Tesla hacker blames the automaker for downgrading his car software as a retaliation of disclosing new information about the product
Recently, Jason Hughes, a fairly well-known Model S hacker cryptically tweeted to Tesla CEO Elon Musk that they are working on a new Model S P100D, something that the company has yet to announce.
Since the revelation, Hughes said that Tesla is looking to greatly push a lower update to his Model S, which he calls “retaliation” for disclosing the “P100D” information.
Hughes wrote about the outcome of the revelation:
“Looks like I’ve definitely pissed off someone at Tesla now. They used some method I was unaware of in another process to go in and delete the pending 2.13.77 update from my car.
Basically they sent the car some command that told it to restart the updater, then the updater restarted and queried the firmware server, which, to its surprise, no longer had an update for me.”
However, Hughes was clever enough to take a backup of the latest update. If the problem is not resolved by Tesla, then he has plans to manually update his car.
@elonmusk @teslamotors #tesla I know your secret. SHA256 of best part: 5fc38436ec295b0049f186651ebba5fd55e8d7b81eb61cbd00d3f1bf18dd9c81
— Jason Hughes (@wk057) March 4, 2016
While there is no clarity if Musk is saying that Hughes’ hacking is “good”, but he surely didn’t refute Hughes’ claim that a ‘P100D’ is coming. The Model S tinkerer mentioned that if the company doesn’t start sending updates to his own car again, he would release more details about forthcoming Tesla products or software updates. He also said that we allow the company time to modify as Musk had responded via Twitter.
@wk057 @TeslaMotors Wasn't done at my request. Good hacking is a gift.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2016
Musk has been opened to the idea of working with hackers. Hacker George “geohot” Hotz was offered a “multimillion-dollar bonus” to work on the Autopilot system by Musk. Hotz is well known for being the first person to successfully hack the iPhone and Playstation.
Questions have been raised in the past when Hughes had disclosed some information from his hacking of the Model S. His pull-down of a recovered 85 kWh Tesla battery pack indicated that it could actually be only an 81 kWh pack.
Source: Electrek
