Tesla hack

It looks like there’s a trend of “Tesla hacks” with a pop culture theme this week. After the Pokemon Go hack yesterday, which turned out to be fake, another ‘Tesla hacker’ released a picture of her Model S dashboard with the vehicle’s rendering replaced by Batman’s Tumbler.
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As you probably know, Tesla blocks video playback on the Model S touchscreen and it has yet to enable app mirroring, a feature owners have been waiting for a while and that was announced for a release this summer. Yet, it doesn’t stop some hackers to try bypass Tesla’s system and implement some of those features (to a certain level) themselves.

Earlier this year, we reported on a hacker installing Gentoo on her car and getting around Tesla’s video playback block to watch Terminator. Now we learn of a hacker claiming to have managed to make Pokemon Go work on his Model S. Update: the “hacker” has since confirmed that he faked the hack.
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When Jason Hughes, best known as the ‘Tesla Hacker’ who first spotted the upcoming 100 kWh battery pack in the Model S’ OS, retrofitted a classic Tesla Model S P85 with an entire Autopilot hardware suite, something Tesla itself refuses to do because of the cost and complexity, we thought we just witnessed the apogee of his ‘Tesla hardware hacking’ experiments, but we were so very wrong.

We learned a little more about Hughes’ latest project this week and it could prove even more impressive technically speaking than his Autopilot retrofit, and certainly more spectacular.
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When Tesla first introduced the Autopilot in October 2014, it announced that every car from now on would be equipped with the Autopilot hardware suite which consists of a forward-looking camera, radar and 360° ultrasonic sensors. Tesla has since been pushing updates to enable new features to the cars equipped with the system.

Of course, existing Tesla owners asked if a retrofit would be available for their vehicles. Tesla was quick to suppress any hope that a retrofit would be made available citing a workload too important to make a retrofit cost-effective versus simply trading up for a Model S equipped with Autopilot hardware.

Now a Tesla hacker proved the automaker’s point by himself retrofitting a classic Model P85 with new and salvaged Autopilot parts and sensors, and actually making it work.
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