When the Tesla Model 3 was annouced around 2006 I was really excited, because I've always wanted an electric car and back then we didn't know exactly who Elon Musk was (and certainly not who he would become). At that time Tesla was making arguably the best electric car and the Model 3 was going to be the first one even remotely close to my price range. But for a few reasons I changed my mind, and the big one was that I didn't want to spend that much money on something I had so little controll over, and which had so much control over me.
Most cars built after 2010 are connected to their manufacturer's "mothership" to varying degrees, sending data back to the manufacturer about how you use the vehicle without your knowledge or control. Some send more data than others, and for some this connection is two-way, allowing the manufacturer to send messages to and even control the vehicle. But none are as wired to the master switch as Teslas, and we've learned that the data they collect is regularly accessed directly by Musk himself (who choses to publish this data publickly with no authorization by the owner).
I suspect this pushes or crosses legal lines, but even if it doesn't, I don't want any part of it.
Over the years I've seen the price of used Teslas drop far enough that older models are becoming very accessible, and while there may be maintenance issues to be dealt with, electric cars are famous for being a lot simpler than fossil-fuel machines. The primary barrier is one of software, not hardware. So I started to think about what it would take to:
1. Divorce these cars from the Tesla company
2. Remove any barriers to servicing them
The idea I came up with was to simply replace the car's brain. At a high-level, the electronics of an electric car serve some very basic functions like modulating power between the battery and the drive motors (acceleration and regenerative braking), manage battery charge and condition and various other "housekeeping" tasks. Beyond that most of what these cars do is similar to any other automobile, save for the "advanced" functions like self-driving capability, mass survelance, etc. After looking into what makes these things work in a Tesla, I was fairly confident with enough time, tools and parts I could "cut the cord" and turn a Tesla car into something a person could actually own and operate independent of the Tesla company.
I didn't take it much further than a thought experiment at the time, because I knew I personally didn't have the resources to pull this off (especially the time and space, along with a full-time job, etc.) and I didn't really think too many other people would want this enough to try and "productize" it.
That was a few years ago, and things have changed a bit since then. Today there are more and more people who have Tesla cars that don't want anything to do with the Tesla company, and there's perhaps more compelling reasons to want to buy a used EV instead of a new one given the constraints that are going to be put on new EV's from places outside of the U.S. There's also a growing number of aging Teslas that would be great cars if not for their entanglement with the Tesla company and it's owners.
So last week while I was enjoying a break from the Wisconsin winter weather I revisited this idea and I had the wild thought of just throwing a crowdfuning campaign behind it and see if there are enough people interested to support such an effort. I wanted to have a little more confidence going into something like this so I did some additional research on what it would take to get it done and after a bit of this I have a three-pronged approach and I'm much more confident that at least one (if not more than one) could suceed.
Perhaps even more exciting is that one of these approaches, if sucessful, could probably be applied to any vehicle to replace it's factory brain and disconnect it from the mothership. Wouldn't that be cool?
So the basic plan would be:
1. Secure sufficient funding to cover the cost, space, tools, consumables and donor cars for 1-2 years of full-time work
2. Document the entire effort in written form and in the form of a documentary film
3. Publish all findings, designs, processes, etc. as free and open source after the project is complete
If the project results in a sucessful process, any remaining resources will go into opening the workshop to the public and providing the procedure as a service to Tesla owners, and providing a "cookbook" for any other shop/etc. who would like to do the same.
There's a lot more to it but I'll stop here for now. If there's significant interest in this I'll start pulling together a more detailed plan to share and take the next step.
The title of this post is a reference to the brilliant Garfield Minus Garfield.