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P85D Possessed? Car listening to Slacker by itself... (probably a bug)

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wk057

Former Tesla Tinkerer
Feb 23, 2014
6,499
17,123
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So, a friend of mine and I have determined why Elon Musk is afraid of AI. As it turns out, they must have included AI in the new P85D. Let me explain...

I left my car in the garage for over a day. It has been sitting untouched, on charge, connected to WiFi.

Previously, I set an alert on my router machine to email me whenever the car used over a certain amount of bandwidth in a set time, alerting me to when the car downloads an update. Worked pretty well, until today.

I received the alert, but I can't get to the car until later to check for an update. So, was looking through traffic logs (I keep the last 24 hours of network traffic logged). Turns out it wasn't an update. At some point in the middle of the day the car started downloading songs from Slacker on its own! And at a normal pace, as if the songs were playing through. It managed to download over 100 songs in the past 24 hours, and use over 0.5GB of bandwidth...

Now, I must assume the car is possessed by an evil AI that likes the slacker Hard Rock station. This is the most logical reason...

... or it could just be a software bug. ;)

I emailed Tesla about it, since this never happened with either P85 I've had (my traded-in or my fiances). It would likely suck for Tesla if it does this while on 3G and they pay for bandwidth...
 
On a related note - what is the normal bandwidth usage for a Tesla when not downloading updates. Mine seems to have been downloading a lot - I can see how much data goes to each wifi client on my LAN but I don't log it. So I am wondering if I have a similar issue. Or maybe it was just the two firmware updates in the last two weeks.
 
Do you have "always connected" checked? Just curious.
I think I do - if I remember that is kind of a weird checkbox that is grayed out but if you switch to one of the other options then you can turn it on.

Is this not recommended? I don't mind it using the bandwidth as that isn't an issue. And when at home I am always plugged inl.
 
Interesting in that one of the changes for the latest FW is that the the buffer capacity for streaming is now represented on the playbar... I wonder if behind the scenes they also changed the buffering algorithm and thus introduced the bug?

Given that there really is no "off" for the media center, just "pause"... I wonder if when the the console computer wakes up for whatever reason it resumes background buffering and just never stops?

I'll have to check my firewall and see if it does the same. It would be interesting to see if it does that if you left the car parked with the radio as the last active media source selected...
 
I do not have always connected enabled. Energy saver is on.

Under normal circumstances the car used a negligible amount of bandwidth.. on the order of a few 10s of MB per day, plus a slacker song or two when I got in the car before leaving the garage. This behavior seems new.
 
@wk057 This may not be what happened in your case since you mentioned that the music started in the middle of the day, but something similar happened to me the other day and I realized that the passenger had not completely closed their door when exiting and since I didn't pause the music when I got out, it continued to play all night while the car charged.

I've tried to get in the habit of locking the car via the fob so I know all doors are closed and I see the car lock (or at least check that it's locked via the app later). If the car won't/didn't lock, it might be a door not completely closed.
 
@wk057 This may not be what happened in your case since you mentioned that the music started in the middle of the day, but something similar happened to me the other day and I realized that the passenger had not completely closed their door when exiting and since I didn't pause the music when I got out, it continued to play all night while the car charged.

I've tried to get in the habit of locking the car via the fob so I know all doors are closed and I see the car lock (or at least check that it's locked via the app later). If the car won't/didn't lock, it might be a door not completely closed.

Another reason for an audible signal when the doors lock (it's on my short wishlist).
 
It appears that my P85D may be doing the same thing. Even if I pause the Slacker music before I lock the car at night, when I come back a different song is on screen. Have you had any follow-up from the Service Center or heard any more on this? Thanks.

Engineering has been looking into it on both my P85D and fiance's P85. Been going back and forth with them via email as they investigate. Sent them .pcap dumps of both cars with timestamps and such so they can compare to vehicle logs. No real status reports from them, but they're definitely looking into it.

I've noticed what I would guess would be terminal/SSH traffic over their encrypted VPN on my WiFi while they're working on things on my cars. (Packet per keystroke or so.) Kind of neat.