this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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You would need to be crazy to apply a voltage regulation hack to the CPU that they don't sell spare parts if something goes wrong. Risking bricking a $50000 car to unlock the $300 heated seats?
And while the root access is unpatchable, because the car is always connected to internet and always sharing too much telemetry to their servers, it would be trivial for them to add an additional server side check to see if some feature has been unlocked without paying.
You could disable their spyware. Cars didn't always phone home to snitch on you.
You could. But then they could also deactivate your ignition of it doesn’t phone home every 1/2/3 week. For “safety” reasons.
You could also disable that disabler. Once you own that shit you can dk what you want with it. Block tesla domains, alter the ignition code.
would really spark some anger after people get stranded with disabled cars while camping for prolonged periods of time, or just parking underground while flying abroad.
I’m sure it would, but someone must think of the children, and make sure that the on board software is up to date for safety’s sake. (I can hear the money changing hands to fill the election coffers of the congressional oversight committee members even as I type this).
Is the MCU no longer replaceable? Definitely was possible to replace them when they were shipping with weak eMMC that degraded and bricked the car (plenty of people also soldered better chips).
It's still not cheap, but there are crashed Teslas aplenty, could pull it off one if you can't pay retail.
This mod is something that people will more likely do when the car has depreciated anyway.
I meant it can be technically replaced, but Tesla won't sell you one if you break it for fun
Idk, seems like a quick buck earned on a car already sold, why wouldn't they? They even sold upgrade kits from MCU to MCU2. The key ingredient was outrageous margins (MCU2 upgrade kit cost over 2k, but ebay MCU-Z units are under 800 used and I'm pretty sure that the used ones are STILL more than what Tesla pays for them).
It costs them nothing if you do manage to upgrade your car with a mod, but they make money if you fail and have to buy a new unit off them. I'd keep the thing going if I was in charge of Tesla tbh. And then in like half a year announce that these cars lose access to Supercharger network or something.
That's what I'd do if I was Musk, anyway. If you're a villain already, why not go full evil
It feels like you could expose yourself to a bunch of liability, too. If you fuck with safety critical features and anything goes wrong?
AFAIK that's never been borne out by a trial.
The driver is always responsible for the car regardless so in reality I don't see it being an important point. Yes if something fails and it causes an accident you are on the hook if you had modified that system or failed to maintain it properly. The onus would always be on the driver to prove the manufacturer was negligent if they believe the car was not manufactured properly or designed safely.
So I wouldn't mess around with self driving (personally I'd never even use it from the factory) but there's little risk in touching many other things, these systems are designed to compartmentalize and fail safe even when you tinker with them. Though maybe not in Teslas case because they mistake the tribal knowledge of over 100years of automotive design and manufacturing for inefficiency. but I do not know a whole lot about Tesla computer systems, in ICE cars I mostly only touch the engine controls, and maybe traction control. In my current car I suppose you could do some real fucky things with electric power steering and brake by wire.
Most tuners won't go beyond messing with throttle curves and traction control when it comes to anything safety related, as neither would cause any kind of serious failure unless you tried to re write the code to do something it wasn't meant to to begin with.
I think the key issue is that the exploit can only be fixed by replacing the hardware in these cars, which means for Tesla that the vehicle’s unique IDs are probably the most valuable thing that could be taken advantage of.