100% not possible since the car was at 55F overnight. The Satonic cable was under tension and had to be cut in order to release the hood.
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Why you should skip the powered frunk and grab a Satonic soft close frunk
- Thread starter ngng
- Start date
100% not possible since the car was at 55F overnight. The Satonic cable was under tension and had to be cut in order to release the hood.
Which means it failed and locked up while it was latching the hood.
I'll have to look when I install mine if it would make sense to put some lube on the end of the cable to help keep moisture out.
I played around a bit with my not yet installed Satonic V1 and found that the cable can not be extended or retracted by hand, leading me to believe that the cable spool must be geared instead of direct drive like the Tlyard design (as tested by johnnyruz). This would explain why the cable still had tension when failing in the retracted position. Hopefully you can confirm once you complete your teardown.
This is my experience as well with Satonic v1, that if I cutoff power at the end of pull cycle, the cable can’t be manually pulled to release the tension. Also, once installed, the end of pull cycle actually pulls the frunk hood well below the flush position. So, it will be very difficult to wedge something into the gap between frunk hood and bumper without damaging either.
Therefore, I fully expect it to fail one day at the worst possible time (Murphy’s law). I have put a long zip tie on the cable so that I can grab and pull it from wheel well and cut it. I may even remove it if the risk seems too high for the convenience it provides.
Sounds like a good idea. Do you think you can actually reach the cable from the wheel well? It doesn't seem like the cable has a lot of slack.
Knowing what I know now, that's what I would do if I were to reinstall the same V1. With this specific failure all you need to do is cut the Satonic cable which is accessible from the driver wheel well. The motor itself is mounted low enough that you can grab it. Easy fix now that we know what's going on. My biggest concern is that the motor could fail at any time. The level of annoyance could range from a pair of shoes being trapped to the inability to access groceries or charging cables.
The Satonic V1 that I have has the motor mount on the passenger side, you wouldn't be able to access anything from the driver's side.
Right, it does not have slack. That’s why I put the zip tie on it so that I can pull it and hopefully can reach with a bolt cutter from wheel well.
This thread has gone from convincing me to get one of these to now convincing me to not. Still, I’d like a solution to manually closing the frunk (which more or less prevents me from using it for fear of intending the hood).
Oh, you can easily rewatch it without a zip tie. No issues once the liner and tray are out!
The solution is to live on the edge and in constant fear
I think I'm going to return my Satonic and get a Tlyard style one. The failure mode is kinda ridiculous. Even the newer Satonics with the manual release are less than ideal since some sort of intervention is still needed to deal with a failure.
If Satonic warranties my unit I will reinstall the new one. Knowing what I know now I'll do a few things:
- design an emergency latch for the Tesla latch failure case (unrelated, but if I'm in there)
- know that if the Satonic fails, I can just cut the cable
- ACTUALLY weatherproof the control box and wires
I’m still working on the video just to show how my version handles the failures, but I had thought about adding another failsafe of trying to splice some wires directly into the motor connections and running them to the tow eye cover with the factory frunk release cables. They would be connected so that when applying power the soft-close frunk motor would run in reverse to retract the cable, bypassing the control box and fuse. Obviously if the cause of the lock-up is a total failure of the motor this wouldn't work, but if the motor is otherwise OK and has just lost power or popped the fuse it could work to release the tension and allow you to open the hood.
Hansshow has a YT video about troubleshooting the latch motor.
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