In an interesting step for anyone who follows electric car technology, the automaker Tesla has released a trove of information about its first-generation Roadster car into the public domain. The documents involved include service manuals, circuit diagrams, and technical details, and Elon Musk himself Tweeted posted on X that “All design & engineering of the original @Tesla Roadster is now fully open source.”
We like the idea and there’s plenty of interesting stuff there, but we can’t find an open-source licence anywhere and we have to take issue with his “Whatever we have, you now have” comment. What we have is useful maintenance information and presents a valuable window into 2010’s cutting edge of electric vehicles, but if it’s everything they have then something must have gone very wrong in the Tesla archives. It’s possible someone might take a Lotus Elise and produce something close to a Roadster replica with this info, but it’s by no means enough to make a car from. Instead we’re guessing it may be a prelude to reducing support for what is a low-production car from over a decade ago.
When it comes to electric vehicle manufacturers open-sourcing their older models we already have a model in the form of Renault’s open-source version of their Twizy runabout. This is a far more credible set of information that can be used to make a fully open-source version of the car, rather than a set of workshop manuals.
Tesla Roadster, cytech, CC BY 2.0.
“Open Source” does *not* mean free (as in freedom), in the public domain or giving you a free (as in beer) license to any related patent or intellectual property.
Note that patents are also Open Source “but we can’t find an open-source licence anywhere”.
Source available and open source are two very different things.
Things that companies are all too happy conflate.
Open source implies the use of a permissive open source license. Be it GPL, BSD, MIT, CERN OHL or TAPR OHL.
No published license means that All Rights are reserved and the documents are fully under the publishers copyright. A far cry from open source.
Open source doesn’t imply publication rights. It’s common, but it is NOT required.
Free Software Foundation has spent decades trying to conflate the two
This and you can only declare stuff “open source” if you own or control it’s copyright, so anything developed by/licensed from outside Tesla will stay a closed black box, like the binary blobs in some Linux variants. It’s not surprising that the available documentation is somewhat thin.
Patents aren’t open source, they’re public domain. There’s a huge difference.
Patents are not open source, just because the content is public.
Anybody *except* Musk had done this, and the geek world would celebrate them.
If Musk had done it 2 years ago, it would have been celebrated; “its not really open” complaints woulda been stomped.
Official reverence for the anointed Techno Savior was silly when it was Steve Jobs, when it was Paypal Musk, and even worse now that Musk has been traded out for Sam Altman.
It’s the same response as when Microsoft makes stuff “open source”. There’s a dog buried somewhere in there.
No everything Elon does is good and the more mad at him people are, the more good he is doing, therefore all criticism is by definition wrong and I’m not just a contrarian licking the boots of a fully government subsidized billionaire who would crush me like a bug to have one more dollar… I just think he makes a lot of good points about the inferior races
My favorite part about OpenAI was when they went before congress and said that they should pass a law that no one should be able to train models on more than a arbitrary amount of compute(the amount of compute OpenAI used)
People celebrated their forward thinking and “sacrifice”, being manipulated into fully supporting lawfully limiting and redtaping their future competition. It blows my mind how people willingly praise corporations boxing them out. If AI development is redtaped bad enough that millions of dollars in law fees are required to make sure you’re not doing something to get sued are required to startup. You’ll only guarantee that the current players are the only players.
Wouldn’t the patents have been public since before they were granted?Because that would mean the documents have been readily available long before the announcement, and all that’s changed is that their status would have changed from [Live] to [Expired]. I dunno, I’m not a lawyer.
So they overpromised that car years ago, can’t make it happen and now they went “Just do it yourself!” and abandoned the whole thing. Perfect Musk move.
Tesla quit making the Roadster because Lotus discontinued the Elise, and thus quit supplying the customized Roadster chassis to Tesla. The ‘dick move’ was by Lotus, not Tesla.
Both Elon & Straubel have said that they had to radically modify the gliders they were sent & they should have simply made their own.
So Lotus’ move shouldn’t have bothered them in the slightest.
The truth is they were losing money on every Roadster & it was only a niche car anyway
I doubt Lotus broke any agreements for supply, more that the Elise came to end-of-life and Tesla didn’t have a plan for that / had maybe hoped they’d extend it a bit longer.
Wrong car, dude 🤦🏻♂️
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Roadster_(first_generation)
smells like redeeming musk
> it’s by no means enough to make a car from
There’s also the possibility that Tesla didn’t have actual compete plans with the Roadster, and they were just banging them together shop style. There’s only about 2,500 ever made.
Sort of the Apple I of cars.
Lotus was building a version of their Elise, customized for Tesla. When Lotus quit making the Elise, they also quit building the Tesla chassis.
Tesla stopped making the original Roadster in 2012 and Lotus stopped making the Elise and other cars based on the same platform in 2021.
The original Roadster had numerous problems with the brake system, the battery/power system, “vampire power use” and cars going dead in storage. It was more of a one-off prototype that was mostly incomplete in terms of systems integration; they just pushed it to production without any clear idea what to do with it.
More “openwashing” like HuggingFace, OpenAI et al. Better than nothing tho.
I looked for a bit, but could not find the Renault files anywhere- only a bunch of announcements. Has anyone found them online?
What is expected of this? Like the IBM PC of yesterday, maybe we could see whitebox low-cost Roadster clones by several white box carmakers?
All off the shelf parts available from many vendors. And it’s 15 years or more out of date technically. So the usefulness is marginal at best to anyone bulding an electric car.
Oops, @Somehuman. Am I incompetent or are comment systems extremely janky these days?
@A It’s definitely not you or anyone else, the comments system is a few sandwiches short of a picnic these days.
Even with this reply I won’t know if it follows yours or ends up down the bottom of the list.
Overight handeating? (Battery Theory of Operation document)
“This switch is wired in series with the pre-charge relay coil, preventing the resistor from overight handeating due to continuous application of battery voltage in fault conditions.”
The Tesla roadster is assembled from off the shelf parts and a Lotus Chassis. I am very curious what can be “open” and thus “sourced”. Crazy.
“The documents involved include service manuals, circuit diagrams, and technical details”
Should be included with every vehicle sold by law IMO.
Or available upon request so no landfill filler or cost to print for those who don’t need or care.
Crazy they built that car without a single CAD file 😳🙄 Also, a lot of the IP is owned by lotus and others, so it will never be “open source”. I’m not even seeing the actual software anywhere.
Think they were using PTC Creo Parametric back then.
Not complete enough to replicate a roadster.
Schematics are missing for major components like the motor controller circuitry. No software is included. Many broken links in the documents.
Breakdown of what’s included and what’s missing:
https://youtu.be/m_8jh_MpWBE?feature=shared
I was curious and had a quick look at the vehicle display system docs from this the other night… from what I saw the electronics details for PCBAs were more the production files output from the design project.
Looks like gerbers and schematic print and a testpoint report, and even pick & place files. But no BOM, which I guess is maintained in a full production system somewhere, and may never have even been exported from the design project directly.
But there was no actual design files I could find.
Not sure I saw any firmware either. not just source but even release images.
So, maybe “open source” is a bit optimistic – I’m sure it’d be very useful to help with debug/repair of broken boards though. which I guess the whole point of this is if Tesla don’t want to deal with them anymore.
Just skimmed the docs and as others say – this is bull, there’s nowhere near enough information to actually re-create a roadster, anything up there is basically detailed service & diagnostics info and not much more.
Then again, anyone who knows how to build that stuff would likely not need all that info anyway – or not be super bothered about replicating such an old design exactly anyway.
From a vehicle software perspective, we’d at least need to see CAN DBCs, UDS databases (DIDs, DTCs, security key unlocks, etc), and preferably CCP/XCP and A2Ls to make the ECU software even remotely accessible. Assuming that the Roadster followed conventional vehicle software development, which I don’t know if it did based on age and the maturity of Tesla during development.
This looks like some good right to repair service information and I’m glad they released it but calling this open source is like calling highway lane keep assist and adaptive cruise control “full self driving”. Oh wait…