This is why I don't want a car connected to the internet. The behavior of my 50k vehicle should not change unexpectedly because some guy in silicon valley pushed an update.
Reminds me of DJI drones which every now and then ask you if you want to update the software, but updating the software only would cause you to have more restrictions on your flight, not less.
They won't because they're either doing the same, or hoping to do the same in the near future.
Certainly they can't prevent you from charging and driving around your wrecked Tesla on your farm or whatever?
This near-7-year-old link[0] always make me laugh.
This thing is definitely not internet connected. The basic trim does not even feature a radio at all, only standard space to fit a 1-DIN radio yourself. It has manual (roll down) rear windows.
I don't know about the US, but I would be surprised if you can't buy an F150 that has no internet connection?
Edit to add from a below comment I made: I mean more in the scenario of a cell going bad, causing a fire, then maybe blowing up the car and causing collateral damage. As I understand it, this would be covered by the car's insurance, right? If so, Tesla shouldn't be locking the chargers (Maybe Tesla would need to verify insurance before allowing supercharging then). But if it doesn't, or if the car is uninsured, then I can accept Tesla not wanting to be held liable for the damage to their station or other owners' cars for batteries that might have undetectable damage.
I know that people here won't be super surprised by this concept, but I still think it's worth getting the wording right.
Just as with music and videos and games, I think one should be disallowed from calling something "selling", "buying" or "owning" if what's really being done is "licensing". Yeah, I'm from the "words matter" police. :)
And as you have correctly discovered, cars catching on fire is a very regular event that is covered by insurance. Does your supermarket make you sign a liability waiver every time you drive onto their parking lot? No, we have mandatory insurance and other higher-level concepts to do away with all of this overhead that we would otherwise incur doing the most trivial of "transactions".
It is not Tesla's car. They don't own it anymore.
The liability would be the same for any other car.
> this would be covered by the car's insurance, right
Yes. Which has nothing to do with Tesla.
> then I can accept Tesla not wanting to be held liable
Tesla does not own that car. The car would be the same as any other car that Tesla does not own.
The charger should be designed to withstand abuse and vandalism. It certainly should be handle a short in a charging system.
I think companies like Tesla are correct in blocking access to their own charging network and I have no issue with another company blocking access to theirs. However I do not agree with the idea Tesla can block you from using another fast charging system.
A 20 year old car might have a market value of $500. If somebody keys it up and down both sides, it's totaled and gets a salvage title, because that's more than $500 worth of paint damage.
In some cases a car gets stolen, the insurance pays out because they can't find it, then later they do find it and there is nothing wrong with it but the policy is already paid out so now it has a salvage title.
It has nothing to do with the safety of the car.
I'm strongly in favor of greater re-use of these enormous machines that require intense capital investment, and valuable and limited resources to create.
Its only fair. After all, the new owner just bought a hunk of metal from the previous owner. They still need to purchase a license for features like starting the car.
Even before Tesla you already had car manufacturers that basically locked out performance behind a pay wall even tho the car itself was identical to the “sport model”.
Many of the German manufacturers had this practice for a decade if not more, the extra price difference is basically their estimated cost to the changes in MTF between when you push your car to 80-90% of its capability to 100%.
And even before Tesla you already had aftermarket products and services that were designed to unlock that extra performance and yes they did often at least in principal voided the warranty.
Personally, I would argue that the most important principle to protect the customer is that they should get what they pay for when they choose to buy a product. That product should not then be retrospectively nerfed through software shenanigans, either for them, or for any future owner they sell the product on to. This is one idea that car manufacturers have been flirting with recently, and IMHO we should stamp on it hard.
Another idea, but to me a clearly distinct one, is that a manufacturer of a combined hardware/software product might develop software-only improvements after the product has been purchased. In this case, I would distinguish explicitly between fixes for problems where the product wasn't performing as expected at the time of purchase (things like safety issues or security vulnerabilities that clearly shouldn't have been there in the first place) and enhancements (things like performance improvements or additional functionality). Again IMHO, the former should be supplied free and unencumbered to all customers, as they are essentially fixing a defective product. For the latter, I don't have a problem in principle with the manufacturer charging for the upgrade, as potentially it incurs additional costs and risks, and it brings a genuine benefit to the customer that they didn't have at purchase time.
A third idea is a manufacturer deliberately shipping a product that isn't using the full hardware capabilities because of artificial software limitations. They might also then offer upgrades for sale later, which is really just a special case of the enhancements-after-sale idea above. Once again IMHO, charging for these enhancements is still OK even if they manufacturer knew in advance that they might ship that software later on, as long as they were honest about what the customer was actually buying at the time of purchase and they didn't claim or imply that those enhancements would become available for free or on any other specific terms that they don't then honour.
There are at least two good reasons for taking this view. One is the general principle that if someone has bought a product of a certain specification for a certain price then that transaction is then concluded. Just as I don't think the manufacturer should be allowed to move the goalposts after the sale in a way that harms the owner, I also don't think the owner is entitled to free extras from the manufacturer that weren't part of the sale. The other is the practical reality that hardware+software products are enormously complicated, software is never perfect, and the idea that a manufacturer should be liable for not shipping optimal software from day one or prohibited from continuing to do work that might develop useful improvements that benefit customers in return for further revenue is kind of silly if you think it through.
One very important issue I'm glossing over here is whether the terms of the original sale were fair to the customer. This is a standard problem in any sort of retail environment, and we usually rely on some combination of competitive markets and government regulation to protect the little guy. But these are also separate issues to the ones above that would have to be considered on a case by case basis.
If they gave you beta motor logic they'd have to fix whatever would burn or fail.
I can think of a ton of examples where what you're saying is nonsensical.
These things take time to develop culturally, if they even do. If they just do it, it will antagonize consumers. ATM, I doubt it's worth it for Tesla.
Meanwhile, they are already selling software, and it seems pretty lucrative. Whether it's taxing used car sales or voluntary upgrades, it's all just software revenue. Unrepentant antifeatures are more of a "late stage" game. There are plenty of less controversial and more lucrative ways for Tesla to make money with software, especially platforms. Tesla now has one, and even if they don't increase production (they will).. it's a growing platform.
...That's not to mention the 800lb gorilla software upgrade.
Agree on the principle though. Everything is becoming a hunk of metal running never software we don't own.
IMO, the really unpopular moves are likely to come from traditional OEMs. They're playing the game of tight margins and high volume. More incentive, at least for now.
Rich Rebuilds on YouTube has documented his entire ordeal with them.
I don't think I believe Tesla's mission statement about the environment if they are so willing to generate all that e-waste.
[0] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/antifeatures
[1] https://www.thecarconnection.com/news/1121248_mercedes-benz-...
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/03/business/bmw-options-soft... , discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23763560
Actually for a number of years there have been companies that disable car ignitions based on car payment status.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/gadgets/remote-kill-switches-di...
You know, it's an electric car, ignition is something you don't want to ever encounter with it.
The way out of it is through competition. My 2c
It doesn't follow you from car to car.
Then, what is the justification of Telsa's " you did not pay for it" given to second hand owners as seen in this article?
This is really disingenuous and in total contradiction with Musk's "your car is an appreciating asset".
There's one case where Tesla apparently messed up and didn't remove the package from a car they re-sold until after sale. I can't find any other cases of that or removing packages during private sales.
edit: This seems to be about Tesla discouraging salvage cars rather than private sales of non-salvage cars.
Either way, you paid for it, and even it it's technically "totaled" it's still fucking yours. When Tesla disables functionality remotely, they don't say it's because the warranty ran out or because it's unsafe now, they say they are happy to re-enable it for fresh money.
That's why I wouldn't buy a Tesla (or any car of a manufacturer pulling the same crap) now, and if I did already buy one, would be looking into filing a class action against the company, because remotely disabling features like that that you already paid for is fraud.
The insurance companies would much prefer minor repairs than to write off the whole asset, but they can't get quality work done to the asset.
This practice is driving up _everyone's_ insurance rates.
I personally don't support any attempts by auto makers to make cars more disposable.
"In Oklahoma, the insurance companies will declare a total loss and deem a vehicle as salvage when the damage is greater than 60% of the fair market value of the vehicle."
PBR is ~$3K, anything more severe and they will write whole car down due to cosmetic damage.
Other features, like unlimited supercharging on newer cars (older unlimited supercharging followed the car) or free data were only for the original buyer, and they will remove those when they resell a car.
"fuck you, give us money".
He paused and thought about it and said "we'll look into it".
So there's hope.
Not sure if you meant to reply to that.
A side effect of this approach is that you could get a new Tesla and log in to activate the features you already paid for. If you crash your Model 3 and insurance buys you a new one, should you have to pay for Autopilot again?
That said, that approach may piss off people as well. Imagine paying $50k for a Tesla, and only being able to get $30k when you sell it because you paid $20k for features that won't transfer over to the new owner. Even worse if your new car isn't a Tesla: that money would be lost.
From a little bit of reading, it really seems like TSLA is trying to have it both ways on this, where it can just disappear after any private transaction?
The fact that there's question here is insane. This should be an easy question to answer from the purchase agreement, but I downloaded a purchase agreement I could find, but it didn't say anything about FSD.
Has anyone here bought a Tesla with FSD? Did your purchase agreement say anything on the subject?
Bicycles are still good.
There's an easy fix for that: add the option to transfer the Autopilot to another account. Then you can sell off the Autopilot as well.
Given, of course, Tesla being willing to allow that, or if not, sufficiently consumer-friendly legislation.
Edit- I've always missed the true small trucks like the 90's era rangers and b2000's. I feel like that's an excellent place for a new ev truck startup to begin. The new rangers and colorados are as big as the old f-150's.
Ford did make a 2000 era electric Ranger though. Perhaps success of an electric f-150 will enable electric trucks in general, and smaller trucks again.
I think solutions like this will be best for the near future for folks who want a car with an electric motor, rather than a cell phone you can rent to drive places.
It seems like every manufacturer is generally going higher and higher grade on feature set and (some) performance metrics, and saying "screw you" basically to maintenance, repairability and general comprehensibility concerns.
The cars I've owned from the 60's up through the 90's all had wiring diagrams that would fit on a few pages and could be maintained, largely, with a handful of tools in a normal suburban driveway. Newer cars seem more and more to require specialized tools or equipment and are harder to debug. Generally the maintenance / repair process is aimed at shops and professionals, not the end user. This specialization is brittle, and unlikely to survive any significant systemic shocks. We've been locking ourselves into this model for decades, and I don't see an easy way out.
I look forward to some high quality open source EV hardware becoming available eventually. That's probably when I'll get an electric car.
Yeah, my old 89 caprice had a computer, but the wiring wasn't too bad. Of course the self diagnostics were not very advanced which makes some troubleshooting more difficult. Ah, the days of bending a paperclip and sticking it into the OBD port...
I bet there's a market niche for what you're describing
I think price is the big issue. The batteries and motors are expensive in a variable cost way. Most of the features use relatively inexpensive sensors or components and have low variable cost. So a consumer sees all these features as justifying the high cost. Removing those features probably wont make it much cheaper (unless maybe you're a separate company that doesn't develop/engineer those features at all).
First, if a dealer advertises a car with a feature and the car is missing that feature, then you have recourse -- with the dealer.
Second, how does Tesla even know that a car has changed owners? What triggered Tesla disabling the feature at this time for this car?
I mean look, if you want to sell your Tesla back to an official Tesla dealer and they have an agreement with Tesla to disable software add-ons before reselling... then that's Tesla's right. But then the purchaser would never have seen any extra features enabled in the first place -- there would be nothing to complain about.
So what is actually going on here?
I take it most crashed vehicles written off in this way can't really be used for parts because Tesla is sabotaging the market for used vehicles and wants to boost sales of new/replacement parts at dealerships, correct?
Also, is the warranty of a Tesla voided if an independent repair shop makes repairs with such parts?
Battery safety and compliance testing is going to be a big industry in the next decade as a result IMO.
meaning all warranties are voided and Supercharging is disabled, even after the repaired vehicle passes a high-voltage inspection by Tesla’s own repair staff.
To an extent, it even makes sense for FSD. If you're going to take on that much risk and liability, you don't want to rely on other people.
We need new frameworks to handle this kind of stuff.
Do they view it as a property of the account, and any Tesla for the account has FSD?
Or do they view it as a property of the specific vehicle that somehow vanishes in a transaction?
Then it would seem to me, in the Jalopnik article that Tesla was just in the wrong in this instance. They could have disabled the feature when they sold the car, but once they transferred title of it and it retained that feature, they should no longer be able to revoke that feature.
Sorry quick search but take a look at this (paywall but you get the jist):
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-16/musk-stan...
Serf mentality.
I can’t really take it in for third party repairs. They seem to refer to me as part of their “fleet”. What data are they collecting? I can’t use it on Uber?
That isn't the case, though. I paid for FSD on my model 3. If I trade it in for a Model Y, I don't get to transfer my purchase, but you know that they're going to charge someone else to enable FSD on that vehicle. It's double-dipping.
I don't want this business model, so I haven't bought an EV, since basically all the EV manufacturers have adopted it.
"This business model" is why I unashamedly burn fossil fuels.
I totally agree. The right to repair[1] should be the basic premise for any device you expect to last more than a couple of months.
https://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-...
Normally a car is serially produced by established factories, and sometimes even re-using parts from other models. And this car will still be in use 20 years later with no restrictions on its features except wear.
While a Tesla is manufactured in a brand new factory with no previous precedence of parts or processes.
And on top of that, it's re-sale usability is apparently garbage. So we'll see a bunch of old Teslas litter nature because no one wants them.
The over the air updates from tesla that adjust things like the pedal heights and performance characteristics of the motor makes me want to avoid them.
The private seller can only sell the car without asking for money for the software features and the new owner instead has to pay Tesla again. Brilliant!
