Module pinout information

[whitex]

Has anyone in the community come across a pinout for any of the Porsche ECU modules? For example, pinout for the Taycan gateway module below

for the 2 connectors shown here?

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[whitex]

No enthusiasts out there reverse engineering their cars?

 

[W1NGE]

Isn't it risky / illegal?

 

[whitex]

Isn't it risky / illegal?

Not illegal in the USA to learn about, service, repair or improve your own car, as long as you're not doing things like hack or sell software hacks to enable paid FOD features, roll back the odometer, or hacking into people's cars without their permission. There are even gray areas, such as the famous Tesla Model 3 performance upgrade which did not hack the car software to enable performance option, but instead just inserted itself between the ECU and the motor and told the motor to produce more power - Tesla couldn't legally shut that down, though they have since added more security around the links to detect and prevent such man-in-the-middle boxes from being able to function. Teslas have been around for a long time and there are plenty of people who have hacked them (check out YouTube), even built businesses around such as Electrified Garage which repairs and services Teslas cheaper than Tesla, while not being an authorized service center (they will do things like repair your battery if needed, rather than charge you for a whole new refurbished one for 10's of thousands of dollars like Tesla would). I doubt this would be illegal in EU or UK either, but I don't live there, so check your jurisdiction.

By now, there is plenty of information on Teslas and how they work, all from people reverse engineering their cars. This information is very useful if you want to fix your own cars. I personally saved a a bunch of money doing things myself, for example changing out an $8 memory chip (I substituted it with a $50 chip which will outlast my car, overkill I know, but if I'm going to do the work to replace it, might as well) instead of paying Tesla $3,000 they were asking for this fix at the time. Below is a picture from the writeup I did on the Tesla forums helping others fix their cars (yes, the pictures are from the actual fix I did).

Other examples of useful things like fixing Tesla door handles can be literally just labor to re-attach a wire inside a mechanism (though most people will recommend $10 worth of parts to improve on Tesla design so it doesn't break again), but Tesla only does full mechanism swaps for $800.

Risky? That depends on how you define risk. More risk if working on a live car, almost no risk if just playing with it on the bench. No different that something like this (see this forum post for more info on how someone started something like this in 2015 for Teslas):


Last but not least, manufactures can benefit from this too. People like myself practice responsible disclosure notifying manufacturers about any dangerous security holes we might find, or in some cases submit improvement ideas or bugs, which manufacturers can fix (well, Tesla can fix via OTA, other manufacturers may include in the next dealer campaign).

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