# Bugs vs. Issues



## DocScott (Mar 6, 2019)

Since I keep bringing this up on individual threads, I thought maybe it was worth a thread of its own for discussion.

Suppose something starts going wrong with my Tesla. Maybe the backup camera doesn't come on sometimes, or AP gets funky, or my car reboots spontaneously while I'm driving, or there are problems with audio, or...

It seems to me there are three broad categories of cause:

1. *There's a bug in the firmware*. If that's the case, and if it's a problem that shows up repeatedly for one person, then I'd expect lots and lots of people to report the same problem. Teslas don't have so many combinations of ways that options can be set and cars can be configured to create a lot of highly idiosyncratic bugs. There are exceptions: phantom power drain that caused by interactions with third party apps is one; strange AP behavior that's caused by interactions with some particular spot on a morning commute is another. But for the most part, if it's something like "my microphone isn't hearing me" then if it's due to the firmware it's likely to affect lots and lots of people that have that firmware. AP has "corner cases"; the audio system, less so.

2. *The firmware installed improperly*. I must say, I'm disappointed with the ability to monitor updates in Tesla cars, although maybe that improves in 2019.12 and beyond? There have been reported cases of cars with issues that a service center said were due to a failed update. For an individual, this will be hard to distinguish from a bug: the problem appears with a firmware update, and goes away with the next one. But this kind of problem would explain a lot of the cases where person A has it with 8.3 and it goes away with 8.5, but person A doesn't have it with 8.3 and then it appears with 8.5. If Tesla gave us the ability to reinstall the same firmware, that might be helpful, although they'd probably need to limit that to when the car was on wi-fi and they might put some other limits on how often it could be done to keep obsessive owners from re-downloading every time AP hesitates on a lane change.

3. *The car is having hardware issues, or corrupted data in software*. I guess I could break this up in to two different kinds of causes, but they're similar as far as their relationship to firmware: they are likely to persist from version to version.

I hang around on the firmware forums a lot, and so I see a lot of people attributing issues to category 1 that may well be due to category 2 or 3. If I looked in to the hardware forums, I might find it to be the other way around.

Why is this important? For one thing, there may be cars with problems that could be fixed with a visit to a Service Center, where instead people keep waiting for the next firmware update. That causes associated frustration, too, because the owner may feel that by not getting pushed a firmware update early that they're driving a buggy car.

I also think that we have to consider re-framing our ideas of what Tesla is and isn't good at. There's a pretty common notion on these forums that Tesla keeps releasing firmware with new bugs, and that they aren't testing their firmware well enough. That might make sense when the bug is closely related to a new feature, but I doubt that Tesla keeps breaking features that they haven't changed. The notion that the firmware is usually the problem implies that the hardware is nearly flawless. These are cars, and are thus travelling in tough environments. Elon Musk points out that there aren't a lot of moving parts in a Tesla, and so there's less to go wrong. In some sense, that's true. But there are a lot of sensors and wires and such. The motors may last a million miles, and soon the batteries will too, but that doesn't mean there's never any maintenance that needs to be done. And then there's the software side of things: rather than a bug in a particular version of the firmware, is the software in general not doing a good enough job of scrubbing out corrupted data?

I'm interested in hearing people's experiences with sorting out the causes of issues. Have you found out from a Service Center that a problem you were having was due to an incomplete firmware download? A bad sensor? Or were you told something was a known bug that would be fixed with the next firmware update? (No, I won't post this as a poll--I'm interested in some of the details of which kinds of problems were fixed in which ways.)


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## MelindaV (Apr 2, 2016)

a month or so ago, my local Tesla Owners club had a social where there was a few of the mobile service guys there, including one of the schedulers. I was talking to the scheduler and he said nearly all the people contacting them for an issue have a firmware related issue. Very few of those calling for help have actual physical issues they are able to address with a service appointment or mobile service visit. 
Obviously, there are some things that are physical issues that cause the software to glitch, but most things resolve themselves.


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