I saw this article earlier:
Tesla ‘going bankrupt’ is endpoint of protests, says local organizer
In the spirit of right to repair, self-hosting, giving a second life to old devices, and limiting data collection by car companies:
- What are some considerations?
- Are there any projects worth keeping an eye on?
An example that came to mind was Valetudo, which is a cloud replacement for vacuum robots enabling local-only operation. Some robot vacuums are easy to install this on, and others require more invasive modifications.
What I’ve found so far:
I wait for the day when we install Graphene OS Automotive Edition on the car
The right to repair. It’s going to require the ability to make changes to the software on the vehicle. At a minimum the ability to replace the public encryption keys used to communicate with the servers. The bootloader and software is probably locked behind signing keys; so you need to be able to disable or add your own keys. I doubt anyone has access to the full protocols used to communicate with the servers. So, the full technical standard need to be released (which is never going to happen) or reversed engineered through unencrypted traffic analysis and reverse engineering the software.
A good right to repair law could require some of that be releasable while the company is still active or all if the company goes belly up. IIRC there was a smaller EV company that went bankrupt and there was a concern that once the servers were shutdown the vehicles would be bricked. Not sure what happened in the end. In any case, cars as IOT is the stupidest idea ever created.
This is the answer. Though there’s a really small chance someone reverse engineers the whole thing, but I ain’t doin it.
Assuming that Tesla goes bankrupt, actually shuts down forever, and shuts its servers down…
At a minimum someone would have to find out where the software sends and receives data from. Then you’d have to reverse engineer the software to control the vehicles.
Then you’d have to reprogram the software to send to your C&C server. I don’t think it would really take all that much to host that… it’s getting there that’s difficult.
You’d likely need all kinds of cryptographic keys to get anywhere with that. Tesla is unlikely to ever publish those, even if they go bankrupt.
On the upside: if you mod your car to get around all that, you’ll probably be able to emulate old consoles on it and play pokemon games while driving.
…But will it run DOOM?
Pretty sure someone would have already done it. Anything with a screen and some sort of computer behind it is low hanging fruit for doom. It’s shit like running it on a calculator using potatoes that raises the bar!
If I had a Tesla and someone smart enough to hack into I wouldn’t doubt I could probably figure out how they build their dashboards and reverse engineer them, they’re most likely browser based or qt or something like it. It’d be too costly to do it in anything else and Id bet many spacex dashes are the same tech. But I ain’t rich enough to get one of those things so someone else has to. There’s only so many ways to draw pixels on a screen in the name of profit
Yeah it’d be a LOT of constant wireshark and reverse engineering to figure out every API it calls. Then probably something in the middle to sit on the host, need to figure out https certs since you’d be spoofing the host, and of course making sure you get the responses absolutely correct.
Not impossible, but it’s not trivial anymore either.
Something else that people don’t think about besides the backend server is the connectivity. A lot of these cars use LTE with eSIMs that can’t be replaced, and getting an internet package for it will be next to impossible since Tesla gets them at bulk rates. Once upon a time cars did allow “bring your own SIM cards” but not anymore. Also as cars get older the cell networks get shut down. Some companies did offer upgrades but that was few and far between. Most just said “sorry, you’re SOL”.
So even if you could hack your car, your car won’t have any way of talking to a custom endpoint.
And this is another reason why putting internet on cars is a bad idea
I mean, what’s the alternative? It’s not like it has to have internet. Anything internet connected is mainly quality of life:
- Traffic
- Remote (app) features
- Music
Except maybe Teslas, damned if I know what they do. But they’re nice to have things that generally require realtime updates but the car functions just fine as a car without it.
Public transit/bikes are (or should be) a good alternative if you can’t find normal, used, dumb cars anymore
That’s a non-sequeter. You started by saying that internet on cars were bad and then switched to “you should be using bikes”
Both of my statements are correct. Cars shouldn’t have internet and there should be less cars. In total absence of offline cars (meaning no used cars, nothing at all), use bikes and public transportation if you can.
I mean you literally asked for an alternative and I gave you one.
Realistically they would get a bailout “for the consumer”.
More likely than central hosting would be some of the same people enabling faster modes via software hacks currently making them run offline.
Bailout, or government ownership run by DOGE? I hear they have some servers available - well, soon.
probabaly full replacement of the motor controller and user facing hardware. basically a diy ev conversion using tesla motors but converting the tesla itself. you would lose features but they would be lost regardless.
You’re better off building an open source car. Teslas aren’t complicated
that’s pretty obvious. Their body panels are falling off and showing how little there actually is their vehicles :D
Some brainstorming from me:
- Ideally people do not buy more teslas
- An initial goal would be to use the vehicle without it phoning home. Would the TeslaMate project be sufficient for that?
- Long term, would it be possible to replace the software running on the car’s console? Or would it be better to tear out the console and replace it with something else?
Alternatively, what would a recycling/conversion program look like?
I’d guess that, like all tech that’s highly locked down, it will be very hard to do anything with - like Apple devices.
So the only thing to do right now is - not updating.
Everything that polls Tesla data goes through (at lease negotiated access) Tesla servers.
That includes TesMate, TeslaFi, Tessie, etc.
I am pretty sure it would be impossible.
That connection I expect to be secured by using signature keys that are private and would need to be released by Tesla to allow anybody connect its car to a different back end.
And remove the need for keys to exchanged and suddenly the impossible is possible. Access to the hardware can always beat any software, it just needs wits. It has to communicate over some sort of NIC or other chip that can be desoldered and replaced with a custom firmware. Or its pins might have a Linux socket connection. Who knows how many insecure holes are there once you have access to the boards. Once you get there it, and enough people care to do it, it can be as easy as an ifixit guide away with an open source board or something, or hopefully just a flash of firmware away.
Removed by mod
What about Comma-AI ?
It sucks that the stick is rising. Trumps asshats are actually investing.
You or anybody, even huge masses of people, have zero impact on the stick, zero point several hundreds of zeroes of impact. Even if all magahats invested at the exact same time. The institutions, mainly brokers, have full control of bundling all investments and settling outside of the market. What the stick does is what very wealthy hedgies decide it should.
Just sell the car to a derby demolition show. We all win.
That’s wasteful and dangerous
Harvest the beast for batteries and GPUs
You can’t
We are talking about a car here not some random cleaning robot.
Not that you aren’t entitled to your opinion, but software running on a Tesla is, in many ways just as mallaible as code on a vacuum robot.
There are several challenges, but basically the protections stopping people from reading and writing firmware would need to be defeated.
I think there have been some software jailbreaks on earlier models already that have been patched, but software is complicated, it’s hard be bug free.
![[Discussion] What would it take to selfhost some of the backend that Tesla's connect to?](https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/58e8ff1a-930a-4e1e-8c7c-da3bcc7dc88b.jpeg){kind=link}