> reasonable average daily use of 1.4 cycles, the expected life would be 5-6 years. NHTSA has not presented any evidence to suggest that this expected life is outside industry norms or that the eMMC flash memory device itself does not comport with that average lifetime estimate.
Instead, NHTSA has asserted that the component should last at least the useful life of the vehicle, essentially double its expected lifespan. Tesla has significant concerns with the impact tentative conclusion.
Despite popular belief, corporations are in fact not faceless entities.
Let's place the blame and embarrassment squarely where it belongs:
Elon Musk thinks 6 years is the useful life of these Tesla vehicles.
I kind of want to unpack this statement a bit more. The number of cycles of a flash chip is the number of times each bit is erased/written to. If you're wear-levelling the device this means that each time you write the capacity of the device to the chip that's one cycle. The affected flash chip is 8GB. This means that Tesla thinks it's reasonable for their software to write just over 11GB of data a day to this device. What the hell are they writing? The endurance of their flash chip may be industry standard but their use of it certainly is not.
To be clear - the component controls the entire media console which has climate controls, the backup camera, defrost settings, all the media, etc. etc. etc. You can't replace the component without disassembling a huge portion of the interior of the car. So either "the component should not need to last the full vehicle life cycle" and people are expected to drive their $100k Teslas without the giant center console working, or it's not actually a "wear" component and they should be responsible for fixing it.
How is it any different than a tire? You pay to get a tire replaced when it’s worn out, and it is therefore considered a wear item. eMMC is the same, just on a longer timeline (and honestly, shouldn’t be expensive to replace. It really shouldn’t be more than $50, and if it is, the car should be able to use some kind of external storage for writing all the telemetry to that’s separate from the computer needed for the car to work)
Tyres are the only part of the vehicle intended to contact another surface, the road, while the vehicle is in use.
Any idiot can see, and has a reasonable expectation, that tyres will need replacing at regular interval.
It's less obvious to the average driver that, say, the cabin air filter will need replacing from time to time. A mechanic or vehicle enthusiast should be expected to know this and replace it.
It's a whole lot less obvious your car's "computer memory" will wear out.
They're not even in the same ball park.
The average driver probably doesn't know about flash memory wear-levelling, and shouldn't have to.
Instead, NHTSA has asserted that the component should last at least the useful life of the vehicle, essentially double its expected lifespan. Tesla has significant concerns with the impact tentative conclusion.
Despite popular belief, corporations are in fact not faceless entities.
Let's place the blame and embarrassment squarely where it belongs:
Elon Musk thinks 6 years is the useful life of these Tesla vehicles.