Back in May 2018, Elon told us all about the "Bug Report" feature available in Tesla cars.
Well, this is great, right? All I have to do is talk to my car, it will generate a bug report, and Tesla staff will get to work on fixing all of these bugs we find!
Yeah, well, not so much. Either Elon didn't really understand how the feature worked, or Tesla quickly realized that they were getting inundated with everybody's various problems and immediately changed how the feature worked. We had various inklings about how it actually works from Tesla Service Center technicians. They would tell people to take a "bug report" after reproducing some issue, and then tell their technician the approximate time of when the bug report was taken. Then they are able to look through the car's logs to see the information that was saved for that report.
To clarify, "bug report" saves some vehicle state to a file. That information can later be brought up and examined by a Tesla service technician to help diagnose problems. It does not send anything to the mothership. Tesla engineers never see these reports. It just saves some system state to a file on the car itself - it doesn't get transmitted to Tesla or anywhere else.
We've got confirmation from @greentheonly that not only is this the case, but it also does not record any autopilot information. So don't bother taking bug reports for autopilot issues.
Well, this is great, right? All I have to do is talk to my car, it will generate a bug report, and Tesla staff will get to work on fixing all of these bugs we find!
Yeah, well, not so much. Either Elon didn't really understand how the feature worked, or Tesla quickly realized that they were getting inundated with everybody's various problems and immediately changed how the feature worked. We had various inklings about how it actually works from Tesla Service Center technicians. They would tell people to take a "bug report" after reproducing some issue, and then tell their technician the approximate time of when the bug report was taken. Then they are able to look through the car's logs to see the information that was saved for that report.
To clarify, "bug report" saves some vehicle state to a file. That information can later be brought up and examined by a Tesla service technician to help diagnose problems. It does not send anything to the mothership. Tesla engineers never see these reports. It just saves some system state to a file on the car itself - it doesn't get transmitted to Tesla or anywhere else.
We've got confirmation from @greentheonly that not only is this the case, but it also does not record any autopilot information. So don't bother taking bug reports for autopilot issues.