Thing is.. Tesla is Just Asking For A Class Action Lawsuit.
Let's get this straight:
- There are via holes in the circuit board.
- They leak light from the turn signal into the camera casing.
- There are transparent portions of the circuit board on the side opposite the via holes that have no copper between the outside surface of the circuit board and the interior of the camera casing that allows light to leak through.
I'm a EE. I happen to, from time to time, design circuit boards, and not as a hobby. Filling via holes is an option when one sends the board out for fab. Putting copper on various layers in various places is what the layout guy does before sending the board out for fab.
Nobody "designed" it, in the sense of, "I designed this to do "X"". Frankly, they screwed up and
made a bad design.
It's not a component defect, in the sense of, "This capacitor came from a bad batch from our vendor. We need to replace those, since they're going to fail." It's a
defect in the design. Literally.
Now, it may have been Tesla's subcontractor who did the screw-up. Stuff happens. And, when you've got a zillion of the things out there and either (a) nobody noticed (ha!) or (b) more likely, nobody was likely using the repeaters in a case that Tesla's engineers thought would show up rarely and was therefore not worth fixing. Now we got the cameras where we can see them and the design defect is obvious. And, as I and others have mentioned before, this
may interfere with FSD. It certainly
does interfere with our use of the camera with the turn signals on at night.
Let this proceed to trial with discovery, end up in front of a judge and actual, non-Tesla experts, and Tesla will go down in flames.
We're probably all under the arbitration clause. But no arbiter would have problems with the above and which way to go. And, now that I think of it, isn't there some company that does robo-file-arbitration, that turns the usual, "Arbritation means that class actions are impossible, and they're weighted towards the company" stuff on its head? And, with the robo-file, ends up costing the company on the other end
more than they'd pay in a normal class action in front of a judge.
Methinks that Tesla should stop playing dodge-'em and do the fix. Yes, it's money. No, it's not
that huge.
Maybe somebody should tweet this whole business to Musk and point out the idiocy in the company's stance. How does one go about this, anyway?