every x years or x,000 miles.)
Sophisticated, user-facing computing is one of the newer parts of cars and so we don’t really know what to expect yet as far as longevity relative to the car itself. However, we should not necessarily see the need to replace computing devices, or parts of them, as prescribing the life of the entire vehicle.
I think every major company that sells consumer based product wants to move to the iPhone model (atleast what I call it). They want you paying them constantly, always, monthly. Pay Tesla 450/month and when an update to their car arrives you can pay 475/month to now have the “latest”.
The pressure for a company to have everyone paying them monthly is just to high. You’ll get pulled into their “ecosystem”, where it’s harder to switch. Why sell a car once per 10 years to a dealer who marks it up and has the interaction with the customer. Electric cars already have less maintenance (theoretically). Tesla doesn’t want you going away from paying them, no company does, and they are all fighting to prevent you from not paying them.
> I wonder what Tesla think is the expected service life of their vehicles?
Their basic warranty is 4 years, and the drivetrain warranty is 8 years. If you buy a used vehicle direct from Tesla they will add on 1 year to the original warranty, but that's it.
That isn't much longer than the warranties you can get on gas-powered cars, and their used warranties seem a bit worse than what you can get from "certified used" programs from other car companies.
In theory, an electric car should last much longer than a gas car, but Tesla's warranty isn't any longer. I bet the price tag to replace Tesla battery packs out of warranty is shocking.
> I wonder what Tesla think is the expected service life of their vehicles? I would imagine the average person on the street would expect to see a service life of >20 years.
I've wondered about that myself. Because comments I've made that an electric drive train should have an expected service life of 30 years seems to draw a lot of ire from somewhere. Probably the automotive equivalent of found the google engineer.
the average person does not think a car will last over 20 years... on average people keep theirs for closer to 10... what are you basing that idea off of?
The revamped Model S and Model X still have big central touchscreens (now in a landscape orientation, rather than the previous portrait-oriented screen), but Tesla went even further by eliminating the turn-signal and gear-selector stalks. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the car will simply "guess" which way the driver wants to go based on sensor data and navigation maps. Tesla is expected to include backup controls as well, leaving drivers to use the touchscreen for selecting drive, and steering-wheel controls for turn signals.
That is terrifying, and this sort of thing is why I don't seriously consider Teslas now I'm looking to buy an EV.
In addition Tesla used a cheap eMMC with a limited number of write cycles.
Tesla did reduce the excessive logging and even implemented a notification when the car suspects it is failing. I think they even extended the warranty, but of course reducing the logging will push some failures outside of the warranty period.
This recall thankfully fixes this problem permanently for those who could be affected.
Or made the EMMC storage user-accessible and replaceable the same way that the LTE radio is (it’s hidden behind an easily removed panel behind/under the main display)
I have an original retina MacBook Pro, ordered the day they were announced, before the presentation was over, in fact. Works fine. I have ThinkPads that are even older. Tesla was cutting corners, no doubt about it. As the regulatory burden increases, they'll adjust. It is an interesting idea though, a first-order example of regulation moving a market.
I agree they were cutting corners, but comparing it to a laptop isn't that useful because as far as I understand it the main issue with screens in cars is the high temperatures they can be regularly exposed to.
There are plenty of people who drive classic cars built from 1950 to 1975. Some people drive even older cars. I once saw a Ford T stopped at a 7-11 to buy gasoline.
Will that Tesla S be the same in 2045 to 2090, or even in 2120? It's looking like the answer is no. The only ones left will be mounted on platforms in car museums. There will not be auto shows featuring real Tesla cars, because the electronics will be dead and impossible to fix. No reasonable part replacement will be possible because of digital signatures.
We'll see some car bodies that get hollowed out and then draped over the innards of newer cars. Somebody already got an unsupported Tesla S running again by installing a gasoline engine, even cutting through the floor to install a transmission tunnel.
> No reasonable part replacement will be possible because of digital signatures.
Bah. Just strip out the electronics and replace them with something newer and more open. Keep the body and the motors, replace the batteries and the computers.
> but Tesla went even further by eliminating the turn-signal and gear-selector stalks. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the car will simply "guess" which way the driver wants to go based on sensor data and navigation maps.
That's impossible. Maybe an AI could guess left/right turns, but signals are also used to signal merges; if I need or want to merge, how could the car possibly know, and know which direction? In a normal vehicle being operated responsibly, the only indication that a merge is going to occur is the driver engaging the signal.
(Though I admit, many a driver doesn't start to signal their merge until their car has half left the lane. A signal then is often useless: I already know they're merging because the car is drifting recklessly into another lane.)
I recently talked about this with a friend who is an engineer at a large traditional car manufacturer (working on sensor technology for self driving). It came up out of a completely different discussion (I had not heard about touch screen failures).
He said that Tesla is well known for using general consumer grade parts (he mentioned the touchscreen as an example) instead of automotive parts (which have typically much longer expected livetimes). That allows the to push the price down but also to iterate faster.
The worrying bit is not really that Tesla does it, but that the mandated strategy at that manufacturer is to only compare themselves with Tesla (all others don't count), so I think we will see a drive to lower quality from all manufacturers to emulate tesla. This is a well know premium manufacturer.
If you are interested in the potential tragedy of modern electronics longevity, look-up “tin whiskers”.
My prediction is that the RoHS regulations that brought us lead-free solder will go down in history as the cause of massive environmental contamination around the world. In other words, exactly opposite what they thought they would achieve.
How’s that missing turn signal stalk supposed to work when you’re supposed to signal turn well in advance of actually turning? If you’re using GPS, then it might be enough but people miss turns all the time, change their minds due to traffic conditions and the information in GPS systems is not always correct.
I suspect many of the people who buy Tesla's are the sort of people who trade in their cars for a new one every 3-5 years. So really it's the second hand buyers who get shafted with no warranty protection at all.
> Tesla will replace the VCM daughterboard with an "enhanced" eMMC controller. The recall is expected to begin March 31, and Tesla will notify customers of when to take their cars to a service center to have the work performed free of charge.
Its not the touchscreen its the emmc. Yeah that sucks but its not like they're bricking old cars with expensive or unserviceable parts.
But it's a good candidate for someone looks for a reliable car. Someone hit me when the car on auto pilot. My hands are on the wheel but it's really hard for Tesla to take back control. The car was shaking and I have to apply a force to the drive wheel to force it went straight.
With Ford adopting Android Auto & many others doing the same, I wonder how many cars are built to last more than 5 years before they become insecure digital trash buckets.
[+] [-] Tsiklon|5 years ago|reply
My worry with a large number of modern tech heavy cars will be that while the centralisation of a lot of these controls and features into one panel may be convenient to the user, when these inevitably fail (as in this case) - what can the owner do when the parts are no longer available, or if the manufacturer is out of business? Mechanically the car may be sound - but if the system responsible for the interaction between the vehicle and the owner is borked and impossible to replace does that mean the car is a complete write off?
I think back to some of the beaters my friends owned when they started driving, with broken HVAC switch gear, burned out audio head unit wiring harness, etc... while mechanically sound (enough to be road legal...), issues like this didn't hinder or prevent driving the car, and they continued in service for years in this state.
[+] [-] ardy42|5 years ago|reply
Centralization of controls into a single touchscreen is most certainly not convenient to the user, because touchscreens suck [1]. What is convenient is the thoughtful deployment of physical controls in ergonomic locations.
[1] Touchscreens are really only a good choice in situations where there's extreme space constraints, or as an enhancement to existing controls for very specific interactions where they make sense.
[+] [-] jmisavage|5 years ago|reply
- https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1354680585139187713
[+] [-] karmicthreat|5 years ago|reply
It's a dumb mistake, but not exactly an uncommon one. I made the same mistake early on and I have contract engineers that propose inappropriate storage solutions to me still on projects. Some very insistently. I think a whole lot of people that work on the embedded side of engineering treat storage as a magic perfect box.
[+] [-] chrisseaton|5 years ago|reply
For a car? Are many people driving around in a car from 2000 or earlier? When I search for cars that old or older it's 0.4% of the used market. Clearly the vast majority of cars do not last this long and I think you have an unreasonable expectation.
[+] [-] userbinator|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwbacktictac|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asiachick|5 years ago|reply
At first I thought "gas wins" because there will be no power grid. But then I thought "maybe electric wins" because getting more gas might be impossible where as getting electricity I can get from solar cells, water wheels, hand cranks, etc... Maybe I takes 2-3 days of charging for every N kilometers of travel but that's better than zero when you run out of gas.
Maybe Mad Max is showing the age of its source material. All their cars should be electric. They'd even go faster!
[+] [-] api|5 years ago|reply
Same goes for appliances, which are becoming encrusted with features and less reliable.
[+] [-] 1123581321|5 years ago|reply
Sophisticated, user-facing computing is one of the newer parts of cars and so we don’t really know what to expect yet as far as longevity relative to the car itself. However, we should not necessarily see the need to replace computing devices, or parts of them, as prescribing the life of the entire vehicle.
[+] [-] a3n|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tashoecraft|5 years ago|reply
The pressure for a company to have everyone paying them monthly is just to high. You’ll get pulled into their “ecosystem”, where it’s harder to switch. Why sell a car once per 10 years to a dealer who marks it up and has the interaction with the customer. Electric cars already have less maintenance (theoretically). Tesla doesn’t want you going away from paying them, no company does, and they are all fighting to prevent you from not paying them.
[+] [-] jjeaff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] twblalock|5 years ago|reply
Their basic warranty is 4 years, and the drivetrain warranty is 8 years. If you buy a used vehicle direct from Tesla they will add on 1 year to the original warranty, but that's it.
That isn't much longer than the warranties you can get on gas-powered cars, and their used warranties seem a bit worse than what you can get from "certified used" programs from other car companies.
In theory, an electric car should last much longer than a gas car, but Tesla's warranty isn't any longer. I bet the price tag to replace Tesla battery packs out of warranty is shocking.
[+] [-] Triv888|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SMAAART|5 years ago|reply
I doubt it, with all the electronics and stuff car makers are looking for <10 years duration for new cars.
[+] [-] Gibbon1|5 years ago|reply
I've wondered about that myself. Because comments I've made that an electric drive train should have an expected service life of 30 years seems to draw a lot of ire from somewhere. Probably the automotive equivalent of found the google engineer.
[+] [-] hshshs2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Haga|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lemming|5 years ago|reply
That is terrifying, and this sort of thing is why I don't seriously consider Teslas now I'm looking to buy an EV.
[+] [-] danmur|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sschueller|5 years ago|reply
Sometimes tactile button and switches can't be replaced by touch screens.
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
Before I believed all model 3 cars should have at least the option of a dashboard to show status in the direction you are looking.
I thought the Model S/X would be higher cost so they wouldn't try to cost-reduce everything like the model 3.
[+] [-] totalZero|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiofih|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m463|5 years ago|reply
The touchscreen is not a problem. They did have a screen yellowing issue due to not enough UV applied to cure a screen adhesive.
The real problem is the EMMC wearing out. And the root cause is that they're logging so much data to it continuously.
They could have chosen to log less data.
[+] [-] hnburnsy|5 years ago|reply
Tesla did reduce the excessive logging and even implemented a notification when the car suspects it is failing. I think they even extended the warranty, but of course reducing the logging will push some failures outside of the warranty period.
This recall thankfully fixes this problem permanently for those who could be affected.
[+] [-] DaiPlusPlus|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Saris|5 years ago|reply
But then again car touchscreens are some of the slowest pieces of tech around it seems.
[+] [-] killjoywashere|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheRealSteel|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] souprock|5 years ago|reply
Will that Tesla S be the same in 2045 to 2090, or even in 2120? It's looking like the answer is no. The only ones left will be mounted on platforms in car museums. There will not be auto shows featuring real Tesla cars, because the electronics will be dead and impossible to fix. No reasonable part replacement will be possible because of digital signatures.
We'll see some car bodies that get hollowed out and then draped over the innards of newer cars. Somebody already got an unsupported Tesla S running again by installing a gasoline engine, even cutting through the floor to install a transmission tunnel.
[+] [-] perilunar|5 years ago|reply
Bah. Just strip out the electronics and replace them with something newer and more open. Keep the body and the motors, replace the batteries and the computers.
[+] [-] deathanatos|5 years ago|reply
That's impossible. Maybe an AI could guess left/right turns, but signals are also used to signal merges; if I need or want to merge, how could the car possibly know, and know which direction? In a normal vehicle being operated responsibly, the only indication that a merge is going to occur is the driver engaging the signal.
(Though I admit, many a driver doesn't start to signal their merge until their car has half left the lane. A signal then is often useless: I already know they're merging because the car is drifting recklessly into another lane.)
[+] [-] cycomanic|5 years ago|reply
He said that Tesla is well known for using general consumer grade parts (he mentioned the touchscreen as an example) instead of automotive parts (which have typically much longer expected livetimes). That allows the to push the price down but also to iterate faster.
The worrying bit is not really that Tesla does it, but that the mandated strategy at that manufacturer is to only compare themselves with Tesla (all others don't count), so I think we will see a drive to lower quality from all manufacturers to emulate tesla. This is a well know premium manufacturer.
[+] [-] robomartin|5 years ago|reply
My prediction is that the RoHS regulations that brought us lead-free solder will go down in history as the cause of massive environmental contamination around the world. In other words, exactly opposite what they thought they would achieve.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] drivingmenuts|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cynix|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FounderBurr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] gandalfian|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atlgator|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|5 years ago|reply
Our van glove compartment repair was quoted at $300 for a broken plastic latch...
[+] [-] u678u|5 years ago|reply
Its not the touchscreen its the emmc. Yeah that sucks but its not like they're bricking old cars with expensive or unserviceable parts.
[+] [-] cptskippy|5 years ago|reply
It could have been a cartridge or easily serviceable module.
[+] [-] kureikain|5 years ago|reply
But it's a good candidate for someone looks for a reliable car. Someone hit me when the car on auto pilot. My hands are on the wheel but it's really hard for Tesla to take back control. The car was shaking and I have to apply a force to the drive wheel to force it went straight.
Tesla as a car feel very fraigle :-(.
but on the other hand, driving it is really fun.
[+] [-] rektide|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themoose8|5 years ago|reply