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Drivetrain Software vs. "Other" Software

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mknox

Well-Known Member
Aug 7, 2012
10,104
1,901
Toronto, ON
Tesla has talked about how the drivetrain control is separate from the software that controls the car's screens, entertainment systems and so forth, and that you could still safely drive the car if this secondary software for some reason "crashes".

I was wondering if these over-the-air updates are for both drivetrain and secondary systems or just secondary systems. It occurred to me that if they were able to implement "creep", they must be touching the drivetrain software through these updates.

Is this cause for concern? Could a bad flash of the drivetrain software potentially introduce some sort of safety issue? I'm sure Tesla tests these things out, but just the same...
 
Failure/interruption to apply an OTA firmware update would render your Model S useless, until recovered by a ranger visit. I expect Tesla to prevent this happening. Model S already features the best UPS imaginable - several months of battery backup power. They could add a watchdog circuit, that activates a fallback copy of the firmware. Still you cannot rule out something like this to happen, just make it very very unlikely.
 
Failure/interruption to apply an OTA firmware update would render your Model S useless, until recovered by a ranger visit. I expect Tesla to prevent this happening. Model S already features the best UPS imaginable - several months of battery backup power. They could add a watchdog circuit, that activates a fallback copy of the firmware. Still you cannot rule out something like this to happen, just make it very very unlikely.

I was also wondering about the scenario where the add something like "creep" and inadvertently break something like ABS or Stability Control. You want to be really, really sure about powertrain updates and probably not be updating those systems as frequently.
 
I was also wondering about the scenario where the add something like "creep" and inadvertently break something like ABS or Stability Control. You want to be really, really sure about powertrain updates and probably not be updating those systems as frequently.

If less frequently means larger updates (more changes) then I disagree. Small, well tested, iterative changes are exactly how I would go.