
Salvaging your way to a working Tesla Model S for $6500 - peteforde
https://hackaday.com/2017/09/20/salvaging-your-way-to-a-working-tesla-model-s-for-6500/
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chrissnell
Reminds me of the guy on the Cummins Forums (Dodge RAM diesel trucks) who
bought the salvaged flooded RAM 3500 that had rolled into a river a few days
after it was purchased new. He paid some small but still risky amount of cash
for a truck that was almost brand-new but presumably destroyed. With the help
of people on the forums, he got it cleaned up and got the motor and
electronics working again and ended up with a $80,000 truck for less than
$10K.

“The RAM 3500 that the Internet fixed”.

[http://www.cumminsforum.com/forum/2013-general-
discussion/19...](http://www.cumminsforum.com/forum/2013-general-
discussion/1987402-flooded-ram-3500-internet-fixed.html)

edit: fixed link. Sorry, Cummins Forum is a crappy AutoGuide site. Bring your
ad blocker.

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HeyLaughingBoy
I wonder how often this happens. Something like 25 (? god, I'm old!) years ago
a friend of mine bought a new Jeep that had been vandalized on the dealer lot
for some ridiculously low price. We helped him get it back in shape and it
ended up being a pretty nice project vehicle.

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mlrtime
So he bought a water damaged Tesla, deemed the electronics as being
unreliable. But, then managed to sell the unreliable water damaged electronics
for the original price of the Tesla?

~~~
zootam
The batteries are sealed up pretty well.

He did have to dismantle the pack to test which cells where good and bad.

He found a few bad ones, but found good ones too.

The market for OEM Tesla parts is locked down by Tesla, so it has become
driven by people dismantling wrecked cars like this. Even questionable parts
can command a high price.

He could have bought cells and put them in this car, but he would be paying
for someone else's labor to dismantle the pack, and he needed additional parts
anyway.

His plan was to acquire another wrecked car and do the work himself.

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pricechild
> Was all of the effort worth it? We certainly think it was! The car was
> deemed road worthy and even has functioning Super Charging capabilities
> which according to [Rich] are disabled by Tesla if such a Frankenstein build
> is detected.

Isn't that inevitable?

And then what recourse will/should be available?

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dingo_bat
> And then what recourse will/should be available?

Apparently you can pay Tesla a few thousand $ to "re-certify" the car and
restore updates and supercharging.

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neo4sure
I watch this guys youtube channel. What he did was awesome. He still has
issues with tesla updates. I guess telsa won't update his vehicle because it's
a salvage. I think supercharging still works. Best of luck to the guy hope he
can make more progress with his vehicle.

~~~
marssaxman
I'd like to know what he did that disabled Tesla updates. I might actually
start to develop some interest in owning a Tesla, if there were some procedure
I could follow to disable all the remote backdoors Tesla has left embedded in
their rolling computers.

~~~
greglindahl
Do you have a plan for installing safety-critical updates?

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marssaxman
If the firmware in that car is so fragile that any such thing as a truly
safety-critical update could still reasonably exist after they've been out on
the road this many years, then I definitely don't want to drive one, and I'd
prefer not to share the road with them either. On the other hand, if there
actually were some epidemic of Tesla crashes due to faulty firmware, the
intense media scrutiny they've experienced would almost certainly have turned
it up by now; so I'm willing to believe that any updates they'd be trying to
push would not, in fact, be safety-critical.

~~~
greglindahl
Tesla has made a couple of things public which were safety critical updates,
such as this one:

[http://mashable.com/2017/06/09/tesla-ota-airbag-
fix/](http://mashable.com/2017/06/09/tesla-ota-airbag-fix/)

which also refers to an earlier incident where they made charging at home more
tentative to avoid faulty plugs causing fires.

~~~
marssaxman
Thanks for the link. Ok, that's pretty clear, no Tesla for me.

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Grazester
Anyone interested in this sort of thing should also check out this page. They
swapped the electric drivetrain of a tesla roadster into a Lotus Evora. It was
not a smiple swap and included the help of Motec(they make aftermarket ECU,
popular in the race world) to control everything.

[http://www.onpointdyno.com/bluelightning/](http://www.onpointdyno.com/bluelightning/)
Lots of videos on youtube also with the builder Sasha
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8rYXBYqPX8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8rYXBYqPX8)

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turk184
My nightmare is DRM cars--it's exactly what has become of almost all consumer
electronics and it totally sucks not just from a hacking perspective but from
a recycling and re-use perspective as well. Watch some of the Apple laptop
repair videos on Youtube.

Cars are flat out too expensive these days, and then to make them "disposable"
on top of that? No way. I like fixing my cars, I like having a fighting chance
at self rescue if stranded far from help. Accessibility and flexibility is
necessary for survival.

~~~
quuquuquu
I am afraid that people like you and I are the minority!

It seems that corporations have decided to pursue DRM, and people are either
knowingly or unknowingly accepting it. The cars are still selling- and I don't
see many people at the junkyard with me pulling motors out of cars from 1993.

People like us are pretty much being forced to DIY everythig from whatever
parts we can find. If I wanted the look of a Tesla, I would find a body only
tesla (somehow), and then stick a 95 toyota camry's motor and trans in it.

Everyone else will just continue spending all of their money on a car whose
utility drops more and more every day.

~~~
solatic
Mostly unknowingly, I would wager. The consequences of deciding to buy a car
with DRM are too far removed from the time of purchase. Also, because the mass
market isn't knowledgeable enough, it has a higher tendency to simply accept
the rising cost of maintenance as inflation, rather than a concerted attempt
to raise costs to the consumer.

~~~
quuquuquu
I completely and totally agree.

Most people have no desire to look at a wiring schematic, troll around a
junkyard, plasma cut, sand body panels, etc.

I do these things on a weekly or monthly basis when I am working on a new
project car for myself or to sell or for my friends.

Maybe other people value their time and effort differently from me, but they
don't realize just how much money and freedom they are sacrificing by buying a
DRM car.

They either don't know that they are signing up to be exploited, or they feel
they have no other choice.

