Tell that to the people buying Telsas since 8/24 that have HW4.1.

Do you have a tldr or some link I could read to know what you mean? Is this hardware braking a lot from factory so that it already needs repairing less than 6 months later? If so that seems like a warranty issue more than a repairability issue (although I’m sure it could turn into one). Or do you mean that this hardware prevents repair in some way that will be a problem once it starts breaking?

There are a lot of articles recently.

“most driver assistance features are disabled, including rearview cameras, forward collision warning and blind spot warning, GPS navigation, and range estimations”

https://jalopnik.com/tesla-s-brand-new-cars-not-drivable-bec...

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Tesla-HW4-computers-are-failin...

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/tesla-scrambles-to-fix-ai...

thanks. Sounds much more like a warranty / manufacturing quality issue rather than a repairability issue at this point. Although if Tesla somehow prevented parts from a donor vehicle from being used in a different vehicle then I would call that a repairability issue.

I spoke with a BMW mechanic who said he wouldn't feel comfortable repairing his own car at his home garage because of specialised tooling they have now.

I used to make third party scan tools. My advice is don't drive a BMW farther from a dealer than you will pay a tow back. Not that they are unreliable cars, but that our tools were far better than our competitors at BMW and I wouldn't give them a passing grade. (BMW writes their own tools). Of course I left that job in 15 years ago, maybe things have changed.

For other makes of cars third party scan tools work pretty well at diagnostics.

Those tools are mostly based on reverse engineering and exploiting security vulnerabilities though.

Commodity hardware that you can replace in the field. When they're saying 3nm-whatever node chips, they mean "We put a $250 Jetson SOM in the car, but fuck you, you can't replace it without replacing a $5000 "Ai CoNtRoL sYsTeM"

For mechanical parts cars are very good. For electronics not so much. It seems like you could repair a chip with an electron microscope and other similar tools - but I've never heard of anyone trying. I have heard of taking the case off to look at the inside of chips (for processes larger than current 3nm); but not repairing issues and putting it back into service.

Electronic parts tend to go out of production. If nobody makes the failed chip anymore what can you do to repair it? If you can get the correct chip we can put the software back on it (well good luck getting that, but it is possible), but all too often parts are not available at any price.