Wife went out to do some errands and after her last errand she called me and said the big touchscreen is black and not coming up. I had her do a soft reset and hard reset and it still didn't bring the screen back up. She was able to get home. I tried a hard reset and still no luck. It is still able to charge at home. Unable to connect to the car through the Tesla App. Scheduled a mobile service for this coming Thursday. 2015 Model S 70 with almost 112,500 miles. If it truly is dead wonder if they'll let us upgrade to a MCU2 instead of a refurb MCU1. Find out Thursday.
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Looks like our MCU1/eMMC died
- Thread starter dskillz
- Start date
Naekuh
Member
i would push for a MCU2 upgrade since your going to have to pay for it anyhow.
My recent experiance with the same problem is that mobile service will cancel and require you to take it to a service center. Appointments were 2 weeks out. I nervous about waiting that long so I took it directly to the SC. When I got to the SC the car died completely. Told me 2 weeks for new MCU. Texted me the next day to say parts would be in following week. Then texted me the following Monday to say car was fixed over the weekend. Even though when at the SC they stated they did not work on weekends. Car was in shop for a total of 5 days. Much better than original estimate of 2 weeks. Repair was under extended warrenty.
They did just that but was able to get an appointment for next week. Unfortunately I am outside my warranty coverage. Out of curiosity did they give you a refurb MCU1 or a MCU2?
They initially scheduled me for Mobile Service, then after 5 days said I'd have to bring it to a SvC. Took it in yesterday. Car hasn't been looked at yet.
well my 2015 85D blacked out yesterday while i was driving. Just made an appointment, but from the sound of it looks like every Tesla will encounter this at some point. Not sure what else to do, granted we know that any electronic device has a life span, but didn't expect that it would be such a massive cost. While the major advantage of a tesla are numerous the limited repair was a major determination in our decision (we have 2 MS).
Akikiki
A'-Lo-HA ! y'all
Yes, you are right, its expensive. I'm not trying to defend the failure, but I want to help you with a little perspective on the problem. 2012-2018 S and 2016-2018 X's were still being built on tech that Tesla designed in 2010, (the eMMC) chip that fails. Its not a flash drive or SD medial but its behavior to fail is similar. Its going to fail after a number of writes. Many people will tell you its the excessive logging to the chip. Its not only logging that writes to the chip. We've also heard that a number of seemingly minor or unrelated settings contribute to the early failures. Things like: not clearing trip meters, because they store enormous energy data, not clearing old Nav searches, having energy savings turned on for faster startups, streaming music because its buffering to the car, and using large flash drives with large amounts of music because the MCU as to parse all that data for indexing.
When Tesla replaces the MCU, they are also replacing the center screen, the eMMC chip mounted on the Tegra board, and upgrading the car from 3G to LTE (that was previously a $500 cost). About a year ago, Tesla was charging $3600+ to replace the MCU, then using refurbished center screens, the price dropped to $2300-2400. In Feb the first reports started appearing the cost was now $1300 plus labor and tax. For these refurbished prices, Tesla is keeping the core (MCU and related items). Some folks want to keep the parts and sell them on eBay or someplace. Tesla is charging a core fee, because they need to recover the core to refurbish and use again.
We've been collecting data on failed MCUs - reported on Tesla's forum and TMC. There's also 3rd party repair shops that are replacing the eMMC and putting them back in the cars. We reach out to these 3rd party guys. They share rough counts of their repair numbers. Adding all those plus what's reported on TM and TMC it's still less than 1% of all the cars sold between 2012-2015. We hear about the failed eMMCs because TMC and TM are so to be focal points for complaints. Granted we don't know the total number fixed by Tesla, and we don't know the number fixed for free under warranty. We do need to remember that.
Those shops are known by Tesla, but not sponsored or approved by Tesla. Repairs are a lot cheaper, but you don't get refurbished center screen or LTE for the price either. Nearly all these 3rd party guys are using a better/larger replacement chip (32GB+). The chances of the same failure occurring again when they replace the chip is at least half or more likely 1/5. When Tesla replaces it, - about the same.Tesla replaces the 8GB eMMC with a same size chip. As I recall, the 8 GB chip is organized into 4 partition. And the firmware used to be about 300MB in size back on version 3.x, but now that we are on 10.x, its larger than 1 GB. The limits of that 2010 tech is being pushed to extremes. Even $1300 is not cheap. But out of warranty repairs on $50,000+ cars could easily be the same or more every 4-6 years.
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I think your number is WAY low. The number of active posters here and on the tesla.com forum is minuscule compared with the total number of owners. And it's likely that very few non-forum owners are aware of the 3rd party repair shops, so the VAST majority of repairs take place at the SvCs. That said, your work is appreciated, but in my opinion, 10-20% have probably failed already and the number is increasing exponentially, like when Covid appeared.
linux-works
Active Member
its a design issue, guys. its not a 'parts failure'. flash memory makers know, very well, what the write cycle lifetimes are. vendors who buy those parts are able to download the spec sheets. what they may not know is: how to read them. or, perhaps the engineers knew this but management suppressed them (very likely in my experience).
bottom line is that its tesla's poor design of how much writing was done to a part that was not designed for it. software updates, data logged, syslog style debug outputs - all tesla's fault.
the fact that they charge customers for their own poor design - that's really sour tasting. I admit to seeing this problem in other code bases, for embedded, and its always embarrassing if this passes design review and qa testing.
its simply a financial call on tesla's part, that they charge you for this. we, and they both know that's not Right(tm) but they do it because ... they can. they get away with it since there is little choice other than 3rd party service guys.
as an engineer who does write embedded code, I understand this problem, its not uncommon, but its still amateurish to blame the customer and charge them when you full well know its your own design that is at fault.
bottom line is that its tesla's poor design of how much writing was done to a part that was not designed for it. software updates, data logged, syslog style debug outputs - all tesla's fault.
the fact that they charge customers for their own poor design - that's really sour tasting. I admit to seeing this problem in other code bases, for embedded, and its always embarrassing if this passes design review and qa testing.
its simply a financial call on tesla's part, that they charge you for this. we, and they both know that's not Right(tm) but they do it because ... they can. they get away with it since there is little choice other than 3rd party service guys.
as an engineer who does write embedded code, I understand this problem, its not uncommon, but its still amateurish to blame the customer and charge them when you full well know its your own design that is at fault.
Akikiki
A'-Lo-HA ! y'all
Aloha @Barry. Thank you for appreciating my work. Nice to hear. It is more productive and rewarding than setting around looking at strangers' selfies on Instagram. I do 100% respect your opinion. I think you are right, I too think my numbers are low. They come from 3rd party, and counts here on TM and TMC. Its just a pretty good guess. Some are Tesla repairs. But that's like the tip of an iceberg. Simply don't know and have no easy way to get the Tesla SC count. Well, I don't. The number of cars built between 2012-2016 is 186,000+ If your number of 10-20% was real, that would mean 18,000-36,000 MCUs would have failed. Wouldn't there be far more outcry from the owning public and the e-zines filled with stories of failures if even half your lowest % was accurate? The number of failures is some where between 1% and who knows.
Akikiki
A'-Lo-HA ! y'all
Certs is a breath mint - No, Certs is a candy mint. I'm not mocking you or disrespecting you. But it does not matter in hindsight if this is parts failure or poor design. It does not change the required repair. Do you know how many failed MCUs have been fixed under warranty? I don't either. But when cars are out of warranty owners pay for that. We could step through every sentence of your post and replace it with like references to the last 100 years of gasoline engine automobiles. Mechanical or electronic equipment breaks down.
Yes, maybe it is a design issue. But it was current tech at the time. How long are most eMMC's lasting or at what age are they failing? 4-5 years? You would have a sound argument for design issue if they failed a 1 year, maybe 2 years. But how many in your world would they have to last for it to not be a design issue?
OrbiterTI4
Member
Nevermind how many read/writes you'll get and if Tesla was doing too many of either; I'm remembering (but don't have the exact post link) that the discussion was wondering why Tesla decided to solder the eMMC to the board to force eMMC/board/display replacement instead of allowing for solely eMMC replacement, of which few/no one said was proper design (and had nothing to do with level of tech).
linux-works
Active Member
you are totally missing my point.
its not about the part. the part could even last 1/10 of the time. does. not. matter.
you know about parts when you design the software. and you don't write to it more than you need to. if you have huge writing needs, you find parts that do that (even if its spinning rust or slow solid state). but you do NOT intentionally syslog-the-hell out of flash, since anyone older than college-hire age KNOWS this and would not even make a design this dumb.
the other aspect is that, even if the system is designed from the start to not wear out flash, developers often have a 'host' mentality when writing embedded code. on their x86 linux box, they can let it run for years at a time and ssd does not wear out. but that is not what embedded programming is.
so, what I'm saying is that there was a weakness in the design APPROACH; and probably junior developers added to the problem and no one high enough cared or caught it, or dared to try to fix it.
its not about the flash part. years ago, flash was slower and worse and wore out more. 'we' (the industry) worked with it and if we had needs that surpassed flash, we used something more appropriate.
and design mistakes have no time associated with it. I'm not talking legal - but ethical. they screwed up the design and it does not matter that the wear-out happened beyond the boundary of 'warranty'. they screwed up, they should fess up and learn from their mistake. maybe next time, don't do things to flash parts that they are not meant for. upload your data or save somewhere else, but do NOT wear out your main booting and data partitions. that's 101 level stuff.
Search and ye shall find:
tesla model s big screen failure - Google Search
@Akikiki, this reminds of one of the reasons I dropped Comcast for cable about 10 years ago...
When channel surfing, instead of refreshing the screen, it split the screen in half and put the new channel on half the screen. Repeat and rinse.
So, I called tech support and explained the problem.
"We have never heard of such a problem. There's nothing about it in our system"
I asked them if it could have something to do with the unusual brand of TV I had.
"Sir, what kind of TV is it?"
"SONY. Do you have internet access at work?"
"Sorry, no."
"Well, there are hundreds of pages documenting this if you google it."
linux-works
Active Member
I can give a possible answer to that. COST. bom cost.
car companies are super stingy. they will save 5 cents if they can, de-rating parts as far as they can.
many of my friends in the hardware side of automotive spend a lot of time 'cost reducing' perfectly good designs, hobbling them in ways that really didn't have to happen. all for money. this is the side of automotive that I really hate, but its there in all brands, not just tesla ;(
sockets are also a point of failure. heat, humidity - all that.
and cost. I have seen a board to board connector that is 'car rated' cost $40. something like a pci connector. I kid you not.
its about cost, very likely. reliability, maybe second.
ucmndd
Well-Known Member
whitex
Well-Known Member
@Akikiki , nice write up, however you do seem to be making a lot excuses for Tesla's lack of proper design and testing.
In 2010, the number of P/E cycles (writes) and MFBF for the chip was readily available to Tesla, so this is no excuse. They could done highly accelerated life testing/profiling on the chip, estimate how many writes they need, and completely predict that it will fail in 2-6 years, therefore implement mitigations. I've worked with other manufacturers who do just that with emmc and other parts, and I know of other manufactures which have produced cars with emmc chips in them, which are designed to last 15+ years, and a fix doesn't cost $3,000. If a technology is not suitable for automotive use, you don't just use it and blame the technology later. There are a number of mitigations Tesla could have planned had they actually done proper design, characterization and testing. For example, they could have made the emmc easily replacable - it's a $10 part, a module with just emmc would not cost more than $20. They could have added an SD slot for log writing, or a completely separate emmc, to reduce the number of writes. They could have used 2 emmc chips in RAID-0 configuration to distribute the writes. Tons of possibilities, had they actually done proper design. Or, are you suggesting they did proper design, knew very well that MCU's are going to fail, and thought that a $3,600 replacement was an acceptable maintenance cost for a $100K car?
It sounds a little like you are trying to blame the customer here. How is the customer, who sees 2 trip meters and an average energy consumption, supposed to know that Tesla implemented it in some crazy and/or lazy way without considering how it will kill the underlying emmc? Keeping track of 2 counters and 2 average power consumption number should not take a large amount of emmc or large amount of writes - they could keep 2 mileage counters plus two cumulative energy counters in memory, and write it to emmc every time they are about to restart, or every midnight. 1 block write per day would provide all the functionality that the customer sees today from trip meters.
You make it sounds like they were surprised that the emmc's were failing, then scrambled for a solution, which is consistent with lack of proper design, characterization and testing. I hope they do a better job with the starship going to Mars, so they don't wake up half way there and realize their components are dying because nobody bothered determining their MTBF and it turns out it's less than a full trip to Mars.
Out of curiosity, who is "we" in this context and is this data available somewhere to view?
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Akikiki
A'-Lo-HA ! y'all
We being the owners with failed MCU's that are sharing six simple attributes with me. I keep it in plain old spreadsheet. You want a copy? PM me an email address where I can send it, and I will send you a copy. Do with it or take from it what you wish.
I am not going to debate with you or try to explain what I said in my posts. Read into them or not whatever you wish.
Nothing I post here is going to change history. Its just my two cents. What I say here, is simply not important enough to get upset about. Certainly not worth making a big deal over whether anything or nothing is right or wrong.
I am not going to debate with you or try to explain what I said in my posts. Read into them or not whatever you wish.
Nothing I post here is going to change history. Its just my two cents. What I say here, is simply not important enough to get upset about. Certainly not worth making a big deal over whether anything or nothing is right or wrong.
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