Help, my car is being disassembled!
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Oh, wait, it's just the service ranger. Quite an awesome service offering imho - I don't need to take time off and go to the service center and wait around until the car is done, and Tesla saves actual service center capacity for more serious issues that need lifts and other equipment only available there.
So, the FSD computer upgrade is in. Took a couple hours, and the car needed to be taken apart a lot more than I thought - as can be seen. All settings and data were backed up and restored afterwards, only a few items are lost and need to be re-configured (Wifi access points, Bluetooth for the phone, and most annoyingly the trip meters are all gone). All in all, quite a smooth experience.
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But wait, there's more! This being Tesla, I fully expected
something to go wrong, and... well, wasn't disappointed. Or was, I'm still not sure.
After the ranger set off, I fiddled around with the menus for a moment, then realized it won't do much until I take it on a longer-ish calibration drive (needs ~20km to self-calibrate all cameras on the new hardware, before all the AP stuff becomes available again), and set off. Then realized it's still the middle of the day and I actually need to get back to work - so quickly came back, parked the car, and wanted to get something out of the glovebox.
Which wouldn't open.
For those who don't know - the glovebox in the Model 3 has no actual handle. It's opened by an actuator, controlled by a button on the screen. Which I pressed, and instead of the usual "click" and the glovebox slowly dropping open, heard a weird short electric "bzz" noise from the general area.
Troubleshooting time! Knock on the glovebox cover a few times - no effect. Try actuating it while pushing on it - no effect. Reset the screen and try again ("Hello, IT, have you tried turning it off and on again?") - no effect.
Ok, fuck this. Called Tesla, to their credit only took me about 3 minutes to get through to an actual person in the service center. Explained the problem. They called the ranger dude, he didn't really get far yet - came back half an hour later, and diagnosed the problem after taking half the dash apart again.
Apparently Tesla uses a ton of the same exact plug for many, many functions of the car - lights, some of the speakers, some actuators. Among those are the glovebox actuator, and the backup speaker that sits below the glovebox and is used for various alert sounds when the main speakers can't be used for some reason (for example, if the screen has crashed and is rebooting - which doesn't really happen much at all, but apparently was enough of a concern for a backup hardware solution to be in place? idk). Which he apparently swapped during reassembly after installing the FSD computer, which sits behind the glovebox.
Thankfully, once diagnosed, the fix took all of 5 minutes. Thanked him for his time, and he took off again. I decided that I'm not going back to work again at this point, and took off on a longer test drive to make sure the rest of the car actually all works
From what I can tell, it does. The camera calibration took about 15km, and after that the left side of my screen shows a ton more stuff than before: lane markings now include any arrows painted in the lane, there's stop signs, speed signs, traffic lines and stopping lines, cones, posts, trash bins... the stuff it has seen before (other cars/bikes/people, lane markings) seems to also be a bit smoother. Reversing and side cameras show up much faster when opened (sometimes took a couple seconds to render on the old hardware, and the side cameras always took a moment after the "main" one - now it's all pretty much instantaneous), and the image processing is better, so the picture of all 3 cameras appears to be a better quality than before. Dashcam/Sentry recordings should be better now, too - need to make a couple tests some time later. Halting at stop signs and lights works as promised. Not yet sure I'll keep that activated though, need to test it a bit more - you _do_ need to confirm every green light to be green, or it will slow down and stop as if it were red when Autopilot is active, which may become tedious after a while.