There's long conversations scattered in many of these threads among the third party fixers on what the primary contributions to the eMMC failed problem are. (According to really smart people working on these, its not simply leveling or excessive logging.) And there are some very competent fixers like Jason Hughes that firmly believe and told Elon the problem is excessive logging and Elon fixed that, two years ago. Not so many posts from them in this thread, because this is not about failures, its about the MCU2 upgrade. Most people would not notice the names/who the third party fixers are without reading and saving some of that content. There's two people on TMC that have reported doing serious work (studying the operation) of the eMMC. (I am not going to mention their names, they will, one regularly does speak up). These two people have reported here that they believe the cause of the failure is less often leveling or bad spots and more a controller failure on the eMMC. Here's an excellent source for eMMC problems, fixes and what's going on
Unofficial Tesla Tech Wiki. I think right now, something's wrong with the site. However save the url. Nuff said about that part.
I agree with
@SucreTease said above "Or the design may have been fine for the original expected use, but later software changes invalidated the assumptions upon which the design was based. There are a variety of possible scenarios, only some of which entail a design flaw." .
We all know that Tesla is very tight lipped, so we have to depend on smart non-Tesla people to share what they have learned. And we piece together info from many places. Here's a couple of things that I have gleaned from TMC, TM, reading articles, emailing/PM third part fixers and some other places.
Personally I think the wrong hardware was used. However, that's easy for me to say. Its easy to look back at what has happened and make that judgement. Was there other hardware from another company that could have been used? I have not heard anyone from any other company - including Tesla say that they had more than one possible source for a eMMC like daughterboard that they choose to use. I bet most people don't know that the Tegra daughterboard was not designed for Tesla's use. It was an nVidia off-the-shelf product already being used in another manufacturer's car - Audi. Audi used the a version of the Tegra daughterboard in their Multi Media Interface. I don't know when they started using it, but were still using it as recent as 2012. Here's a
link to the user manual and some pictures. I found this info and this
link here on TMC in a NL thread a couple of years ago and saved it. The link does not work all the time. After you select an item on the left column, scroll down. If its working there content lists there. Let's not forget, the Tegra daughterboard is not the CPU, its storage. In another place I read that the Tegra board was modified by nVidia for Tesla to make it compatible with power requirements, and that made it slightly different from the one in the Audi. We've all heard stories how thin the resources were at Tesla when they were designing the Model S. If this Tegra board was all there was in 2010-2012 when Tesla was designing the Model S, there was little to choose from to get the job done. I think its easy now to say, they should have found an alternative to the Tegra board before 2015 when the worse of the failures have occurred.
Did you know that back when we received Ver 3.0 firmware it was just 300 MBs? And has grown since. Last time I heard a number without the added FSD Beta features, the size of Ver. 10 was just over 1.3 GB and still growing. That's just the firmware.
I'm not defending them now. I think now that there is enough money to fix, compensate or offer some amazing deals on MCU2 upgrades - whatever the owner (early adopters) want to do. I also think that several tens of thousands of 8GB eMMCs/MCU1 have been replaced and Tesla owes four things to owners. 1. Replace all 8 GB Tegra daughterboards that Tesla installed in refurbished MCU1 up until June 1 2020 whenever the owner request it be done Every car has earned that regardless of who owns it now - under warranty or not. 2. Offer a MCU2 upgrade at a substantial price reduction if the owner request it. 3. Compensate any owner that took their car and had the failing/failed 8 GB eMMC replaced by any 3rd party fixer - worldwide. 4. Apologize for the frustration/pain every owner with an impacted car has been through and promise nothing like this will ever happen again. But I'm not in charge, so I know my opinion does not matter.