I have no idea what this is referencing as a joke, but I’m dying to know. Please explain. I’m just waiting for it you know. Because I just don’t get it so I feel dumb. Then, I will be enlightened, and I will laugh so hard my pants fall down.
I recommend you check out a franchise called Fast and Furious. Dom (vin diesel) is famous in memes as the trope of gang as family is overused in the franchise. In their last movie, (or maybe there is a new one now, I’m not sure) they actually take the cars to the freaking space. I kid you not . There’s a famous meme with Dom crossing paths with Anakin in space.
You would need to be crazy to apply a voltage regulation hack to the CPU that they don’t sell spare parts if something goes wrong. Risking bricking a $50000 car to unlock the $300 heated seats?
And while the root access is unpatchable, because the car is always connected to internet and always sharing too much telemetry to their servers, it would be trivial for them to add an additional server side check to see if some feature has been unlocked without paying.
would really spark some anger after people get stranded with disabled cars while camping for prolonged periods of time, or just parking underground while flying abroad.
I’m sure it would, but someone must think of the children, and make sure that the on board software is up to date for safety’s sake. (I can hear the money changing hands to fill the election coffers of the congressional oversight committee members even as I type this).
The driver is always responsible for the car regardless so in reality I don’t see it being an important point. Yes if something fails and it causes an accident you are on the hook if you had modified that system or failed to maintain it properly. The onus would always be on the driver to prove the manufacturer was negligent if they believe the car was not manufactured properly or designed safely.
So I wouldn’t mess around with self driving (personally I’d never even use it from the factory) but there’s little risk in touching many other things, these systems are designed to compartmentalize and fail safe even when you tinker with them. Though maybe not in Teslas case because they mistake the tribal knowledge of over 100years of automotive design and manufacturing for inefficiency. but I do not know a whole lot about Tesla computer systems, in ICE cars I mostly only touch the engine controls, and maybe traction control. In my current car I suppose you could do some real fucky things with electric power steering and brake by wire.
Most tuners won’t go beyond messing with throttle curves and traction control when it comes to anything safety related, as neither would cause any kind of serious failure unless you tried to re write the code to do something it wasn’t meant to to begin with.
Is the MCU no longer replaceable? Definitely was possible to replace them when they were shipping with weak eMMC that degraded and bricked the car (plenty of people also soldered better chips).
It’s still not cheap, but there are crashed Teslas aplenty, could pull it off one if you can’t pay retail.
This mod is something that people will more likely do when the car has depreciated anyway.
Idk, seems like a quick buck earned on a car already sold, why wouldn’t they? They even sold upgrade kits from MCU to MCU2. The key ingredient was outrageous margins (MCU2 upgrade kit cost over 2k, but ebay MCU-Z units are under 800 used and I’m pretty sure that the used ones are STILL more than what Tesla pays for them).
It costs them nothing if you do manage to upgrade your car with a mod, but they make money if you fail and have to buy a new unit off them. I’d keep the thing going if I was in charge of Tesla tbh. And then in like half a year announce that these cars lose access to Supercharger network or something.
That’s what I’d do if I was Musk, anyway. If you’re a villain already, why not go full evil
I think the key issue is that the exploit can only be fixed by replacing the hardware in these cars, which means for Tesla that the vehicle’s unique IDs are probably the most valuable thing that could be taken advantage of.
It’s worth noting our regular cars have locked down ECU. I had to pay good money to be able to get around it. But I agree it’s not great overall and isn’t headed in a promising direction.
Even my 2005 Audi A6 had software locked features.
Some were probably tuned for different markets, like lock confirmation beep, but others were added as later model year updates like visualization of parking sensors which, IIRC, was added with the 2006 model year update.
Now, granted, the Audi dealer that had serviced my car prior to my ownership never bothered to install firmware updates, but even when I did it was off by default.
To update I needed to flash new firmware onto the ECU’s using 3 CD’s with various updates while the car was hooked up to a charger. The whole thing took about 3 hours.
And then I could use a third party diagnostic tool (VCDS) to set and enable the visualization of the parking sensors. Honestly can’t remember if it actually worked, but at least I got other features made available due to the software updates.
The problem, IMO, is the trend towards never owning anything - not software gated features.
