After the exposure of anonymous hacker and researcher @greentheony, media Jalopnik quickly reported a new discovery – new Tesla electric cars have introduced a novel feature designed to prevent people from adjusting the seat settings. Specifically, if the in-vehicle system detects indiscriminate changes, related functions will be temporarily blocked.
Recently, Tesla has begun to install new seat motors on some Model 3/Y vehicles, as well as domestic manufacturers and in-house manufactured seats. The new motor is said to come from the 110-year-old German company Brose, which supplies a large number of components to the automotive industry.
Looks like Tesla added new front seat vendor for model 3/Y cars: BROSE (this is in addition to in-house Tesla seats and also YANFENG they were using for MIC cars sometimes in conjunction with Tesla seats).
This is a new premium seat only, so base seats still remain Tesla-only— green (@greentheonly) January 27, 2022
Brose’s companion system will pop up a warning when it detects an indiscriminate adjustment. If the user continues to ignore it, the feature will eventually be disabled. In addition to tracking the number of seats rolls forward and backward (rather than lumbar support), a follow-up OTA update may bring more sophisticated algorithms.
At first glance, this statement is a bit strange and annoying, but it is still somewhat helpful for the actual user experience. For example, it will only pop up the warning “Overuse of the seat track motor detected” for the first time only if it lasts for more than 90 seconds in 5 minutes.
ha, they are also introducing “seat abuse” metrics complete with disabling of seat moving for busers with helpful messages like “Excessive use of seat track motor detected””Seat track motor unavailable due to excessive use” and “Wait 5 minutes to adjust seat track position again”
— green (@greentheonly) January 27, 2022
If the user decides to ignore and continue to abuse the adjustment device for 30 seconds, the in-vehicle system will only disable it completely and issue a further warning of “overuse”. While adults are unlikely to be so bored that they want to run the power to the top for a long time (there is a risk of damage), for parents, this feature can still prevent many bear children.
@greentheonly revealed on Twitter that they discovered the new feature while scanning Tesla’s latest system firmware version. By comparing with older versions, they were able to estimate what features were coming soon. As for the reasons for adding the new seat control protections, they also made two points.
- Historical experience tells manufacturers that many motor failures are related to this.
- The quality of the newly replaced motor may be poor, so simply use the new version of the firmware to prevent it from happening.