That said, if there is a systemic problem with this part failing faster than it should, which certainly seems to be the case, Tesla should be pushed to either recall the affected vehicles or waive the service costs for those owners who are impacted. But that isn't any different than if there was a design flaw in a critical part of an ICE cars manufacturing.
But we're well aware that flash memory degrades, corrupts and gets a bit screwy. Flash memory chips are also dirt cheap and quite small - couldn't Tesla of baked in a bit more redundancy in this case?
In our transmission example, any fault in the transmission is not catastrophic, but with electronics, a single bad joint or bridged trace can take the whole thing down.
I am not defending Tesla here. I am simply pointing out that this is being covered in a fundamentally different way than other cars. My last car was recalled twice for electrical wiring issues. One of the problems could have resulted in a fire and the other one would have resulted in the exact same "bricking" that you see here. Neither of those issues would be covered or dissected like this Tesla issue.
That's why Toyota isn't releasing updates to transmissions every few weeks, that are changing it's behavior and using off the shelf parts without proper attestation and testing in all possible configurations.
Tesla moves fast, which is great for progress. But extremely risky for long term reliability of complex machines.
That would be like if the CD player in my ICE car broke, suddenly I can't drive my car. Absurd.
This is not an apt analogy at all. In a Tesla, there is no separate dashboard or control so it's not an optional part like a CD player. It would be more like saying that your transmission failed. It just happens that, because it doesn't need all the other mechanical parts, an EV's "transmission" is the same box that runs the radio, AC, etc.
A good engineering team would have decoupled them. In an ICE car half of your dashboard could be non functional (climate control completely broken, etc) and the car will still drive because the two systems are decoupled.
It's not the infotainment part that causes the failure, though. It's the firmware flash chip which happens to be in the same board as the infotainment array. It's not like the radio breaking would cause the car to stop working. Again, this is more akin to the transmission going out. It's just easy to make this sound like an engineering failure because of that. It's similar to saying that the new Google Pixel has a "massive engineering failure" because the "Ok, Google" voice assistant breaks. It's disingenuous to say that because all that happens on the security module. You wouldn't want someone to have access to your phone if the security module breaks but, if that breaks, it also breaks the voice assistant functionality. This phrasing makes it sound like a fault in the voice assistant can block access to the entire phone which is intentionally misleading.
Diagnostic logging should be stored on a separate (re: decoupled) flash chip. If that flash chip wears out, the car should still drive.
Something is too tightly coupled right now, as evidenced by the existence of the article.
The main difference is that the probability of a typical ICE ECU or TCU failing is much lower than a Linux-based infotainment system running on non automotive grade flash.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190621052637/http://teslaservi...
It's not just a matter of "oh just go get a Hynix NAND part from DigiKey and reball the PCB". At minimum you need to copy the data over. At worst you need to bless the part with whatever secret sauce Tesla is using at the factory.
Source: I used to repair cable boxes for CTDI. While everyone else is using their Metcal station and wasting 5 minutes, I've got the BGA off, board deballed, and a new BGA package installed and ready for PKI in less than 45 seconds with a heat gun.