Turns out the uber question was irrelevant. I ended up sitting around for something like 3 or 4 hours working in their waiter lounge waiting for a diagnosis appointment, and was pleasantly surprised when the car came back fixed. The problem turned out to be a slightly complicated one. The Merritt Island service center was way more relaxed than the Orlando one (once I got past customer lack-of-service and actually got my car to them).
To start, when I first bought the car, I replaced the
monstrous lead-acid 12v battery with one of these really cool and light LFP batteries (the same tech Tesla just switched to for the Plaid):
12V Lithium Battery for TESLA Model S
If there's one big silver lining here, it's that my car ran 12k-ish miles with zero serious problems and no trips for service at all since I bought it used, until this software glitch happened. In that time, I left the Seattle area, drove down the west coast of the US, crossed Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico (including a detour to Roswell and Carlsbad Caverns), in to Texas, all the way down to SpaceX Starbase, then around the Gulf of Mexico and all over Florida. I've had this car in some polar opposite extreme environments (some were area records), and have effectively beat the crap out of parts of it.
In all of that time, apparently the lug clamps on the aftermarket battery wiggled loose (yay thermal expansion), and so the computer systems were occasionally receiving dirty power.
Now, lets talk a little bit about hardware:
To put an automatic anything system on a heavy moving object with people in it (the law around this supposedly comes from planes and boats originally), you're required to install basically 2 of everything. 2 steering motors, 2 sets of comms channels in and out of all the vital motion control stuff, 2 throttle controls, etc. This includes the FSD computer
s, which there are two of.
When my car got the update with 10.11.2, the primary computer successfully updated, but the secondary was having a problem some time over the 50 minutes it takes to update due to that dirty power issue stemming from the loose terminal clamp on the battery. The computers freaked out and wouldn't engage any cruise features and the (working) primary computer fell back to just serving as an emergency intervention computer (which did end up saving me from hitting an orange barrel on the freeway, so, good failure mode). Simply fixing the battery wouldn't have fixed the issue, as the computers don't allow user-initiated reinstallation.
Being in software myself, I'd love to see them do a couple relatively light changes that would result in less service center visits:
Add a warning for the issue the battery was having
Enable reinstallation of failed updates by the user
Mobile service or remote service should be able to pull
complete diagnostics, even if it has to be analyzed elsewhere.
We keep saying Tesla needs more service centers, but maybe a few updates and process changes could instead drive down the demand for service centers.
Now I get to go see what all the buzz is about 10.11.2!
