OTA Update authorization and security

[toaster]

Hi,

I don't own a tesla yet, but I am interested an thrilled by the online update capabilities.
But how exactly does it work? I imagine it working like on my phone. But then, how secure is it? I have a million questions...

Can anybody sitting in a parked car start an available update? Can my kids start the update while I am running to the store? Is my car blocked for the time of the update? Can I emergency start the car in case I need to?
There are youtube videos that show parts of the process. They tell about clicking noised and lights going on and error messages beeing displayed. Is it safe to sit in the car while it updates? do the seats move?

Has anybody experienced an update failure? will it brick the car?

Any comments/discussion is welcome.

 

[green1]

Hi,

I don't own a tesla yet, but I am interested an thrilled by the online update capabilities.
But how exactly does it work? I imagine it working like on my phone. But then, how secure is it? I have a million questions...

Can anybody sitting in a parked car start an available update? Can my kids start the update while I am running to the store? Is my car blocked for the time of the update? Can I emergency start the car in case I need to?
There are youtube videos that show parts of the process. They tell about clicking noised and lights going on and error messages beeing displayed. Is it safe to sit in the car while it updates? do the seats move?

Has anybody experienced an update failure? will it brick the car?

Any comments/discussion is welcome.

It's very secure as it happens over the VPN connection to Tesla's servers, if someone can hack the update process, you have bigger things to worry about as they can probably also remote start your car.
Anyone sitting in the parked car can start an update. and yes, your car is blocked for the duration of the update, there's no way to bypass it part way through to continue driving, I also wouldn't recommend it as you could easily cause issues.
It would be safe to sit in the car during an update, but it would not be safe to touch anything, or get out part way through, touching anything on the car during the process has been linked to various sorts of failures of the update.
When a failure occurs it can take varying forms. The most common is that one module fails and some specific feature doesn't work right/at all, however there's always a risk of it failing during update of some critical component and "bricking" the car. Don't mess with in progress updates.

Most failures can be fixed by Tesla pushing the update to you again, but depending on what fails, they may need a technician to connect to the car locally to fix it. I also believe one person reported managing to get it to fail in such a way that Tesla had to replace the centre stack.

 

[toaster]

i saw in a video, that you can schedule the update to a certain time.
can i look the car? if i charge at the road?

i think it is strange that the headlights turn on an off during an update. won't that attract people to see whats going on? does the car stay looked during the update?

 

[Johan]

i saw in a video, that you can schedule the update to a certain time.
can i look the car? if i charge at the road?

i think it is strange that the headlights turn on an off during an update. won't that attract people to see whats going on? does the car stay looked during the update?

You can't drive during an update. In fact the screens and car as a whole will be unresponsive. Sort of like when an iPhone updates iOS or something similar.