GTrusted

The Tesla Model X has two USB Type-A ports in the middle section between the driver and passenger seats which support USB 2.0 which you can use to play music from a USB flash drive. However, most people probably use these ports to charge their phones. While we had no problems in the past charging phones like the Apple iPhone 6 Plus, Huawei P8, and Google Pixel phones, we started seeing strange issues once we started using the Tesla Model X to charge the Huawei P10.

On a daily basis we started seeing the Tesla Model X touchscreen display become unresponsive to touch.

At some point after become unresponsive, the Tesla Model X would then warn about this problem but give not so clear instructions on how to fix it. When driving fast on a highway, this can be a bit disconcerting.

We eventually pulled over and went to the Tesla website to learn we had to press both of the scroll buttons for a few seconds before the center console display would reboot.

Fortunately the display electronics runs independently from the car's drive electronics so while the display was rebooting, we still had full control over driving the car.

Once rebooted, the touchscreen was responsive again and the warning message disappeared.

After experiencing this problem on a daily basis, eventually we determined that the touchscreen display started to crash once we plugged in the Huawei P10. The phone would ask whether to charge or allow data access from the Tesla Model X. Often the console display would become non-responsive when the phone reached this screen.

Placing a USB protocol analyzer between the Huawei P10 and the Tesla Model X, we could see USB data traffic meaning that the car was communicating with the phone. However, the communication patterns were not very clean and appeared to be related to the quality of the electrical signals between the phone and car. In fact, we could start replicating the issue 100% once we started using longer USB cables which further degraded the electrical signals. We suspect there is marginal electrical signal performance between the Huawei P10 and the Tesla Model X, causing the Tesla Model X to be unable to cope with the resulting problematic communication and thus crashing.

While we've experienced PC's crashing before upon a poorly performing USB device, having this happen in a car can be more worrisome. Fortunately this issue did not affect the driving functions of the car, but having the center console display become non-responsive is a huge inconvenience and potential driver distraction.