Teardown of some parts of Model S

Tesla had a motor and inverter taken apart at their Monterey Car Week event. I'm sure someone has pictures, I forgot to take some as I was really enjoying how efficiently the whole thing was put together.

Yes I was there and posted pictures of those parts. Of course now I don't recall what topic I posted them in!

Thanks tom66,

Very interesing.

I noticed that when you remove even more from the URL : "/photos/9xxxx/binary?size=thumbnail", you'll get a JSON formatted list of all pictures from that part.
Maybe i'll write something that will parse all the url's in this json file automatically.

Thanks, that is indeed the thread I started so I could post the photos I took of the Tesla event during the Monterey car week events.

tom66 said:

This?
http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/show...sla-leather-goods?highlight=Monterey+Car+Week

Great pictures!

Click to expand...

There's some seriously good engineering on those parts. I'm especially happy and impressed to see the main display assembly and computer are very modular. The GPS/Cell sub board is socketed which means it can be upgraded by Tesla down the road for faster service. I'm hoping by the time Model 3 comes out it will come equipped with at least 4G cell speeds. LTE would be great but I'm not holding my breath.

Regarding the main display. It seems to have one micro SD and on SD card.
Here: https://technology.ihs.com/Teardowns/binary/devices/2594/photos/95737/binary
Wonder what's on those two...

matbl said:

Regarding the main display. It seems to have one micro SD and on SD card.
Here: https://technology.ihs.com/Teardowns/binary/devices/2594/photos/95737/binary
Wonder what's on those two...

Click to expand...

Not sure which sub board those are on but based on my software engineering experience those would most likely be used to store temp data such as log files, cache the software updates and allow for the software update process to temp storage. Using commodity items like SD cards allows Tesla to increase the amount of storage at very little cost compared to adding soldered flash memory to the boards and incurring PC board redesigns.

Making the whole CPU systems of the car as modular as possible makes for easy upgrading at minimal costs and here's no need to go great lengths for miniaturization in a car.

Main board of the center display computer (not the nvidia sub-board that actually holds the cpu)

matbl said:

Regarding the main display. It seems to have one micro SD and on SD card.
Here: https://technology.ihs.com/Teardowns/binary/devices/2594/photos/95737/binary
Wonder what's on those two...

Click to expand...

Early on it was advertised that there was on-board storage[1] that would be available for music libraries.

That idea seems to have evaporated... and I've seen some assertions that the space is being used for additional metrics data gathering and/or the new (limited)map-caching that a recent firmware update enabled.

I'd guess one of those might be the OS/libraries for the consile itself, the other the secondary storage that is accomplishing the above...

[1] Often referred to as the car having a "hard drive", but I've always suspected it was solid-state media

When flash drives are so small and inexpensive, music storage is almost a non issue. Not that it matters, my BMW has a hard drive based navigation system (definitely mechanical, not SSD) and 18GB was carved out for music storage.

(LMB spouse)

matbl said:

Main board of the center display computer (not the nvidia sub-board that actually holds the cpu)

Click to expand...

...with several ECOs (green wires). I wonder if this is from an early VIN?

IHS Model S Teardown Webcast

There's a TMC thread about the original IHS Teardown, but for those interested they are doing a webcast later today talking about their findings.

Inside the Electronics Inside the Tesla Model S | October 14, 2014 | IHS GlobalSpec Events
via
Teardown- Tesla 2013 Model S - IHS Technology

Crap, I missed most of the webinar. I only caught the very end summary and the Q&A. The Model S has a NVIDIA Tegra 2 to control the dashboard display and a Tegra 3 to control the big display. I'm thinking that Tegra 3 should have enough graphics capability to draw backup lines - I understand the Tegra 2 would have difficulty, but I would hope the Tegra 3 could do it (dynamically draw overlays on top of live video).

The IHS rep seemed impressed with the amount of custom boards built with Tesla's logo. He said by really designing their own, they get better control of the bill of materials and can control costs. Tesla seems to pick and choose specific parts to do custom - for example, the sunroof control is pretty much an off the shelf standard part but the head unit was custom. He also said the Model S battery pack almost killed his mechanic due to weight and that the BMS teardown was something they'll do, but not yet in the queue. I suspect the hardware electronics to be not as interesting as the software aspect.

Anyone catch the main presentation and can give a summary?

IHS ― MODEL S Teardown

Tesla Motors Model S car teardown reveals Nvidia as winner - Investors.com