Owners of old Tesla Model S and X have knocked out the right to free replacement of worn-out flash memory
In May of this year, perennial complaints from owners of Tesla Model S and X electric cars about expensive repair of the processor unit led to a class-action lawsuit in California and threatened the recall of hundreds of thousands of cars. To prevent this, Tesla made a compromise: they promised a warranty replacement of faulty blocks in cars no older than eight years or those that traveled no more than 100 thousand miles (160 thousand km). In other cases, the owner will shell out up to $ 3000 from his pocket.
The problem is that until 2018, the MCU in Tesla Model S and X electric vehicles used NVIDIA Tegra 2/3 and 4/8 GB SK Hynix flash memory processors. Because the system keeps a log and is the basis of the entire infotainment platform machines, intensive overwriting data frequently and quickly exhausting the resource rewriting of flash memory, which manifested itself in different failures.
The most typical failure was the disconnection of the touch screen and the inability to control the whole range of functions of the electric vehicle – turning on the heating, air conditioning, rear camera responsible for leaving the parking lot, communications, and many other operations. The owners of the machines themselves paid for the replacement of the MCU block from $ 1800 to $ 3000. After 2018, Tesla switched to an Intel Atom processor and 64GB Micron flash memory in the MCU. It is obvious that even with the same or less Micron memory resource (and it is likely to have significantly decreased), the increased array size will provide much longer wear resistance time.
Tesla released a message on Monday that it had made warranties amendments. The company compensates owners of Tesla Model S cars from 2012 to 2018 and Model X cars from 2016 to March 2018 for the repair or replacement of MCUs, but only if the cars with faulty blocks are not older than eight years or have traveled less than 100 thousand miles. In other cases, the warranty will not cover the costs, as there will be no free replacements for serviceable MCUs in vehicles whose warranty period is nearing its end.