Google Glass

We reported last week that Tesla is using wearable tech to increase production efficiency at its factory, and cited knowledge of a promotional video that Google made in collaboration with Tesla as reason to believe that the company was using Glass hardware. Now, we have clips to share from that video to prove that, indeed, Tesla Motors did at one time trial using Google’s wearable at its Fremont factory…

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Google Glass Enterprise Edition has been leaked in full at this point, but what good is new enterprise-focused hardware unless it’s being used in the field? APX Labs, one of Google’s Glass at Work partners, has confirmed on its site that it has signed renowned maker of electric vehicles Tesla Motors as a client, and there is speculation that the company is using the latest unannounced Glass hardware to increase productivity at its Fremont factory…

Update: While multiple people close to the situation say that Tesla is still deploying both Glass and Vuzix hardware in some capacity at Fremont and running trials to compare the platforms, Tesla has reached out saying that “Tesla does not use Glass hardware in the Tesla Factory”. It seems that, while we’re confident Glass was at Fremont at one point, the company has recently moved away from Google’s platform. A person says that Google engineers were at one point referring clients like Tesla to Vuzix while the Enterprise Edition was in development.

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Dragtimes has a nice little rundown of the latest in hacking the Tesla Model S. It turns out that there is an exposed 4 pin connector on the left side of the dashboard that is actually a 100mb Ethernet connection. That connection was actually connected to with a laptop and after some port scanning and sniffing…

The car’s internal 100 Mbps, full duplex ethernet network consists of 3 devices with assiged IP addresses in the 192.168.90.0 subnet, the center console, dashboard/nav screen and one more unknown device. Some ports and services that were open on the devices were 22 (SSH), 23 (telnet),53 (open domain), 80 (HTTP), 111 (rpcbind), 2049 (NFS), 6000 (X11). Port 80 was serving up a web page with the image or media of the current song being played. The operating system is modified version of Ubuntu using an ext3 filesystem. Using X11 it also appears that someone was able to somewhat run Firefox on both screens as per the pictures. All of this technology certain brings up the question as to when and if Telsa’s internal systems will be hacked and jailbroken to allow 3rd party applications to run on the large 17″ touchscreen. Hacking your iPhone s one thing, hacking your car is quite another. We should also note that apparently Tesla engineers detected this hacking or exploring and sent a nastygram to the cars owner, “Tesla USA engineers have seen a tentative of hacking on my car.”, “can be related to industrial espionage and advised me to stop investigation, to not void the warranty”. Does Tesla have an network intrusion detection system installed on the cars? Do they have the right to not allow you to tinker with your own car?

All really good questions. Will Tesla eventually allow hacking. IT seems like the type of company that would want to encourage it from its extremely savvy customer base. Its APIs for the app are already being used by various companies for things like Google Glass interfaces and Chrome extensions.