Major Safety Issue - Hoping a Tesla engineer watching the forums reads this!

[nasell]

@nasell - actually I know a Tesla engineer - I will email your post to his personal address. I'm sure he'll at least forward it to someone internally.

Thanks, they can track me to my VIN and contact me any time. I've made myself available to the SC for any questions or follow-up.

Does free and open discussion in public make the issue (if it exists) less likely to be solved? If he hadn't posted the issue then you wouldn't have known to give him the tip about Tesla's internal blogs - would you? Maybe he didn't know about them. Now he does. He's more informed - and so are we.

I'm actually aware of the owners forum, but they don't show up for me. I guess it's a common problem that I've seen discussed before. You have to msg tesla to have them fix:

To see if you have owner access, go to the main Forums page (Tesla |) and see if any Clubs are listed; if not, you don't have owner access. If you're logged in using the same e-mail address that you use for My Tesla, contact Tesla and ask them to fix this for you.

So yeah, I know about them, don't know how active they are - I've always used this forum... Either way, it's being discussed, and that [to me] is good.

 

[mmd]

If there was a safety issue like this, Elon would have informed everyone with a tweet. Or Tesla would have issued a voluntary recall.
Tesla has issued recall for one loose screw, before anyone reported any issue with it. Yes, Tesla is that fast and good!

 

[calisnow]

If there was a safety issue like this, Elon would have informed everyone with a tweet. Or Tesla would have issued a voluntary recall.
Tesla has issued recall for one loose screw, before anyone reported any issue with it. Yes, Tesla is that fast and good!

This reasoning is flawed. You assume Elon knows about bugs before they are reported? Bugs by their nature are exposed during testing and exposure of software to use. The software has been used. One user thinks he found a bug and has told the world. It is quite possible Elon did not know. You seem to assume Elon is omniscient.

 

[nasell]

Yes - I don't think Tesla is engaging in egregious behavior. No engineer purposely stuck a bug in the code to turn off the headlights. Nor do I think Tesla is covering anything up. If a problem exists it is probably simply a software bug. The problem here is not Tesla - the problem is the attitude of people who want to keep discussion of defects/bugs/failure "private" and privilege "saving face" over disseminating knowledge of a potential problem in the community.

If you had your way @NoMoGas I would not know that the OP's problem existed because you would have preferred he never posted it here! To me - that's unbelievable.

THIS. I have never thought that Tesla is doing anything nefarious. It's such a complicated piece of machinery that involves a lot of technology. There are certainly things that I think they should be prioritized over adding easter eggs (can you fix my XM Radio already?!), but I think they can sometimes dismiss problems as "firmware bugs", but never provide any real insight or assurances that it's fixed. That's what has happened in this case. I feel like having an open discussion will ensure some sort of resolution; and I have a hard time thinking it would be a bad outcome.

If anyone doesn't understand how badly last night could've gone, let me spell it out a bit more. My wife rarely drives my car. All of the technology makes her nervous for whatever reason! I was out drinking, so I couldn't drive. I had her Uber down to me and drive my car home. So she's not as familiar with the car, I wasn't operating at full speed, and the headlights shut off on the highway. If that doesn't give anyone pause, then I don't know what to say. I could easily be selfish and just make sure that MY car gets fixed, but I feel like this is a big enough issue that I want to ensure that EVERYONE'S tesla is fixed.

And hey, maybe it's only my car - I HOPE that's the case. But without proper vetting, we will never know.

 

[NoMoGas]

I totally understand your frustration. It's so opposite of my experience. Definately keep a fire under their butt until an actual diagnosis (not a maybe) is found.

 

[NoMoGas]

What is also rather amazing is that the OP @nasell took pains to DOCUMENT the problem happening both spontaneously and during his own testing. Yet he still gets criticized! If he had posted no video the cries here would be "where's the evidence? you're a troll! you're a short! you're a JERK!" So he posts video and here's what happens next:

• @mmd privileges Elon's imagined omniscience over @nasell's very recent video of a potential bug.
• @NoMoGas urges @nasell to keep quiet about this problem in public - lest the organization be embarrassed.
• @artsci criticizes @nasell for his choice of venue to report the problem and makes all kinds of assumptions that the OP didn't try to solve his problem some other way - clearly biased against the OP and toward Tesla.

Can you say C U L T?

ORRRRR Perhaps reasonable people can disagree?

 

[calisnow]

If there was a safety issue like this, Elon would have informed everyone with a tweet. Or Tesla would have issued a voluntary recall.
Tesla has issued recall for one loose screw, before anyone reported any issue with it. Yes, Tesla is that fast and good!

OMG @mmd I just realized you were being sarcastic. Well played sir. I'm sorry - misread your tone at first lol. My bad.

 

[mmd]

What is also rather amazing is that the OP @nasell took pains to DOCUMENT the problem happening both spontaneously and during his own testing. Yet he still gets criticized! If he had posted no video the cries here would be "where's the evidence? you're a troll! you're a short! you're a JERK!" So he posts video and here's what happens next:

• @mmd privileges Elon's imagined omniscience over @nasell's very recent video of a potential bug.
• @NoMoGas urges @nasell to keep quiet about this problem in public - lest the organization be embarrassed.
• @artsci criticizes @nasell for his choice of venue to report the problem and makes all kinds of assumptions that the OP didn't try to solve his problem some other way - clearly biased against the OP and toward Tesla.

Can you say C U L T?

Come on! I was just joking
I know full well Elon will never tweet anything negative about his own cars or company. Just like the shareholders on this thread, who would try to suppress every negative news.

PS: No offence taken

PS2: That loose screw recall was right before quarter end, when owners were strongly encouraged to visit the SCs for immediate fix. IMO, it was mainly to try and upgrade some owners to newer cars, to boost sales numbers.

 

[calisnow]

Come on! I was just joking ...

PS: No offence taken

I know - it took me a few minutes to realize it lol. Slow tonight.

 

[nasell]

I know - it took me a few minutes to realize it lol. Slow tonight.

Almost as slow as my reaction time to turn on the headlights. /s

Seriously though, if anyone makes it through Atlanta, there's a great brewery called Monday Night Brewery. But it caused about a 10 second reaction time to fumble through the menus... if anyone was counting.

EDIT: Also, great call on just pulling the stalk and going with hi-beams. Duh.

 

[TJtv]

Having debugged countless intermittent hardware problems in my professional life, I know how extremely challenging they are to resolve. I don't doubt at all that the first time a company hears a wacky bug report from ONE person that they dismiss it with "it's just a firmware bug and is patched now" kind of statement.

Once you present them with actual video evidence of it STILL happening though, that is a completely different story. Every company should take that extremely seriously as a verified issue, and it seems like Tesla is attempting to do such. However, I'm sure it will not be easy for them to find root cause and a fix, especially if it's something that only happens on one car and even then it happens sporadically. I don't fault you at all for posting here, and it will be nice to follow Tesla's response to the situation. It sounds like it's a one-off problem, but how a company deals with verified customer complaints of one-off problems is extremely important for gauging the health and honesty of the company moving forward.

 

[nasell]

Having debugged countless intermittent hardware problems in my professional life, I know how extremely challenging they are to resolve. I don't doubt at all that the first time a company hears a wacky bug report from ONE person that they dismiss it with "it's just a firmware bug and is patched now" kind of statement.

Without a doubt. And they've been very forthcoming with the things they are thinking through - we ran through a couple of the theories tonight, and I think we debunked a couple based on the data and some logic. The great thing in all of this is that most major companies would likely clam up, call their lawyers and figure out how to address this. Instead, this time knowing what they know, I feel like they are jumping in now full force to address it, and they're not leaving me in the dark.

They're back on it Monday, so I won't likely find anything out until then.

 

[calisnow]

I'm glad you posted because I also have an AP2 car - I'll just turn on my headlights myself for a while - the way I did it in horse and buggy days.

 

[nasell]

I'm glad you posted because I also have an AP2 car - I'll just turn on my headlights myself for a while - the way I did it in horse and buggy days.

THE STRUGGLE IS REAL.

 

[jeffro01]

Wow... While I haven't had that happen to me, it shouldn't ever happen to anyone at all....

Jeff

 

[nasell]

Wow... While I haven't had that happen to me, it shouldn't ever happen to anyone at all....

Luckily it's very rare. 3 times in 6 months...and as an obsessed Tesla owner, I drive a lot.

 

[RichardL]

Sounds like a camera issue to me, since this is an AP2 car and both headlights and wipers use the camera (I believe)

In my younger days I drove many British cars with Lucas electrics. These kind of events wouldn't even be worth mentioning when you arrive at the Pub - let alone filing a government safety report

 

[jeffro01]

Luckily it's very rare. 3 times in 6 months...and as an obsessed Tesla owner, I drive a lot.

Still... Yikes...

Jeff

 

[Saghost]

Sounds like a camera issue to me, since this is an AP2 car and both headlights and wipers use the camera (I believe)

In my younger days I drove many British cars with Lucas electrics. These kind of events wouldn't even be worth mentioning when you arrive at the Pub - let alone filing a government safety report

I didn't think the rain sensing functionality was active on AP2 cars yet - I thought they just had fixed intermittent speeds at the moment?

Rain sensing will use the cameras, though - and as I noted above, it seems likely that this is related to the camera or the code processing the images even if the wipers aren't related.

 

[nasell]

I didn't think the rain sensing functionality was active on AP2 cars yet - I thought they just had fixed intermittent speeds at the moment?

Rain sensing will use the cameras, though - and as I noted above, it seems likely that this is related to the camera or the code processing the images even if the wipers aren't related.

This is correct. We don't currently have rain-sensing wipers. The windshield wipers DO adjust the timer based on speed. So the faster you are traveling, the quicker the time between activating. With that said, even at full stop, every twist of the stalk should activate the wipers.