It is quite embarrassing for them; Flash write endurance is something that most new graduates are aware of.

There's an NHTSA investigation into the incident, but on the bright side, Tesla did remediate it in newer models...by using chips with twice as much eMMC memory to push the failures farther out.

I have a 5 year old model S and I ran into this failure. My car was about 4.5 years old, it was about 6 months after the initial 4 year warranty expired. I'd struggled with deciding to get an extended warranty or not - of course now I insist everyone should get one. They very generously let me purchase an extended warranty at repair time and let me use that toward that repair.

That was a really stupid design decision of course for Tesla to use the emmc in that way. I love my car but that was a bad day when the problem hit me.

It's been a great car even with a few problems (had one of the door handles replaced). Mine will be 6 years old soon, I will probably wait till it's about 8 years old for replacing it.

On the other hand, I have a friend with an 8 year old model S and he had no extended warranty and he hasn't had that problem.

Compared to other luxury cars, Tesla's cars have a lot of issues and design problems you wouldn't normally see. I'm not surprised that those problems extend into the internals of their cars, as well.

I believe they avoid socketed chips due to vibration issues. Definitely should have upped the physical capacity to distribute the writes, though.