Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/08/24/oh-boy-tesla-gossip.html
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This seems very legit and is a goldmine of Information.
C’mon Honda - you can do better:
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If this is true it sounds like a highly dysfunctional management culture. The tweet at 3:56AM on 24 August confirms something I’ve suspected, though, that the real value is in the battery/Powerwall/Powerpack part of the business:
tesla has really good engineering on the go-juice part of the car […] if nothing else they could be profitable selling battery packs, drive trains, their new in-house chips, that kind of thing.
Beyond the initial series, the newer cars and all the software and displays seem like afterthoughts, literal selling vehicles.
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So people can SSH to your car? Interesting.
Its no better or worse than any similar environment I have worked in. They all degrade when features are piled on and workers struggle to keep stuff running.
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Uh oh, looks like one escaped from the hermetically sealed enclosure!
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Reminds me of the very true saying: Never time to do it right, always time to do it over.
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I had to comment to give props to Xeni for the Hellraiser quote!! im a total noob or id post a GIF of Pinhead saying it
Edit, never mind, I have just failed at reading internet. I saw it and my geek impulse kicked in.
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Y/W
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As a software engineer: all of that sounds above board and probably true.
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I wish I could say I thought any of that was surprising.
Not only that, they can do it with expired certs.
“They used to end up in a giant 700TB single mysql database after they were expanded. all of production after-sales service and engineering relies on that single log-interpretation system which ran on centos 5 and python 2.4.”
Holy shit!
When I think about it, though, that doesn’t surprise me either.
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The SSH service has been known for a long time. It is how the first Tesla hackers made theirs do neat stuff.
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Please tell me the screen in the cabin has an upload public key function.
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I would be surprised if there was any expiration with a Tesla NDA. They usually run in perpetuity.
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Please do not misquote me. I wrote “funy computer,” not “funny computers.”
Changing my phrasing changes the meaning of the phrase.
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That’s it, I’m getting a Lada Taiga. No electronics past the ignition and the radio.
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I have read that tread and apart from a few known eyebrow-rising moments (like the remote update, on-line telemetry, remote login/control of the car, wtf?) the rest are pretty much par for the course.
Ugly? Yes.
Terrible engineering in some parts? Sure, that’s what you get when management contracts featuritis and wants something out yesterday - fixing bugs and rewriting messes is never done unless something actually breaks. Shortsighted? Sure. But management is rarely the visionary in the company (or even understands that what would cost $X to fix today will cost 100x as much later when it breaks - and it will likely break at the most inopportune moment).
Bad management? You betcha …
Nothing all that different from any other company of a similar size and there were no real “smoking guns” or “5 alarm fires” there. People would be shocked what is going on in SW industry if only they knew, even worse in embedded/automotive. The restrictive copyrights, everything proprietary/closed source and NDA-ed setups are there for a reason - not only to protect the companies from competitors but often also from having the stinky mess of often safety-critical but badly written code by a lowest-bidder contractor/some intern leaking out into the daylight. These companies are building hardware/cars, they are rarely software specialists - and it does show, unfortunately. It is as much brand protection/PR as IP protection.
E.g. the tread mentions Bosch by name in this context - I can’t say I am surprised … (among other things, Bosch has been implicated as the contractor who developed and delivered the “cheating” firmware for VW in the original “dieselgate”).
Or look at the Toyota’s firmware (analyzed as a part of the unintended acceleration inquiry few years ago: http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintended-acceleration-and-big-bowl-“spaghetti”-code). When the experts called it “spaghetti code” in court that should give you a pause, given that this gadget is controlling the engine of your car.
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https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-review/lada/niva. Even Bosch got to it. The voting machine tampering electronics is standard. Only in orange.
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I was once given a lift in a Lada (back in the 90s). When we stopped, and got out, I couldn’t find the button to lock the door.
Me, “Does this have central locking?”
Owner, “Yes. From Moscow.”
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I would tend to agree. I got some horror stories from my two and a half years as a developer in a Denmark-based corporation that I’ll refrain from naming (suffice it to say, they manufacture pumps and electric motors).
Most engineers were basically good & skilled guys just trying to do their jobs, but management was dysfunctional except for a few exceptions (one of them being my own boss) and so was the cooperation between departments - which caused a lot of people to basically waste a lot of time and money waiting for each other.
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I agree. I’ve seen far worse pipelines at large companies that were quite profitable and stable.
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