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The Rogue Tesla Mechanic Resurrecting Salvaged Cars (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: In a scrapyard in Massachusetts, the YouTuber known as Rich Rebuilds runs a pair of jumper cables from a broken down Tesla Model S to a deep cycle battery. "We may hear some clicks," he says, as he prepares to connect the second lead. "We may hear some buzzing. The car may explode. I don't know what's gonna happen." As a self-described "Doctor Frankenstein of Teslas," this is Rich Benoit's modus operandi. On YouTube, he's chronicled his journey to learn how the cars' internal systems work -- and how to repair them after floods, fires and wrecks. In a new Motherboard documentary, Benoit shows us the scrapyards where he scavenges Tesla parts, the basement where he categorizes them, and an auto body shop that lets him use its equipment. He shows us deep under the hood, where he wrestles with the motors, high-powered batteries and tangles of electronics and cables that make Teslas tick. Since his first Tesla restoration -- he's now working on a second -- Rich has become a point-person in the Tesla repair community. He runs a Facebook group for people who want to sell and trade parts and has helped other enthusiasts across the country and as far away as Norway, Germany and South Africa. Tesla told Motherboard that it will inspect salvaged vehicles to assess which repairs are needed, but there would be a fee. The company says customers are free to do whatever they want with their cars, including repair them. However, Massachusetts, because of their "Right to Repair" initiative, is the only state where Tesla owners can register to access repair manuals, service documents, wiring diagrams, and part information. According to Electrek, President Jon McNeil says the automaker is working on opening the program.
for Mass. residents. Re-sell access to the manuals to people all over the world. Fuck Tesla's evil attitude towards DIY owners.
If this was a computer company that refused to resale parts or provide repair information everyone here would be having a coronary.
No.
Someone how only Tesla gets a pass on this...
No.
Care to explain your position?
No.
Who here is saying that Tesla should get a free pass on this?
BTW; there's lots of people who tear down and build up Teslas. There's a great series over on Youtube from Ingineerix (who salvages wrecked / flooded Teslas), who's been going into how every system on the Model 3 works, down to the nitty-gritty details. One of my favourite things recently was the design of the rear wheel/motor assembly. To take it off involves only disconnecting 2 dampers, 2 brake lines, 3 electrical cables and 4 bolts. And you've entirely removed the rear wheels and motor. Unlike S and X, this car was clearly designed with keeping maintenance labour costs down as a high priority.
Another really interesting thing is in his most recent video, where he shows how much thicker the charge port-to-battery wiring is on Model 3 than Model S and Model X. Now, there's always the possibility they switched from copper to alumium or similar, but as it stands, it looks like they've designed it for much higher max charge powers. Which matches well their plans to introduce a new supercharger (V3) later this year. If it's 180kW per-vehicle, as the speculation has been, a five minute charge at low SoCs would allow for an hour of driving at moderately fast highway speeds (about an hour and a half at the sort of speed limits we have here!)
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
Why can't I go into a Tesla parts counter in the same fashion as a Mazda parts dealer can get whatever the fuck I want if I'm willing to pay for it?
When your computer crashes, it doesn't involve a school bus full of children.
Have gnu, will travel.
For the hard-core geeks both electrical and mechanical:
Tesla Model 3 - Exploded
This guy has a brilliant series of videos detailing all aspects os Tesla anatomy.
One thing to note about restored Telsa EVs is that they cannot use the supercharger stations. Apparently there is some sort of key held in RAM that indicates it's been tested and meets certification criteria. You can get it re-certified but I've heard it's a costly process because they have to inspect the cabling.
You may think this is somehow unfair but remember how much power is flowing through the cables to recharge all those batteries. It's not a stretch to think that minor damage to a cable could go unnoticed and then set your car and the whole supercharger station on fire.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I've been watching RichRebuilds for a while.
It's amazing that Tesla can remotely "brick" one of their cars against the owner's wishes and render it inoperable until they give the owner a code to get it running (if they choose to do so).
It's also criminal that they will not allow owners to buy repair parts for their cars.
Last, if Tesla goes bankrupt (which, at their current cash burn rate and unprofitably is a good possibility) owners will be left holding the bag with cars that cannot be maintained or repaired.
Tesla reminds me of a pyramid scheme.
Manufacturers have significant liability.
A lot of people don't understand that when they go to the parts counter at most auto dealers, the company that sold the car isn't who made those parts. And since they're not the manufacturer, they don't have the same sort of liability. Of course they're happy to sell you those parts. And many of the parts are not the stock part, but a qualified replacement part that was totally designed and built by a 3rd party with no involvement by the auto brand other than testing it at the end to qualify it as a replacement.
Tesla doesn't have all that supply infrastructure, that takes decades of operations to develop. They also make way more of the parts themselves, and where they're using suppliers, those suppliers are more likely to be making a "custom part" rather than a pre-designed part built to a certain specification, and so there are differences in liability.
People who don't like it should focus on the future and getting Tesla to agree to be more open as their supply chain matures, instead of just whining that a new company doesn't already do all the good things possible to eventually do.
That is BS. Do you think Ford makes all the parts for their cars? They have parts suppliers. Same as Tesla. They don't even make the batteries.
What are you even talking about? Tesla does not "remotely brick" cars. The concept of a "code" makes no sense in the concept of a Tesla. Where would you even enter a code?
I've been wracking my brain to try to figure out what you might be talking about. The closest I can think is that Tesla considers salvaged cars that haven't gone through recertification "unsupported", and they can't get updates or use the supercharging network.
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
both electrical and mechanical:
Can't.... resist...
I'm the very model of a modern Tesla technician,
I've information technical, electrical, mechanical,
I know the latest models, and I quote designs historical,
From Model X to Model 3, in order categorical;
I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters mathematical,
I understand transmissions, both continuous and manual,
I'm bullish on the stock reports and teeming with a lot o' news,
With many cheerful facts about executive option issues.
Relays and solenoids are likely to activate and respond when an electrical device is powered up from an unknown state. This is slashdot. Maybe your comments belong more on yahoo news.
Oh please.. technically ANY car with mBrace, OnStar, LexusEnform, etc... can remotely brick their cars. These days any vehicle with any sort of remote assistance/remote start CAN be bricked against the owner's wishes.
So why are you beating up on Tesla. They baked into their vehicles the SAME things that all the manufacturers have. And if anything, they have one main advantage over others. Vehicles with third party "remote" functions can be attacked via the third party so any issues with that can be laid at their feet, and not say Ford or Chevy. So security (from Ford's perspective) is less of a concern because they don't carry the liability. Tesla HAS to keep the security high because any issues are THEIR fault and not a 3rd party.
The people who are screaming about Tesla not opening up the repair info to the masses should also realize that almost none of their vehicles sold, to date, are old enough to be completely out of warranty. The Model S wasn't a thing you could buy until 2012, and they all got an 8 year, unlimited mileage warranty on their powertrains.
When you couple that with the fact that Teslas were never mass produced in the quantities the big-name auto makers produce? You start to realize that the number of Teslas out there in scrap yards from getting totaled in accidents or written off from flood damage are FAR too few to support the business of local garages or other repair shops who might want to specialize in working on them.
As a used Model S owner myself, I've done a lot of reading and research on the cars, because I wanted to know what I might be up against in coming years. The biggest issue facing Tesla owners today is an overall shortage of parts. Even if you have an authorized Tesla body shop repairing your car from a fender-bender, it's quite common they can't obtain a body panel or other trim part you need for 2-3 months. That's one of the challenges the company is still trying to overcome. (Again, they're nowhere near the size of GM or Ford or Toyota ... and they didn't really have the money to stock large quantities of spare parts in warehouses. I'm sure they started out just making spare parts to order, as they had the need. And now they have enough cars on the roads so that's not workable, but their factories were doing all they could just to meet demand for the new Model 3 vehicle orders.)
Personally? I think there's a great money-making opportunity for independent shops who can stock specific parts that are known to fail somewhat regularly, and can do those specific repairs. Great example? Model S auto-retracting/presenting door handles. These are pretty complex components and had a couple of design flaws. (Tesla used a cast metal gear part that tends to develop a stress fracture over time and break into pieces. They also used regular copper wire where flexible silicone wire should have been substituted, so over hundreds of door handle cycles, the wire flexing back and forth snaps it.) Both of these issues have been addressed, at least to a large extent, with a newer handle revision. But my understanding is, Tesla didn't do that until 2017 and there's kind of a run on these -- since service centers will only replace an older revision broken handle with the latest revision. Clearly, this is a place where independent shops could re-work a broken, old revision handle and make it "better than new", for cheaper than Tesla's repair cost. (Tesla wants around $700+ per door handle for an out of warranty repair.)
Another example is the small 12 volt battery in a Model S. This is known to fail on a lot of people, and will leave you stranded if it does. (Luckily, you *usually* get some kind of warning on the dash that it's having issues for at least a little while before it conks out.) This one, again, was usually just a free warranty swap so far. But as these cars age out of factory coverage, it'll become a problem. There's a company on the net called BattMobile who sells an improved replacement battery with the necessary, proprietary battery connector points already on it. But it would be great if more shops knew how to swap one of these and could do it for people inexpensively. On a dual motor Model S, it's not THAT tough as job, but it's kind of a bear to get to it on the regular, single motor vehicles.
You mean that bus full of children leeching my WiFi? Those kids get quite irate when the WiFi goes down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
That's not what the word "bricks" means. And no, there is no "factory code". The whole concept of "codes" has no meaning in the context of Teslas. What it requires is recertification if you want to use supercharging. To make sure that your someone-else-pieced-it-together-car doesn't fry their superchargers and potentially start a fire. For really bloody obvious reasons.
You can still charge just fine on non-Tesla chargers, because hey, no risk to their hardware.
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
Model 3 went into production in mid 2017, not 2015. That's two years difference. And the 13th generation Ford F-150 was mostly the same vehicle platform as the 12th generation. They replaced the body panels with alumium (the new production systems took years to develop) and they switched out a couple engine options (but they weren't newly developed engines). Most of the rest of the vehicle, including the chassis, was carried over from the 12th generation.
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
Impressive mislabeling job. That article wasn't about a customer satisfaction survey. Pied Piper's surveys are how skilled a company's salesmen are at selling cars. Tesla has (for many years running) the least "salesy" salemen in the industry. By design. Tesla publicly celebrates every year scoring last in the Pied Piper studies.
The Consumer Report study I linked is an actual customer satisfaction survey.
"Lock and load, Brides of Christ!"
If only Tesla would do the right thing and let you get it repaired where you want like all other manufacturers. But I guess vendor lock-in is a good thing?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I don't think you can get the software ICE makers dish out to their dealerships to diagnose faults accurately either, you can get off the shelf machines but they are generally not that clever
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I interviewed with Snap-On who make car diagnostic equipment once. They have to reverse engineer everything, they don't get any help from the manufacturers.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC