tesla

122 Articles

Tesla’s Plug Moves Another Step Closer To Dominance

December 21, 2023 by 46 Comments

Charging an EV currently means making sure you find a station with the right plug. SAE International has now published what could be the end to the mishmash of standards in North America with the J3400 North American Charging Standard.

The SAE J3400TM North American Charging Standard (NACS) Electric Vehicle Coupler Technical Information Report (TIR), which just rolls off the tongue, details the standard formerly only available on Tesla vehicles. We previously talked about the avalanche of support from other automakers this year for the connector, and now that the independent SAE standard has come through, the only major holdout is Stellantis.

Among the advantages of the NACS standard over the Combined Charging System (CCS) or CHAdeMO is a smaller number of conductors given the plug’s ability to carry DC or AC over the same wires. Another benefit is the standard using 277 V which means that three separate Level 2 chargers can be placed on a single 3-phase commercial line with no additional step down required. Street parkers can also rejoice, as the standard includes provisions for lampost-based charger installations with a charge receptacle plug instead of the attached cable required by J1772 which leads to maintenance, clutter, and ADA concerns.

Now that J3400/NACS is no longer under the purview of a single company, the Federal Highway Administration has announced that it will be looking into amending the requirements for federal charger installation subsidies. Current rules require CCS plugs be part of the installation to qualify for funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill.

If you want to see how to spice up charging an EV at home, how about this charging robot or maybe try fast charging an e-bike from an electric car plug?

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Hackaday Links: December 3, 2023

December 3, 2023 by 28 Comments

Sure, it does less than originally promised, but hey — at least it’s more expensive. That about sums up Tesla fans’ feelings after the long-awaited Cybertruck reveal at the Texas Gigafactory on Thursday, where Elon Musk himself handed over the keys — or their Cyber equivalent — to a few new owners. These are expensive machines — $61,000 for the two-motor model, and just shy of $100,000 for the three-motor all-wheel-drive model with all the bells and whistles. That’s considerably more than they were expected to cost back in 2019, a fact which may be at least partially behind the drop in Tesla shares after the launch.

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A Few New Car Owners Will Join The 48V Future

December 1, 2023 by 135 Comments

Leaving aside all the annoying hype surrounding Tesla’s Cybertruck, there’s a little technical detail which might be of more interest to readers than the automotive behemoth itself. It’s one of very few vehicles on the road to eschew 12 volt electrics for not 24 volt, but 48 volt. This has been one of those automotive innovations promised as just around the corner for many years, and it seems finally we’ll see it in practice.

The reason that there’s nothing new in the prospect of moving on from 12 volt electrics has been brewing for decades now. A typical car has plenty of motorized gadgets from seat adjusters to sunroofs, as well as at least one heated windscreen or other surface. These devices take a lot of power, and at the lower voltage require significant current to operate. The 48 volt system will require much less in the way of copper to get the power where it’s needed, so the surprise is that we’ve not yet seen it in run-of-the-mill vehicles from the likes of Ford or Volkswagen.

What we’re guessing is that other manufacturers will be watching from the sidelines as to whether 48 volt electrics cause any problems for the Tesla, and it’s not impossible we could see it becoming the new hotness. There are many choice words we could say relating to the hype around Tesla and its supposed level of innovation, but it could be that this time they’ve really been first with something the whole industry will go for. If so we should rejoice, because it’s likely to push down the prices of 48 volt lithium-ion packs.

Header image: Mliu92, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Tesla Claims To Have Open Sourced The Roadster

November 25, 2023 by 38 Comments

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.

A Die-Cast Car Subframe, Pushing The Limit Too Far?

September 16, 2023 by 81 Comments

A piece of manufacturing news from Tesla Motors caught our eye, that Elon Musk’s car company plans to die-cast major underbody structures — in effect the chassis — for its cars. All the ingredients beloved of the popular tech press are there, a crazy new manufacturing technology coupled with the Musk pixie dust. It’s undeniably a very cool process involving a set of huge presses and advanced 3D-printing for the sand components of the mould, but is it really the breakthrough it’s depicted as? Or has the California company simply scored another PR hit?

We produced an overview of die casting earlier in the year, and the custom sand moulding in the Tesla process sounds to us a sort of half-way house between traditional die casting and more conventional foundry moulding. I don’t doubt that the resulting large parts will be strong enough for the job as the Tesla engineers and metallurgists will have done their work to a high standard, but I’m curious as to how this process will give them the edge over a more traditional car manufacturer building a monocoque from pressed steel. The Reuters article gushes about a faster development time which is no doubt true, but since the days of Henry Ford the automakers have continuously perfected the process of making mass-market cars as cheaply as possible. Will these cast assemblies be able to compete with pressed steel when applied to much lower-margin small cars? I have my doubts.

Aside from the excessive road noise of the Tesla we had a ride in over the summer, if I had a wish list for their engineers it would include giving their cars some longevity.

Header: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0.

Teaching A Mini-Tesla To Steer Itself

September 2, 2023 by 4 Comments

At the risk of stating the obvious, even when you’ve got unlimited resources and access to the best engineering minds, self-driving cars are hard. Building a multi-ton guided missile that can handle the chaotic environment of rush-hour traffic without killing someone is a challenge, to say the least. So if you’re looking to get into the autonomous car game, perhaps it’s best to start small.

If [Austin Blake]’s fun-sized Tesla go-kart looks familiar, it’s probably because we covered the Teskart back when he whipped up this little demon of an EV from a Radio Flyer toy. Adding self-driving to the kart is a natural next step, so [Austin] set off on a journey into machine learning to make it happen. Having settled on behavioral cloning, which trains a model to replicate a behavior by showing it examples of the behavior, he built a bolt-on frame to hold a steering servo made from an electric wheelchair motor, some drive electronics, and a webcam attached to a laptop. Ten or so human-piloted laps around a walking path at a park resulted in a 48,000-image training set, along with the steering wheel angle at each point.

The first go-around wasn’t so great, with the Teskart seemingly bent on going off the track. [Austin] retooled by adding two more webcams, to get a little parallax data and hopefully improve the training data. After a bug fix, the improved model really seemed to do the trick, with the Teskart pretty much keeping in its lane around the track, no matter how fast [Austin] pushed it. Check out the video below to see the Teskart in action.

It’s important to note that this isn’t even close to “Full Self-Driving.” The only thing being controlled is the steering angle; [Austin] is controlling the throttle himself and generally acting as the safety driver should the car veer off course, which it tends to do at one particular junction. But it’s a great first step, and we’re looking forward to further development.

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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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