Tesla News

The Brilliance of Tesla Engineering
(What they got that nobody else has)

I just listened to a senior software engineer – Thomas Mueller – who reverse engineers hardware/software products, kind'a like Sandy Munro does with cars. This guy chatted with Sandy for 45 minutes at the 2023 Consumer Electronics Show (CES).

Fascinating conversation! Thomas reverse engineered the Tesla motherboard (below)! Not to sell the proprietary secrets to others, but out of curiosity. Cool guy.

What he discovered is that Tesla does something that no other carmaker does with their redundant Self Driving processor. The second identical chip is just there in case the main one fails, and this is by regulation...

...but that's a waste of unused processing power. So Tesla uses this fall back chip to do "shadow mode" work. It calculates what the driver (in manual driving mode) or the main chip (in Self Driving mode) should do (based on the latest in-house alpha version of the software), and if the driver or the main chip does something different, the second chip sends that data to Tesla to figure out why and improve the software!

(Of course the second chip can revert back to "take over mode" in a few milliseconds if the main chip fails.)

And Thomas said that Tesla obviously has senior programmers who are experts at coding with the "C" machine code language. These people are very hard to find, and he says that other carmakers don't have such programmers because it's obvious (to him) that they rely on the code that comes with the off-the-shelf electronic modules they buy to put in their cars, and this gives Tesla a huge competitive edge with being able to reprogram the car in its entirety. These are the brainiac programmers who re-jiggered the car's software when Tesla had to use different module chips during the Covid-caused supply chain shortages so their finished cars didn't sit in parking lots for months awaiting a single chip. No other carmaker was able to do this.