Author Topic: Tesla Recall  (Read 8898 times)

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Offline coppice

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Re: Tesla Recall
« Reply #50 on: February 09, 2021, 10:17:23 pm »
So Tesla has 'voluntarily' issued a bare-bones recall, while insisting that their electronic systems are only made to last 5-6 years.

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-computer-touchscreen-recall-nhtsa-designed-for-6-years-2021-2
So, they don't expect the electronics to last long enough for the autonomous driving software you've paid for to be delivered and installed on it. :)
 
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Online Berni

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Re: Tesla Recall
« Reply #51 on: February 10, 2021, 06:33:38 am »
I found this the other day.  Atom???  Could they find a more lame processor?
Err, included under the Atom range is a series with up to 24-cores, 32 PCIe lanes, 16 SATA ports, 100Gbps (yes, that's two zeros) ethernet, and support for 128GiB of RAM. Pretty lame.

Yes that is something that got released this very month and its designed for servers where you need many slow threads without them eating up huge amounts of power.

The sort of Atom you would find in a 6 year old Tesla infotainment system is not going to be one of those chips. The earlier Atom processors got a really bad reputation due to being used in ultra portable laptops back in the day. These laptops ware really slow compared to all the other ones running more classical x86 chips. So it got a reputation for being slow, and yes it was slow, you wouldn't want an Atom CPU in your daily driver PC. Yet it still did it at impressively low power consumption so in terms of performance/watt its actually pretty good. This combined with having a lot of the peripheral controllers (that would otherwise live in a south bridge) integrated on the chip makes it a good choice as a x86 SOC to integrate into products.

So its probably a pretty nice fit for an infotainment system. Linux will run just fine on old underpowered hardware and most of the heavy lifting of drawing a pretty UI is likely handled by the integrated GPU anyway.

Im still very much against the overall trend in automotive towards big ass touchscreens, but that's a topic for another day-
 

Offline Monkeh

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Re: Tesla Recall
« Reply #52 on: February 10, 2021, 06:50:21 am »
The sort of Atom you would find in a 6 year old Tesla infotainment system is not going to be one of those chips.

I have no information dating this infotainment system - just a random photo of mostly irrelevant details and a blanket "ew, atom" statement, I've no way to tell if that's the latest and greatest off the line yesterday or something from the dark ages. And even six years ago there were some pretty decent chips in the lineup if, as you mention, you're not trying to run the least responsive software imaginable. ps. Snow Ridge came out a year ago, not last week.

E: If you happen to have any solid information on what's actually in 'MCU2', as opposed to the contradictory speculation Google wants to feed me today, I'm curious.
« Last Edit: February 10, 2021, 07:21:27 am by Monkeh »
 

Offline gnuarm

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Re: Tesla Recall
« Reply #53 on: February 10, 2021, 07:36:21 am »
I found this the other day.  Atom???  Could they find a more lame processor?
Err, included under the Atom range is a series with up to 24-cores, 32 PCIe lanes, 16 SATA ports, 100Gbps (yes, that's two zeros) ethernet, and support for 128GiB of RAM. Pretty lame.

Yeah, show me how it compares to nearly any other non-atom processor with similar features other than the atom name.  The whole point is the Atom is slow so as to be low power.  They rip out a bunch of stuff to reduce the circuitry, so of course it is small allowing you to get 24 of them on a chip.  Normally this would be bad as it's hard to design a memory interface to keep up with that many CPUs, but when they are Atoms it's not so tough. 


Quote
Yes that is something that got released this very month and its designed for servers where you need many slow threads without them eating up huge amounts of power.

The sort of Atom you would find in a 6 year old Tesla infotainment system is not going to be one of those chips. The earlier Atom processors got a really bad reputation due to being used in ultra portable laptops back in the day. These laptops ware really slow compared to all the other ones running more classical x86 chips. So it got a reputation for being slow, and yes it was slow, you wouldn't want an Atom CPU in your daily driver PC. Yet it still did it at impressively low power consumption so in terms of performance/watt its actually pretty good. This combined with having a lot of the peripheral controllers (that would otherwise live in a south bridge) integrated on the chip makes it a good choice as a x86 SOC to integrate into products.

Six year old?  This design is older than that I think.  Actually my car got an upgrade to something so it may have been this board.  It had to do with the full self driving capability, but... that's not quite the same as "infotainment" and I'm pretty sure it isn't running on an Atom.


Quote
So its probably a pretty nice fit for an infotainment system. Linux will run just fine on old underpowered hardware and most of the heavy lifting of drawing a pretty UI is likely handled by the integrated GPU anyway.

So if this is such a great processor, why would it be so dogged slow on the browser.  I suppose that could actually be the connectivity.  It's over the cell network and I'm pretty sure they aren't using 5G.

I'm no fan of Atom because every review I've seen of them indicates there is an ARM that is better, faster, lower power and cheaper.  Intel still owns the desktop, but that is fading away and mobile is taking over.


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Im still very much against the overall trend in automotive towards big ass touchscreens, but that's a topic for another day-

I'm opposed to touch screens of any size.  Cars bounce around making touch screens problematic.  I guess if it only supports the "press" of a button and no swipes it can work ok, but the big Tesla screen that you reach at nearly arms length has a tendency to see lots of button presses as swipes and ignore them.  Sometimes I have to press a button three, four or five times to take effect.  Trying to bump the heater fan up a few notches is a PITA. 

The Tesla UI is far, far too complex to be safe.  But I didn't say that out loud, did I? 
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Online Berni

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Re: Tesla Recall
« Reply #54 on: February 10, 2021, 09:34:56 am »
From the line that specifically mentions it has a "Full self driving computer" installed i assumed that it is handled by some other black box somewhere. Perhaps having more specialized hardware towards image processing and AI, maybe running some of Nvidias SOC offerings. But those are just my guesses, they are probably wrong.

But yeah web browsers are actually a surprisingly resource intensive task these days. The new complicated broad HTML5 functionality and websites abusing it into ridiculous amounts of bloat means that any browser that has to open a modern website has a fair bit of work to do. This is the reason why Chrome and Firefox are such resource hogs. So yeah embedded systems with limited resources like this can have trouble being a competent browser. On top of it as browsers try to run the mountains of scripts faster they start introducing fancy dynamic recompiling tricks. When these tricks go wrong they can crash in spectacular ways that takes down even things other than the browser. A lot of the more modern gaming console hacks involved crashing the built in web browser in just the right way to corrupt memory in just the right way.

As for touchscreens other manufacturers are not doing much better of a job (Tho Tesla did sort of make touchscreens popular in cars). Everyone is moving more and more hard button controls into the touchscreen. Dads new Volvo does it too, the menus are a confusing mess and pressing buttons is trial and error once the car is moving and going over bumps. Luckily the EU is starting to step in and tell manufacturers just how bad of an idea these things are for road safety. But i have a feeling that all this will result in is a list of important buttons that must remain hard buttons that manufacturers will just put somewhere hastily in the form of a tiny button to make it comply, then replicate the same button on the touchscreen.
 

Offline gnuarm

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Re: Tesla Recall
« Reply #55 on: February 10, 2021, 10:39:37 am »
I don't see my PC browser eating up much resources until i open multiple tabs and windows, but there certainly are sites that are insanely intensive.  But I'm talking about pages that I opened yesterday just fine, today bogging the display and even make the entire dash board crash.  Then after rebooting the browser works fine until it throws the next fit. 

I don't know if there is any software on the Tesla that is solid.  I tell people all the time it is a cell phone with wheels. 

Touch screens are what we get because the voice commands in the Tesla are far behind the industry.  When my android is paired with the car many functions are absorbed into the car like texting.  I can text by voice much better with the phone than I can by the car.  I should be able to turn on the wipers by voice.  I can't so I enable the auto wipers which suck.  They could be used in Las Vegas to generate random numbers for the roulette wheel. 

I think we need more law suits against Tesla.  Lots more. 
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Offline JPortici

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Re: Tesla Recall
« Reply #56 on: February 11, 2021, 06:12:44 am »
I expect a car to last more than "5-6 years" because I'm non-rich and can't buy the latest and greatest model every few years.

you don't get it. You are supposed to lease the car, and after 3-4 years you can start over and lease another.
(this is the situation here, may vary depending on country)
Full hybrid/EV pays no tax for the first... you guessed it! 4 years. Then you'd rather have bought a 3.0L petrol porsche or something, if you leased it it's a problem only for the poor guy that will buy an EV for "cheap" (which by the way is how i got my current car, mid range executive trim that i wouldn't have been able to afford otherwise. 4 years old but barely used)
Besides, prices were inflated so much in the last 4 yeras that a citycar that used to cost 10-12k is now about 18k, but if you lease it the "base" price is now 11k (but 17k with interests)
« Last Edit: February 11, 2021, 06:14:37 am by JPortici »
 

Offline PlainName

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Re: Tesla Recall
« Reply #57 on: February 11, 2021, 07:49:35 am »
Quote
You are supposed to lease the car, and after 3-4 years you can start over and lease another.

That's very popular over here. For the drivers, who don't really understand the shit they've stepped into yet, and the vendors, who can't believe how easy it is to lock in punters and make a killing with little risk.

It's fine so long as you don't mind throwing the monthly rental away every month forever. If you hit hard times you have no car and no money to  buy a car, and if that hard time just happens to be a year or so down the line you'll be paying a fee on top as well.

And don't even think about doing too many miles or getting a scratch on in it the supermarket car park. Much better to buy and own a 3yo motor outright.
 

Offline SiliconWizard

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Re: Tesla Recall
« Reply #58 on: February 11, 2021, 05:25:42 pm »
It's fine so long as you don't mind throwing the monthly rental away every month forever. If you hit hard times you have no car and no money to  buy a car, and if that hard time just happens to be a year or so down the line you'll be paying a fee on top as well.

Yes. This rental model is wicked. It may sound practical at first sight, but it makes us completely dependent. If either you, or the car seller, has a problem, you may end up with nothing left. And it's just the beginning. Next thing you know, once all vehicles are entirely and permanently "connected", if you havent paid the rent or the system has any problem, you may not even be able to start the car. Possibly from one minute to the next.

That's the opposite of being autonomous.


 

Offline Medved

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Re: Tesla Recall
« Reply #59 on: March 09, 2021, 08:46:48 pm »
The worldwide Automotive Industry, namely the Tier 2, Tier 1 and OEMs, they have very high standards concerning reliability, safety and defects liability, either being safety or simply functionally relevant.
All HW and SW components are designed, manufactured, verified and validated (tested) to the commonly accepted Automotive industry standards to secure that all components and systems are safe and operate w/o defects over the whole span of the cars life, i.e. at least 10 years, for some OEMs even up to 20 years.

The relevant documents for this philosophy (on components) can be found here: http://www.aecouncil.com/AECDocuments.html

'Wear and Tear parts' like the brake are obviously not included, but an eMMC, in interaction with its SW driver and the whole SW application, is of course not regarded as such a wear and tear component. See especially the AEC - Q100-005 - REV-D1


Well, Tesla is ridiculously known to "suffice with no AEC grade components" from their suppliers...
I think that tells it all...
And don't surprises anyone I guess...
 

Offline kaz911

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Re: Tesla Recall
« Reply #60 on: March 22, 2021, 07:09:37 am »
I do not find Tesla that different from most other car companies.

I have owned Porsche Cayenne Turbo on a "company" paid for benefit - where the car radio / control system died when car was about 6 years old. Replacement cost about $8000+ (If I had not had it on Porsche Extended Warranty)  - that was a common problem. (I think made by Becker Germany for Porsche)

I own a Ford Galaxy 2014 - where Radio / control system died due to touch screen defect (common problem) - it died at the 5 year mark. (System made by Becker Germany) - replacement Radio / control system from Ford : Euro 3500,-  I bought a replacement from a scrap yard - and then plan to replace the touch screen in the old one.

A lot of my friends have BMW's - and their displays often die after 5-7 years - resulting charge of $3-15.000 dependent on which part of the display. When I was in the Middle East - it was even worse - most BMW's had display failures due to the heat. Yes it is hard to make a car that might sit in the sun @ 50degC - but that should be part of the consideration when you make a car to sell in that area.

I'm not saying Tesla is good - and they should have done better. I'm saying Tesla is not alone in producing electronics that will fail. And I know both Porsche and Ford might be able to drive post a control system failure. But you will be driving without a lot of creature comforts like AC, navigation, fan control etc or not know the settings.

Becker in Germany makes a lot of Radio/Control units for car manufactures. What characterise them in my opinion is they are at least 4-8 years behind "current" technology - and always very expensive to get fixed. Tesla at least is more "current" in their technology.

Sadly I do think a lot of products are "made to fail" maybe not the above but... A large % of revenue in any dealership is from repairs.

The worst I have seen is UK brand Baxi boilers - where the control PCB sites right below the boiler. The PCB gets up to 75-100 degC hot for extended periods of time. They used 105 degC capacitors off "not first class" brand all over with relative low hour rating. The board had components worth maybe $15 on it in total - single sided through hole - but replacement cost is about GBP 280,- plus labour plus VAT for the PCB. $3 worth of high quality capacitors made it all work again - and PCB never failed after that. Just eBay search for Baxi refurb PCB and you will see a lot of re-capped Baxi boards. But the average consumer would not know that. But those boilers are in my opinion made to fail. If it was intentional or the MBA in the purchase department who wanted to save some pennies - I do not know. But I think it is was really bad.


 

Offline srb1954

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Re: Tesla Recall
« Reply #61 on: March 22, 2021, 08:02:31 am »
Quote
You are supposed to lease the car, and after 3-4 years you can start over and lease another.

That's very popular over here. For the drivers, who don't really understand the shit they've stepped into yet, and the vendors, who can't believe how easy it is to lock in punters and make a killing with little risk.

It's fine so long as you don't mind throwing the monthly rental away every month forever. If you hit hard times you have no car and no money to  buy a car, and if that hard time just happens to be a year or so down the line you'll be paying a fee on top as well.

And don't even think about doing too many miles or getting a scratch on in it the supermarket car park. Much better to buy and own a 3yo motor outright.
Leasing cars is very popular for companies in my country.

The main reason is that the leasing fees are completely tax deductible whereas buying a car outright only allows a much smaller tax deduction for depreciation. A secondary reason is that companies don't have to be too concerned with maintenance and they can just get rid of the car no problem at the end of the lease.
 


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