I remember an old twitter thread that purported to be stories from a programmer just out of their NDA, lots of juicy tidbits about just SSHing into cars to fix bugs.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1032939617404645376

This is actually extremely common across the tech industry. Backdoors are standard.

It's one thing to have a backdoor so your engineer can unfreeze someone's phone or fix their smart lights. These are motor vehicles carrying people inside of them on highways.

Horrifying - wow. The amount of photos I've seen purported as leaks from Tesla getting camera access or access to saved images makes it easy for me to believe.

I seem to remember one of the leaked images was rumored to be from Elon's own garage showing an odd item he owned at the time.

>I remember when the "Tesla source code" leaked and I was a decent programmer, so I was curious and looked through some of the posted code... I have never sat in a moving Tesla vehicle since that day. Even if that code never drove a mile, the fact someone writing code for them saved it somewhere as progress scared me.

Have you looked at other car manufacturers' source code? AFAIK Toyota's source code got scrutinized as a result of the unintended acceleration lawsuits, and it was also criticized for sloppy coding.

edit: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_...

probably the same can be said for any car company, any tech company, any company of sufficient size and most small companies too. looking at you Boeing!

What other examples could we look at? Boeing seems like low hanging fruit but as I try to think of other examples it is hard.

I can't think of another transport/medical/safety related software leak that left the same kind of impression on me. I was somewhat considering a Tesla back then, but the source code stopped me from that idea.

It's interesting that the recent AI 171 crash may be software related. At least if looks so far that both engines were shut down at the same time which happened once before on a 787 due to the "Thrust Control Malfunction Accommodation" system. Time will tell.

There are high reliability providers of software for mission critical tasks. The egregiousness with which Tesla pursues, cowboy engineering is one reason why Green Hills, which makes mission critical RTOSs, CEO Dan O'Dowd has created demonstrations of the dangers of Tesla's software.

There are standards for this type of software and there are products that meet those standards. Maybe we need different standards for software that's meant to blow something up versus software that avoids sudden energetic outcomes, but these aren't new problems and there's no excuse for not establishing, updating, and meeting standards.

Well if you mean MCAS, then coding was not a main issue, but the fact that system expected 2 sensors to deduce malfunction while management decided to put there only 1 sensor and 2 only as a premium. Then MCAS system had no way how to deduce if 1 input sensor is sending correct data or garbage.

Unfortunately you have a very good point. After working with several car manufacturers I’ve come to the conclusion that very few good software engineers exist there.

Some of the most horrifying code and technical designs I’ve ever seen came out of Stellantis, GM, Ford, Toyota and Tesla.

> Then LIDAR was disabled/removed.

Radar, not lidar. Tesla cars never had lidar.

Thank you for correcting this, I've edited it in an obvious way so I don't misinform. There's enough of that on Tesla already.

I recall Tesla having vehicles in their testing with Lidar and had no idea they never shipped it.

My 2015 towing VW has two radar sensors on the front for adaptive cruise and 5 cameras for lanekeeping. The cameras constantly come on and offline depending on visibility, cleanliness, and even weather. The radars have never once misperformed.

I can't imagine even trusting automatic cruise control to "vision only", much less what they are calling self-driving features.

Having driven plenty of cars with adaptive cruise using only one front radar, I can't really even suggest that - false positives are likely to happen to any driver that racks up mileage when the brakes can be fully applied based on single forward radar sensor covered in bug guts.

If it’s so bad - why all of their cars top safety charts?

Probably because ICE safety charts aren't super applicable to the dangers of an EV.