Tesla Motors

6 Articles

Jailbreaking Tesla Infotainment Systems

August 5, 2023 by 22 Comments

With newer cars being computers on wheels, some manufacturers are using software to put features behind a paywall or thwarting DIY repairs. Industrious hackers security researchers have taken it upon themselves to set these features free by hacking a Tesla infotainment system. (via Electrek)

The researchers from TU Berlin found that by using a voltage fault injection attack against the AMD Secure Processor (ASP) at the heart of current Tesla models, they could run arbitrary code on the infotainment system. The hack opens up the double-edged sword of an attacker gaining access to encrypted PII or a shadetree mechanic “extracting a TPM-protected attestation key Tesla uses to authenticate the car. This enables migrating a car’s identity to another car computer without Tesla’s help whatsoever, easing certain repairing efforts.” We can see this being handy for certain other unsanctioned hacks as well.

The attack is purported as being “unpatchable” and giving root access that survives reboots and updates of the system. Since AMD is a vendor to multiple vehicle companies, the question arises as to how widely applicable this hack is to other vehicles suffering from AaaS (Automotive as a Service).

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An image describing parts of a Tesla modem board

LTE Modem Transplant For A Tesla Imported Into Europe

January 3, 2022 by 24 Comments

When modern connected cars cross continents, novel compatibility problems crop up. [Oleg Kutkov], being an experienced engineer, didn’t fret when an USA-tailored LTE modem worked poorly on his Tesla fresh off its USA-Europe import journey, and walks us through his journey of replacing the modem with another Tesla modem module that’s compatible with European LTE bands.

[Oleg]’s post goes through different parts on the board and shows you how they’re needed in the bigger picture of the Tesla’s Media Computer Unit (MCU), even removing the LTE modem’s shield to describe the ICs underneath it, iFixit teardown diagram style! A notable highlight would be an SIM-on-chip, essentially, a SIM card in an oh-so-popular DFN package, and thankfully, replacing it with a socket for a regular SIM card on some extender wires has proven fruitful. The resulting Tesla can now enjoy Internet connectivity at speeds beyond those provided by EDGE. The write-up should be a great guide for others Tesla owners facing the same problem, but it also helps us make electric cars be less alike black boxes in our collective awareness.

Not all consequences of Tesla design decisions are this minor; for instance, this year, we’ve described a popular eMMC failure mode of Tesla cars and how Tesla failed to address it. Thankfully, Tesla cars are becoming more of a hacker community target, whether it’s building a computer-vision-assisted robot to plug in a charging cable, getting it repaired for a fraction of the dealership cost, or even assembling your own Tesla from salvage parts!

Think Your Way To Work In A Mind-Controlled Tesla

November 18, 2016 by 11 Comments

When you own an $80,000 car, a normal person might be inclined to never take it out of the garage. But normal often isn’t what we do around here, so seeing a Tesla S driven by mind control is only slightly shocking.

[Casey_S] appears to be the owner of the Tesla S in question, but if he’s not he’ll have some ‘splaining to do. He took the gigantic battery and computer in a car-shaped case luxury car to a hackathon in Berkley last week and promptly fitted it with the gear needed to drive the car remotely. Yes, the Model S has steering motors built in, but Tesla hasn’t been forthcoming with an API to access such functions. So [Casey_S] and his team had to cobble together a steering servo from a windshield wiper motor and a potentiometer mounted to a frame made of 2x4s. Linear actuators attach to the brake and accelerator pedals, and everything talks to an Arduino.

The really interesting part is that the whole thing is controlled by an electroencephalography helmet and a machine learning algorithm that detects when the driver thinks “forward” or “turn right.” It translates those thoughts to variables that drive the actuators. Unfortunately, space constraints kept [Casey_S] from really putting the rig through its paces, but the video after the break shows that the system worked well enough to move the car forward and steer a little.

There haven’t been too many thought-controlled cars featured here before, but we have covered a wheelchair with an EEG interface.

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Homebrew Powerwall Sitting At 20kWh

September 29, 2016 by 128 Comments

Every now and then a hacker gets started on a project and forgets to stop. That’s the impression we get from [HBPowerwall]’s channel anyway. He’s working on adding a huge number of 18650 Lithium cells to his home’s power grid and posting about his adventures along the way. This week he gave us a look at the balancing process he uses to get all of these cells to work well together. Last month he gave a great overview of the installed system.

His channel starts off innocently enough. It’s all riding small motor bikes around and having a regular good time.  Then he experiments a bit with the light stuff, like a few solar panels on the roof.  However, it seems like one day he was watching a news brief about the Powerwall (Tesla’s whole-home battery storage system) and was like, “hey, I can do that.”

After some initial work with the new substance it wasn’t long before he was begging, borrowing, and haggling for every used 18650 lithium battery cell the local universe in Brisbane, Australia could sell him. There are a ton of videos documenting his madness, but he’s all the way up to a partly off-grid house with a 20kWh battery bank, for which he has expansion plans.

There’s a lot of marketing flim flam and general technical pitfalls in the process of generating your own non-grid electricity. But for hackers in sunny areas who want to dump those rays into local storage this is an interesting blueprint to start with.

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Working For Elon Musk

August 31, 2016 by 163 Comments

One of my favorite types of science fiction character is found in the books of Ben Bova; a business mogul who through brilliance, hard work, and the force of personality drives mankind to a whole new level in areas such as commercializing space, colonizing the stars, battling governments, and thwarting competitors.

It is possible to name a few such characters in real life — influencing the electricity industry was George Westinghouse, automobiles was Henry Ford, and more recently Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. With Elon’s drive we may all finally be driving electric cars within 20 years and spreading out into space with his cheap rockets. Due to the latter he may be the closest yet to one of Bova’s characters.

So what’s it like to work for Elon Musk at Tesla or SpaceX? Most of us have read articles about him, and much that he’s written himself, as well as watched some of his many interviews and talks. But to get some idea of what it’s like to work for him I greatly enjoyed the insight from Ashlee Vance’s biography Elon Musk – Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. To write it Vance had many interviews with Musk as well as those who work with him or have in the past. Through this we get a fascinating look at a contemporary mogul of engineering.

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An Interview With Tesla Battery Hacker [wk057]

November 11, 2014 by 63 Comments

We covered [wk057] and his Tesla Model S battery teardown back in September. Since then we had some time to catch up with him, and ask a few questions.

You’ve mentioned that you have a (non hacked) Tesla Model S. What do you think of the car?

It’s the best car I’ve ever driven or owned, period. Not to get too into it, but, I love it. I’ve put almost 20,000 miles on it already in under a year and I have no real complaints. Software feature requests… but no complaints. After almost a year, multiple 1700-miles-in-a-weekend trips, and an overall great experience… I can never go back to a gas vehicle after this. It would be like going back to horses and buggies.

A salvage Tesla Lithium battery had to be expensive compared to a Lead Acid setup. What made you go with the Tesla?

Actually, if you consider that the Model S battery is already pre-setup as a high-capacity pack, contains the wiring to do so, and the modules are much more energy and power dense than any lead acid battery bank, it’s actually almost cheaper than a comparable lead acid bank and all the trimmings.

I haven’t officially weighed them, but the modules from the Model S battery are roughly 80 lbs. 80 lbs for a 5.3 kWh battery is around 15 lbs per kWh, which is impressive. For comparison, a decent lead acid battery will have a little over 1 kWh (of low-rate discharge capacity) and weigh almost the same.

Also, the Tesla pack is much more powerful than a lead acid bank of the same capacity.
Generally a lead acid battery bank would have a capacity that would only be realized with slow discharges, so, 1/20C. Much over that and you sacrifice capacity for power. 1/20C for an 85kWh pack is only 4.25kW, barely enough for a central air unit and some lights without losing capacity.

Now the Tesla pack can be discharged (based on how it does so in the vehicle) at up to 3.75C for short periods, and at 1/2C continuously without really affecting the overall capacity of the pack. That means I can run 10x more power than lead acid without a loss in overall charge capacity. Leads to a much more flexible battery solution since the loads will, in reality, always be so low that this will not even come into play with the Tesla pack, but would almost always be a factor with lead acid.

Charging is also somewhat better with the Tesla battery. Charge a lead acid battery at a 1/2C and it will boil. Charge the Tesla pack at 1/2C (42kW) and it might warm up a few degrees. Oh, and the charging losses at high rates are much less than lead acid also.
Overall, without continuing to yack about the technical aspects, it’s just a much better battery, takes up less space, weighs less, and has more power available.

There are likely decent arguments for other solutions, but the rest aside, this one won out because it was definitely more interesting.

Click past the break to read the rest of our interview with [wk057]!

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