Anyway "considered redundant backup not necessary for level 2 autonomy" breaks the "all Teslas now have the HW required for full autonomy" promise. They should have told customers.
I suspect the internal decisionmaking will have decided that there are already components of the car which are not double-redundant. For example, if the front left wheel falls off, you're gonna crash. It's simply designed to happen rarely enough that it doesn't have a substantial impact on safety.
This powersteering unit now has a lot of field data about failures - they have 3M+ power steering units on the road.
So they may now have the confidence to put the powersteering into that category of "single redundant, but sufficiently reliable to be acceptable". Whereas before they had that data, it wasn't.
'Internally, Tesla employees said that adding “level 3” functionality, which would allow a driver to use their Tesla hands-free without steering in normal driving scenarios, would need the dual electronic control unit system and therefore require a retrofit at a service visit.'
There was V2, v2.5, V3.
With both compute and camera improvements.
It's pretty much expected that you will need some form of hw upgrade if your car is >2 years old when the FSD becomes a thing.
And it's included in the pricing.
> "There's still a mechanical component of course. But in today's vehicles, when you 'turn the wheel' you are providing an electronic signal telling your car to go left or right."
I think what the article is trying to say is that almost all the torque turning the wheels is from the electric power steering, while your hands are just providing a small input that the torque sensors pick up. The fact that there is a mechanical connection doesn't really make much of a difference (except when power steering fails).
And the "previous generation" of power steering was hydraulic, which had a similar behaviour and setup in that it is an amplification of steering input.
Electric power steering allows for configurability of steering difficulty, which tends to engender the feeling of precision at a certain point along the effort curve. (Variable for different people, naturally).
Plus, with more powerful electric systems (better alternators, basically), moving hydraulic steering pump from belt-driven frees up the engine a bit, yielding less drag and better fuel efficiency.
But fundamentally, I believe that in modern vehicles, due to their weight, direct steering linkages are a bit rare.
Direct steering linkages are a major safety feature that isn’t going away because at high speed you need minimal steering input. My power steering died in a 3,000 lb car and I didn’t get it replaced for a few weeks because it was only noticeable at very low speeds.
Personally, I prefer electric steering because it takes so little torque input. My Mercedes cabrio was heavy and tiring to steer, but I can steer the Mirage with my fingertips. As a bonus, the steering is tuned to "tighten up" at speed, which effectively makes the car snappier without actually changing the alignment.
Are you talking about a car without power steering, or a car with failed power steering? Because I remember being quite surprised how hard it was to steer a car rolling downhill after I turned off the engine (I thought it would be smart to conserve fuel, did not realise how unsafe that was).
I think he is talking about the former. I've also had power steering fail on me and it took everything I had to get home. And I was ~2 minutes from home.
I am talking about a car with failed power steering. It is very hard to steer when moving slow, not so hard when moving. Presumably this could vary depending on vehicle mass and other factors but I do notice that both you and the person who replied to you with an incorrect assumption both made it, despite having to use your muscles.
Modern cars have crap suspensions/steering geometry for unassisted steering. This is a side effect of the geometry that helps keep their wide tires from making them wander all over the road. That said, it's only a marginal increase in effort. Modern cars are just fat. An Altima curbs at about the same weight as a base spec 2wd pickup that would have come with manual steering in the 80s and the Altima has a much higher steering ratio.
It also depends on the size of the car. I drove late 1990s Geo Metros and Ford Aspires without power steering. (I worked for a car rental agency.) It wasn't a big deal because the cars were tiny, but I think I would have struggled if the big pickup trucks had manual steering.
It's gotten progressively harder over the decades because both steering wheels and steering ratios have gotten smaller as the reliability of power steering systems has improved. I think many people would have a very hard time controlling a modern car in the case of a power steering failure.
That paragraph is a straightforward description of power steering. It doesn’t suggest that Teslas are drive by wire. The article is not incorrect in this instance.
Electronic power steering has been in use since the mid 80's, the article is framing it as some new technology. And steering behavior has been software defined since the intro of electronic power steering with electronic stability control(introed in 1983), etc...
Seems like a non issue? I’m guessing Tesla has plenty of data about failures on those components to know whether the redundancy is needed. And there’s a mechanical steering connection anyway.
Sounds like the worst that can come of this would be Tesla has to retrofit the part into a bunch of cars for FSD.
The headline here is that this is yet another instance of the company lying to its customers. Yes, intentionally withholding information is a form of lying. I do not understand how we can live in a time that people are disgusted with Facebook's behavior and VW's scandal in living memory and consciously give Tesla the benefit of the doubt. It is all corporations lying to consumers in the name of the bottom line. You either like it or you don't. The shape of the logo does not matter.
How exactly is the company lying? It’s not like the spec sheet for the car specifically lists redundant power steering systems, it’s a minor implementation detail.
Would you expect Tesla to also put out an announcement if they started sourcing their upholstery from a different source, or used different stitching on the steering wheel? None of this thing impact the usability of the car in any meaningful way, and none of them are listed as part of the detailed specs.
Teslas also add new things to their cars all the time, such as matrix headlights that they added to the Model 3 last year, and heat pump based heating system.
> Internally, Tesla employees said that adding “level 3” functionality, which would allow a driver to use their Tesla hands-free without steering in normal driving scenarios, would need the dual electronic control unit system and therefore require a retrofit at a service visit.
How many of these customers are expecting to simply update their car to FSD over the air? I agree, other manufacturers would not have the responsibility. But one of the main selling points of Tesla has been that, one day, your car will drive itself if you choose to buy $X upgrade with the heavy implication of over the air.
Edit: Consider this, in the future, when people go to sell their cars, potential buyers will ask "does this car have the dual ECU?" for the sole reason of inquiring if they need to go to get the car serviced for FSD. If you don't think this makes Tesla bound to inform their customers that their car will obviously be impacted on resale and allow them to back out of the purchase, I don't think we will ever see eye to eye.
> How many of these customers are expecting to simply update their car to FSD over the air? I agree, other manufacturers would not have the responsibility. But one of the main selling points of Tesla has been that, one day, your car will drive itself if you choose to buy $X upgrade with the heavy implication of over the air.
I understand your point but it would be just as simple as that, when you purchase FSD, you are notified that you have to go to the nearest Tesla service to get it, at no extra cost (well, beside the FSD cost obviously). It's an annoyance, sure, but not a big deal.
> Tesla did not disclose the exclusion, which has already affected tens of thousands of vehicles being shipped to customers in China, Australia, the U.K., Germany and other parts of Europe.
Do you honestly think that cars produced in a country stay in that country?
Most of them will, and the odds of FSD coming to Europe are zero to none. The EU has already been putting rules out on the topic of FSD, and honestly I doubt Teslas will meet the bar, with or without dual steering systems.
I agree that Tesla are lying about the idea their cars have all the hardware needed for FSD. But that was true (at least in EU cars) before this change.
I agree. There was an article recently about the new mayor of NYC being caught eating fish even though he’s claimed many times to be vegan. He was complaining that the “food police” was harassing him over something trivial.
My reaction was the same as to this news. I don’t care if Tesla made a small change, and I don’t care what Adams eats. I care about transparency and honesty.
Hilarious considering the 2 things are completely different.
I'm not paying Adams many thousands of dollars to be Vegan.
People are paying Tesla many tens of thousands of dollars to do stuff they claim they will do, haven't yet done, and by these actions are even more unlikely to be able to do.
If your criteria are "people paid thousands of dollars", I bet you could find two donors of $2,000 or more to Adams who did so because they wanted a vegan mayor.
Now, I agree they are not the same severity. But the line you drew doesn't make sense.
Would you want Tesla to publish _every_ small change they make, or just this one because you read about it? Because absolutely no company in the world anywhere will publish all changes they make to their product or production line.
What we're seeing here is a rather pesky bias called "Isolated Demand for Rigor". You shouldn't feel bad: it's quite common, very hard to figure out if you don't know about it, and almost impossible if it mixes with confirmation bias. For a fun post about it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...
Well. For certain values of fun. I always thought Scott was so pissed at this bias he was in a very "fuck you" mood when he wrote it.
Whoa. My own car already has throttle-by-wire i.e. no mechanical linkage for that. Brakes is debatable; I assume if the ABS unit fails they revert to "dumb" hydraulic brakes with the usual rendundancy (pairs of wheels fail independently plus you still have some backup from the parking brake).
But steering by wire? That's what the article implies, though another comment already debunks it. I hope there are exactly no cars on the road today that are steering-by-wire. I.e. they all degrade to non-power, mechanical steering if the electronic or hydraulic gimcrackery fails.
Does this actually change how much the wheel turns or just the level of power steering? The wiki seems to suggest it does, though this seems dangerous to me. You don't drive the same on the highway as you do in a parking lot.
It changes how much the wheel turns, but it's subtle / intuitive so you don't notice it's there. Unless you drive the same kind of car without the option, then you notice the steering seems not as nice.
It is also used by stability control to counter-steer small amounts of oversteer. But it can only do so for a relatively small amount of wheel angle change, not turn the wheel 90 degrees or something like that.
As described in the article, it's the self-driving computer who is "steering by wire", not the human driver.
If the powered steering fails, then the computer cannot steer. Therefore, there was redundancy in the powered steering system. The redundancy was removed because of a chip shortage, and this was considered acceptable because the self driving feature still requires the driver to keep hands on the steering wheel anyway.
>The redundancy was removed because of a chip shortage, and this was considered acceptable because the self driving feature still requires the driver to keep hands on the steering wheel anyway
But aren't we pretending that this year the autopilot /FSD will actually live to their names? Or will Tesla put the chip back later this year ?
Electric power steering / steer by wire systems still have a backup mechanical link. This issue here is the backup when in self-driving mode, where nobody would have their hands on the wheel so you couldn't rely on that link. So instead you have to have a second system as a backup instead.
> Electric power steering / steer by wire systems still have a backup mechanical link.
Electric power steering and steer by wire are two different things. A steer by wire system does not have a "mechanical link" backing up the function of the electronics.
If your Antilock Braking System fails, then your brakes will continue to work as they always did, save the fact that they’ll lock the wheels if you press too hard. If there weren’t a light on the dashboard, it is unlikely one would notice ABS failure (unless, of course, one is in a situation where ABS would come in handy, like an ice-covered road).
" So the cars in the fleet essentially becoming self-driving via software update, I think, might end up being the biggest increase in asset value of any asset class in history"
This sentence is packed so tightly with irony that I can't believe it was uttered by a self-aware human. Yes, it's a great idea that two ton vehicles capable of 100mph just "update" themselves to be fully self-driving. Because what could go wrong? Forget about terminators, just the strategic risk in the event of a cyberwar. Astonishing lack of awareness. And he complains that AI is "summoning the demon"?
And yes, they are just "an asset class" whose value needs to be increased because STONKS. I can't even.
You're being downvoted, but you're not wrong about the strategic risk. I worked on that for a while and at least got people to take it seriously. When I started there weren't even regulations coming for self-driving cars. At the end of the day, we use nukes to deter against strategic risks and if undeterrable adversaries have strategic capabilities then we're doing it wrong.
The thing is when you want to go global with a "10s in 1000 hours" problems is that it'll happen every single day to thousands of people. It's all fun and games when you're a website or a mobile app, not so much when you're a 500+hp two tonnes metal cage using public infrastructure as a beta test sandbox
Was that the minor version that introduced phantom braking? Or the minor version tossed over the fence a few days later that "fixed" phantom braking? Or the minor version after that re-introduced a different phantom braking issue? Or the minor version after that...
Sure, the OP said that Tesla FSD is "fancy cruise control with lane assist".
If you have FSD Beta 10.10 installed in your car (which 60K+ people have in the US), you can input a destination and it will take you there. That includes stop/go at green lights, changing lanes, going around parked cars, making un-protective left turns etc.
It's not perfect, but it's beta, and the iterative improvements have been very noticeable over the past few months.
That could be true, but given that few systems cannot be compromised by a determined attacker with resources, it seems worth thinking through what happens if a fleet of these is controlled remotely by people with bad intent.
I think online commentators don't understand how low the general public's bar for "safe" is.
People will be elated if they can buy a car that can chauffeur them around as well as a teenager who's had their learner's permit for two days. At least with the car you're already in the driver's seat and don't need to articulate to it what it's doing wrong. Sure you'll have to keep an eye on it to make sure it's not setting itself up for a situation it can't handle but you have to keep an eye on the teenager too.
Crappy half-baked automation is prevalent the world over in all sorts of situations. The normal, unwashed, much derided masses are perfectly capable of learning its quirks so they can keep it out of trouble. The idea that a car "can't see" bollards or bike lane marking or partial lane obstructions or whatever is not a hard one for people to grasp.
The solution to "teenagers having their learner's permit for two days are dangerous" is not to put an untested, shitty OpenCV car on the road, it's to make your driving tests and lessons more than just "drive twice around the block". I've seen Teslas do things learners would never do.
I think the critics see the amount of bugs in code that has been tested much more than self-driving cars and have very reasonable doubts about giving over something as important as driving. Even without (say) foreign actors trying to hack the cars or jamming the sensors, they seem to keep driving into stationary objects all on their own.
Pieces of software like OS kernels and browsers run code quadrillions upon quadrillions of times per day and yet still suffer hundreds, if not thousands of critical security vulnerabilities. Testing only demonstrates the presence of bugs, not the absence.
There's a whole field of high-assurance software, with verification, formally-proven compilers with translation validation. Only there is there hope that one can write software and prove it, with a machine-checked proof, correct. Tesla is not that far. Not even close.
Critics mostly have made the correct observation that the investment, time and effort required for each increment of improvement seems to place the problem in the “theoretically possibly but probably practically unreachable” domain.
Tesla can’t even implement auto breaking on a straightaway that doesn’t kill model pedestrians in controlled testing. Only the truly credulous think they can get to FSD in any realistic timeframe let alone Musk’s fantasies.
I wonder. Even with the (loud) minority of extreme fanboys, I'd argue that most fans probably know more about Tesla's strategy and the current tech than most others.
Another, then. These fans are often the ones parroting the entirely incorrect "You have to have incidents and near misses in order to train it to do the right thing next time".
I don't think Musk zealots realize how stupid it was to demand it work with only camera sight, banning LIDAR, so the AI has piss data without depth perception to work with
Tesla's FSD will never come to fruition as a stand-alone system.
I agree it will need to go beyond cameras if it ever works. But the question becomes, will Tesla be on the hook to upgrade the sensors in cars that are camera only, or will they instead deploy unworkable software to those cars?
Funny thing is, they removed Radar because it provided less accurate data on depth than their vision system. I doubt that there's much gain in including an additional source of depth information.
Sure, it might be more precise than what is possible with vision alone, but it's also not needed.
It is the absolute standard in any safety-critical industry to have multiple sensors all feeding data and making up for each other's weaknesses. Cars are not excluded from that.
I refuse to believe that Tesla's image-based AI can discern better distance and depth information than LIDAR (even if they're using cameras with calibrated positioning for stereoscopic vision or something) without better sources than "Elon said so."
And I am talking about LIDAR not RADAR, even though RADAR also could be used as yet another sensor in the stack. Using only regular vision is a typical dumb Musk thing; LIDAR was quite a bit more expensive when these self-driving things begun to take hold and Musk didn't want that cost so he went all-in with his own dumb solution of "software will fix it."
Reminds me a bit about how Musk originally wanted to fly people to Mars, by 2014, with a launch escape system on the rocket.
By now the launch escape system has been scrapped wholesale, the new approach; Just have to fly enough rockets, without exploding, until safety becomes a side-effect of economies of scale and improved tech.
It's a combination of "tech your way out of the problem" with "grow your way out of the problem". Which might be a viable approach for creating non-integral software products, but seems like a really bad fit when peoples lives are at stake.
Not that much, honestly. They've already switched tech stack multiple times. They recently removed radar from new cars, the 'camera only' stack hasn't been tested that much. They also have mostly tested on and built for California roads and weather.
My Tesla once tried to steer me into a guard rail (multiple times) because the setting sun caused a lens flare. You can't tell me that this is well tested technology that will enable level 3. Only after doing that twice, autopilot noticed it and disables autosteer.
The cameras also have condensation and freezing issues, causing them to not work on cold, wet days.
This was a car that was, according to Elon, fully equipped for self driving.
I really enjoyed autosteer, but there's major flaws in the current implementation and I seriously doubt they'll deliver on current hardware. If they don't, I'm really curious about the outcome of the lawsuits.
Compared to actual safety critical automation systems, designed to operate with humans? It hasn’t even started.
Edit, as I pressed enter by mistake.
What’s happening now isn’t testing, as a system as whole isn’t ready for that. It starts with proper design and long validation, before you can start talking about proper testing. Tesla is rewriting all parts of it constantly. What’s happening right now is mostly PR exercise, plus collection of low quality training data.
Pithey comment that is true based on current usage patterns, but a total lie when everyone starts flying to work or the grocery store... and they're the pilot.
If drivers got the same training and stuck to the same rules as airline pilots, we'd have a lot less accidents. Most accidents [citation needed] are still caused by reckless driving; inattentiveness (exacerbated by driving assistance), speeding, drunk driving, aggressive driving, etc.
Moving to automatic driving will probably be a thing long term, but for the short term, it's a human problem. If only people were held more accountable for driving badly.
I vaguely recall that the risks are closer than you'd expect when going by hours of flight, rather than distance. I'm not finding the numbers right now though.
Even the 737 MAX was very safe though. That's why it was notable: it was a genuine safety regression with a clear root cause in an industry that had been getting steadily and inexorably safer for decades and decades.
General Aviation is in totally different situation than what Tesla is doing. GA is so over-regulated that we're flying decades old small planes as it is financially not feasible to bring something new to market and have it certified. Progress is mostly done on experimental/ultra-light planes. Those suffers similar issue as they are limited to certain weight and even feasible safety features often can't be added due to weight limits.
On the other side of safety spectrum you have Tesla that is pushing something-like-autonomous-driving software to common people to try out on real streets.
The majority of those aviation rules and regulations are written in blood. While unfortunate, it's not surprising to me that automated vehicles may follow the same path. Regulators are rarely forward thinking.
The problem isn't that regulators cannot be proactive.
The problem is that no one wants to be regulated. Just look at crypto, people love the lack of regulation. However, once there is a crash or enough people get scammed, there will be demand for regulations to prevent that from happening again.
Weight limits, and then electrics. A lot of GA planes have multiple things - lights + radios, wired into the same circuit because there's not enough circuits to keep them all separate.
I'm expecting a Ghost in the Shell type attack on Tesla's update software that gives all the Tesla's self driving, and they auto-drive themselves to the next protest, ala Freedom Convoy without the truckers. Then brick them, once they reach the protest, so they can't be driven home (only towed).
Sounds kinda like the bigger issue where they were removing features on delivered vehicles. I don't have the link in front of me but there was a reddit thread about I believe Y models where customers were getting delivered vehicles without the passenger lumbar even though it was a listed feature on purchase. I know they have done it on other things as well. Common problem across all modern tech companies, the ability to communicate is not present.
> Under pressure to hit fourth-quarter sales goals while coping with widespread semiconductor shortages, Tesla decided to remove one of the two electronic control units that are normally included in the steering racks of some made-in-China Model 3 and Model Y cars, according to two employees and internal correspondence seen by CNBC.
A complete non-story, as long as it still passes safety checks. The automotive industry is always looking to save a few cents here and there - the only requirement is that it does not compromise safety.
> "So the cars in the fleet essentially becoming self-driving via software update, I think, might end up being the biggest increase in asset value of any asset class in history. We shall see."
Elon Musk, the billion dollar man with a billion promises. I'll make a few bets on this:
1. It won't happen this year. He has been incorrectly guessing it at when it will be ready for many years now.
2. If it does happen this year, it will be blocked legally until proper regulation is ready. If a self-driving car crashes, who is responsible? This needs to be answered, because if it turns out to be Tesla, things will get expensive real quick.
3. If it's not blocked legally, it will be disabled for everybody except those on a subscription service:
> Drivers can also buy a more advanced version, called Full Self-Driving, or FSD, for $12,000 or $199 a month (in the U.S.).
It won't end up being quite the value-add it's claimed to be. Whatever happened to the Tesla car that would pay for itself? So far it seems to just require even more money, for features already suggested to be free when the idea of the car was first sold.
> "If something like a chip or an ECU is not providing additional functionality, if it is truly redundant, you may be able to turn it off or leave it out. With chips and software, there's a little bit of wiggle room. I can reassign stuff here and there," he said.
Not entirely true. Whilst the infotainment system may have enough processing power to run all the safety critical tasks, you don't want it to. Crashing your infotainment is inconvenient, but a 5 second reboot is not the end of the world. Crashing your ABS, throttle control, steering control, etc, is not an option.
A lot of safety critical stuff is usually also proven with tonnes of testing (rather than formal validation) - but that testing is highly coupled to the hardware its running on. You know for example that system X will reliably poll some pin at 1k times a second, because it is the only thing running on the chip. It cannot be interrupted or delayed. The more tasks you add, the great the risk of not hitting timing targets, the larger the testing surface, the greater number of possible states it can be in, etc.
And fearmongering like this - "We have to keep trying, otherwise it'll be regulated out of existence and we'll have to wait generations" is absolutely uncalled for.
It's being regulated because people like Musk value their cars, sorry, "asset class" more than they do about the risks that they are taking.
It’s absolutely not possible, and I think he’s crossed the Rubicon into full scale fraud at this point. There’s plenty of videos out there showing just basic failures of the system. Last week a popular Youtuber ran into a pylon on it while making a video. It was a simple right turn with great visibility and no traffic, but the system still couldn’t prevent it. Could have been a person.
That's what I was thinking. At what point do statements like this from a CEO constitute fraud? Especially given the historic record. I suppose if there isn't sufficient and directly attributable damage done, it's not going to be pursued.
I don't understand why this kind of coverage gets so much purchase. Cars don't come with bills of materials for the consumer and never have. Substitutions and configuration changes like this are the rule in the industry, not the exception. Yet... when Tesla does it it's worth clicks?
FWIW: It's a backup for the power steering system, which is in fact not a safety device even in modern vehicles. Tesla's steering is mechanical, like almost all cars (obviously a true drive-by-wire vehicle would need a ton more redundancy, of course).
So, Tesla is adding another point of failure to their car subsystems instead of removing it, and still pushing self-driving technology as aggressive if ever.
So, what happens if that electric steering subsystem breaks without a redundant backup? "Customer took the risk, we don't care?"
You even didn't notify the customer about it in the first place.
"Tesla vehicles can still use the current “level 2” versions of its driver assistance systems, Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (or FSD), without the dual-control steering system.
But employees told CNBC if Tesla launches a more sophisticated FSD update, owners with the affected cars who use that premium system will need to get a steering rack retrofit from a Tesla service center."
If the electronic power assist steering controller fails during use, the rack falls back to manual mode where the steering is heavy. I wonder if they were collecting data on how many units fell back to the backup unit, and decided it was enough to either not use it, or pay the warranty costs for fixing them. There's really nothing in the EPAS system that can wear out, maybe the motor itself...
FSD is trash, all these Teslas on the road braking to a stop for no reason, driving slow in the fast lane >:( Cut them off the computer wont care.
I know, but I'm considering a situation where the electric steering gives up at a very inconvenient moment (accident aversion, overtake, etc.) and the driver cannot provide the required force to correct the car, even with a 100% concentration.
> There's really nothing in the EPAS system that can wear out, maybe the motor itself...
After the whole logging and wearing down flash memory saga, I'm not sure about that. In theory you're right, but in practice "It's a Tesla".
A Honda Legend has level 3 autonomous driving in Japan I wonder what their setup looks like. Every car that I've been into looking to scrape the controllers and motors out of uses a singular EPAS ECU, but none of them provide any level of automation.
What level of system redundancy do they offer on brakes?
> You even didn't notify the customer about it in the first place.
No customer was ever aware that there was a redundant sensor. To me the 'they didn't tell customers' part of this is really odd, since it's not like it's part of the sales pitch. It's not like when they just stopped adding USB-C ports.
My 20 year old Ford has a backup ECU unit inside its ECU and secondary programs if the ECU itself or half of the ignition or fuel transport fried, or the engine is heated beyond control (coolant loss, etc.).
I had to use at least one of these modes twice during the ownership of my car, too. My ignition coil's one output went dead, twice. Once overnight, once during driving at highway speeds. In both cases I went to where I need to go safely, because the car knew what to do, and the facilities to do so.
These features are written in the user manual as fine prints, but they're not sales points. Nobody advertised these to me.
Tesla is selling an autonomous, connected car with enough electronics to fly a small plane, and they rightfully add redundancies inside it. That's great, that's the way it should be. Then they're removing a redundancy feature which might save lives even if it's rarely used.
It's akin to MCAS system. "It doesn't change the behavior, so the pilots don't need to know". We know how well it went.
Yeah, I wasn't saying it isn't a problem they removed it. I don't know whether it is, because I don't know the importance of the part. I was saying how I don't understand that it's a problem they removed a part and didn't tell customers. Parts get added and removed from products all the time without informing customers.
What you describe is a software fallback (Limp mode), and doesnt require another separate computer. US cars are not my forte, can you name actual year/model so I can see with my own eyes that extra backup ECU unit just sitting there doing nothing?
The manual actually stated that there's a "separate, lower capacity, backup ECU is embedded inside the ECU in a case where the main one is damaged and unable to operate the car. That ECU can keep engine synchronization up to 60KM/h and 3000 RPM".
In one case, my parent's car's ECU (we drive the same make/model) blown one of its coil signalization lines. In that case the car has no backup for example. You need to tow it, because it can't understand that it's output is gone, and can't get into proper limp mode. You need to tow the car.
Cylinder disable on overheat and other modes are proper "limp modes" which keeps car operational when other systems get damaged, but not the ECU.
The automatic transmission has its own limp mode too, which is activated by selecting the 3rd gear and making some other internal pressure adjustments.
Personal anecdote after being a Tesla model 3 owner for a little over a year now: The car feels like a toy. The manufacturing quality is honestly quite poor. The electric motor is truly fantastic - that's the awesome part, and I'm a total convert to electric cars for the rest of my life. However, I'm selling my Tesla at the 3yr mark and going back to a German (albeit electric) car. I imagine my Tesla falling apart every time I hit a large pothole.
I still can't get any of my devices to reliably send a text message, and here's someone saying, again, that we'll have FSD by the end of the year. They aren't worried that some cars won't have the hardware capability because they know they won't have the software capability.
To be fair, they probably didn't tell people that there was a backup system in the first place. Removing something that people generally didn't know about isn't a sin. Especially since it was a duplicate device.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadThis powersteering unit now has a lot of field data about failures - they have 3M+ power steering units on the road.
So they may now have the confidence to put the powersteering into that category of "single redundant, but sufficiently reliable to be acceptable". Whereas before they had that data, it wasn't.
'Internally, Tesla employees said that adding “level 3” functionality, which would allow a driver to use their Tesla hands-free without steering in normal driving scenarios, would need the dual electronic control unit system and therefore require a retrofit at a service visit.'
There was V2, v2.5, V3. With both compute and camera improvements. It's pretty much expected that you will need some form of hw upgrade if your car is >2 years old when the FSD becomes a thing. And it's included in the pricing.
> "There's still a mechanical component of course. But in today's vehicles, when you 'turn the wheel' you are providing an electronic signal telling your car to go left or right."
Tesla’s aren’t drive by wire.
Electric power steering allows for configurability of steering difficulty, which tends to engender the feeling of precision at a certain point along the effort curve. (Variable for different people, naturally).
Plus, with more powerful electric systems (better alternators, basically), moving hydraulic steering pump from belt-driven frees up the engine a bit, yielding less drag and better fuel efficiency.
But fundamentally, I believe that in modern vehicles, due to their weight, direct steering linkages are a bit rare.
Also this situation is no different than normal power steering, which assists you with a different mechanism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_stability_control
Sounds like the worst that can come of this would be Tesla has to retrofit the part into a bunch of cars for FSD.
Would you expect Tesla to also put out an announcement if they started sourcing their upholstery from a different source, or used different stitching on the steering wheel? None of this thing impact the usability of the car in any meaningful way, and none of them are listed as part of the detailed specs.
Teslas also add new things to their cars all the time, such as matrix headlights that they added to the Model 3 last year, and heat pump based heating system.
> Internally, Tesla employees said that adding “level 3” functionality, which would allow a driver to use their Tesla hands-free without steering in normal driving scenarios, would need the dual electronic control unit system and therefore require a retrofit at a service visit.
How many of these customers are expecting to simply update their car to FSD over the air? I agree, other manufacturers would not have the responsibility. But one of the main selling points of Tesla has been that, one day, your car will drive itself if you choose to buy $X upgrade with the heavy implication of over the air.
Edit: Consider this, in the future, when people go to sell their cars, potential buyers will ask "does this car have the dual ECU?" for the sole reason of inquiring if they need to go to get the car serviced for FSD. If you don't think this makes Tesla bound to inform their customers that their car will obviously be impacted on resale and allow them to back out of the purchase, I don't think we will ever see eye to eye.
I understand your point but it would be just as simple as that, when you purchase FSD, you are notified that you have to go to the nearest Tesla service to get it, at no extra cost (well, beside the FSD cost obviously). It's an annoyance, sure, but not a big deal.
"... except the parts that you'll need to go book a service appointment to have installed at a later date."
Probably not many since the market is China where FSD is not currently offered.
> Tesla did not disclose the exclusion, which has already affected tens of thousands of vehicles being shipped to customers in China, Australia, the U.K., Germany and other parts of Europe.
Do you honestly think that cars produced in a country stay in that country?
I agree that Tesla are lying about the idea their cars have all the hardware needed for FSD. But that was true (at least in EU cars) before this change.
My reaction was the same as to this news. I don’t care if Tesla made a small change, and I don’t care what Adams eats. I care about transparency and honesty.
I'm not paying Adams many thousands of dollars to be Vegan.
People are paying Tesla many tens of thousands of dollars to do stuff they claim they will do, haven't yet done, and by these actions are even more unlikely to be able to do.
Now, I agree they are not the same severity. But the line you drew doesn't make sense.
What we're seeing here is a rather pesky bias called "Isolated Demand for Rigor". You shouldn't feel bad: it's quite common, very hard to figure out if you don't know about it, and almost impossible if it mixes with confirmation bias. For a fun post about it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...
Well. For certain values of fun. I always thought Scott was so pissed at this bias he was in a very "fuck you" mood when he wrote it.
If it is impactful to the customer then, sure, a complaint is merited. But if not, not an issue.
But steering by wire? That's what the article implies, though another comment already debunks it. I hope there are exactly no cars on the road today that are steering-by-wire. I.e. they all degrade to non-power, mechanical steering if the electronic or hydraulic gimcrackery fails.
It is also used by stability control to counter-steer small amounts of oversteer. But it can only do so for a relatively small amount of wheel angle change, not turn the wheel 90 degrees or something like that.
If the powered steering fails, then the computer cannot steer. Therefore, there was redundancy in the powered steering system. The redundancy was removed because of a chip shortage, and this was considered acceptable because the self driving feature still requires the driver to keep hands on the steering wheel anyway.
But aren't we pretending that this year the autopilot /FSD will actually live to their names? Or will Tesla put the chip back later this year ?
Electric power steering and steer by wire are two different things. A steer by wire system does not have a "mechanical link" backing up the function of the electronics.
If your Antilock Braking System fails, then your brakes will continue to work as they always did, save the fact that they’ll lock the wheels if you press too hard. If there weren’t a light on the dashboard, it is unlikely one would notice ABS failure (unless, of course, one is in a situation where ABS would come in handy, like an ice-covered road).
" So the cars in the fleet essentially becoming self-driving via software update, I think, might end up being the biggest increase in asset value of any asset class in history"
This sentence is packed so tightly with irony that I can't believe it was uttered by a self-aware human. Yes, it's a great idea that two ton vehicles capable of 100mph just "update" themselves to be fully self-driving. Because what could go wrong? Forget about terminators, just the strategic risk in the event of a cyberwar. Astonishing lack of awareness. And he complains that AI is "summoning the demon"?
And yes, they are just "an asset class" whose value needs to be increased because STONKS. I can't even.
The whole thing is a stock pump that went too far
If you have FSD Beta 10.10 installed in your car (which 60K+ people have in the US), you can input a destination and it will take you there. That includes stop/go at green lights, changing lanes, going around parked cars, making un-protective left turns etc.
It's not perfect, but it's beta, and the iterative improvements have been very noticeable over the past few months.
edit: FSD is clearly still alpha; ive seen it steer towards on coming traffic, and almost cut off large vehicles but for human intervention.
People will be elated if they can buy a car that can chauffeur them around as well as a teenager who's had their learner's permit for two days. At least with the car you're already in the driver's seat and don't need to articulate to it what it's doing wrong. Sure you'll have to keep an eye on it to make sure it's not setting itself up for a situation it can't handle but you have to keep an eye on the teenager too.
Crappy half-baked automation is prevalent the world over in all sorts of situations. The normal, unwashed, much derided masses are perfectly capable of learning its quirks so they can keep it out of trouble. The idea that a car "can't see" bollards or bike lane marking or partial lane obstructions or whatever is not a hard one for people to grasp.
Considering how strongly HN advocates for strict liability for car drivers I find your reply baffling. Why wouldn't the driver be liable?
There's a whole field of high-assurance software, with verification, formally-proven compilers with translation validation. Only there is there hope that one can write software and prove it, with a machine-checked proof, correct. Tesla is not that far. Not even close.
But no matter, let's just deploy it anyway.
Tesla can’t even implement auto breaking on a straightaway that doesn’t kill model pedestrians in controlled testing. Only the truly credulous think they can get to FSD in any realistic timeframe let alone Musk’s fantasies.
So far it's ridiculously underwhelming, even I didn't think it was going to flop that bad and I was very skeptical to begin with.
Tesla users are experiencing some sort of Stockholm's syndrome, it's scary
I've heard that way too often.
Tesla's FSD will never come to fruition as a stand-alone system.
Sure, it might be more precise than what is possible with vision alone, but it's also not needed.
It is the absolute standard in any safety-critical industry to have multiple sensors all feeding data and making up for each other's weaknesses. Cars are not excluded from that.
And I am talking about LIDAR not RADAR, even though RADAR also could be used as yet another sensor in the stack. Using only regular vision is a typical dumb Musk thing; LIDAR was quite a bit more expensive when these self-driving things begun to take hold and Musk didn't want that cost so he went all-in with his own dumb solution of "software will fix it."
By now the launch escape system has been scrapped wholesale, the new approach; Just have to fly enough rockets, without exploding, until safety becomes a side-effect of economies of scale and improved tech.
It's a combination of "tech your way out of the problem" with "grow your way out of the problem". Which might be a viable approach for creating non-integral software products, but seems like a really bad fit when peoples lives are at stake.
My Tesla once tried to steer me into a guard rail (multiple times) because the setting sun caused a lens flare. You can't tell me that this is well tested technology that will enable level 3. Only after doing that twice, autopilot noticed it and disables autosteer.
The cameras also have condensation and freezing issues, causing them to not work on cold, wet days.
This was a car that was, according to Elon, fully equipped for self driving.
I really enjoyed autosteer, but there's major flaws in the current implementation and I seriously doubt they'll deliver on current hardware. If they don't, I'm really curious about the outcome of the lawsuits.
The concept that automobiles will travel without human assistance to override IO mistakes from sensors is ridiculous.
Compared to actual safety critical automation systems, designed to operate with humans? It hasn’t even started.
Edit, as I pressed enter by mistake.
What’s happening now isn’t testing, as a system as whole isn’t ready for that. It starts with proper design and long validation, before you can start talking about proper testing. Tesla is rewriting all parts of it constantly. What’s happening right now is mostly PR exercise, plus collection of low quality training data.
Moving to automatic driving will probably be a thing long term, but for the short term, it's a human problem. If only people were held more accountable for driving badly.
In https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/planecrash/risky.html I did find some older numbers. For commercial carries, it was 1.9 deaths per vehicle mile instead of 1.3.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/planecrash/risk-01.html (99 through 03)
However, private planes are more risky and don't seem to be included in those numbers.
Cars crash in pretty much every situation. Fatal incidents are more clumped but no where near as much as planes.
The problem is that no one wants to be regulated. Just look at crypto, people love the lack of regulation. However, once there is a crash or enough people get scammed, there will be demand for regulations to prevent that from happening again.
https://video.hardlimit.com/videos/watch/ede3d957-2a1f-4ec4-...
The preceding bit, just as bad IMO.
Especially since L3 FSD - when and if it comes - requires the second motor.
A complete non-story, as long as it still passes safety checks. The automotive industry is always looking to save a few cents here and there - the only requirement is that it does not compromise safety.
> "So the cars in the fleet essentially becoming self-driving via software update, I think, might end up being the biggest increase in asset value of any asset class in history. We shall see."
Elon Musk, the billion dollar man with a billion promises. I'll make a few bets on this:
1. It won't happen this year. He has been incorrectly guessing it at when it will be ready for many years now.
2. If it does happen this year, it will be blocked legally until proper regulation is ready. If a self-driving car crashes, who is responsible? This needs to be answered, because if it turns out to be Tesla, things will get expensive real quick.
3. If it's not blocked legally, it will be disabled for everybody except those on a subscription service:
> Drivers can also buy a more advanced version, called Full Self-Driving, or FSD, for $12,000 or $199 a month (in the U.S.).
It won't end up being quite the value-add it's claimed to be. Whatever happened to the Tesla car that would pay for itself? So far it seems to just require even more money, for features already suggested to be free when the idea of the car was first sold.
> "If something like a chip or an ECU is not providing additional functionality, if it is truly redundant, you may be able to turn it off or leave it out. With chips and software, there's a little bit of wiggle room. I can reassign stuff here and there," he said.
Not entirely true. Whilst the infotainment system may have enough processing power to run all the safety critical tasks, you don't want it to. Crashing your infotainment is inconvenient, but a 5 second reboot is not the end of the world. Crashing your ABS, throttle control, steering control, etc, is not an option.
A lot of safety critical stuff is usually also proven with tonnes of testing (rather than formal validation) - but that testing is highly coupled to the hardware its running on. You know for example that system X will reliably poll some pin at 1k times a second, because it is the only thing running on the chip. It cannot be interrupted or delayed. The more tasks you add, the great the risk of not hitting timing targets, the larger the testing surface, the greater number of possible states it can be in, etc.
Is this even remotely possible?
And fearmongering like this - "We have to keep trying, otherwise it'll be regulated out of existence and we'll have to wait generations" is absolutely uncalled for.
It's being regulated because people like Musk value their cars, sorry, "asset class" more than they do about the risks that they are taking.
This Twitter post documents how many times Musk has promised FSD is coming “next year.” https://twitter.com/BS__Exposed/status/1482465346061848583?s...
FWIW: It's a backup for the power steering system, which is in fact not a safety device even in modern vehicles. Tesla's steering is mechanical, like almost all cars (obviously a true drive-by-wire vehicle would need a ton more redundancy, of course).
So, what happens if that electric steering subsystem breaks without a redundant backup? "Customer took the risk, we don't care?"
You even didn't notify the customer about it in the first place.
"Tesla vehicles can still use the current “level 2” versions of its driver assistance systems, Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (or FSD), without the dual-control steering system.
But employees told CNBC if Tesla launches a more sophisticated FSD update, owners with the affected cars who use that premium system will need to get a steering rack retrofit from a Tesla service center."
(Emphasis mine)
FSD is trash, all these Teslas on the road braking to a stop for no reason, driving slow in the fast lane >:( Cut them off the computer wont care.
> There's really nothing in the EPAS system that can wear out, maybe the motor itself...
After the whole logging and wearing down flash memory saga, I'm not sure about that. In theory you're right, but in practice "It's a Tesla".
What level of system redundancy do they offer on brakes?
No customer was ever aware that there was a redundant sensor. To me the 'they didn't tell customers' part of this is really odd, since it's not like it's part of the sales pitch. It's not like when they just stopped adding USB-C ports.
I had to use at least one of these modes twice during the ownership of my car, too. My ignition coil's one output went dead, twice. Once overnight, once during driving at highway speeds. In both cases I went to where I need to go safely, because the car knew what to do, and the facilities to do so.
These features are written in the user manual as fine prints, but they're not sales points. Nobody advertised these to me.
Tesla is selling an autonomous, connected car with enough electronics to fly a small plane, and they rightfully add redundancies inside it. That's great, that's the way it should be. Then they're removing a redundancy feature which might save lives even if it's rarely used.
It's akin to MCAS system. "It doesn't change the behavior, so the pilots don't need to know". We know how well it went.
In one case, my parent's car's ECU (we drive the same make/model) blown one of its coil signalization lines. In that case the car has no backup for example. You need to tow it, because it can't understand that it's output is gone, and can't get into proper limp mode. You need to tow the car.
Cylinder disable on overheat and other modes are proper "limp modes" which keeps car operational when other systems get damaged, but not the ECU.
The automatic transmission has its own limp mode too, which is activated by selecting the 3rd gear and making some other internal pressure adjustments.
"2001 Ford Focus MK.I"
Looks like later switched to Bosh https://www.ecufile.net/ecu-file-description/BOSCH-EDC16C34-... https://www.ecufile.net/ecu-file-description/BOSCH-ME9.0-026...
no second ecu hidden inside