Bill, the info I posted was provided to me by the Burlingame CA Tesla Service Center manager, not my dad.
My dad is a Tesla owner but he does not work for Tesla, he is retired
-
Want to remove ads? Register an account and login to see fewer ads, and become a Supporting Member to remove almost all ads.
Center display spontaneously reboots?
- Thread starter ecarfan
- Start date
-
- Tags
- Model S User Interface
Bill, the info I posted was provided to me by the Burlingame CA Tesla Service Center manager, not my dad.
My dad is a Tesla owner but he does not work for Tesla, he is retired
Bill D
Member
I suspect the SC manager may have mistakingly meant they cycled some of your car's settings OTA (not installed an undocumented SW revision). As suspected by others, the reboots may be related to settings that inadvertently change after an update. My wife was driving our P85 a few days after the 5.9 update and said the driver and passenger seat heaters were on, even though we've never used them and they were not shown as being on. She said that after she cycled the seat heater settings they went off. A few days later we had our first spontaneous reboot.
It looks like both the joy and angst of software revisions have followed us home from our jobs to our dens to our phones and now to our cars. What's next?
Bill, you may well be correct, but no way I can know for sure just what the SC manager was trying to describe to me.
And yes, software is now pervasive in consumer products. Cars are the latest, next is home appliances like fridge, oven, and who knows what else...
And yes, software is now pervasive in consumer products. Cars are the latest, next is home appliances like fridge, oven, and who knows what else...
Mayhemm
Model S P85+ "Lola"
If this capability exists, count me in as one of those disturbed by it. You're basically saying that Tesla has left themselves a backdoor into our cars' systems that they can use to access it, make changes, and leave no trace that they have done something. Of course they would sell it as being used to fix bugs. How else could you justify the existence of such access? In reality, they could remove or alter functions with the user having no idea something has been changed. Unfortunately, Tesla now has a history of sketchy behavior when it comes to making unwelcome changes (need I even mention the removal of suspension function in FW5.8 or the fact that it was "hidden" behind the addition of other features?).
I admit, I would be a bit confused if they could do this. Wouldn't it undermine the existence of the traditional update functionality? Would access in this manner be limited in some way? Otherwise, why bother using regular updates when they could make any changes behind the scenes and not have to explain themselves? (aside from the obvious PR benefits of letting people know what you're doing to their cars)
I have to stop you right there, ecarfan. Tesla has emphasized multiple times that the safety systems of the car are isolated. That way a bug in the stereo software can't, for example, make your brakes quit working or randomly deploy the airbags. So your assertion that Tesla needs this access to keep the car safe is crap. And haven't some of the most horrible government actions in history been justified by trying to keep their constituents "safe"? This does not give me confidence in what Tesla's (allegedly) doing.
No legitimate software will update itself without some kind of user intervention (malware is obviously the exception here). You have to give software express permission to update itself (functionality which can be turned off by the user at any time), tell it to download an update, and/or tell it to install said update. No software in existence downloads and installs updates automatically without the user having control over when and how it does so.
JJR64
28680
ecfan, I'm with you. I think this is a good thing.
Mayhem, they asked if it was OK to access my car and I gave them permission. They didn't do anything to my car that I didn't ask them to do. Could this be used for evil instead of good - maybe, but I tend not to lean too much toward the conspiracy theory kind of thoughts.
Mayhem, they asked if it was OK to access my car and I gave them permission. They didn't do anything to my car that I didn't ask them to do. Could this be used for evil instead of good - maybe, but I tend not to lean too much toward the conspiracy theory kind of thoughts.
Mayhemm
Model S P85+ "Lola"
Fair enough. That is quite different than them accessing your car and making changes behind the scenes without you knowing.
I'm just passing on what I was told, without embellishment. I was glad to hear from the SC manager that the issue I posted about had been fixed with my car. Tesla did not need to explicitly ask my permission to fix a problem I had already brought to their attention. I had already told them I had a problem. They fixed it. Good.
I don't appreciate being told my point of view is "crap". You are welcome to disagree with me but do it in a civil manner.
I hope it does not surprise you when I point out that Tesla is not the US government.
And I am aware that the driving and safety systems in the car are isolated from the less critical functions.
Last edited:
Mayhemm
Model S P85+ "Lola"
I thought I had made it clear that we were both speaking hypothetically; since you were relaying the account passed on by your SC and I was reacting to your account of their account. Nobody but Tesla knows for sure whether or not they have this capability. You expressed the view that you thought it was a good thing that Tesla could "patch" the car without us knowing. I disagreed for all the reasons I listed.
I did not say your whole point of view was crap, just that the statement you made about the car needing to be able to be patched for safety reasons was. I pointed out that this made no sense, since the safety systems were isolated from the rest of the car and would remain unaffected by any software bugs. In your latest comment you agreed this was the case. So, what was the point of your earlier statement? If crap was too harsh a criticism, perhaps I should have just said "wrong"?
I did not say your whole point of view was crap, just that the statement you made about the car needing to be able to be patched for safety reasons was. I pointed out that this made no sense, since the safety systems were isolated from the rest of the car and would remain unaffected by any software bugs. In your latest comment you agreed this was the case. So, what was the point of your earlier statement? If crap was too harsh a criticism, perhaps I should have just said "wrong"?
Well then maybe next time don't take the fanboy attitude of "if you don't like it don't buy the car". I don't have to have a fanatical devotion to Tesla to drive the car. I voted my feelings with my wallet. But that doesn't mean Tesla is infallible. Well, maybe when portrayed by David Bowie, but that's another story.
@Mayhemm, I"m sorry to disagree with you. But I've been in the IT field for over 25 years. There are software companies (one very large one that probably runs your PC) that do, in fact, download updates and commit them without your knowing. We have even had incidents of updates occurring after we explicitly turned off automatic updating and/or disabling services. I'm quite sure if you saw the network traffic from most of your compute devices to and from update services, you would probably be shocked (no pun intended, okay, maybe a little).
Mayhemm
Model S P85+ "Lola"
I still find this hard to believe, but I'll accept it being possible (I'm hardly an expert on the subject).
However, it definitely isn't considered normal behavior for computers and mobile devices as ecarfan asserts in post #38.
Ofcourse they can do that (update various pieces of the software remotely). Not having a Tesla myself, and not having experienced the issue at hand, it very much sounds like some application running on the center display had a memory leak, causing it to slow down and finally, when the onboard computer is totally out of memory, reboot.
We already know that the computer runs a version of Ubuntu, probably with an internal Tesla repository of proprietary software. So my guess is that they did the Tesla-version of an "apt-get upgrade". This would ofcourse update the version of that single piece of software with the bug, whereas a complete "firmware upgrade" (with a new version string) probably includes a lot of other stuff as well.
Just like any other computer, you can update the individual software packages without updating the entire OS.
We already know they have remote access (how would they be able to do all the other analysis they do remote), so shell access (or some other way to trigger an update of a single package) is likely something at least some of the engineers have.
We already know that the computer runs a version of Ubuntu, probably with an internal Tesla repository of proprietary software. So my guess is that they did the Tesla-version of an "apt-get upgrade". This would ofcourse update the version of that single piece of software with the bug, whereas a complete "firmware upgrade" (with a new version string) probably includes a lot of other stuff as well.
Just like any other computer, you can update the individual software packages without updating the entire OS.
We already know they have remote access (how would they be able to do all the other analysis they do remote), so shell access (or some other way to trigger an update of a single package) is likely something at least some of the engineers have.
Normally, upgrades happen in a general release, but Tesla certainly has the capability to push out a patch to solve a particular problem with a particular vehicle. Obviously they don't do this often because it's a manual process (and time consuming) but doing it to solve a particular car's problem is likely a standard procedure. When my car had its charger replaced, they had to do something similar because the software in the Ranger's laptop wasn't working.
Going back to the original issue posted in this thread, last night I got an alert saying my car's software would be updated at 11:15pm. I went and checked this morning and it looks like it just re-installed 5.9. Mind you, I haven't contacted Tesla at all yet about the problems I've been having since the 5.9 update a couple of weeks ago. (reboots, map choppiness, etc). Well, this afternoon my 17" display turned off and now it won't come back on. The mystery continues!
I've only had my S for about a month. The first week or two, everything was fine. After upgrading to 5.9, I had 2 or 3 screen reboots. I also had and instance where the car turned off...Here's the story. We were pulling into pay parking lot. My wife couldn't reach out far enough to get the ticket for the parking lot. She put the car in park, opened the door, reached over to grab the ticket, got back into the car to drive forward. Well guess what, the car didn't move and it still said "car off" or something like that on the display. After about a minute, the car worked again.
Last night I also got a notification for a software upgrade. After the upgrade, the screen just told me about 5.9. I'm not sure if it just reinstalled 5.9 or installed 5.9.1 or something like that. I presume that if it installed something new, it would tell me so, no matter how minor the upgrade.
The car turned off when she took her weight off the seat by leaning over while in park, that is working as designed.
Yeah, I realized that but it should not have taken a full minute of sitting in the seat to turn the car back on.
Similar threads
