My Tour of the Tesla Gigafactory - September 22, 2017

At long last, I can reveal my super-secret, super-geeky event - a tour of the Tesla Gigafactory! Due to confidentiality, details are light but what is there is interesting, and you get to see several early Tesla Model 3 cars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thqi09aJZHg

Tesla Paris Chambourcy Showroom and Service Center

From the Paris Ouest Tesla showroom, I took another series of trains and subways to get as far as I could to St. Germain, home of the famous PSG football team.  From there it's a 20 minute bus ride to Chambourcy.  I made it to the store with about 15 minutes to go before closing time, whew!  I took some pictures and had a chat with one staffer until closing time.

Tesla Paris Ouest France Showroom and Service Center

While in Paris I discovered two Tesla locations, one easy to get to and one difficult.  I went to the easy one first in Paris Ouest.  I did a series of subway and outer-region train rides and a long walk to get there.  Turns out it's a service center only now, they moved the showroom two weeks ago to the other location that's about 30km away to the west.  The staff were very helpful, pulling out a map and showing me what public transport I'd have to take to get there.

Tesla Tilburg Netherlands Showroom and European Factory

The Tilburg factory is a 2 hour walk, train, bus and walk in the pouring rain but hey if I'm that close I have to do it.

I walk into the Visitor center at the factory to find that it's not the factory anymore!  It's now a showroom, service center and warehouse since September.  The very helpful man there explained everything and pointed me towards the new factory just down the road.

I walk in more pouring rain to the new building.  This is a massive building, about 200 meters wide and 40 tractor-trailer-loading-bays long.

I walked into the first sliding glass door but it looked like an employee entrance, so I went out and then into the next door which led me into a big visitor room with floor-to-ceiling glass walls looking right into the factory.

The "factory" is what I would call final assembly, about the size of a basketball court, done this way to reduce the taxes payable for fully assembled cars brought into the country for distribution around Europe.  The cars come four to a shipping container, with the wheels bolted onto the hubs so they can roll.  The cars enter what is labelled "General Assembly", riding on a smart cart and they move in an S-shaped work line where the car is grabbed from above with a big claw-like hanger.   The wheels come off, the battery pack is installed, the drivetrain(s) are installed and then the wheels go back on again.  They fill it with windshield washer fluid and then flash the software at which point the car is driveable.  The car is lowered onto another smart cart and makes its way to final inspection for paint and water leakage.  It comes off the cart and goes through an indoor test track about 900m long with bumps designed to make squeaky things squeak.  They then are driven over into the detailing area then parked waiting for shipment though Europe or for local pickup.

All this time, several people walked through the visitor area and nobody seemed to be worried about me with my nose pressed up against the glass.  Finally a young man walked over and introduced himself.  He was the Delivery Specialist, handling about 8 - 10 local pickups every day.  One customer with a new titanium colored Model S drove past me and out the door with a huge smile on his face.  I told my story and we talked for about half an hour.  He then told me it was OK to take pictures through the glass, I said I hadn't up to then because of the no-picture rule in Fremont but he said there are no secrets here, so he took a few pictures of me, then I took a few more.  He then went back to his desk and brought out a stainless steel Tesla pen for me, I'm very thankful for his gift.  Well that was an awesome visit.

Tesla Amsterdam Zuid-Oost Netherlands Showroom, Service Center and European Headquarters

On the Amsterdam city outskirts is another Tesla location.  This one combines a showroom, huge service Center and the Tesla European headquarters.  All support calls in Europe come here and staff is available in all supported languages.

I thought it was interesting that Tesla had a big "we're hiring" sign outside the office.

Tesla Amsterdam Netherlands Showroom

I walked to the Tesla showroom, of course.  It's in a tiny storefront in an upscale part of town.  The young man working there said electric cars are really coming in the Netherlands, nearly every street has at least one charging station so the infrastructure is there and ready for more cars.

Tesla Copenhagen Denmark Showroom and Electric Bicycles

Continuing my trip I tracked down the Tesla showroom in Copenhagen.  This is a very dense city with small streets and the showroom was tiny but in a high-end shopping area.  They did have just enough room for a rolling chassis and a production 90D model running the brand-new AutoPilot software update.  I spotted 4 other Teslas around town.  Due to a change in government, the tax-free status of electric cars is going away soon and will now be subject to the 200% tax levied on all cars.  Maybe tax free is too much of a break but a little social engineering always helps to move society towards a zero-emission, renewable energy future.

We walked outside and down a block to a rack of electric bicycles!  Woo hoo!  Simon entered his account information on the touch screen and away we went.  It has 3 speeds and uses a pedal-assist method.  You start pedalling and the motor turns on and gives you a strong assist, you just need to keep gently pedalling.  If you stop, you get a nice regen.  We rode through the city over to a canal with a sightseeing boat and checked the bikes into another rack.  Cost for the ride was DK25 or about $4.

As we walked away from the bike rack, I spotted a VW plugged into an electric charging station, and a guy with professional camera equipment taking pictures.  He said the car was on sale in Sweden now and would come here next March, so he was taking pictures for the brochure to be used here.

Tesla Birmingham England Showroom and Service Center

Continuing on my trip, I was visiting a friend near Birmingham England when I realized that there is a Tesla location nearby, so off we went.

It's quite a large location near the city center.  I took some pictures and talked with a young woman who was just recently hired.  I walked out into the back parking lot to look at the cars waiting to be delivered and was politely chased out, turns out I can't go back there, sorry!

Tesla Sarasota Florida Showroom

I drove over to the west coast of Florida to visit my friend from way back in High School and visit the Tesla Sarasota showroom.  Like two others I've visited here, it's in a shopping mall.

For a Monday, there were a lot of people in the mall and a steady stream of potential customers coming in and looking at the chassis and assembled car.

Sadly, no pictures.  I'm pretty sure at this point my camera is deleting pictures behind my back...

Tesla Tampa Florida Showroom and Service Center

Continuing my trip, I visited the Tampa showroom and service center.  Despite the hints on the Tesla web page, this location is very hard to find.  It's in a complex of one-story professional and light industrial offices.

Once inside though I was happy to meet with Agnes, a transplanted Scot who talked with me for a long time about her showroom, service center and Tesla in Florida.  You can just barely see the service center through the glass doors.

Tesla Miami Dadeland Florida Showroom

The end of the long day brought us to the Miami Dadeland Tesla showroom.  The showroom in Miami beach I went to last year is no more, it was getting more tourists than folks actually in the market for the car, so this site was opened.

As with the Boca Raton showroom, this one is in a mall.  There were less people in the mall here this afternoon for some reason.

Sorry, again no pictures.

Tesla Dania Beach Florida Showroom and Service Center

We then drove south to the Dania Beach showroom & service center which is just a little bit north of Fort Lauderdale.

There we met Franklin, a very enthusiastic young man!  He invited us for a test drive in a Ludicrous mode car, which has just been released and I was not going to pass up on this opportunity.  We did 3 passes up and down the service road next to the airport runway.  The acceleration is mind-blowing.  I didn't have the courage to keep my foot on the floor until the third run.  Big thanks to Franklin and best of luck to him in the future.

With my body buzzing with adrenaline, I completely forgot to get any pictures!

Tesla Boca Raton Florida Showroom

Continuing south, we stopped in at the Town Center mall in Boca Raton, home of the Tesla showroom.  There were so many people walking into the store that I only had time for a brief chat with Dan.  Shopping malls are a good way to get eyes on the car and plant a seed in people's minds.

Charging stations in the mall parking lot.

Tesla West Palm Beach Florida Showroom and Service Center

While I'm in Florida visiting my father, I decided to visit all of the Tesla showrooms in South Florida. Heading south from Vero Beach, first up was West Palm Beach.

This location is a bit out of the way but quite a large facility with a showroom and service facility.  I spoke with Steve and Tess.  We talked about the launch of the Model X and Tesla in general.  Tesla is doing quite well in south Florida and they expect the trend to accelerate.

EVCCON 2015 - Day 4

This morning the schedule shows the Car Show at Jack's house from 9 AM - 2 PM.  For the majority of us, it meant a well-deserved sleep-in and then hang out in the workshop until 2 PM.

Ray and Nabil got their motorbike-of-death running.  It's a frankenbike made with a Kelly controller and an automotive alternator wired backwards.

Among the goodies found around the shop was this Chinese motor controller from a company called Shinry.  Yes, the jokes just write themselves folks.  The specs seem good, liquid cooled and even includes a DC-DC converter so if it tests out well it could be a viable controller.

This is a section of Tesla battery pack, made from 18650 form-factor Lithium Ion batteries.  Every one of those holes is a battery and there's a tiny wire welded from the battery to the metal backplate, acting like a fuse.  If a battery goes runaway, the wire will melt and the battery will be taken out of the circuit in the pack.

This is the guts of a 10 KW Tesla battery charger.  Time will tell if Jack and the team can reverse engineer it and install it into a vehicle.

At 2 PM, Jack kicked off the awards.  This year, the awards are small and engraved plastic rather than the huge softball-championship-trophies in years past.

Awards were given for the top 3 attending cars but the drag strip and autocross trophies went un-awarded as those events were cancelled this year.

Steve West and Nick Smith and their Charge.net.nz organization won the Electric Vehicle Evangelist of the Year award, well-deserved.

Kevin Smith, leader of the Illuminati Motor Works team that came *this* close to winning the Progressive Automotive X Prize, won for Technical Innovation.

Second year in a row, I snagged the Furthest Travelled Attendee, or as Jack called it this year, "Global Visionary (Furtherest Travelator).  Nick Smith went the long way around through the UK to try to beat me, but my 3 months on the road from door to door added up to 27,418 miles, longer than the earth is around.  He'll have to step up his game next year.

After the awards, most of us headed over to Sikeston to Dyno Dom's drag race track.  Most years we went on Sunday morning but Jack decided to go on Saturday night this year.  The dinosaur-juice folks were out in force, while we made up a small EV contingent, under the official auspices of NEDRA.

After waiting for about an hour and a half in frigid cold and cloudy skies, Dyno Dom cancelled the whole day on account of rain which didn't really exist.  The lady at the ticket gate refused to give us each our $15 back, but did write on them that we could come back later.  We explained we only come once a year but she wouldn't relent.  Screwed again...

Most folks headed back to the hotel for free "kickback" drinks and buffet of tremendously fattening American food.  I couldn't get anybody interested in going out for the evening so many goodbyes were said.  The Drury Lodge is scheduled soon for demolition and rebuild into an 8 storey hotel so we'll have to find a new place to stay next year and possibly the year after that if their schedule slips.

All in all a great week, with the hard-core EVCCON folks showing up despite cancellation and we managed to safely get liquored up and play with high voltage again.  Until next year...

EVCCON 2015 - Day 2

Session: John Hardy - Battery Testing

Day 2 kicked off, surprisingly on time, with John Hardy from the UK.  John returns again as our overseas battery testing expert.   He reviewed his earlier battery testing methodology and cell types.

The Headway 38120S cell had no detectable voltage drift but the first cell failed after 600 discharge / charge cycles.

He tested a shunt balancing product which simply destroyed the pack in under 100 cycles.  He is a fan of bottom-balancing your pack before assembly.

His CALB CA40fi cells lived beyond 2000 charging cycles and each of the 8 cells showed nearly identical voltage profile on the 2000th cycle, which is exactly what we want in our batteries.

John's full testing history shows that Lithium Ion batteries have no discernable drift and an extremely long charging cycle life.

John then moved to his current (no pun intended) testing of the Tesla-style 18650 LiFePO4 cells.  He has developed a new charging algorithm so has asked us to not talk about his ideas until they're protected.  I will say it's very sophisticated and looks very good!  Hoping to hear good things in the future.

Session: Collin Kidder – CAN Bus Hacking Hardware And Software
Collin's work writing software to collect and analyze CANbus traffic of existing OEM automotive components has formed the cornerstone of the reverse-engineering innovation of the world-wide EVTV team.  Due to his efforts we now can control the charger and DC-DC converters from Chevy Volts, the motor and controller for UQM/Coda vehicles, the motor and controller from Siemens/Azure Dynamics DMOC and the motor and controller from the Tesla Model S.

Collin recommends the EVTV CANDue 2.0 board as it has two complete isolated 2-wire and 1-wire CANbus connections, a temperature sensor, a MicroSD memory card slot for massive data logging and a 256kb EEPROM for persistent data storage.  It is a standard Arduino shield, meant to be stacked on top of a standard Arduino Due processor board.

Another option is the  EVTV Due board, which combines the features of an Arduino Due and a CANDue 2.0, but does not have a 1-wire CANbus port.  It has a much stronger USB port and screw terminals for power and CANbus wiring.

Jack has developed a plug-and-play device in a box to plug directly into a Tesla Model S diagnostic port which is native CANbus and Tesla cannot disable it.

GVRET is Collin's CANbus sniffing tool, driving the hardware to capture all CANbus traffic.  It is Arduino firmware and is flashed into one of the above boards.

SavvyCAN is a QT5-based app which is used to analyze the CANbus data captured by the hardware and GVRET.  QT5 supports Windows, Linux and MacOS.  It has sophisticated tools to visualize and filter messages and can also play back messages onto a live CANbus.  This is critical to fast development of an independent controller for an OEM CANbus device with no manufacturer documentation.

DBC files are used to define signals that flow on a CANbus.  As you reverse-engineer a device, DBC files save the knowledge gained and help SavvyCAN interpret the format of specific messages.

The reverse-engineering process is as follows:
- Find a convenient place to plug into the CANbus.
- Capture some bus traffic to see if it's working
- Go for a drive and capture real bus traffic
- Perform small discrete functions and save the traffic into separate small files, such as open the door lock, close the door lock, shift into neutral, press the brake pedal, etc.
- Launch SavvyCAN and isolate the meaningful messages
- Define newly discovered messages in a DBC file
- Play captured or synthesized messages back on the bus and see what happens
- Write software in a controller to perform that specific function.

Note that this is *not* easy and you will get better at message analysis as you see more devices and more ways of representing data.

Collin gave us a guided tour of SavvyCAN.  There are many, many ways to visualize the data to help you find patterns and values leading to your solution.

We have to break for lunch, Collin will continue again later this afternoon.

Session: Craig Smith - Car Hacker's Handbook 2014. – Politics and Legal Environment of Automotive Security

Next up is Craig Smith, a new EVTV speaker.  He's an expert in vehicle computer systems.  Cars are basically rolling computer networks.  He started out by talking about the current legality of vehicle hacking.  He says to always talk about "hardware".  We all know software is running inside all of these computers, but in the eyes of the law, it's all hardware.  We are already protected in law to reverse engineer components to add 3rd party devices, so the line is blurry.

Who Owns Your Car?  GM, John Deere and the Auto Alliance.  GM claims they retain copyright on the software inside and we are not allowed to look at it.  The basis of their opinion is the DMCA - Digital Millennium Copyright Act - which was originally intended for movie and music piracy.  People have proposed new Class 21 and 22 exemptions to DMCA about reverse engineering for security research and the right to understand and update firmware.  The Copyright Office has not decided on these two exemption requests yet. We are a small voice against the large corporations and their lobbyists.  No one has been sued yet though, and the industry is worried about losing the suit so the only tool they have is threatening people with potential litigation.

What can we do to help?  Share information.  Share stories.  Share data.  Collaborate.  Check out the Open Garages group and the I Am The Cavalry group.

Craig talked about other CAN sniffing hardware, from $60 open source to $5000 proprietary Kvaser and software such as SocketCAN and the Linux Can-utils package that you match up with them.  The LAWICEL protocol is a network protocol under Arduino that handles CANbus traffic like any other network device.  There are 3 CAN interfaces: Can0, SIcan0 and Vcan0.

Craig showed a demo that he created.  It uses a Playstation controller to drive a virtual car with speedometer, left and right turn signals and door locks via CAN traffic.

There are additional software layers available that run on top of CAN such as UDS that provides higher-level functions such as ECU reset, diagnostic codes, VIN number and data upload and download.  

There is an important packed called TesterPresent.  It is issued every 2 or 3 seconds and tells the car a diagnostic tool is connected.  Some functions may require this.

SecurityAccess tokens are required to update firmware.  It's a multi-step handshaking protocol to prevent easy hacking.  

Craig showed up pictures of his test bench with a junkyard dashboard and ECU and pots for changing simulated data values such as fuel level and RPM.  

We had a good Q&A session to wrap up before Craig had to leave for the airport.

Jack gave Craig an EVTV Due board to see if he can use it in his research.  Big thanks to Craig!

More Cars!

Session: Jack Rickard - Tesla Drivetrain Demonstration

We moved into the workshop area where Jack's Tesla drivetrain test bench is located.  He showed us the control panel which operates contactors and simulated the brake pedal.  He showed us the Arduino code that drives commands to the motor controller, and then he engaged drive and spun the unit up.  He demonstrated forward, reverse and neutral and creep mode.

Here is a short video from his demonstration.

For longer video and a far more detailed description of the reverse engineering of the Tesla drivetrain, please see the relevant EVTV videos here.

Now we're packing up to go to the BBQ at Jack's house.  It looks like this will be the first year we don't get rained out.