During the pandemic I haven't had much use for driving the Roadster, so it's mostly been sitting in the garage. Back in August it started having what seemed like periodic data communication problems. The gauges on the instrument panel would sometimes just go to zero and various errors about missing or incorrect data would pop up.
Since I wasn't using the car and it still worked I pretty much ignored it. I figured I'd take it in to Carl Medlock to get it fixed eventually, but for the time being it didn't matter.
It generated a *lot* of errors. When I went into the garage to do something I'd often hear it do the beep indicating a new problem. If I looked in the car, I'd often have to clear as many as a dozen errors before I could get to the underlying VDS screen.
It stopped charging once, but I got it to charge again by disconnecting and reconnecting the power cable. Then a month later it stopped and wouldn't start again. I tried to move the car, but it wouldn't shift into reverse (or anywhere else), the shift buttons just flashed red like they do if you try to put it in park when you're moving. I noticed some of the errors on the VDS had SHFT as their component, so that may have been why.
This seemed bad, so I started texting Carl and we decided it was past time to send the car to him. It wouldn't go into tow mode so it wasn't even going to be easy to get it out of the garage onto the flatbed.
We suspected that the problem was with the CAN bus, since it all seemed to be related to data communication.
When I was in the process of getting a tow company to come out and pick up the car, Carl texted me and asked if I could unplug the VMS and plug it back in. I didn't know how, so he explained it to me and I did.
This completely fixed the problem. It wasn't that the CAN bus was grounded or a connector was loose, it was that something had gone wacky in the computer and it just needed to reboot. Professionally, I'm a computer scientist so it was kind of embarrassing that I didn't think of turning it off and back on again myself.
I pulled the logs. From when it started having problems in August to when I rebooted the computer yesterday it had a total of 58,495 errors. That's more than one every 5 minutes for the entire time. So I might have that record now. Woo!
Anyway, the bottom line is that if this happens to you, just power cycle the VMS before you pay to have your car towed.
Since I wasn't using the car and it still worked I pretty much ignored it. I figured I'd take it in to Carl Medlock to get it fixed eventually, but for the time being it didn't matter.
It generated a *lot* of errors. When I went into the garage to do something I'd often hear it do the beep indicating a new problem. If I looked in the car, I'd often have to clear as many as a dozen errors before I could get to the underlying VDS screen.
It stopped charging once, but I got it to charge again by disconnecting and reconnecting the power cable. Then a month later it stopped and wouldn't start again. I tried to move the car, but it wouldn't shift into reverse (or anywhere else), the shift buttons just flashed red like they do if you try to put it in park when you're moving. I noticed some of the errors on the VDS had SHFT as their component, so that may have been why.
This seemed bad, so I started texting Carl and we decided it was past time to send the car to him. It wouldn't go into tow mode so it wasn't even going to be easy to get it out of the garage onto the flatbed.
We suspected that the problem was with the CAN bus, since it all seemed to be related to data communication.
When I was in the process of getting a tow company to come out and pick up the car, Carl texted me and asked if I could unplug the VMS and plug it back in. I didn't know how, so he explained it to me and I did.
This completely fixed the problem. It wasn't that the CAN bus was grounded or a connector was loose, it was that something had gone wacky in the computer and it just needed to reboot. Professionally, I'm a computer scientist so it was kind of embarrassing that I didn't think of turning it off and back on again myself.
I pulled the logs. From when it started having problems in August to when I rebooted the computer yesterday it had a total of 58,495 errors. That's more than one every 5 minutes for the entire time. So I might have that record now. Woo!
Anyway, the bottom line is that if this happens to you, just power cycle the VMS before you pay to have your car towed.
