Seems like there's been relatively less attention on the 48V/800V architecture and the Ethernet comms/steer by wire setup, but I think those are what make this particular vehicle quite interesting. Up until recently I think 48V power electronics have been fairly rare outside of telecom/other high cost situations, but I suppose one major difference is that at 48V, transformer-based DC-DC conversion is usually a better choice for digital electronics compared with a simple buck, which historically seems to be a significant jump in cost and faff to design. Perhaps PCB planar transformers will help here, but this may be one reason we don't see 50V EPR USB C devices yet (disappointed that the Cybertruck didn't decide to be the first 240W USB-C device, still stuck at 65W)
Seems like if there were to be some kind of electrical failure, now with full steer-by-wire it could be quite a harrowing situation.
Based on the images posted from the event [1] it seems to have two discrete power steering motors (we know from previous vehicles that these have two motor driver channels internally for failover), so there's probably a decent amount of redundancy here. There seems to also be some kind of a sensor that's only populated on one side, though I can't tell what it does from the picture (position sensor?)
Given that the steering is variable gain now, seems like the vehicle speed data would also be important, as in, the communication bus is now quite important for the function of the steering module.
With the Ethernet architecture they're using now, it's likely that it's not as problematic as with CAN bus (where water intrusion can take down the whole bus) but it would be interesting to see what the design choices there were.
[1] https://twitter.com/DriveTeslaca/status/1730305183572177107/...
Seems like if there were to be some kind of electrical failure, now with full steer-by-wire it could be quite a harrowing situation.
Based on the images posted from the event [1] it seems to have two discrete power steering motors (we know from previous vehicles that these have two motor driver channels internally for failover), so there's probably a decent amount of redundancy here. There seems to also be some kind of a sensor that's only populated on one side, though I can't tell what it does from the picture (position sensor?)
Given that the steering is variable gain now, seems like the vehicle speed data would also be important, as in, the communication bus is now quite important for the function of the steering module.
With the Ethernet architecture they're using now, it's likely that it's not as problematic as with CAN bus (where water intrusion can take down the whole bus) but it would be interesting to see what the design choices there were.
[1] https://twitter.com/DriveTeslaca/status/1730305183572177107/...