dinom

If you were trying to elicit a chuckle, then... yes you're doing it very right!

He later learned a separate 12-volt battery in his Tesla Model Y died after he opened the door, and he said he was trapped inside on a 100º day for 20 minutes. The low-voltage battery powers what’s inside a Tesla including the doors, computer display, and windows.

I won't speak to the usability of the "emergency latch". But, it certainly sounds odd that there's a separate low-voltage battery in addition to the main battery.

The corollary is, of course, no one wants to pay anymore (-:

Correct me if I'm wrong but, if I understand things correctly... at this point we're wondering if manual locking hubs are a better (or worse) solution than electrically isolating the motor(s). Right?

And, off the top of my head I'm going to say the manual locking hubs will be better overall. Better from an energy efficiency perspective as well as overall convenience and simplicity of design. They might be worse for Tesla's P&L though since anyone with a tire jack and a standard parts dealer nearby could work on the car.

Then again, besides the fact that I'm a cynic... what the heck do I really know!??!

Yeah, that's a fair point but isn't it true that a mostly discharged battery will still have enough charge to perform some limited functions. E.g. even in a normal car I think a dead battery can power the lights even though the starter only "clicks".

Nonetheless, I'm a rather conservative type of person and see your point so in my "dream car" I might want a way to manually put the car in neutral (or free-roll mode, whatever you want to call it). That's why locking hubs came to my mind in a prior reply.

Most EVs either don't have neutral or a poor implementation of it,

I'm sorry, do you mean that neutral and "car wash/freeroll mode" are not 100% equivalent?

This really confounds me... if my car has a problem while driving down the road, I'd really like to have a chance of pushing it onto the shoulder if necessary.

A car that you can't do this with sounds very poorly designed to me.

Is it...not just going into neutral via disconecting a drive shaft?

Very good point and although IDK how it's done I completely agree with you regarding the terminology. In other words, I don't see new internal combustion cars renaming neutral to be "car wash mode"... lol.

Cars should have neutral. And, if yours does then it should be named as such.

Making sure I've got "car was mode" is not what I want to do when I'm in the market for a new car. Nor do I want to start reading through the owners manual should I have to push my car onto the shoulder of the road in an emergency.

Perhaps my age and crotchety grumpiness is starting to show.

Others have mentioned that there is indeed a "free roll" mode and I'm prone to think your hypothesis regarding the implementation may be correct. The specifics, however, do not matter to me.

What I'm wondering now is, if "free roll" mode is activated while I'm at a red light... is there a chance I start rolling as I do in my manual when I take my foot off the brake?

Maybe I should just reach out to Tesla at this point though (-:

You can enable free-roling wheels in the car and push away

This was mentioned a little earlier and further down in the comment tree but many thanks to you too for clearing this up.

thank you

I understand that... so you're saying something like "unlocking hubs" would not suffice? Or they'd add too much cost to the vehicle?

Fair enough, I was thinking back to the time something similar happened to me "mid-mountain".

This Tesla must've been in one heck of a stop where "hiking wasn’t an option as it was pretty hot and we had no water", lol. Does Tesla make a motocross bike?

Unless it's downhill.

Wouldn't that be ok since the parent's root problem was no cell-phone signal?

Edit: of course walking is an option too :-)

don't have any clutches in the drivetrain

Wouldn't a clutch be unnecessary in this case... a complete disconnect from the drive train should suffice, no?

able to get a tow truck capable of transporting my car (turns out you need one that has a full bed because of the regenerative breaking

Sounds incredibly short-sighted that the regenerative braking can't be temporarily disabled by the driver... two people can push a "regular" car to a nearby gas station in a pinch. Even one person can push a smaller car around a parking lot if necessary.

That said, they often send out full/flat bed tow trucks these days for almost any reason.

Edit: fixed "breaking" to "braking"

Alone it doesn't at all, but when you couple the tagline "Turn your audience into a business" along with the blog's more literary narrative style, the whole piece strikes me as entertainment meant for a particular cohort instead of a rigorous analysis.

In addition, the tone of the article seems overly condescending to me. I certainly don't want to minimize accountability and the severity of security holes, but in the real world where startups are trying to hastily bring products to market, they are often understaffed and there is a certain reality that can't be denied.

The author may have indeed found flagrant problems but, in even moderately complex systems, there are big struggles with a diffusion of responsibility and a lot that can be lost in translation; for many reasons besides technical ineptitude.

Ultimately there was too much punditry and not enough of a clinical postmortem for my taste. Of course I don't seem to hold the popular opinion here given that my comment got down-voted rather severely, which seems unjustified. Oh well.

Ya know the worst part? After explaining all this, my chips were cold. Oh, the humanity.

The worst part for me is that the blog reads like a short story instead of a technical analysis. And, given that it's published via ghost.org, makes me think there's just a bunch of scams and meta-scams going on... one layered on top of the other.

Bring back the slider!

Have you considered using a usb relay instead of a "smart plug"?

   https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/344691

Lol, and they say Perl is bad.

https://www.perl.com/pub/2000/01/10PerlMyths.html/#Perl_look...

This isn't meant as flamebait, I'm just pointing out you can write obfuscated code in any language.

Very cool; condolences.

impossible

Probably, but I'm not the type who likes to rule anything out completely.

It can until there's hard hardware chain-of-trust enforcement (like UEFI) with signed images.

And then hackers will graduate to side-channel attacks... it's a game of cat and mouse. The best bet, IMHO, is to make the cost of cracking exceed the value of what's being cracked.

Did you try swapping or replacing capslock w/ ctrl? Something like this...

    setxkbmap -option ctrl:nocaps
    xmodmap -e "keycode 107 = Control_R"

Sure, I'd go one step further too. If you've been kind and the person took offense anyway... don't just move on, avoid self-flagellation as well.

I think the point is that no matter how kind you are to those people they'll find a reason to take offense anyway.

Ok, congratulations... you're right. You can can have the last word instead. I must have said "OpenBSD fully supports every piece of hardware known to man" and missed it. I sincerely apologize for that. You, in no way, tried to put words into my mouth.

And here I thought I was merely stating that there is some Unix variant somewhere on this planet that supports a TPM, any TPM. I'm a boob; sincere apologies. You've made the world a much better place!

Lol, sorry... you're wrong. The question was posed as:

there any support in OpenBSD, or indeed any Unix-based desktop/server operating system

That's a wide swath and TPM 1.2 was finalized in 2011, saying "of course" was perfectly fair. It's one thing to say that such a device, perhaps a specific revision from a specific manufacturer, might not be supported on a specific release of an even more specific distribution... but that wasn't the case.

Trolling and quibbling over a common colloquialism such as using the phrase "of course" is not constructive.

Sure... but that presupposes Unix based desktop and server systems are obscure and that the hardware in question is new. In reality, neither is accurate.

A huge number of people and organizations run Unix based systems and TPM devices have been around for a pretty long time (at least by tech standards).

Might the world be a bigger place than you think?

Yes, of course there is...

https://github.com/01org/tpm2.0-tools http://trousers.sourceforge.net

You can also emulate a TPM in recent versions of QEMU...

https://tpm2-software.github.io/2020/10/19/TPM2-Device-Emula...

I wrote a couple of scripts meant to help me lock down a machine for colocation in this "BitLocker" type manner. And, as luck would have it, lol... I'll (again) shamelessly self-promote the Show HN I wrote just a short while ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35066894