A man desperate to buy his way into the massively deflating Tesla value eagerly tossed away $10K to win a salvaged unit.
In order to reanimate the heavily damaged robot he had to guess the former owner’s four digit PIN. Given an already obvious penchant for more time and money than wisdom, his 158th attempt worked. That’s right, Tesla has zero safety design in the console to anticipate someone trying 158 times to guess the PIN. That sounds like a lot, but in reality the Tesla safety design is known to be weak…
Transmitting at 100 messages / second, I tested PINs 0000 through 9999 in 100 seconds. Average PIN discovery time was thus approximately 50 seconds at this rate.
If that’s not bad enough consider “PIN is exposed if brake pedal pressed and ‘Navigate’ search bar tapped simultaneously”.
Massive safety design gaps in the console code, including brake pedal? That’s just foreshadowing for the pedal code itself.
Breaking into the salvaged car’s computer revealed a trove of past personal data, such as videos, including the exact type of unintended acceleration crash notorious for rapidly lowering Tesla market value.
The video shows the woman, presumably the former owner, opening the driver’s door and getting behind the wheel. However, she has no time to close the door before the car starts driving and accelerating. The footage shows the car crossing two lanes, striking a plastic bollard, driving straight onto the sidewalk, and almost running over a pedestrian. The Model 3 stops right after it slams into an electrical box. The incident left the whole street without an internet connection, and the female driver in shock after the ride against her will. Luckily, she wasn’t hurt, and no other vehicle was involved in the incident. The pedestrian her car passed inches away from was the one who helped her out of the Tesla.
Some are far too quick to try to blame the former owner for Tesla having an absolutely horrible design flaw (skipping right past the PIN brute-force vulnerability).
…the female driver might have accidentally put the car in Drive and stepped on the accelerator the moment she got on board instead of pressing the brake pedal. The car started off with the driver’s door open, taking her by surprise and mowing down everything that came its way. She panicked due to the sudden acceleration…
This is unnecessary gender shaming to start with. The driver stepped into this pile of garbage, rather than the female driver. Nobody has any time to react to an over-tuned acceleration monster, rather than she panicked. Why is the Romanian woman who allegedly wrote this article leaning into it as a mysogynist?
After all, what gender was the pedestrian? How is that not more important than the driver’s gender?
But more to the point about basic driver skill expectations, what kind of “engineering” team couples extreme acceleration with a trivial “accidental” shift into drive and launch with the door open? That’s a “do harm” concept waiting to happen.
Perhaps this is the same design team that “accidentally” killed a driver who reversed at high speed into a deep pond.
Tesla really is the worst attempt at engineering possible. How could any driver with their door open shift into drive and punch the accelerator hard, all without some kind of warning or default disable fail-safe to recognize an obvious disaster combination? The story reads to me more like there was an electrical fault, which triggered a robot into a violent abrupt crash against the owner’s intention.
$10K is far too much for any Tesla, unless we’re talking about something to be parted out. The Tesla brand and product trajectory since at least 2016, due to such horrible safety design failures, is on track to being worthless.