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JRP3
Hyperactive Member
I would be really careful to use ingineers services.
He rooted and tried to convert a friends car to EU charging and lighting.
Lighting didn't work. So my friend repaired the car in one year time. And last week he asked ingineer to finally fix the lighting issue.
He just did a firmware update and bricked the tuner with this update. The lights still didn't work. BUT ingineer wanted 350 Dollar for this firmware update, which needs 5 mins to start. The car does the rest alone.
350 dollar for a bricked tuner and not solving the lighting issue.
When my friend didn't pay 5 days after that, ingineer locked his car out of his web interface for which my friend paid 750 dollar to use.
Solved this issue with other peoples help now
Can share these contacts if anyone is interested.
The car finally got registered on Friday
Just wanted to give a small word of caution here, from the experience we had.
bkp_duke
Well-Known Member
Not to add fuel to this fire, but I had a not-pleasant interaction with Ingineer as well when I first bought a car he originally rooted. I got the distinct impression that he didn't have time to bother, but wasn't polite enough to just say that. He just stopped replying to emails.
I eventually paid someone else to re-root the car and provide continued support, and have never been happier.
I eventually paid someone else to re-root the car and provide continued support, and have never been happier.
I had terrible experience with Ingineer also. He charged me $950 but disappeared immediately after receiving money. I was trying to reach him for 2 months. All I got in reply is - he is busy. Car was standing and waiting two months after which he quietly refunded my payment without any apologies. What a waste of time!
Figured I'd chime in. I get tons of requests for assistance with salvage Teslas, although I only recently started even publicly offering such services.
I know @Ingineer does a really great job of working with people on their salvage vehicles. I've worked with him on a few projects over the years. His server-side setup is way better than my own even. I also know of quite a few people who have used his services with glowing recommendations. Overall, I'd be pretty inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt over any dispute involving a customer, for sure.
@Ingineer has worked with even more salvage vehicles than I have, mainly because he works with others and I mostly deal with my own. Judging by some of the requests I get from people about salvage vehicles it's no surprise to me that there would be people out there with ridiculous expectations for such services and then equally strong disappointment when someone can't turn their partially assembled car into a Falcon Heavy with a software mod after paying a few hundred bucks for remote diagnostic and config services.
I recently had someone pay me to get initial access to their salvage, asked me just about doing a firmware redeploy because they replaced a couple of things. No biggie, right? Well then this guy expected me to be able to do autopilot and air suspension calibrations remotely, upgrade his non-performance car to performance, and a whole slew of other things... remotely... included in the few hundred bucks charge for gaining access to his MCU and helping with a redeploy. Sadly, this seems pretty common, and I'm sure if there is anyone hating on Ingineer, it's likely a similarly impossible situation. Ingineer is probably a bit nicer than I in that respect, since I know he'll work with folks on more tedious and sometimes impossible tasks...... where I'll just flat out tell them I'm not wasting my time.
Overall, dealing with salvage Teslas is a nightmare. Literally no one knows what they're getting into. No one. Then they expect the world from the few people who do, and many even except those who do know what they're doing to help them on their schedule and for little to nothing. Overall, just stay away from salvages. Buy a CPO, inventory car, used S, or a 3 and save everyone the headache. You're not really saving much, if anything, these days anyway. Not when a used, fully working S can be had for under $40k these days pretty easily.
I know @Ingineer does a really great job of working with people on their salvage vehicles. I've worked with him on a few projects over the years. His server-side setup is way better than my own even. I also know of quite a few people who have used his services with glowing recommendations. Overall, I'd be pretty inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt over any dispute involving a customer, for sure.
@Ingineer has worked with even more salvage vehicles than I have, mainly because he works with others and I mostly deal with my own. Judging by some of the requests I get from people about salvage vehicles it's no surprise to me that there would be people out there with ridiculous expectations for such services and then equally strong disappointment when someone can't turn their partially assembled car into a Falcon Heavy with a software mod after paying a few hundred bucks for remote diagnostic and config services.
I recently had someone pay me to get initial access to their salvage, asked me just about doing a firmware redeploy because they replaced a couple of things. No biggie, right? Well then this guy expected me to be able to do autopilot and air suspension calibrations remotely, upgrade his non-performance car to performance, and a whole slew of other things... remotely... included in the few hundred bucks charge for gaining access to his MCU and helping with a redeploy. Sadly, this seems pretty common, and I'm sure if there is anyone hating on Ingineer, it's likely a similarly impossible situation. Ingineer is probably a bit nicer than I in that respect, since I know he'll work with folks on more tedious and sometimes impossible tasks...... where I'll just flat out tell them I'm not wasting my time.
Overall, dealing with salvage Teslas is a nightmare. Literally no one knows what they're getting into. No one. Then they expect the world from the few people who do, and many even except those who do know what they're doing to help them on their schedule and for little to nothing. Overall, just stay away from salvages. Buy a CPO, inventory car, used S, or a 3 and save everyone the headache. You're not really saving much, if anything, these days anyway. Not when a used, fully working S can be had for under $40k these days pretty easily.
Dr. Smoke
My former name was Edmond. Before that, Quantum`.
I had a similar experience with Ingineer only mine was much worse. I posted an even-tempered and detailed thread about it here six months ago but mods deleted it.I would be really careful to use ingineers services.
He rooted and tried to convert a friends car to EU charging and lighting.
Lighting didn't work. So my friend repaired the car in one year time. And last week he asked ingineer to finally fix the lighting issue.
He just did a firmware update and bricked the tuner with this update. The lights still didn't work. BUT ingineer wanted 350 Dollar for this firmware update, which needs 5 mins to start. The car does the rest alone.
350 dollar for a bricked tuner and not solving the lighting issue.
When my friend didn't pay 5 days after that, ingineer locked his car out of his web interface for which my friend paid 750 dollar to use.
Solved this issue with other peoples help now
Can share these contacts if anyone is interested.
The car finally got registered on Friday
Just wanted to give a small word of caution here, from the experience we had.
I am highly technical and a good engineer, and knew exactly what I was getting into with a salvage car. I bought two cars built within a month of one another, and repaired one with the other. I was the first to part out a car here and made a good deal of money, in fact $10k more than I'd paid for the two cars. Although, now parts are fairly plentiful so that's not possible anymore. Btr_ftw got his first parts price list from me. I sold parts to WizKid and many others, but I always gave parts to Ingineer and we had a decent (if turbulent) relationship for years.
So, I am a well-educated man, but in this case I was always walking on eggs, and enduring unprovoked barrages of insults and temper. Being raised in the South I just don't do with that.
Ultimately I had an HV fault and narrowed it down to the A/C system. (With Ingineer's help) I developed a completely novel way of fixing it and shared that vastly moneysaving info with Ingineer. I also was the first one to describe how to replace the eMMC chip on the CID, and shared that info with Ingineer, since he had $20k+ of bad CIDs he couldn't fix.
But we had our final argument soon after on the phone, wherein I told him the truth of what I thought, and that he's never been honest about the value of the novel info I've given him, so he not only cut off my service but also my car. Which is why I posted that thread describing the situation. After a couple days he turned my car back on and I asked him to get away and stay out of it, but he still puts little reminders on the screen that he is still watching me, even this past week. (verygreen spilled these beans to Ingineer recently that I know it's him) I now have the knowledge and means to root my car and close that VPN, but not the time.
Bear in mind that there are others who are afraid to speak up...
dannytrue, I use American Family and even have comp. Most here have to get both comp and collision as they've financed it, but we haven't.
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bkp_duke
Well-Known Member
The guy that rooted my car had a similar not pleasant experience with him. Let's just say the guy I know REALLY knows his stuff, and is very polite. He shared some of what he did with Ingineer, and a month later saw that info being claimed as Ingineer's own.
The above, and the not pleasant email exchanges I had with Ingineer, prompted me to get the car rooted and get him OUT of my CID as quickly as possible.
I am also engineer, 20+ years experience with Linux and electronics. I've got a salvage Tesla in Europe where I live. The car had no problem except some small body work needed in the back side. I needed access for diagnostic, software update, and EU maps installing. First I asked on the forum who may help. I was contacted by @Ingineer who told me that he wants exclusive access to my car and some hundreds bucks to root it and to first do a general diagnostic. I explained to hm that I do not want somebody who I don't know to control my car and do anything on my car without me seeing everything he does.
I explained to him that I am a technical person and I understand and know what I am doing. He refused, invoking security reasons for his network ! This was nonsense for me: he considered a security risk that I had access to my own car but not a security risk to let somebody I don't know to have exclusive access to my car !
Obviously I refused his help in these terms ! Since then, with the information that existed on this forum I managed to root the car first by desoldering the emmc. Then I found of course easier ways ! ANY VERSION OF THE SOFTWARE CAN BE EASILY ROOTED without desolderig the chip, but having access in the car network! The only reason I don't make these things public is that I respect my word given to other members of this forum who privately shared info with me and asked to not share with others.
Now I know how to do most of the things, I have full control on the car, access to logs, knowledge to upgrade, change hardware and options, etc. I have it connected in my own VPN and disabled all tesla remote access. I plan to make an app that directly connects to cid and do all the remote actions possible on it (more than Tesla does). It is a little bit frustrating that many people waste their time doing the same thing, it would be more productive to have a place to share info and work together in developing alternative, open software for these cars! At least for the maintenance and service issues. And I disagree that it makes no sense to get salvage cars. Some of them are a good deal, you can get a fully functional model S, 30000 km car for USD 30k !
I explained to him that I am a technical person and I understand and know what I am doing. He refused, invoking security reasons for his network ! This was nonsense for me: he considered a security risk that I had access to my own car but not a security risk to let somebody I don't know to have exclusive access to my car !
Obviously I refused his help in these terms ! Since then, with the information that existed on this forum I managed to root the car first by desoldering the emmc. Then I found of course easier ways ! ANY VERSION OF THE SOFTWARE CAN BE EASILY ROOTED without desolderig the chip, but having access in the car network! The only reason I don't make these things public is that I respect my word given to other members of this forum who privately shared info with me and asked to not share with others.
Now I know how to do most of the things, I have full control on the car, access to logs, knowledge to upgrade, change hardware and options, etc. I have it connected in my own VPN and disabled all tesla remote access. I plan to make an app that directly connects to cid and do all the remote actions possible on it (more than Tesla does). It is a little bit frustrating that many people waste their time doing the same thing, it would be more productive to have a place to share info and work together in developing alternative, open software for these cars! At least for the maintenance and service issues. And I disagree that it makes no sense to get salvage cars. Some of them are a good deal, you can get a fully functional model S, 30000 km car for USD 30k !
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
It's unfortunate that the secrecy we complain about with Tesla has made its way into the DIY world. Hopefully the sheer volume of vehicles soon to come with Model 3 production will break that wide open.
I mean, I can understand it to an extent... If we publish publicly how we gain access, that hole will likely be immediately patched in the next SW release.
The solution of course is for Tesla to just release Toolbox to anyone that wants it, and yes, to even allow users to root their own cars if they desire (in exchange for letting Tesla track who those users are and having those users absolving Tesla from liability for damages caused by their modifications).
Really it is a win-win...
The solution of course is for Tesla to just release Toolbox to anyone that wants it, and yes, to even allow users to root their own cars if they desire (in exchange for letting Tesla track who those users are and having those users absolving Tesla from liability for damages caused by their modifications).
Really it is a win-win...
We'll I'll go out on a limb and declare Tesla is not going to do that, they have no desire too. The problem is, even if we setup a private community because public would never work due to Tesla penchant for slamming doors shut, that Tesla offers bounties for the community to sell the key details back to them so they can patch the holes making it harder and harder to do things. So, as long as the community is effectively working for Tesla, there's no hope for an open / DIY network, people and their greed / big mouths would enable Tesla to just take away all the good things.
My plea to the community, if you know or have an exploit that is not remotely exploitable, DO NOT give it to the bug bounty program to Tesla. Just stop folks, who cares about the $250 or what have you. Your just doing Tesla's dirty work for them, and causing great harm to the community. So, if it's not remotely exploitable, keep it in the community and don't give it to the mothership. There is especially true of the M3 and the new MCU2, new ways will need to be developed and Tesla would be very eager to get these new ways and slam the door shut, so keep it private folks and only share with trusted resources that don't leak etc.
My plea to the community, if you know or have an exploit that is not remotely exploitable, DO NOT give it to the bug bounty program to Tesla. Just stop folks, who cares about the $250 or what have you. Your just doing Tesla's dirty work for them, and causing great harm to the community. So, if it's not remotely exploitable, keep it in the community and don't give it to the mothership. There is especially true of the M3 and the new MCU2, new ways will need to be developed and Tesla would be very eager to get these new ways and slam the door shut, so keep it private folks and only share with trusted resources that don't leak etc.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
I'm not sure that it would be anymore. @wk057 has said that they have now cryptography linked components such that he can't even replace a drive unit anymore.
Of course it is possible. The community has knowledge to build an open source software package compatible with the tesla original hardware! It would be nice for Tesla to release even source code for older sw versions!
Tesla has said publicly that they plan to release an “owner/independent shop” version of toolbox. So that will probably happen. Who knows how much it will cost (probably too much/a subscription :-/) or what it will actually give us access to.
Also who knows when they’ll get around to it. They’re already 2 quarters late (what else is new?!) ;-)
