Coches electricos

[Marv]

Hay quien se empieza a hartar de las tontunas del Sr. Musgo.

"If there are a million Tesla robo-taxis functioning on the road in 2020, I will eat them.  Perhaps @rodneyabrooks will eat half with me?"

https://twitter.com/kaifulee/status/1126238951960993792?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1126238951960993792&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fthenextweb.com%2Fartificial-intelligence%2F2019%2F05%2F08%2Felon-says-tesla-will-field-1m-fully-autonomous-robo-taxis-by-2020-ai-experts-call-bs%2F

Lo de colocar la bacalada (Hockey Stick Projection) pudo ser en 2013. Ya como que no.

Palomitas.

[Saturio]

Bueno.

Musk no dijo que en 2020 habría un millón de robotaxis funcionando.

Aquí, el hater, echando un capote.
Dijo que la red de robotaxis estaría operativa en algún entorno urbano limitado. Y todo ello en el caso de que no hubiese problemas de autorizaciones y regulatorios.

[Saturio]

El Reverendo Musk, quería decir.

Leyendo el interesante artículo de Mark Wilson sobre su primera experiencia con Waymo -da para un hilo comentar la larga pieza-, se llega a una no menos interesante noticia sobre el "Holy Grial" de las baterías, una de aluminio grafito que se carga en escasos minutos y tiene decenas de miles de ciclos.

Lo mejor de la noticia de la pila mágica es que es de... 2015.

Desde 2015 se han producido algunos avances, pero:

Según parece el Ion-Aluninio (con electrodo de grafito o grafeno) jamás sustituirá al Ion-Litio (al menos en automoción) porque su densidad energética será siempre bajísima.

[JENOFONTE10]

VE, BYD, CHINA. VOLÚMENES, SUBSIDIOS Y BENEFICIOS.

Build Your Dreams (BYD) es el fabricante de los coches eléctricos más vendidos en China y en 2015 se convirtió en el mayor productor de vehículos eléctricos del mundo. Está llegando tan lejos que este 2019 ya puede presumir de haber obtenido mejores beneficios que Tesla.
La compañía, que también comercializa coches de combustión, ha informado de un aumento del 632 % de las ganancias en el primer trimestre de 2019 respecto al mismo periodo del año anterior.
Los datos son más que buenos: las ganancias de la compañía aumentaron a cerca de 750 millones de yuanes -99 millones de euros- en el primer trimestre, en comparación con los 102 millones de yuanes del año anterior (unos 13 millones de euros).
[…]
https://www.motorpasion.com/industria/imparable-fabricante-chino-coches-electricos-byd-acaba-trimestre-beneficios-632

Subsidies are speeding up a turnaround at BYD. The electric-vehicle maker reported a stupendous 632 percent increase in first-quarter net profit. It will be tricky to pull off a similar manoeuvre next time, as government grants helped to buoy the bottom line to 750 million yuan ($111 million). But investors nonetheless have cause for cautious celebration.
[…]
Wang’s marque shifted 73,172 electric-vehicle units in the first quarter, compared with less than 30,000 a year earlier. Management expects half-year net profit as high as 1.65 billion yuan, more than triple the same period last year.
The next test will be whether BYD can build on its head start. Last year Chinese drivers had a choice of more than 100 electric models, more than any other country, according to Nomura. Local startups are already rampant, and foreign giants are determined to get a piece of the action too. For now their share of the local market is modest, but regulations and emissions standards are forcing the likes of Volkswagen and Toyota to double down on the new technology.
Grants won’t fuel fast and furious growth for much longer. But BYD investors – including Warren Buffett, who has held a minority stake since 2008 – could still enjoy this ride.
 
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-byd-results-breakingviews/subsidies-gas-up-turnaround-at-buffett-backed-byd-idUSKCN1S50FR

El VE experimentando política industrial de planificación central.

¿No sienten en los huesos un cambio de tiempos?. Ya veremos el resultado, si Dios quiere.

Saludos.

[JENOFONTE10]

VE Y VW: BATERÍAS, ECOLOGISTAS Y RENTABILIDAD.

Los accionistas de Volkswagen, contra el coche eléctrico.
Además, un centenar de manifestantes ecologistas abucheó a los accionistas de Volkswagen, denunciando el impacto en el clima y la contaminación ambiental que tiene el gigante alemán.
[…]
El golpe de efecto era la novedad de un proyecto para comprar y acondicionar una fábrica de baterías eléctricas en Salzgitter, Baja Sajonia, en la que la empresa invertirá 1.000 millones de euros, contratará a 700 empleados y que servirá a la actual estrategia de producción de unos 22 millones de vehículos eléctricos en los próximos diez años.
[…] la producción de baterías no cubre la demanda del mercado en el futuro […] Volkswagen se anotará un importante tanto fabricando las suyas sin depender de proveedores.
[…]
«En el futuro previsible, no hay alternativa al desarrollo de la batería eléctrica», defendió Diess,
[…] solamente a través de la producción masiva pueden abaratarse los costes y lograr la introducción definitiva en el mercado.
[…]
https://www.abc.es/economia/abci-accionistas-volkswagen-contra-coche-electrico-201905151050_noticia.html

Saludos.

[visillófilas pepitófagas]

La acción de Tesla a 211 USD. Musk reconoce la situación financiera en un mail a los empleados e implanta fuertes medidas de contención de costes:

Tesla CEO Elon Musk launches new ‘hardcore’ cost-cutting effort, will review all expenses
https://electrek.co/2019/05/16/tesla-hardcore-cost-cutting-elon-musk/

Elon Musk: Tesla Broke in 10 Months Without ‘Hardcore’ Cost Reduction
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/291618-elon-musk-tesla-out-of-money-in-10-months-without-hardcore-cost-reduction

[Cadavre Exquis]

Visto en el foro de The Oil Crash:

El costo de extraer litio se ha reducido a $2,400 x tonelada
Suyman Mayo 17, 2019; 10:18am

El nuevo proceso ha reducido el costo de la extracción de litio a un "récord bajo" de $ 2,400 por tonelada, según un informe del gobierno chino.

Eso se compara con un precio internacional para litio que oscila entre $ 13,000 y $ 22,000 por tonelada, y un precio de contrato a largo plazo de alrededor de $ 18,700, durante el año pasado, según algunas estimaciones de la industria.

https://www.inkstonenews.com/science/chinas-lithium-breakthrough-could-be-game-changer-electric-cars/article/3010277

Saludos.

[JENOFONTE10]

https://www.inkstonenews.com/science/chinas-lithium-breakthrough-could-be-game-changer-electric-cars/article/3010277

Magnesium, in particular, is extremely difficult to separate from lithium because the two minerals have similar ionic properties.
According to the report, a 15-year research project funded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences has cracked a cost-effective way of unbinding lithium from other minerals, especially magnesium, through multiple processing stages with complex electronic and membrane filtering.

Salares tibetanos y un proceso abaratado para eliminar magnesio.

[...]
The Salar receives significantly more rain than its counterparts in the lower altitudes of Argentina and Chile, which can slow the evaporation process. Its lithium deposits also have a higher magnesium content. “While the ratio of magnesium in Chile is 5 to 1, in Uyuni it’s 21 to 1. Four times the concentration,” Bolivian chemical engineer Miguel Parra said. “So it’s a much simpler operation for them. For us, separating magnesium from lithium is the biggest challenge.”
[...]
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2019/02/lithium-is-fueling-technology-today-at-what-cost/

Tianqi, una espodumenera, ya controla un cuarto de la salinera SQM. Al otro lado de la frontera andina, los bolivianos esperan un procesado barato para poner sus grandes reservas en producción.

La movilidad está agitada por la cadena del VE, desde mineras hasta fabricantes competidores de VC, o clientes.

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

Entre los días 23 y 24 de agosto de 2018 un supuesto ex-empleado de Tesla improvisó un AMA (Ask Me Anythin) en un hilo de un foro llamado Something Awful (que podría considerarse una especie de Forocoches yankie que lleva en funcionamiento ya la friolera de 20 años ya que fue creado en 1999 en pleno boom de las "puntocom") en el que contaba sus experiencias trabajando en el desarrollo del sistema de "infotaiment" y en la parte del backend de los Tesla.

Evidentemente es imposible saber si lo escrito es cierto, pero parece bastante plausible y permite conocer detalles interesantes del funcionamiento (en aquel entonces) de la empresa.

Les dejo a continuación con el (largísimo) hilo:

Ayn Krugerrand's "Tesla Shrugged"

i used to work for tesla writing infotainment firmware and backend services - all of which runs in a single bottom tier Datacenter in a single location on the worst VMware deployment known to man.
fun fact: a jenkins pipeline once caused almost the entire fleet to reboot loop for about an hour

i want need to know more

model s and x use openvpn to talk to their backend. inside that backend there are metadata services that feed info to the system, one of those things being a ~20MB+ (generated by the worst erp system) json payload that describes supercharger poo poo for the map in the touchscreen. somebody was smart enough to do automated linting but forgot to validate against the custom parser the car runs which caused a segfault in the qt app that runs the ui, which in turn for a variety of reasons forces a reboot of that component. I think we clocked about 15 seconds before it read the file and faulted after boot. it was doing that for an hour before everyone panicked and got me and qa on the phone to fix it. i wrote a quick python/fabric script that ssh’d to as many cars as possible at a time to rm the file

I’ve got a few hundred stories like this

why do the cars run a cluster of ubuntu vms?

used to be centos 6 and Ruby on Rails. I haven’t worked there in 3 years, but last I heard it hadn’t changed much for s and x. model 3 uses newer tech, but still based out of a single Datacenter

also drat dude you want plat or a new av or anything, it pains me to see an '01 slummin' a trumptar

appreciate the offer, I mostly browse and don’t post because I’m a boring computer toucher

some of what I wrote runs on the factory line - at the time we started the model s program, which has not changed to this day, we fake the backend to install and validate firmware as the car moves down the line. a tech runs over to the car, plugs an eth cable in diag and dumps an image on the car using curl and a tui app I wrote using python. as the car moves down the line it is installing firmware for about an hour. if that station for any reason can’t talk to the PKI system, erp, or a ruby webapp it halts the line

can't you flash the storage before its installed in a car?

yes and no. the firmware update process in a car is complicated because you have a bunch of dumb components hanging off of CAN or LIN and they have to updated in very specific order and sometimes you have to retry 10s of times to get it to take. ( gently caress you Bosch). Tesla never bothered to flash those things ahead of time before assembly so that gets done the first time as it rolls down the line. the infotainment system and gateway arbitrate that stuff. typically any update that tuned voltages becomes a one way - no downgrade is possible without frying something

this is the thing, like i work with boards that have many devices on them that have firmware and they're all flashed well before the board is installed in anything if not before even being soldered down

they got smart eventually - model 3 does do this now, but doing that at scale with all the components for a car is a challenge when you have it being done with stations running yocto images and perl

like, for all the lols @ tesla, have they literally never heard of a process engineer?

like everyone else who was smart they either quit or were fired through no fault of their own so what you’re left with are people fearing for their job who desperately don’t want to change status quo for fear it will break something

they forgot that the unspoken part of "move fast and break things" is that you're supposed to fix what's broken

exactly this. we never really had time to address critical issues and were constantly short on staff because people were quitting or they just wouldn't give candidates competitive offers. this is why you hear about people burning out - they've managed to chase everyone away

more fun facts:

the infotainment system and gateway don't have a battery-backed rtc. when the system reboots (sleep, deep sleep, reboot, whatever) the car is at tyool 1970 until it gets ntp again. the logs themselves are written in a binary ring buffer format and when they come in 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 until hbase/hadoop and friends were brought in.

the supercharger system uses ssh dss keys to "vpn" back to the datacenter to a single server over 2G wireless with very limited resources. the connection is essentially simplex for various reasons so getting data to and from the supercharger is usually a 1KB/s operation unless that site has had connection aggregation done. at one point i looked at the system and to pull data out for analysis, somebody had written a bash script that was printf'ing in a for loop across ~5k devices. it would usually take about 3 days to do a successful firmware update on any single supercharger.

we once patched openssl to ignore client cert expiry because somebody forgot to create a process to update keys in the field and all the customer cars started falling offline because their certs had expired. the quick and dirty was to just patch openssl quickly and make openvpn on the server side use that one while we created those processes for about 2 weeks.

With "no fault of their own" being the usual "proposing a process that isn't fragile and prone to error but will take longer than X promised to Y who promised it to Z and hurting the feelings of V and W, who are responsible for the monstrosity in the first place and have the ear of management"?

yep that was 90% of it. most of the time me and the other firmware folks were chasing elon's whims about what to do with firmware. where i should have been fixing critical issues in the system i was pulled off to do poo poo like add farting unicorns

uh we literally do the same thing; well, yocto images and python

tesla isn't the first to solder down SOMs running embedded linux and a bunch of MCUs hanging off an i2c/canbus/whatever line

they aren't the first - for what we were doing at the time it made sense and helped us get the program off the ground quickly. lots of room for improvement and in 8 years, they should have done so.

my issue was the fact that the systems doing the flashing were running the yocto images and perl and the guy writing the perl was also responsible for writing the thing that actually updates the car. that thing (the car-side updater) is about ~100k lines of C in a single file. code reviews were always a laugh riot

2G is dead so i wonder what happened to cars that used that

not sure. anything using the "old gateway" would need to be replaced - i brought that up years ago. roadster, supercharger and rav4 all used that standard (though toyota pulled all the wireless connectivity from the board later on, wisely)

i am SO GLAD your nda expired

99% of what i'm talking about is "public" anyway. tesla isn't encrypting their firmware and it's really easy to glean information from the vpn with a packet cap because nothing inside the vpn (was) encrypted. dumping tegra 3 model s and x is trivial and tesla's cars are nowhere near as secure as they'd have you believe.

for example, at one time you were able to root a model s with a usb stick and a gstreamer exploit.

while tesla should be given credit for updating the car over the air to fix issues, that's also any connected car's biggest weakness - you're one exploit away (or malicious employee with access) from remote root.

more fun stuff: there's limited space on the emmc in the touchscreen system so updating maps can't be done using an image or a binary diff. so the thing rsync's map updates (all 2GB of them) from various places. they may have fixed that in the newer intel-based boards, but who knows.

autopilot had _really_ high turnover at one point before release because some guy from space x came in and gave the entire dept a C pointer/memory test because Elon said they were "late" to ship.

There's the story online of that hacker who was pulling software images off through the door Ethernet port and found that his car's firmware was remotely downgraded after he uncovered and posted the first references to the P100 models.

Does that sound plausible to you?

yup, i'm the guy that installed the older versions. this was a marketing mistake really. if i recall correctly, he ended up getting a marketing car or his car got tagged in the update system as a trusted car and he ended up getting pre-release stuff. this happened from time to time - sometimes marketing would sell off a car and the poo poo erp system wouldn't record the change. that car would then get prerelease and sometimes very broken firmware. i seem to recall another case where we just forgot to remove the prerelease materials from the official build, so all you had to do was look around.

wait, do you mean the guy came in and cleaned out the department of people who couldn't pass his personal fizzbuzz pointer quiz?

pretty much. many quit in protest of the test, others didn't pass because they were harness people working in cad programs and not actually programmers. even HR, who at the time was run by the worst conspirator rear end in a top hat ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnnon_Geshuri ) told him to can it before they sank the program

are these all done over cellular? the network itself provides a lot of security in that case at least. of course until someone gets your password to control center/command center

they're done over cell and wifi, depending on how big or urgent the update is. the network does generally provide security in the transport sense - the backend systems are what worry me and tesla is a big enough target that a determined actor could gain control. i can only guess how the likes of NIO (a chinese e-car startup) runs their backend.

"We don't need QA/UAT, we just need to pound out a really insecure and buggy product! Jackpot!"

we had firmware QA and they were great folks. for the lack of staff and timelines we had they were amazing people and the folks i worked directly with, save a few, were really talented. that said, it takes more than just firmware to QA something like a car that talks to a complex backend with continuous delivery into production

the early days of tesla, post-roadster, early model s and the start of model x were good times - everyone was trying to prove the technology worked, we were innovating and making something that hadn't been done before. things really started to poo poo the bed around the time we pivoted from model 3 plans to shipping model x first. the falcon wing doors were _such a shitshow_. they ended up delaying the program almost a year, hence why model 3 basically skipped all the usual phases a car goes through for validation. i mean, come on - you have bumpers falling off in the rain, the interior is a disaster, there's no instrument cluster which takes your eyes off the road - this list just goes on.

tesla basically runs their entire business like a just in time compiler only they don't treat warnings or errors as failures. most groups in the company don't cross-communicate so there's a lot of duplication of effort.

i once got pulled into a meeting because a car burned down when it was attached to a supercharger and we didn't get a log out of the car. normally under some emergency circumstances the car will try to upload a log when it thinks poo poo has gone really badly, but in this particular case it was far enough away from a tower it had half 3G connection and had to upload a 30MB log via HTTPS POST. the car burned down before it even got to 10MB and the system was only designed for exponential backoff retries, not resumption of in-progress. elon was calm about it, but we had to justify why we never had time to address it - maybe it was because we were all busy making unsafe features work?

also on the supercharger note - you can get blacklisted from using them if you charge on them all the time. that's because the supercharger bypasses the charging regulator boards and dumps directly into the pack at 300A/450v which creates a ton of wear on the battery. want to keep your range high? don't supercharge often.

do they define “too often”?

algorithm-based now - the ai poo poo i was working on took into account a lot of factors to determine if you were abusing it before i left. the criteria takes into account the state of many components in the car, your driving patterns and other details. or it did anyway. not even sure that stuff is running still - they rotated projects in and out of existence pretty rapidly.

what is elon like when stuff goes wrong due to his idiotic micromanagement and big stupid ideas?

he's never wrong. his "open door policy" was an invitation to catch you breaking rank.

tesla was also in the news because they were doing cute poo poo like spinning up k8s clusters which had AWS IAM access to sensitive S3 buckets but wasn't ssl'd and the k8s mgmt api was available publicly. there were other teams running industrial control equipment with centos 7 an no hardening at all.

there was one time where a canadian kid stole the domain and redirected emails and managed to take over slack and a bunch of other poo poo because the idiot IT team didn't hide the registrar information or use something like markmonitor. the car-side stuff at least did full mtls at the time so it was ok, but lol did that kid get a lot of info.

thats just what i want, the car manufacturer monitoring how i drive the car i own and deciding that features should be turned off after i have purchased it, that's a good feature.

you have no idea. any connected car is ripe for data harvesting and you (the consumer) should expect it going forward. on that note, china has a law in place that mandates all electric cars send real time telemetry to their government servers - model s/x/3, NIO cars and any other electric car if they're driving already complies with that law to be road certified. don't be surprised if that becomes a mandate in other countries

thats ok my car is 15 years old and i will never buy a new one and the only thing i connect it to is my own butt

i powered my old car with farts too

for all the poo poo that went down at tesla, there were some positive aspects. everyone i worked with really cared about physical safety and we put a lot of effort into making sure the engineering was sound so nobody got hurt. if you subtract autopilot, and that's a big if, the car is generally well designed minus the fit and finish issues + interior, but i'd argue that's never been tesla's strong point anyway. the cars are fast, the 2013-2014 model s lines were really good, solid, basic cars. my last straw was the summon feature - i strongly believe a car you are not in, backing out on its own from a parking space with the current sensors is super dangerous.

i was making jokes with the tesla expats when ol' musky launched his roadster into space that you could see the gaps in the fit and finish without a telescope

btw thanks for posting these. they're amazing

no problem - if you want to know anything specific (i won't violate any ndas, patents or internal arch) happy to oblige

no worries. love your posts, i just thought defending tesla on the safety front was a bit strange

i think i just got caught up in their collision safety. i dunno, most of us really tried our best to do things the safe way - i advocated for patching out shellshock and heartbleed across the company really hard but a lot of it fell on deaf ears for too long

also advocated for switching out boards with something that had an hsm, doing hab stuff, encrypting the ssl keys the car has (they're on an unencrypted cf card, lol), mtls for everything on the backend, ipsec between components in the car, etc etc. i just gave up and quit

what size bed does grimes's ex-boyfriend sleep in on the factory floor

i worked out of deer creek, never really saw him in the factory. rumor is he was stealing an office and sleeping on a couch

*edit - i did see John McCain in deer creek once, that was a trip. showed him some of the stuff we were working on

just remembered some bits of trivia

• they took away our free snacks in deer creek and replaced them with lovely vendors
• said vendors food poisoned people often enough osha or whatever the body is shut them down
• people were so mad about the free cereal being gone they'd intra-office snail mail bowls of cereal from the factory and post pictures in slack
• deer creek's parking got so bad (too many people, not enough space) they hired permanent valets
• they were cited for the shitshow parking for fire safety violations (unconfirmed, but i believe it)
• elon publicly being a shitbag to trans people
• the first time we turned on real time telemetry for the dev fleet we caught somebody going 130mph over the san mateo bridge
• it networking so bad the company had permanent 5~8% consistent packet loss between various places (like, next rack)
• firmware git repo so large they had to mirror it (something like 2TB)

What would describe as being the most seriously hosed up thing you saw happen there? Define hosed up any way you want to.

internal politics. the most toxic culture i have ever encountered, heard about or worked in

i swear they selected for the shittiest people in silicon valley and made them managers

Can you confirm/deny

no tailpipe but i wouldn't be surprised if he attempted the charging port

lmao $100k cars should not have issues with fit and finish that haven't been since the death of british leyland

depending on when and what features you got (and if you got a marketing used car) they could go as low at $40k after incentives - but totally agree with you. fit/finish issues have been a thorn in their side forever

the touchscreen is kind of a safety issue in that you have to look at it to touch it, stealing focus. tactile buttons for some functions would have been better

Another safety issue at Tesla is that of being swatted by your CEO for pointing out that resin is being injected into the holes of unsafe lithium batteries and shipped into a bunch of customers' cars

some friends of mine worked with the guy, the jury is still out on that one. ol' musky isn't totally paranoid - we did catch bad actors doing stuff and they were nailed to the wall. finding a real apt in your network can be some next level poo poo

the firmware repo was that size if you take into account a huge company, many devices in the car at play and incremental updates to firmware across all those devices + branches for people to do work in. i contributed to that mess by policy, not by choice, but whatever. i'd imagine they'd be smart enough to move to something like git lfs so it isn't as much of a pain

scale stuff:

tesla has a real thundering herd problem at this point. if you factor in common peak drive times for any region (bay area CA being the largest by pop) they have to weather something like 100k+ cars slamming servers all at once during rush hours. i saw this play out on some of the cj dashboards, it was fun to watch the production poo poo come to a grinding halt before they figured out they couldn't just-in-time the autoscale and had to provision ahead of time for peaks

i had to deal with marketing people sincerely asking me why we weren't going to run containers on the car in firmware. no, marketing, i don't care that the car would "update faster" or "features would release faster"

a web front-end (we'll say it's a cms that's php-based) that needed $500k in WAF bullshit just so we didn't get pwned every 5 minutes

fragmented installs of splunk. i think i counted well over 20 installs for various departments before they finally hired a decent data scientist that cleaned it up

so many random java, django, .net services from various places, more than i could count and i had to touch a _lot_ of them with firmware. ActiveRecord controlling way way _way_ too much. i consider this probably one of tesla's biggest scale problems - i don't think they actually know or can track exactly what they're running server side at all - so you end up with teams running vmware, nsx, k8s, openstack, hyper-v.

a car that has a json parser implemented in bash 3 because <interpreted language> is dangerous in the car. there are some seriously magic shell scripts on that thing that probably 3 people in the company understand in full

nodejs was a thing for a while but quickly broke down once we reached the 20k car mark - ended up replacing a bunch of that stuff with a Go variant

bets on whether the fire was due to incompetence, act of nature, or deliberately set?

never attribute to malice what can more easily be explained by incompetence

not surprised at all. earlier in Falcon 9 lifecycle at SpaceX, they kept having helium problems because the QC team kept signing off on defective bottles and valves. do you think that attitude might have scared them into not saying anything?

absolutely. taking advantage of the "open door policy" was the fastest way to lose your job at tesla and from what i'm told, spacex, being run by the same guy was no different. there is so much pressure to ship on time they push people to work 14 hour days, 7 days a week - i did that for a while before i just couldn't take it anymore and just accepted being marked down in employee review for being late

i realize you may not be able to answer this for reasons, but what the christ are your vehicles doing that ends up with this much traffic on your back end?

imagine if all of your services were synchronous instead of async

the openvpn problem is easy to get around thundering herd/scale issues if you design it correctly and know how to run a network. in theory, you could get around a lot openvpn scale issues if you use bridged networking, ipv6 on the inside, and some redundant dhcp servers to hand out leases - that kind of poo poo won't work in most cloud providers though so you stuck at running that crap in a datacenter.

tesla's issues around the services were many fold - the specifics would give away too much, but i'll say this: when you make all of your services depend on a single rdbms while simultaneously using the world's worst ORM, you get what's coming to you.

i poked around on a 3 a friend has and after looking at a packet cap it looks like they're doing ssl'd amqp - i didn't see any openvpn packets so i suspect they got wise to how lovely it can be, but lol at running connected car stuff directly over the internet outside a private apn or a tunnel

wait they’re not using a private apn?!

can't say - i do most of the packet grabbin' on wifi because that thing will shakes its bits on any ole network

The staggering level of internal fragmentation reminds me of how PayPal was when I worked there in '09-15. They experimented for a few months with an "agile product solutions" team that basically took "we need a widget that does this" orders and cranked out custom Java poo poo that never worked.

that's basically tesla in a nutshell only, i guess it kinda works. every different team has some kind of different service where you can get data but none of it published anywhere, there are no standards, and everyone just loves to write their own client implementations because they don't trust you to do it right (sorry that we don't have a client in C++ which is mandated by policy for the car)

poking holes in the firewall was always super fun - i would describe, in full detail all ports, sources, destinations, have security assessments done, etc and somehow, still, the firewall cj's would gently caress up the ports. i once spent, and this is not a joke, 3 weeks chasing a single port down - i think that email thread had 100 reply-all's, two video confs and me visiting the firewall cj in fremont before it was finally fixed

was there any sort of accountability for the devs there, or was it if you knew how to talk the talk you could bs your way through the ranks while producing nothing of value?

was there any noticeable increase in the absurdity of musk's requests as time went on? anything particularly absurd he called for that was flat out shot down?

no, if you didn't do work it was really really obvious and they purged you quickly. that didn't mean it was any _good_ but if you produced you were generally left to your own devices as long as you weren't breaking builds - this seemed to be true of most engineering teams.

ol' musky did increasingly weird poo poo, but i wouldn't necessarily call it out of the ordinary for silicon valley - many folks, me included, for a time, viewed him as a bit of a Jobs-type. his behavior became really erratic around the time we wrapped up X and headed for 3 full steam - the more stuff piling on about autopilot, the more issues with the factory, the ongoing issues with X and then with 3 mfg, his ongoing spacex work - the dude really needs a nap and to just walk away from tesla at this point. its arguable he isn't running it successfully considering all the issues

* edit - running it successfully by silicon valley standards. too many issues to reach profitability because of really poor strategy and execution. too many people get wrapped up in his celebrity without really asking 'can he pull this off' which is the difference between him and Jobs - Jobs actually did poo poo

is turning a profit considered an issue?

consider silicon valley when you ask that question

yeah, i get that, it's just they make a product that will probably poo poo itself when the back end goes dark, and that product costs $65k-$120k so it's an outlier by sv standards.

the product shouldn't poo poo itself when the backend eventually goes dark - autopilot won't work, updates won't, remote phone poo poo won't but otherwise the driving and infotainment part of the car should still function if you pull the sim and put your own in. given how poo poo the firmware security is it'd be pretty easy to dump the firmware, compile up some statically linked tools for shits and just patch in your own services. there's been a few clever people on twitter who figured out you can run Go arm bins on the thing - after that it's just figuring out what crap you care about on CAN (if anything).

all that said, tesla did sell cars explicitly with the sim pulled and no network ever - service was always complaining to us because the ring logs on those cars would take hours to parse.

speaking of the ring logs - because there was no battery backed rtc, we had to stitch and best-guess times based on the intervals when the car _did_ have valid time and patch that into the logs serially before they could be imported. inaccuracies in the signal data could and did lead to all kinds of bullshit when somebody needed to be debug issues

jobs got booted from his own company for a decade and his only saving grace was that a soft drink exec managed to misunderstand the market even worse than he did. his non-apple 90s projects were commercial failures

yup - i suspect elon is more like 90's era jobs - but i don't think it's a market understanding problem. tesla has really good engineering on the go-juice part of the car, but really really lacks in total execution: fit, finish, body, interior, design. if nothing else they could be profitable selling battery packs, drive trains, their new in-house chips, that kind of thing.

also, what? can you expand on why/what markets?

can't expand on anything customer/market related. it is an option during the manufacturing process, you just have to ask for it. as for the why: you can't remotely root, monitor or otherwise track a 'connected car' that isn't actually connected

i'm surprised that's an option

it isn't advertised for obvious reasons. tesla was partially able to bring autopilot to market so quickly because they had seeded all cars after a certain time with autopilot sensors and hardware, just not activated - they then dialed up the tracking across the customer fleet to gather the data - and with the density of cars they had at the time with hardware in, they had a goldmine within hours. pii was stripped, but i don't think they could have pulled it off quite the same way if the US had GDPR.

this raises so many questions i don't even know where to start. not even on the privacy front, just how that data could be useful for autonomous lane keeping and cruise control

I don't really work in that space, so I can't tell you. At the time everyone made it out to be a big deal - if you consider how far other players are in that space now (waymo) I'm not convinced tesla has anything in the current gens that's even close to worthwhile. autonomous driving is a rabbit hole - another thread for that if people want to discuss that

(sigue)

[Cadavre Exquis]

(continua)

Y el hilo de SomethingAwful apareció en Reddit...

Former Tesla Programmer's anecdotes about problems

... y pocos minutos después, en Twitter...

A former Tesla employee, who worked on their IT infrastructure, is posting in a subforum of a subforum, a little-known place for funy computer forgotten by time. His NDA has expired.

lmao that some cj (no offense op) can accidently remote brick your car with some badly written php, potentially forcing you to break a window to get out

the future is here!

now that the teledildonics patent has expired buying a tesla can now result in literally getting hosed as well as figuratively

man twitter is so dumb this isn't even news. big shock - a large company has some issues with development and some of the issues were lol bad but I guarantee you the technical issues i posted are long gone now

bringing up hardware is always messy and with tight deadlines, poo poo happens, so to be real for a moment: in my opinion tesla is shipping good (model s/x) products, they are road safe and tested, there are growing pains, quality pains and such but nothing they can't fix. model 3 is another story, I hope they fix it

honestly i started out really liking working there and I feel like my 8 years there had an impact and tesla to this day is still full of good folks doing the right thing. i know for a fact all the crap i worked on is probably gone by now as it should be - they are evolving. you'll notice they haven't had further incidents like the thing I posed earlier with the reboot loop, so at the very least rca's are paid attention.

most of tesla's problems are self-imposed management style issues, they'll be forced to fix them at some point, one way or another, but that's up to the board

why did you change your name

I think farts are funnier

yeah I'm not buying this until they start running recalls on the clearly underspec'd and dangerous suspension components made from aluminum foam

not much of a mechanical guy, can't speak to that stuff. my comments are restricted to firmware and my experience driving dev cars. I don't actually own one so I can't really comment on long term ownership or repair issues. besides, you can verify much of what I say by dumping the firmware for yourself.

I do care a great deal about privacy and any connected car's ongoing connectivity should be heavily scrutinized - what assurances do I have they aren't Facebook stalking me?

yeah I'm not buying this until they start running recalls on the clearly underspec'd and dangerous suspension components made from aluminum foam

not much of a mechanical guy, can't speak to that stuff. my comments are restricted to firmware and my experience driving dev cars. I don't actually own one so I can't really comment on long term ownership or repair issues. besides, you can verify much of what I say by dumping the firmware for yourself.

I do care a great deal about privacy and any connected car's ongoing connectivity should be heavily scrutinized - what assurances do I have they aren't Facebook stalking me?

This thread hit the main teslamotors subreddit:

https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotor..._discusses_the/

Top comment so far:


You gonna stand for this Mr Fart Powered?

i guess they're missing the part where i worked in firmware - we had a devops team in infotainment but i wasn't part of it.

i never claimed to be smarter than anyone and i'm not, i'm you're pretty average computer toucher that knows enough about programming, linux and networks to get paid for it i just called out bs as a i saw it. my experience at tesla can be summed up as both rewarding and the most frustration i've experienced professionally

can someone please explain why people think slobbing your boss's knob and working your life away are good things



and also how come they all post on redd- oh, nevermind

also incorrect - openvpn on the tesla model s/x is encrypted - packet cap one for yourself and find out.

elon musk spotted

real talk: i learned a lot from the other engineers and i have them to thank for my career advancement. i have no bad words to say about them, they're my people

Wouldn't take it personally. /r/teslamotors are not that good at accepting critical commentary on Tesla, they're massively invested in Tesla and Cult of Musk.

That being said I still read it daily...

for the most part i ignore the likes of twitter, facebook and reddit - social media has always been poison and exists purely to datamine you

i figure you guys know as well as i do that poo poo sucks in engineering a lot of the time and nobody should have any illusions about how the sausage is made (the point of the 'pos)

to me that's one of the more fascinating parts about your posts

every software dev shop in existence has at least some smattering of inane nonsense going on where the fingers meet the keyboard; it's just that in this case it's attached to high speed heavy and poorly constructed machines

yeah true - i'd be far, _far_ more worried about autopilot (any vendor's, not just tesla), than some dumb infotainment firmware. as i said, tesla does follow the safety guidelines - you can drive the car safely with infotainment down, but the creature comforts are gone like ac

my poasts are just examples of how lovely infotainment can be, but car security is hard. the thing was running ubuntu 10.04 forever on Nvidia's lovely pdk so as soon as it shipped it was vulnerable. firmware development is a balance of limitations

if you think tesla has it bad, ohhh man. there are other connected cars (jeep) which have been demonstrably remote-rooted in really horrific ways. there's a bunch of poo poo coming out of china that was made by the Chinese company and Bosch/delphi/whoever and i guarantee you they don't do due diligence like we did. my point in general being that connected cars, privacy, security - these are industry wide issues and should be addressed

because if you're even having problems with how your parts are being stamped out i could easily believe that a rolling battery would liquify its occupants in a crash before the lithium fire becomes a problem

tesla had less fatalities than usual until autopilot - I'm a firm believer they oversold the thing, in marketing speak, in what it could do, in how you should treat it. excluding autopilot there were stories of people smashing into brick walls at 80mph and walking away, but any car you abuse could kill you or someone else

do we know each other?

only did cars for a while tesla ruined my taste for it but i keep up a little bit. the china stuff is really interesting because they're making some really neat looking cars that look totally unsafe

harsh but fair

the crumple zone of the frunk was sometimes cited as the life-saving measure - all that stuff should be in the nhsta reports or whatever

i'm sure they were also of better build quality before the muskman's compensation was directly tied to the stock price and he went balls deep into trying to crank out as much car-shaped garbage as he could

the only criticisms i ever heard about the model s from before all that were just the unexpectedly mediocre interiors

the rush to huge numbers in production is what lowered the build quality imo. when they were pushing around 100 model s a week the build quality was good and the issues found were small things like charging port getting stuck sometimes, robots not putting on glass properly

I also think they tried to automate too much - at some point you have to pay humans to assemble your car in bulk, you can't cut out the middle man. musk is nothing if not an old-school factory baron

not only do they look unsafe, pray that the results of software audits and functional safety assessments never become public

lol that's probably the reason you can't buy an ES8 here, hilarious

That which is dead can never die

again, reddit didn't read. the warning was for charging them _all the time_ on the supercharger which tesla has already publicly disparaged anyway. I don't even know if that old policy applies to paid-for supercharger subs - it may not

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

Visto en el foro de The Oil Crash:

Electric Transport Revolution Set To Spread Rapidly Into Light and Medium Commercial Vehicle Market

May 15, 2019
London and New York, May 15, 2019 – Electric vehicles, or EVs, are on track to dominate global sales of passenger cars and buses by 2040, and to encroach significantly on the market for vans and short-distance trucking, according to the latest forecast from research firm BloombergNEF (BNEF).

Based on analysis of the evolving economics in different vehicle segments and geographical markets, BNEF’s Electric Vehicle Outlook 2019 shows electrics taking up 57% of the global passenger car sales by 2040, slightly higher than it forecast a year ago. Electric buses are set to hold 81% of municipal bus sales by the same date.

For the first time, BNEF has incorporated in its forecast detailed work on the commercial vehicle market. These projections show electric models taking 56% of light commercial vehicle sales in Europe, the U.S. and China within the next two decades, plus 31% of the medium commercial market.

Heavy trucks will prove the hardest segment for electrics to crack, with the latter’s sales limited to 19% in 2040. Their use case will mostly be in shorter-distance applications. However, conventional heavy trucks on long-haul routes will also face other, non-electric competition – from alternatives using natural gas and hydrogen fuel cells.

Colin McKerracher, head of advanced transport for BNEF, commented: “Our conclusions are stark for fossil fuel use in road transport. Electrification will still take time because the global fleet changes over slowly but, once it gets rolling in the 2020s, it starts to spread to many other areas of road transport. We see a real possibility that global sales of conventional passenger cars have already passed their peak.”

The role of shared mobility services such as ride-hailing and car-sharing will be important in this evolving picture. These services account for less than 5% of all passenger miles travelled globally at the moment, but this is set to rise to 19% by 2040. The BNEF team does not expect autonomous driving to have an impact on global transport and energy patterns until the 2030s.

Ali Izadi-Najafabadi, who leads BNEF’s coverage of shared mobility, said: “Providers of shared mobility services will choose to go electric faster than private individuals. There are now over a billion users of shared mobility services such as ride-hailing globally. These services will continue to grow and gradually reduce demand for private vehicle ownership.”

The main driver for the electrification trend over the next 20 years will be further sharp reductions in EV battery costs, making electric cars cheaper than internal combustion engine (ICE) alternatives by the mid-to-late 2020s in almost every market, on the basis of both lifetime costs and upfront costs. Since 2010, the average cost of lithium-ion batteries per kilowatt-hour has fallen by 85% on a mixture of manufacturing economies of scale and technology improvements.

The BNEF report sees China continuing to lead in electric cars, accounting for 48% of all passenger EVs sold in 2025 and 26% in 2040 when other markets are catching up. Europe pulls ahead of the U.S. as the number two EV market globally during the 2020s. Electrification in non-China emerging markets will be much slower, leading to a fragmented global auto market.

The aggregate increase, however, will be impressive. BNEF expects passenger EV sales to rise from 2 million worldwide in 2018 to 28 million in 2030 and 56 million by 2040. Meanwhile conventional passenger vehicle sales fall to 42 million by 2040, from around 85 million in 2018. Policy support such as fuel economy regulations and China’s new energy vehicle mandate are expected to drive the EV market in the next 5-7 years before economics takes over the latter half of the 2020s.

The oil, electricity and battery industries will all be impacted by the rise of EVs. A year ago, BNEF estimated their impact on road fuel demand at 7.3 million barrels per day by 2040. However, it has now nearly doubled this to 13.7 million barrels per day, partly because of new forecasts for electrification of the commercial vehicle sector and partly, paradoxically, because ICE fuel efficiency is expected to proceed more slowly than previously thought. That means that every EV displaces a conventional car that would have used a greater quantity of road fuel.


BNEF now estimates that EVs will add 6.8% to global electricity consumption in 2040, and that they will drive a surge in EV lithium-ion battery demand from 151 gigawatt-hours in 2019 to 1,748GWh in 2030. New mining capacity for all battery materials will need to come online to avoid this causing a supply crunch.

McKerracher said: “Transport is moving into a period of disruptive change, with many different factors coming into play. We have incorporated several new elements into our analysis, including an updated EV cost model that includes the cost of a home EV charger to reflect more accurately the costs individuals face to go electric; and a battery chemistry forecast for each of the new segments covered in this year’s report.”

Despite the radical changes afoot, the outlook for road transport emissions remains far from rosy. The BNEF team sees the size of the global on-the-road conventional passenger car fleet continuing to grow until 2030. This means that road vehicle emissions will continue to rise for the next decade, followed then by a sharp fall in the years before 2040, which will only return them to levels similar to 2018.

Contact
Veronika Henze
BloombergNEF
+1-646-324-1596
vhenze@bloomberg.net

Saludos.

P.D.

Aquí el informe en formato "presentación":

BloombergNEF: Electric Vehicle Outlook 2019

[JENOFONTE10]

TSLA ha abierto bajando y ha hecho mínimo a 195,25$ casi -7,5%. Ahora se recupera a 202$.

Parece que la autoridad de tráfico ya les 'ha cargado un/el muerto' por el autopilot.
Me da miedo la guerra comercial-tecnológica, y su nueva planta china se transforma de fortaleza en posible debilidad.

Además su modelo de camión eléctrico, parece ahora amenazado por el sueco que nos ha traído Cadavre:

[…] la compañía ya está planeando su expansión a Estados Unidos. "El punto de partida para los vehículos autónomos es Estados Unidos. Creo que es el primer mercado a escalar cuando se trata de vehículos autónomos", aseguró Robert Falck.
[…]

Ya saben que la tendencia en movilidad tiene cuatro patas:
- propulsión eléctrica,
- conducción autónoma,
- vehículo conectado,
- uso compartido.

El 'quinto elemento', en guerra comercial, es el acceso al mayor tamaño del mercado chino, imprescindible para economías de escala, que se convierte en arma de contrataque.

No compro, aunque el precio objetivo de algún analista (200$) a principios de año, ya ha sido tocado. Esperaré rebajas de valoración.

Saludos.

[Saturio]

No compro, aunque el precio objetivo de algún analista (200$) a principios de año, ya ha sido tocado. Esperaré rebajas de valoración.

Saludos.

Si no hay apoyo institucional el valor de la acción se va al guano sin remisión.
Alguien tiene que salir a "soportar" Tesla.
La guerra comercial no le favorece. Si se intensifica, significará que no habrá ni mercado chino ni producción china.
Tesla siempre ha sido una opción de riesgo y en tiempos de tribulación es lo peor de lo malo.
No lo veo, no lo veo...

[JENOFONTE10]

PRECIO/COSTE DEL VE: ES EL VOLUMEN (Y ESTÁ EN CHINA)

No compro, aunque el precio objetivo de algún analista (200$) a principios de año, ya ha sido tocado. Esperaré rebajas de valoración.

Si no hay apoyo institucional el valor de la acción se va al guano sin remisión.
Alguien tiene que salir a "soportar" Tesla.
La guerra comercial no le favorece. Si se intensifica, significará que no habrá ni mercado chino ni producción china.
Tesla siempre ha sido una opción de riesgo y en tiempos de tribulación es lo peor de lo malo.
No lo veo, no lo veo...

Warnings about Tesla are growing louder as Morgan Stanley slashes its worst-case scenario to $10 a share (TSLA).
Tesla shares fell early Tuesday after Morgan Stanley's auto analysts adjusted their bear case for the stock.
The analysts, led by the longtime Tesla watcher Adam Jonas, cut their worst-case-scenario target to $10 from $97.
While the firm's price target was held at $230, the extreme downside implies a 95% drop from current levels.
Watch Tesla trade live.
[…]
"The reduction in our bear case to $10 is driven primarily by our concerns around Chinese demand for Tesla products," a team led by Adam Jonas wrote in a note to clients.
"Our revised bear case assumes Tesla misses our current Chinese volume forecast by roughly half to account for the highly volatile trade situation in the region, particularly around areas of technology, which we believe run a high and increasing risk of government/regulatory attention."
[…]
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/tesla-stock-price-morgan-stanley-bear-price-target-lowered-10-2019-5-1028217695

Ya están aquí las rebajas. Las destaco por venir de A. Jonas (M.S.). Mantiene 230$, pero su escenario bajista, queda muy tocado por la guerra comercial con China.

"Se va al guano", como nos dice Saturio.
--------------
Ayer hubo un foro interesante sobre movilidad urbana, patinetes eléctricos y otras alternativas compartidas. No se dice nada en la reseña, pero el técnico de AEDIVE (químico), fue preguntado en la 2ª mesa redonda sobre precio del Li, ahora bajando, como factor de posibles aumentos de autonomía, gracias a baterías mas potentes y/o baratas.

Al responder, redujo la importancia del precio de los minerales, incluso citando al cobalto, y mencionando que las dos minerías de Li (salmuera y roca dura) mantienen competencia en precio. La clave del coste del VE, estaría mas bien en el volumen fabricado -como ya apuntan otros analistas-, es la economía de escala, amigos. La plataforma única para distintos modelos.

Según BNEF, el precio de adquisición del VE se equipararía con el VC en 2026. Pero según Del Río (se confesó usuario de dos, para ~150 km/día que recargan por la noche en su garaje) el TCO ya está igualado.

Eso explicaría la rebaja de Jonas, teniendo en cuenta la Gigafábrica 3 de Tesla, en construcción, determinante para el acceso sin aranceles al mercado chino, y con suministro autosuficiente en Li y tierras raras.

En el foro también se remarcó la tendencia creciente en movilidad urbana: USAR>POSEER.

Patinete-sharing y similares. SEAT ya tiene un departamento como anzuelo para enganchar jóvenes que ya no se sacan el carnet a los 18.

Pienso que el coche en propiedad, con población 80% urbana, sería residual, para rurales y chaleteros extrarradiales, reduciendo el volumen del parque ocioso aparcado (descongestionando calles y, ¡atención! Wyoming, garajes) y empujando a una segunda ola de concentración de fabricantes del sector, en lucha por el volumen menguante.

Para flotas, alquiler compartido y privados restantes, bastaría media docena de gigafábricas que ya están ampliando nicho a los servicios de movilidad (geolocalización, robotaxis, motos, bicis, patinetes y todo lo que se mueve). 

Saludos.
________
P.S.: el eléctrico dura mas, tiene menos mantenimiento y eso afecta también a los talleres mecánicos.

[Saturio]

Sobre la paridad de TCO entre un EV y un ICE.

Esto es difícil...
Digamos que hoy por hoy, un habitante de Adosadolandia puede comprarse un eléctrico y no estar haciendo una burrada siempre que "conmute" a diario y haga un buen número de kilómetros cada uno de esos días. ¿150?, puede ser.

El problema es que el ICE con el que igualas el TCO de cualquier eléctrico es mejor en todos los aspectos salvo en aceleración (siempre que en ese TCO no metas las ayudas).

E incluso algunas de las cosas por las que teóricamente el TCO de un eléctrico es reducido, están por ver. Si, es esperable que sea así, pero hay que tener datos consolidados de que los eléctricos cuestan realmente menos en mantenimiento.