Tesla’s new vehicles, which are leaving the factory, will include a strange feature designed to prevent abuse of seat adjustment controls. The new seats will track and measure the amount of adjustments made by users and deactivate controls if they detect “excessive” changes. The feature was first identified by @greentheonly, an anonymous hacker and researcher, and was subsequently covered by Jalopnik.
Tesla recently began installing new seat engines in some of its Model 3 and Model Y vehicles, in addition to the seats it receives from China’s Yangfeng and those it manufactures internally. The new engines come from Brose, a 110-year-old German company that supplies many components to the automotive industry.
The difference between the Brose and Yangfeng and Tesla seats is what @greentheonly calls “seat abuse indicators”. This feature will issue warnings to users if they make too many adjustments and will eventually disable seat controls if warnings are ignored. Apparently, the car keeps track of how many times users move their seats back and forth, as opposed to lumbar support controls – although the feature may eventually include these controls.
ha, they also introduce indicators of “seat abuse” complete with deactivation of seat movement for carriers with useful messages such as “Excessive use of a seat ankle motor has been detected” “Seat aisle motor is not available due to excessive “Wait 5 minutes to adjust seat tracking position again”
– green (@greentheonly) January 27, 2022
If this sounds weird and annoying, keep in mind that we’re talking about a lot to deal with seat controls. The first warning – “Excessive use of the seat motor” has been detected – comes after 90 seconds of use within a 5-minute period. If you decide to say “hell” and keep messing with the controls for an extra 30 seconds, the car will deactivate the seat control tracker as a whole with a warning against further “excessive use”.
(For anyone who finds it difficult to imagine the circumstances in which someone will fuck with the seat controls for a full two minutes, let me introduce you to a concept known as “children.”)
In a live Twitter message, @greentheonly said they discovered the new feature while scanning the latest versions of Tesla’s firmware to compare them to older versions and see what new features are coming. The hacker also had some theories as to why Tesla decided to include new seat control protections:
so there are two possibilities:
1. their historical replacement model shows that engines fail in this way.
2. they are using worse engines in the factory now, so first add this check to the factory firmware.
In the end, I can’t tell you it’s one thing or another for sure. This change coincides with the configuration of the BROSE seats, so maybe only Brose seats have this weaker engine? This would explain that the first appearance is in the factory firmware.
But it can also be based on historical data and applied to all cars and everything is simple [coincidence]. I have no real way to know. I don’t even have a Model 3 car
@greentheonly notes that “the new feature is not yet in a widely public version, as it comes from a factory version installed on new cars in factories and has not made a leap in public, but it usually happens soon enough.”
I’m not sure how much use of a burned-out seat engine is, but Tesla must have some idea if they install these weird new behavior trackers. As a person married to another person who is much shorter than me, I know I would be a lot annoyed if I turn off my seat controls. This will probably prevent me from driving my car completely.
But as @greentheonly notes, this must be the real thing; otherwise, why would Tesla spend time and energy tracking it and deciding when it makes sense to limit its use? “[E]”2 minutes out of 5 seems like a decent amount anyway,” they noted, “so we’re not talking about ’10 seconds and you’re out.'”