It's fascinating that the Jobs Reality Distortion Field is alive and well in Tesla.
I don't own one, and each friend I ask tells me the same thing across S, 3, X, and Y: "Great tech! Amazing experience! I mean, sure, fit and finish is a problem, repairs take forever, hard to get parts, you just live with the smallish problems... Well, no, never had this many issues on <any other car brand> but this is the future I'm driving! I'll get even newer stuff in upgrades... Oh, the physical parts? That's a problem... But the savings! Of course, no gas payments! Well my power bill did increase, but it's gotta be cheaper than my gas."
Each person was initially effusive then, when pushed, realistic. Sloppy assembly, broken features, things that we would never accept in a usd$90K car from any other brand... Til Tesla both lowered and raised the bar, depending on your pov.
The power of Brand: the comfort with paying more for an item or service wirh equal or less quality than alternatives in general, but with one (or a small cluster of) perceived unique value prop. Amazing.
And even with all the evidence of the problems, I still want one too...
(A coda: the cutesy naming of tesla sort of sums it up around lots of flash, some amazing function, some tawdry qualities: the models sure are "s3xy".)
I hate Tesla fanboyism as much as the next person, but I bought a Model 3 as a midlife crisis car (joking, I think?) and it’s the best car I’ve ever driven. Probably most of this is the improved acceleration and handling of an electric car in general, meaning that it isn’t Tesla-specific — except that when I tried to buy another brand there was nothing comparable. But elements of the Tesla experience really are light years beyond and other car, electric or not: the supercharger network is ubiquitous and it “just works”. I can’t imagine buying another electric car and having to worry about where I’ll charge on longer trips. The UI and navigation makes other cars (including my friend’s newish BMW) look like a 2009-era Blackberry. Last week I scheduled a computer upgrade, and Tesla showed up at my house yesterday and did it in my driveway. Yes: the interior is more basic and probably it doesn’t have the excellent build quality of a BMW. But I wouldn’t trade back. In fact, I’m never buying another ICE car again, which means other brands had better get their act together and start shipping something that competes.
The TL;DR here is: people who rave about finish are like people who complained about the iPod based on storage capacity. Tesla really is doing something very right, and ignoring that based on the (very real) perception of fanboyism is cutting off your own nose.
Did you ever try a 45k$ sedan car before or are you comparing your tesla M3 to a couple years old Toyota Corolla? I also drove a tesla for a while and it didn't impress me. The acceleration is nice but it's not something you realistically care about in the long term (also acceleration kills your battery)
It seems pretty common that people compare Teslas with the car they had before. It's like comparing an entry dell laptop with a MacBook pro.
I think it's an immature car and most buyers are attracted to the brand appeal, and use it to appear next gen to their neighbors. As usual, no owner will recognize this but it's a well known phenomenon that manufacturers use against us.
I've owned a couple of BMWs. They were nice cars, and I particularly liked the interiors. Did not particularly enjoy the clunky entertainment system and navigation, or the relatively slower pickup and constant on/off cycling of the engine every time I came to a stop.
I wholeheartedly agree with everything you said. Admittedly, I'm a bit of a fanboy but I do recognize that there are some things on my MY that are not where I would like them to be. Regardless, the upsides of the car more than outweigh any downside I have experienced.
I feel like most people who say things like "Yea, it's nice, but what about all those problems?" would change their tune if they actually owned one. After the first test drive my view on other vehicles instantly changed to "How do people continue to drive those covered wagons?"
I traded my Prius for a used Fiat 500e, even trade, and it was the best decision I ever made about a car. I love my electric car, and hope to never own a gas-powered vehicle ever again! (After my wife's car eventually dies.)
Sure, for rare longer trips we have to take her car, but all of the benefits you mention for your Tesla are also true for my cheap, limited-range Fiat. The acceleration, the handling, it's a thing of beauty and a joy forever!
The iPod analogy is so perfect. Gotta love how it rhymes with the Jobs reality distortion critique while also striking at the heart of the argument. There is definitely a difference between the value generated by excellent attention to detail and that generated by sweeping an industry with transformative technological dislocations, and the impact of the latter can dominate that of the former.
These days, cars are generally scrapped at about 15 years.
Do you think Tesla has a commitment to that sort of longevity? People are always talking about theoretical reasons why electric cars should be more reliable. But if a Tesla is like a smartphone on wheels, who is using a smartphone from 2006?
It’s not the worst manufactured car I’ve ever owned but it’s not the best either. The service experience varies but doesn’t match the luxury brands. With as many as are on the road people regularly want to talk about my Model S like it’s a Ferrari or something. The rise in my electric bill is a fraction of my old fuel bill but I can’t say it justifies the cost. The model X is particularly ostentatious with its gull wing doors. A couple families at our children’s private school drop their children off in one. The cars get far more attention than the more expensive luxury cars in the drop off line.
So it’s purely an emotional purchase. Something car manufacturers have been using to their advantage for some time now.
It's the interior that does it for me. Model 3 is the one I find the least appealing. I doubt as many buyers would have accepted that if it was from another manufacturer at the same price point.
Oh yeah, not a fan of the ultra-minimalistic Model 3 interior. And if I understood it right, they didn't even bother to put windshield wiper controls on a physical button or stalk, which boggles my mind.
You can activate the wipers for one-time spraying and wiping from the stalk, and you can select wiper speed by voice command. If none of those options are suitable, it's the touchscreen.
One-time spraying isn't convenient when it starts raining. Voice commands are useless to people like me with a heavy accent. Touch screen while driving is not a safe distraction.
Maybe it works better on Teslas, but my experience with other cars is that auto wipers are a gimmick that I would pay not to have. I can't say if it's more because of the sensor, or the programming.
What kills it for me is that buying a Tesla means tethering yourself to the company for everything. Parts, service, functionality, analytics and telemetry. I don’t want to have a relationship with the manufacturer of the goods I buy—I just want to buy the thing and have the ability to use and fix it without them always up my ass.
I bought my Tesla with 335k of its 340k miles on it. A bit of an experiment.
Not one feature was broken except one USB port, which I was able fix myself. Headlights were replaced once before I bought it (HID, not LED) and the motor was replaced under warranty in its first year. I had the front sway bar link replaced because it made a little clunk. It still has the original brakes on the rear (which I'm about to replace, myself, they're readily available outside Tesla). This is a third year Model S, remember. They've come a long way since.
There are places where the fit of the carpeting could be better; looking at new Model 3s, all such fit and finish issues seem far ahead. Still, mine's better by and large than my 2006 Jeep.
There are plenty of Tesla owners that have problems with their cars, and Tesla's customer service experience varies widely between service centers. But to say that someone else has had more problems with their Tesla than any other brand is just an unlucky Tesla owner. Or one that has never owned an Audi or a Land Rover or a Jeep or a Cadillac or a Jaguar or a first-gen Kia or a lot of other cars.
That Tesla could even make any brand-new car, in America, in the 21st century, is miraculous. The fact that it is a revolutionary car only adds to what you call a distortion field.
(Edit: cutesy naming? It uses [until Model 3] an AC synchronous motor, invented by Nikola Tesla. It couldn't be a more appropriate name, imho.)
Maybe it's too obvious to point out, but Apple, in which Jobs pioneered the Reality Distortion Field, is now among the very most profitable companies in the world.
The term was originally used in either awe or derision depending on the person, but in that case it heralded exceptional success.
I find that when speaking about many cars here in Australia, some people are very strong on their opinion of their cars and brands. Where you will find someone trashing a particular car brand, then another person of the view that they've had little to no issues at all.
I suppose with the Tesla maybe it's the feeling of buying a little ticket of the future and as such you might feel okay with dealing with teething problems when it comes to a car brand that is trying to do better for the environment in a way that car brands snobbed off in the past.
For me, it's the exteriors. The Model S is my favorite looking Tesla that's currently in production, and that's because the proportions are right, and the front bumper isn't one giant expanse of plastic, but is instead broken up by a faux grille. The Model Y and X look like unattractive blobs with poor proportions (in fairness, all crossovers look like this), and the 3, X, and Y all have the front bumper that is just an ugly expanse of plastic that has no visual breakup.
Eh, Apple had profit from the start and was on the path to profit as long as Jobs was in charge. Selling regulatory credits to attain profitability isn't a sustainable business model, nor is it novel in the least.
There are dozens of reasons why Teslas are much better EV’s than competitors have come up with. Most owners (I probably know an order of magnitude more than you) are pretty clear eyed on some of the quality issues, service and especially the buying/delivery experience. Most (not all) owners I know like the mission of the company and really love their cars despite some of those issues.
To the issue at hand here, this is the eMMC endurance issue. Tesla should absolutely replace that for free since it is their software writing too much data that destroyed them.
I think Porsche won over Tesla in producing the next generation of sports EV first. I don't think it's fair to compare the Taycan to anything Tesla offers except the new unreleased Roadster.
I haven't personally driven it either, but that's what I gathered from the reviews and spec sheet. Maybe after driving it I would change my mind, that's certainly possible..
It's also interesting that Bill Gates chose the Taycan as his first EV when he could have afforded anything he wanted.
Maybe he wanted the feeling of a traditional luxury car? Teslas are nice, but they certainly don't follow the "traditional" ways of styling. Was there any other reliable competition?
> Their software now detects the issue before it occurs and adds a notification alerting the driver.
I've never seen this notification on my 2015 Model S, whose MCU (the center console display referred to here) has become increasingly unreliable over the past year. Its gotten so bad that there's almost a 50/50 chance of needing to reboot it every time I drive. (its actually even worse than that now, as the car now gets stuck installing a firmware update every night and needs a reboot to get that bit working again)
I honestly can't tell if the issue is eMMC partial failure, corruption, or simply a lack of proper regression testing on Tesla's part. (After all, if all new cars use the new MCU2 then they probably don't care about my MCU1 car unless they have to.)
That being said, I personally care a bit more about long term reliability and responsiveness than being annoying and making them pay. So the moment I qualified for an upgrade to their newer MCU, I just went ahead and scheduled that. Sure, it actually costs me money, but in exchange I get a faster UI, better software support, and hopefully fewer issues. (I plan to keep the car for a while still, and MCU quirks are really my only complaint.)
> Its gotten so bad that there's almost a 50/50 chance of needing to reboot it every time I drive
Holy. Shit. If this is true (I no reason to doubt you, yet at least), the market cap of Tesla makes even less sense. Who in their right mind would invest in a car company that can't even build a car that work half of the time you're using it? Especially since all controls are depending on the console as well.
Honda's HondaLink panels in their Civics since 2013/14 can occasionally have poor or no responsiveness or display. The UI is also poorly designed enough that accomplishing anything with it is a distraction (eg- does not separate parked and in-motion UIs, allows navigating 4 menus deep for a feature before throwing up a verbose text warning about why interacting with an option the 5th deep menu would be dangerous). Honda's credibility and market didn't receive any scrutiny for it.
Maybe touchpanels for any major control systems without tactile backups is a stupid idea?
We've all been asking that question for 5+ years since they began the FSD lies. Never made sense to promise major software ahead of time in any industry much less promise to support old hardware. That's always been a death knell.
I think it’s not particularly surprising that cars have parts that fail early and need replacing.
I had a similar failure in my Infiniti 2006 G35. The Bose stereo had a cap that would blow, which would cut power to the whole center stack, including climate control and defog. The radio was a $2,000 part, and they never extended the warranty. I ended up replacing the climate control panel with a non-US version of the part that bypassed the radio.
It’s good that Tesla extended the warranty in this case, as they should have. I think there’s one key part that’s even better, and as far as I know totally unique to Tesla;
> So the moment I qualified for an upgrade to their newer MCU, I just went ahead and scheduled that. Sure, it actually costs me money, but in exchange I get a faster UI, better software support, and hopefully fewer issues.
Tesla has actually designed a harness to allow their newest generation of MCU to be retrofitted into their older cars, and will factory support this upgrade. This gives you access to all the latest infotainment and driving visualization features that came out well after the car was made.
I don’t know of any other car manufacturer which supports their late model cars like this.
Chances are that newer models (S/X with MCU2, the Model 3, etc) don't have such bad issues. Beyond that, I can easily think of a few reasons...
First, this doesn't affect the parts of the car necessary to actually drive it. (Remember, the dashboard on the Model S is a separate component.) The actual "car" part of the car still works just fine, and you can even reboot this part while driving without causing problems.
Second, most people who actually own these cars tend to be somewhat protective of the company's image. Therefore, while you'll see plenty of ranting on Tesla-specific forums, it rarely leaks out into the greater conversation.
Third, and most importantly, all of the reporters who write articles covering Tesla are doing so from the perspective of an outsider looking in. They jump all over the great features and new easter eggs, but are completely and utterly oblivious to all the "quality of life" issues you'll only ever notice if you actually own the damn car and drive it every day.
I would not consider an anecdote as a pertinent indicator to invest in the company but a warning to invest in a car.
Recalls are pretty common across cars manufacturers, even the ones seen as reliable, such as Mercedes or Volvo. As for as anecdotes go, I have rented an almost brand new Toyota that would turn the lights off on 90 degrees turn, that was frightening :)
Other way round: if a company can market cars so well they're selling out faster than they can be built, it doesn't matter how well they actually work once they've arrived at the customer. The market cap is down to the effectiveness of Tesla marketing.
As someone who believes that Tesla will come to strongly dominate this industry, I'm happy that the regulators in charge have done their job, and worry that conceding to this kind of pressure would lead to lax controls on automotive product lifetimes.
Sure, today, it's a generous 8 yr / 100k mile warranty voluntarily extended, but I can easily imagine a scenario where Tesla (or whoever else is large) has bean counters that figure out most of these parts will fail 2 years and a day from now, so throw 2 years as a cheap means to appease owners.
In fact, many auto manufacturers today (and historically) have not covered technical defects in electronics as well as they should, in my opinion. I would argue for greater regulatory enforcement on this front. "Bumper-to-bumper" is not the same as "bumper-to-bumper-but-not-the-silicon-bits", and it can be a meaningful and large difference in the total cost of ownership of a vehicle that is increasingly focused on "the-silicon-bits".
If this stays a purely proactive measure that adds to the Tesla experience, I'm all for it, but I really hope regulators continue to hold their ground without ceding to the industry pressure of "we'll self-regulate because we have the best data on individual component failures and can provide a better customer experience around it than recalls."
It's not like the regs and/or Tesla have fixed the discovered flaw in a new design, and will be replacing the old part with the newly designed part. In that case proactive recall would make sense.
But that's not the case here. Here if you've only used 0.5 of 8Gb, and Tesla is required to make a recall, all Tesla is doing is replacing your old unit with the exact same model but now 8Gb free space instead of 7.5Gb free.
Instead, if a new design is not developed, shouldn't it be treated like a recurring maintenance? like when the memory is 6 or 7Gb full, the user gets a warning to take it to the repair to have the unit replaced, or something.
Also why isn't the memory emptied from time to time? old data should be of no use and should be backed up to Tesla cloud, or user's cloud storage outside the vehicle or something? In which case the whole exercise is moot.
They’re replacing the chip (actually the daughterboard that hold the chip) with a much larger chip (32GB vs 8GB) and allocating half the chip for wear leveling.
This is the same fix a southern Cal company has been performing for a few years, at car owner’s cost.
They are not doing much in the way of preventive replacement, and their “predictive failure” notification is BS afaict. Maybe it’s new, but I’ve not yet seen it when my MCU starts acting up.
It’s currently a $500 non-warranty service, but they won’t do it until the chip fails.
The predictive notification is new as of 2020.40.9.2, which was released on November 24, 2020 after they extended the warranty.
Just because it was release on 11/24 doesn’t mean all cars got it that day. Figure it can take a little while depending on how they roll these releases out to the fleet.
> and their “predictive failure” notification is BS afaict. Maybe it’s new, but I’ve not yet seen it when my MCU starts acting up.
If they are using eMMC, it should be trivial to just query the controller about the flash health which should be a pretty accurate indication of when it's going to fail.
The problem isn’t lack of capacity, it’s that Flash storage(of all kinds, from microSD to NVMe SSD) bears only so many write operations.
Reading is fine but reflashing takes away lifespan like what poisonous metals do to a person, they gets slower and slurred and eventually die.
It’s not a problem had their software been actually tested and finalized before shipping so the cars don’t have to download Chromium patches every few weeks. Tesla being Tesla do that and break cars.
- One is the system memory. It'll have OS, apps, necessary data. This shouldn't change frequently. Like one update a month, or a few months. Should last a lifetime.
- Second is the daily data memory. Logs, metrics, whatever. This would go bad more frequently, but the functioning of the car shouldn't depend on this part. If this stops working and user doesn't replace it, the rest of the car should work, except that no new logs will be generated. Or user is given the option to upload the logs straight to the cloud (is a Tesla vehicle always online?).
The typical design is to have redundant system partitions that are only ever mounted read-only and exist in a separate wear-leveling domain (through GPP partitioning). Application data is on its own partition and raw logs aren't written to flash storage at all, they go to a tmpfs in memory.
Of course you will find few Linux distributions are set up like this, even if they would benefit tremendously (see Raspberry Pi SD card corruptions..). But your throwaway Android phone probably does it.
Nokia had logbufd on their linux devices (N770/N800/...) to prevent NAND getting abused by constant writes. They realised very early on that writing logs during runtime is essential for debugging purposes but also that it would kill the internal flash in no time at all.
With tmpfs backed log partition, you still need active log rotation. Logbufd was an in-memory ringbuffer that listened on the standard syslog socket, and if you spewed too much logs, you only killed your own ability to go back in time. If you fill up tmpfs before rotation gets a chance to rescue you, you will break all applications that don't handle out-of-disk-space gracefully.
The whole point of these schemes is that they are meant to survive a power loss during the very moment you are flashing a system upgrade. There is no "fix" for power loss, of course - it can happen at any time.
Surely Tesla has reduced the log write frequency in updates after this was discovered.
My understanding is that the parts have decent endurance, it was just that a ton was being written there.
If that's true, replacing the hardware is a long term fix.
Edit: elsewhere in this thread points to 6000 cycle endurance, which means a best case of 42 TB lifetime writes, although write amplification will lower that.
That's enough for 6gb of logs a day over a 20 year lifetime which seems plenty.
Although that's also predicated on a controller that wear levels well.
The 3k writes in the article sound like a single page lifecycle number, and the computation indicates it fails after that many vehicle starts. Meaning they are either rewriting the entire flash on every start (8G) or it simply doesn't have a FTL. Which means its not even to the level of needing to worry about write amplification.
I think the article uses "capacity" a bit confusingly; the NAND chip is not at its storage limit, it is at its write cycle limit. Presumably there are NAND chips with much higher limits that they swapped it for, as this doesn't affect units after 2018 (according to the article).
eMMC storage devices can provide a plethora of usage information to the eMMC controller such as read/write counters but also number of blocks of flash that have failed so far. After you hit a number of failed blocks the device could then send the notification to the user that failure is nearing. If you are curious this link expands a bit more on how this could work
https://media-www.micron.com/-/media/client/global/documents...
Turns out Automotive grade is a thing for a reason, and using best practices can be important even if you're an agile and new startup with a lot of hype.
> Elon Musk bragged that the Model S's 17 inch screen isn't automotive grade, but now Tesla and its customers are mired in "replacement hell."
"..a bizarre problem that was clearly caused by thermal issues..Tesla appeared to mostly fix this problem with its "cabin overheat protection" feature (which it sold as being to protect dogs and children, despite the fact that it held the temperature at +40C which is about the temperature where a child's organs will start shutting down)"
So they chose to intentionally reduce the car's range when parked in hot weather (e.g. a day hike in a forest where you need the range the most to return home) because they didn't get an automotive grade (Grade 2 instead of Grade 4) screen like every other auto manufacturer? wow..
Cabin overheat was never billed to protect children and dogs, as far as I know (besides Elon's tweet...). Plus, there's actual keep climate on features now that actually can keep it at whatever temperature you want. And you have the ability to turn it off completely if you want. I have to say, coming back to a car that is only 100F inside instead of 140F+ is great.
Does anyone know what happened with the faulty door handles? There was a lawsuit in 2019 but I couldn't find any updates since then.
Two separate accidents in 2018-2019, Model S crashed, fire started, owner (and passenger in the second case) survived the crash but couldn't get out of the car because the flush electronic door handles didn't unlock and present themselves out. The police officer on scene couldn't open it to get them out. Both cases everyone inside the car burnt to death [1][2][3].
In all modern cars, including the Model S [4] the doors are supposed to automatically unlock on a crash or airbag deployment. I haven't heard this happening on any other car (not that many cars use those flush door handles anyway).
The front window is made out of laminate glass so that it won't shatter on a heavy impact (or simply a stone chip) and spray the occupants in the face with glass fragments or shards. Even if you crack it, or manage to make a hole in it, it's pretty difficult to get through it, and certainly difficult to make a hole big enough for a person to fit through.
The side windows are made out of tempered glass, also known as safety glass, which when broken shatters into tiny pieces rather than large shards. However, it's really difficult to break. Blunt force often won't do it: you need quite a lot of force concentrated on a very small area. This is why glass breakers have quite sharp points and are often made of tungsten: it allows the to focus the force so that the glass will break on impact.
It's possible the officers involved simply didn't have anything suitable for breaking the glass, and very likely that the occupants didn't.
(Which reminds me: I've been meaning to put glass breakers in the door pockets of my car for ages. Must do that.)
Can confirm that side windows are no where near as easy to break as hollywood portrays. I went to a pick and pull junkyard with a friend a decade ago to help him find some parts for his car. Well, it was slow that day and a huge back field and we happen to have a crowbar. We wanted to shatter a window for early 20s guy mentality reasons. I swung at it one handed and the crowbar bounced right off. Both of us were confused as hell. It takes a good effort, two handed batter swing to break those windows or put in a lot of effort one handed and make sure the hook end makes contact, not the backside. That scene from 2 fast 2 furious where he uses his elbow to break a window... I have to call bullshit unless certain cars truly have really weak windows. We broke 4 different windows in cheap USA consumer vehicles, all of which put up a good fight against crowbar.
Spark plug ceramic is used to break tempered windows. The ceramic is so hard that when it contacts glass all the force is concentrated on a small point causing the tempered window to fail.
I doubt they would use the spark-plugs sideways (which is how you'd get the ceramic part of the spark plug to contact the glass). Unless they are throwing the plugs, it makes more sense to use the sharp, metallic ends which can apply the same force, but over a much smaller surface area.
I'm not doubting you for a minute in terms of whether it would work, but the occupants of a car (and especially not a Tesla!) are unlikely to be carrying sparkplugs. Ditto police officers.
Supposedly, the front seat headrests of most cars in the US can be pulled off and used as glass breakers. I haven't personally tried it, but the prongs on the bottom definitely seem like they could do the job from the inside, at least.
There are 12V adapters on Amazon that have a glass breaker built in, makes it easier to find in an accident when everything not bolted or tied gets thrown around during the impact.
That's what the lawsuit says. I couldn't find first-hand details of what the police officer put in the report, but there are several theories [1] and videos [2] showing it can be pretty difficult even with blunt object tools. The absence of available time due to the raging fire definitely couldn't have helped either.
For each BLM case there is a one or more similar for other ethnicities with all video evidence that gets no further media coverage and no justice to the victims.
This is great news for people who own an aging S or X. I have a 2017 Tesla and the screen started spazzing out on me a while back but I drive pretty often. I willfully purchased an upgrade that solved the problem as the new screen (MCU) doesn't have the same architecture that caused the failure. I'd be nice to be compensated for my willful upgrade but at least other people can stick it to Tesla.
I LOVE the car and will stick to it that it's the best car I've ever owned but it has its flaws and hopefully this recall teaches Tesla a lesson.
It’s mind-blowing to me that a 3-year car is considered aging.
Anecdote time: my parents bought a secondhand 93 Toyota Corolla that I inherited and drove until 2011. They continued using it until 2018, and got rid of it. It was still running. A few plastic internals had failed and the engine was rough, but still going. It easily had another 5ish years on it.
I have a 2004 Land Rover Discovery 3 with 220k miles on it, all of the systems in that car still work, even the ancient screen with all of its functions is still absolutely fine.
Teslas seem to be on the same path as smartphones - even if the original hardware doesn't get any slower as such, the experience gets worse and worse and worse with updates, to a point where a car that's less than 10 years old is now uncomfortable to use. It's a tragedy.
That's the problem though: car interfaces shouldn't "look modern", they should provide access to features in a maximally safe and ergonomic way. Tesla seems to be going in the exact opposite direction, mirroring the trend of web and mobile technologies.
They should also work predictably and consistently. When I’m in an emergency going 70 miles per hour or stranded by the side of the road at 3AM, I don’t want to have to worry about whether I’m running Car2.0 or Car2.1 where they changed where the hazard light button was.
I owned a FIAT Punto for 13 years, did 250-300k kilometers with it and only replaced it because I had two kids and baby seats were a pain in the ass on a 3 doors model.
Still worked like a charm, and it wasn't a particularly fancy model or brand.
I hope GP just used "aging" meaning "not brand new", it would scare me deeply if we started replacing cars the way we do smartphones.
Average age of a car in the US is at least over 10 years I think. And probably 15 years before it's scrapped. Most wouldn't be with their original owner though.
That's about 49300 miles a year, or about 200 miles a day if you drive five days a week, 50 weeks out of the year. That's a lot of driving. What has pushed you to be driving so much?
I have a twenty year old Honda and a six year old Toyota and both feel amazing. The Honda doesn't feel new, but it doesn't have any problems. All I have to do is change the oil.
It shouldn't be; depending on source, average length of new car ownership in the US seems to be somewhere in the 7-9 year range, and average length of car ownership (including cars bought used) seems to be ~4 years, and average car lifespan seems to be around 15 years. A car 3-4 years from new shouldn't be “aging”.
That's likely what's happening. Owner buys it new, uses it for 7-9 years. Goes to the used market, where it gets 4 years. Maybe a second turn on the used market, and then it gets sold overseas. I hear the Middle East is a big consumer of used cars from the US.
Also, "aging" is going to be heavily influenced by socioeconomic group. For some people, aesthetic damage to the paint or interior is enough to qualify as aging. Other people are more interested in the functionality, and other people are interested in whatever drives. I have friends that consider a 3 year old car to be aging, and I have friends who drive 10 year old cars and think they're just fine.
I do think Teslas (and electric cars in general) are going to have an impact on the used car market, especially on the cheaper end. These batteries don't have tremendously long lifespans, and a replacement often costs as much as a cheap ICE car.
I'm curious if there's going to be any profit in repairing electric cars with new batteries to sell them in Mexico or other parts of the globe, or if we're basically just going to be cutting off part of the used car market. The social impacts of developing countries losing access to a relatively cheap supply of vehicles could be bad.
Average for modern cars is 20+ years, hence the 2021 change in odometer reporting regulations. It used to be 10 years before that based on older studies.
To keep the meme bubble Musk's created alive and justify the market cap as well as personal buying decisions, it is neccessary to create a conversation where a Tesla is always the default, the "normal".
Thus: A three year old car is "aging", the steering wheel falling off is no reason to complain [0] and buying a two-ton sportscar is the ultimate pro-environment move.
This isn't about market cap. It's about people doing mental gymnastics and adjusting expectation to feel like they got a fair deal or didn't get screwed. People make all the same excuses every time a Tacoma frame rusts out or the 3.4 eats a timing set.
The group you are describing are the ones who bought the car. The one I am describing are the ones who are holding Tesla shares/options and doing mental gymnastics how Tesla is still undervalued and will moon forever.
I'm afraid we have done long ago now. BMW estimates that 90% of buyers won't keep their car for longer than 3 years. They are rolling out a subscription model for features based on that fact - so you buy the car which has all the functions built-in from factory, but then pay an annual fee to unlock them. Fancy heated seats? You get a 7 day free trial, after that it's a paid unlock. Same with adaptive cruise control, adjustible suspension, sport driving modes, etc etc. Tesla might have pioneered this model but BMW is taking it all the way. And they have the gull to say it actually saves their customers money so it's a preferred option.
Well, apparently companies love these - it means that work vehicles can all be bought in "basic" cheapest spec, but if the employee driving them wants fancy gadgets, they can pay for it from their own pocket! What's not to like?? /s
In the article it states that the memory is burned every time a car is booted up and put in drive, that means if you drive many times each day,it's going to burn up faster than if you say, drive from LA to Vegas once a month. This is according to the Feds research.
Understood, but how many miles are we talking about here? I know plenty of cars with smaller touch screens that last the lifetime of the car (100k+ miles).
eMMC is fine if used appropriately. The problem appears to be that Tesla is (or was) writing frequent log file updates to eMMC, resulting in huge write amplification and a quick exhaustion of wear cycles.
If you buy in enough bulk, demand the emmc provider give you the source code and firmware update procedure for the emmc card. Get them to sign over rights to use that code to update cards you have purchased in the field.
There is no such thing as a failed emmc card - it's simply that the built in firmware has failed to correctly remap data around failing flash sectors. There is always life left in the actual flash provided you're happy to throw enough error correction at it.
Tesla’s volume isn’t even close. A million cars is a lot of cars, but we’re talking about smartphone hardware. A million phones is not a lot of phones.
The right solution is to use higher quality storage and to keep frequently-written logs on a removable device.
This is true. Early SSDs had double digit failure rates because of buggy controllers. The situation has gotten better but if you stress out cheap eMMC in an embedded application like a car there is a decent chance that the controller fails.
My motorbike is required to have the essential warning and information lights in a separate independent panel to the LCD screen. Whereas my Audi e-tron, and presumably the Telsa, doesn't seem to have this requirement, with the regular warning lights on the main screen.
is a safety issue since functions like the backup camera and defogging and defrosting setting controls stop working as well as audible chimes, which are used when the turn signal indicator is activated and to alert drivers while the vehicle’s Autopilot advanced driver assistance system is engaged
Interesting choice of functionality to call out; IMHO backup camera is much lower in importance (Teslas still have rear windows and physical side-mirrors) but HVAC and other controls normally used when traveling forwards would definitely be high. How about things like the speedometer?
The speedometer is on the dashboard display, which is a somewhat independent unit that will work fine even if the MCU (center console display) isn't working correctly.
I really wish they offered physical buttons. They could easily mock up a physical button 'break out box' and connect it to the system. It's how keyboards and mice have worked for eons...
Same, but I expect it wont happen. Looking forward to more options from other manufacturers that are capable of making a reasonable separation between what is vital and what is convenience or entertainment... and also generally not using touch screens for _anything_ while moving.
》At a daily cycle usage rate of 1.4 per block, accumulation of 3,000 P/E cycles would take only 5 to 6 years, the agency said.
Designed lifetime of Tesla cars is about 6 years. After that parts like batteries start failing and need expensive replacement. There is no after market for parts and no second hand market.
Normal car with basic maintenance lasts about 15-20 years.
They're not necessarily wrong, though. That battery will fail some day, and I can guarantee that it will lose its charge before the normal life expectancy of a car (15-20 years) is over.
If they still make batteries in 10 years then perhaps Tesla will prove to be the more ecological of the bunch. However, when I look for the price of a new battery for the Roadster, all I can find is discussions about how there are no batteries available, and if they are, the batteries are the price of a new, normal car. For the Model S, the price is much lower (about $13k + labour) but according to news posts I've found from the beginning of 2019, Tesla has already discontinued the batteries for that model.
For any car to be ecological, replacement parts need to be available for years after the original sales date. For most petrol-based cars, this has not been a problem, but for silicon valley company cars, this can be a dangerous pitfall. Batteries can suddenly fail, making the entire car worthless if there's no replacement available for a decent price.
It's a cool, high-tech car for rich people, which is a perfectly valid reason to get one, but if it really is that ecological only remains to be seen. Of course, it's still far more ecological to buy a used gasoline car and drive that around for another ten years than it is to buy a new EV purely because of the pollution that comes with producing a new car.
I bought my Tesla used. They still make the battery.
Longer term, I don't think that the economics of ICE cars will beat battery cars any more than the economics of horses beat cars. It is no more difficult to continue to make batteries available than transmissions.
We're still in the first decade of practical electric cars, and the 11th decade of ICE cars. It won't happen for a while.
It hurts me to no end the arrogance of the young engineers on pushing digital displays and completely removing analog displays. Of course when it comes to cars, this is actually a critical issue. But the same story has been playing out with all sorts of tech.
The motive to reinvent something entirely instead of making gradual improvements is something I cannot understand. It is like rewriting the entire healthcare bill and completely disrespecting the work of the previous generation of lawmakers instead of progressively enhancing it.
Maybe this comes out of genuine hate for the previous engineers. And if not hate, then they just didn't respect them much.
I hate the obsession with touch screens. Screens are great ways to show information, but a terrible way to take input. No tactile feedback, stateful placement of buttons, multi modal displays that are not consistent. Etc.
You could easily adjust features in your car while looking at the road using plain old dials and buttons.
Self driving cars. They'll turn right all by themselves to take you on a tour of advertisers. Mandatory expenditure before they'll take you to your destination. Pay more to turn it off...
Waze already does this -- it started with ads for food places nearby/on route and a "drive" button, now it's all categories. Sounds likely that some manufacturer will do this in some capacity. Maybe they'll market it as "recommended for you".
Waze is a mobile phone app that I get access to and maintenance of for free. If manufacturers think they'll get the same reaction from me on a car that I paid $40,000 for, they're in for a nasty surprise.
You're right, I didn't mean to justify this, just that it's been done before in a fitting way. I assume they'll borrow that implementation at some point.
Mercedes also makes the A-series and they're really entry level cars, parts are affordable, and the engines are super reliable. The bigger problem with Mercedes is that their electronics and software positively suck.
> Mercedes A series parts are affordable
> The headlight is only sold together with an electronics module for steerable headlight control attached, for a cool 800€.
That module is positioned in such a way that water collects around it if the car gets sufficiently splashed from the front, and it dies even though the PCB is conformally coated.
Yes, this is part and parcel for most cars now, even the cheap brands come with ridiculously expensive headlight assemblies, that are also completely not user serviceable. The LED revolution should have resulted in cheaper headlights, not more expensive ones. Fortunately my car still has a regular bulb and zero electronics outside of the ECU and the radio.
Not being sarcastic. A single, hi-res, (possibly oled?) screen that needs to be replaced in its entirety vs a bunch of individual components which can be individual replaced. The up-front cost may not be too different (possibly the screen is cheaper?) but how robust, how much flex, how much tolerance to vibration does it need to have over 5-10-15 years? And good luck getting one in 15 years. A knob is still a knob even on a wreck. An intact screen? Rare as hen's teeth I imagine. Increasing obsolescence right there.
Not great comparison but take iPad for example (different scale of production of course). It’s packed with tech and won’t magically rub off even in 50 years of use. Likeliest failure is software obsolescence, battery, charging and drops.
And as Tesla is finding out when you have critical safety systems such as wipers or defrosters attached to a touchscreen and that screen can fail- then you will face a mandated recall from the us government. Hell even Honda's trash infotainment system got hit this year because their gauge cluster and rearview camera could fail. https://www.consumerreports.org/car-recalls-defects/honda-re...
Screens are much more likely to be tied to complex systems that could fail. Buttons talking to a BCM by grounding out wires is pretty simple and if there were ever a recall on a switch the part would be cheap.
Mazda has no real interest in EVs. They have publicly said that BEVs are not the future and a stupid concept. They are just producing EVs to please the EU.
Based entirely on their MX-30 car design, I'd believe it. It's a fairly stupid design that slavishly mimics many aspects of the much and controversial older BMW i3.
Most driving interactions in a Tesla are through the stalk or knob rollers on the steering wheel (that adjust based on situation). It is very well thought out.
Voice is an option for nearly everything as well, and it is actually good.
The key is that they aren't locked into an outdated fixed UI. Blackberry lost because of their keyboard.
Finally, for the scattering of buttons in a traditional vehicle that are used rarely, you still have to visually scan the entire dash to find it and hope their icon is meaningful. This takes your eyes further from the road than a well positioned, responsive screen.
> Finally, for the scattering of buttons in a traditional vehicle that are used rarely, you still have to visually scan the entire dash to find it and hope their icon is meaningful
No you don't.
Many drivers, including myself, will adjust thermostat controls simply through touch and feel.
Controversial take. I think Blackberry lost primarily because of their locked-in/niche OS at a time when the app scene was exploding. The keyboard if anything was a compelling reason to stay with them, especially in the exec/professionals sector of the market.
If blackberry had successfully executed a full iteration of their build/design quality with Android OS at a point where they could have retained their enterprise dominance, I think they would still be a major player today.
But it didn't go that way (a major cause for which was the scale of change that would have been needed to pivot BES/BIS early enough). I don't think the keyboard contributed to Blackberry's demise.
That weird scroll nubbin, on the other hand.... and let's not forget the 'haptic' touch on the Storm.
I would argue that the BB keyboards was bad, its just that contemporary alternatives like T9 and the first touchscreens were even worse.
I would say that a modern swipe keyboard after training by far beats old style BB keyboards (not real computer keybords where you can use up to 10 fingers).
Actually blackberry keyboards were awesome, I use swype on Android which is pretty good, but the blackberry was less fatiguing.
I still miss my blackberry for sending emails. There were keyboard shortcuts for everything too, like press F to forward or R to reply, q to expand display names to email addresses.
You could also assign tasks for when you held down a key at the home screen.
Most models also had a dedicated hardware mute button with distinct tones for mute/unmute.
If you were a heavy user they were much quicker than touch screens.
They just sucked at anything unrelated to email, and weren't great for most users who never bother to learn their tools and become efficient.
I recently got a Tesla, so maybe it just takes getting used to, but I miss tactile controls.
I think a row of knobs along the bottom edge that correspond to the buttons/icons directly above would be the best of both worlds: flexibility of software-defined controls (except the number/spacing becomes fixed), with the tactility of real knobs.
I think the model 3 has horrible controls. The scroll-wheels are imprecise and feel like a $5 mouse. And because there are only two stalks, it means features are moved to the touchscreen or overloaded (autopilot == PRND depending on context)
The model S/X have better controls + a dashboard. Autopilot is controlled by a separate stalk.
That said, controlling lights and climate control with tiny touchscreen targets in a moving car is... ludicrous.
Can you not just push the voice control button and say, “turn on the fog lights”? I thought the idea with the voice control was that everything could be done through it?
I've never driven a Tesla or another car with a touchscreen. I almost never need fog lights, so I wouldn't even know which knob to turn which way in my new car. Doesn't help that it's different for every car manufacturer. I'd actually prefer a touchscreen with big, properly labeled buttons for this.
Yes, but I also need to take my eyes off the road (like for the touchscreen) and look for small symbols in a badly lit corner of the dashboard (unlike for the touchscreen).
Look, I'm not arguing for replacing physical controls with touchscreens, I'm just pointing out that it's not as clear-cut as some knob-proponents would have you believe.
Sure, a touchscreen might be better for discovery, for when you need to use a thing you've never used before.
Physical controls excel at repeated use though, because you develop muscle memory for it. Imagine if the blinkers had to be activated through the touch screen. That sounds completely ridiculous, right?
> Physical controls excel at repeated use though, because you develop muscle memory for it. Imagine if the blinkers had to be activated through the touch screen.
Again, you're arguing against a point of view which I've never professed.
Yes, of course it would be ridiculous if you had to activate your blinkers through the touchscreen. Did anyone claim otherwise? Are the blinkers in a Tesla controlled through the touchscreen?
> Again, you're arguing against a point of view which I've never professed.
Fair enough, but your argument that physical buttons aren't so great basically boils down to "they suck the first time". Which is correct, but in the long run they're simply superior.
> Finally, for the scattering of buttons in a traditional vehicle that are used rarely, you still have to visually scan the entire dash to find it and hope their icon is meaningful. This takes your eyes further from the road than a well positioned, responsive screen.
You have to scan the dash roughly in the area you recall the button may be, and identify it visually. After that, you can return your gaze to the road, while your hand finds and manipulates the button. Touchscreens require you to focus your eyes on the button for all the time it takes to find it, press it, and confirm the UI actually registered the press.
This is why when I am designing HMIs for equipment in the industrial realm I use buttons when the machine operator needs to be watching the work being done. Humans have limited I/O. They CAN feel and touch something as they are looking at something else. However they can only LOOK at one thing at a time. This is still a very heated area of discussion in industrial controls. https://www.controldesign.com/articles/2017/do-you-actually-...
I never use my eyes to find a dash button when driving. This seems like a ridiculous strawman set up to defend touch screens. The only buttons I look at to use are the clock adjust buttons, because they are tiny and flush with the dash, but using those only when parked is easy to do.
> Most driving interactions in a Tesla are through the stalk or knob rollers on the steering wheel (that adjust based on situation). It is very well thought out.
Does the tesla know that I've changed heading and the sun is now providing some radiative heating and the thermostat can be turned down? Does it know that I got a chip off my windshield that affects the cameras, and I need to manually turn the windshield wipers (or brights, or etc) on and off every time a vehicle passes and sprays me? Maybe I just want a big ol' power/volume knob to turn it off and on easily without looking - most cars have those on the steering wheel and I hate them.
(To be clear, I love Tesla and I truly hope they continue to succeed - but even more, I hope Toyota et al get it through their thick heads that BEVs are the future and gain ground in a hurry. Competition should make everyone better...)
> Does the tesla know that I've changed heading and the sun is now providing some radiative heating and the thermostat can be turned down
All (well, maybe only those manufactured within the last 5 or 10 years) cars have an auto temperature mode which regulates the temperature for you if it deviates from the set temperature.
Mazda has been removing touchscreens from its vehicles a model at a time and replacing them with HUD designs and physical controls, explicitly for driving safety reasons.
I just wish Mazda had higher output cars, I’d buy in a heartbeat. I have a Miata for Autocross but I want a turbo/good ev for daily, and I can’t get it from them.
With the new outback, it's whack how it takes around 5 seconds of staring at the touchscreen to accomplish acts like turning off the heated seats. In most cars you don't have to take your eyes off the road to do that
Yes the same for me. Just touch is so bad and backward inovation in so many ways. No blind use etc. I wonder if the idea from B&R Automation is any good. They engrave buttons and sliders in touch displays for this reason.
Completely agree. The new electric Mustang seems like a pretty decent car (despite being a Mustang in name only), but the godawful screen stuck to the dash ruins it for me.
At least they kept a physical volume knob, although apparently its just glued onto the screen and has virtual fingers that emulate a finger touching the screen.
I agree, and when I rent a car with a touchscreen it feels unusable and unsafe. I don't want to have to look at the screen every time I use it.
What's even crazier to me is the way futuristic movies depict interfaces that float in the air. Has anyone thought that through? Your arms would get tired so fast. There's a reason our best input methods have our arms resting on a surface.
That was the first complete light-pen system that could be used by a non-programmer. Sutherland immediately declared the light pen was a stupid idea because all the blood drains out of your hand.
Dials are way better than buttons. For one you need to find out up/down etc where as the dial is just one operation. Esp for things like volume and temperature adjustment.
Top top that dials/knobs are more reliable than buttons.
I still covet the Honda Civic/Accord 2004-2008 dashboard. I didn't even use the steering mounted controls as the knobs were so easy to use.
I can't stand this aspect of newer cars. It also means you're often hosed if you want to update the infotainment system.
I've driven a model 3 and I find the gigantic tablet to be not only distracting but impossible to safely interact with while driving. Maybe I'd get used to it but I heavily rely on the tactility and feel of buttons and dials to know what I'm doing while keeping my eyes on the road.
It was not a pleasant surprise when I was looking at some mid 2010 Ford Super Duties and wanted to research what it would take to add in an Apple CarPlay head unit. (wasn't added an option from the factory until 2017). Turns out if you get a Lariat or even a well optioned out XLT you get saddled with a touch screen that integrates nonsense like the HVAC and heated seats. The interface is dreadful and you'd be stuck with it for the life of the vehicle. Thanks for nothing Ford.
Yeah I hate it, I do have some friends who have upgraded their head units with canbus interfaces that allow aftermarket head units to control things like heated seats and climate. To them the cost was worth it- I am still too cheap.
I would love a hybrid approach: gimme touchscreens, gimme some physical controls especially for hardware actions like popping the trunk. C'mon, a software update isn't going to delete my trunk, so put a button for it.
> gimme some physical controls especially for hardware actions like popping the trunk
I'm with you on this, but it's a pretty great example of when a touchscreen isn't a safety hazard: very unlikely I'll want to pop the trunk while I need to keep my eyes on the road.
That would be great. My older BMW doesn't let me do that despite having physical buttons for almost everything. I got stranded once because of this. Manual said to call roadside assistance, which is real helpful when I don't have cell service.
Agreed. Rather than a built-in screen I want to see a simple slot for a tablet with an app that is fully integrated with your car. The screen will be outdated within a couple of years and is a waste of resource. Really wish people designed products with longevity in mind.
Edit: just realized this is probably what Apple will end up doing.
My car has a very nice compromise: the center screen is surrounded by physical buttons, with a mini-screen on the surface of each button. The buttons display different, relevant functions based on the context being displayed on the center screen. Even the rotary dial switches context.
Muscle memory kicks in just like with buttons. The Volvo infotainment does that really well. You can easily learn where something is. Meanwhile with BMWs you still constantly have to look at what you are doing. But that was even normal back when iDrive first came out. The problem is the execution and design, not the technology itself.
> Screens are great ways to show information, but a terrible way to take input. No tactile feedback, stateful placement of buttons
I never understand this. Unless the interface has like, no more than 2 buttons on it, I'm no better at using buttons than a touch screen. Are people regularly interfacing with complex analogue button systems without even glancing at them?
You must be young enough that you never messaged your friends discretely in your pocket using the low latency deterministic haptic interface of a good old Nokia.
Also, there was a case locally not too long ago where a victim of a bloody knife attack almost bled out trying to unlock their phone and dial 911 with bloody fingers.
> Also, there was a case locally not too long ago where a victim of a bloody knife attack almost bled out trying to unlock their phone and dial 911 with bloody fingers.
Can't find what you're looking for on Google, but Apple has been trying to fix this by allowing you to press the lock button 5 times to bring up emergency SOS. There's also an 'emergency' button on the passcode screen.
> The home button or whatever fancy biometric unlocking to work with a bloody finger or face.
I think emergency calls work on most phones without unlocking. My android phone is locked with a pin and that input screen has the option to make an emergency call.
yes! do you not touch type? have you used a game controller?
at least some tesla UI requires touchscreen interface for things such as wiper control [1]. normally this is a lever and tactile knob, with zero distraction potential and no learning curve beyond where to put your hand.
personally, i've memorized the stereo controls of every car i've driven more than a few times.
The alternative for adjusting the wipers is to either press once, leave it on 'auto' (it seems to work well enough for me, but talk from last year suggested it didn't work well), or use voice commands like 'wipers up', 'wipers down', 'wipers max/min/1/2/3/4'.
My instinct is that glancing at an analogue button is much quicker than looking at a touch screen. I can briefly glance to get a rough position of a tactile control, then look back to the road as I reach out. I'll then rely on touch to get the precise location. With a touch screen I need to continue looking at the control until my finger is in the correct position.
I'm blind and my life is all about not glancing at buttons that lack braille prints on them as well. I fear the moment when I'll need to turn on the missing accessibility service on a car's OS in order to open the window.
Back in old days, I could send text messages with phone in my pocket. In my car, I can control all analog knobs without taking my eyes off the road but still need to look at touchscreen for a few interactions.
If my understanding is correct, essentially what happened here is that the computer that drives the touch screen was actually failing (MCU / media control unit). Apparently they were just logging so much stuff to disk that the flash storage would eventually wear out in a few years, due to the chips having a limited number of writes in their lifespan. this doesn’t affect the ability to drive but without the computer you can’t see your speedometer, many vehicle controls, etc. or even connect with your phone (which normally could replace the main display in a pinch).
they changed the software to log less a while ago, but the damage was done on many cars. Not 100% sure this recall is related to the same issue but it sounds like that’s what they’re saying
“ Investigators determined that the expected usage life rating for the 8GB eMMC NAND flash memory device is about 3,000 Program-Erase cycles, after which the eMMC NAND flash memory device would become fully consumed and no longer be operational. At a daily cycle usage rate of 1.4 per block, accumulation of 3,000 P/E cycles would take only five to six years, the agency said”
Another way to read this is the feds are trying to send the message "if you're gonna ship junk that you know will break please act like Toyota and run a rolling recall or be like the Koreans and offer a crazy warranty".
The fix is definitely that simple, and model 3/y doesn’t have (or hasn’t yet had) that issue, so they must have solved it. I think it’s unclear if this issue is still happening with recent software since I can’t find any reports about this message as of recent.
I don't own one, and each friend I ask tells me the same thing across S, 3, X, and Y: "Great tech! Amazing experience! I mean, sure, fit and finish is a problem, repairs take forever, hard to get parts, you just live with the smallish problems... Well, no, never had this many issues on <any other car brand> but this is the future I'm driving! I'll get even newer stuff in upgrades... Oh, the physical parts? That's a problem... But the savings! Of course, no gas payments! Well my power bill did increase, but it's gotta be cheaper than my gas."
Each person was initially effusive then, when pushed, realistic. Sloppy assembly, broken features, things that we would never accept in a usd$90K car from any other brand... Til Tesla both lowered and raised the bar, depending on your pov.
The power of Brand: the comfort with paying more for an item or service wirh equal or less quality than alternatives in general, but with one (or a small cluster of) perceived unique value prop. Amazing.
And even with all the evidence of the problems, I still want one too...
(A coda: the cutesy naming of tesla sort of sums it up around lots of flash, some amazing function, some tawdry qualities: the models sure are "s3xy".)