Tesla Model 3 - Secret Signals!

ATTENTION: Do not ask me how to obtain access to these hidden menus. Unfortunately there is no simple way for one to access them, Tesla has went to great lengths to keep people out. Getting access involved warranty-voiding techniques on the ICE circuit board, including soldering, and is very risky to attempt on your $50k+ car.

Here we take a deep dive into some of the hidden inner workings of this exquisite software driven machine by exploring some of the internal CAN Signals.

CAN stands for "Controller Area Network". It is basically a way for all the modules in the car to talk to each other. Interesting read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN_bus

The Model 3 (like the S/X before it) uses CAN and other technologies as communications networks which greatly reduce wiring. Tesla has built a CAN Signal viewer into the software of the center screen to make diagnostics easier. In this video we dive into this secret screen and I show you live interesting values from the Model 3.

Model 3 has only 3 main CAN Buses; Vehicle, Chassis, and Party. (There are a few other dedicated private buses as well for certain components) The "Party" bus is also used for fault tolerance in the event one of the other buses is unusable. There are also quite a few LIN buses, and BroadR-Reach (100Base-TX) single twisted pair Ethernet is used for high-bandwidth and/or low latency communications.

Warning: This is a much longer video than my normal offerings. Feel free to use the speed selector on the lower right if you want to watch it faster.

Also, Sorry for the autofocus problems. The camera doesn't like looking at the screen and would rather focus on my finger.

Note that this is only a very small subset of the actual signals on the CAN Bus. There are many things we can't see on this screen flaying back and forth between the modules in the car at very high speeds. Tesla only makes a small subset available for diagnostics.