"Fleet" is longstanding car industry lingo. Not something Tesla dreamed up to keep you under their boot.
Source: Father worked in car industry. All of my neighbors, too. Pretty much everyone I knew and then, eventually, me... albeit tangentially.
Source: Father worked in car industry. All of my neighbors, too. Pretty much everyone I knew and then, eventually, me... albeit tangentially.
I am aware of that and I hear that terminology used by rental car companies and equipment dealers, etc.
My objection is to what I hear as a subtle difference - the post-sale automobile to a private, end-user is still referred to as belonging to their fleet - as if one's ownership and use of the car were a minor detail.
I dislike this subtle shift in language and attitude.
It's the language used by the rest of the industry including manufacturers, not just private owners.
If you buy a Tesla, you will not be able to control access to it without limiting its normal set of features.
If you buy a normal bicycle, you always have full direct control of it. No software updates, no data uploading, no tracking.
Normally fleet is reserved to meaning ownership in the management sense, not the micromanagement sense. Even a Navy fleet has autonomy within. Not so with Tesla software by default.
This could be rms territory. Free vs non-free, or even Airbus vs Boeing, etc.
And I think it's fair for the engineers that have responsibility to have an internal sense of partial ownership.
As long as they still have responsibilities, they also have partial ownership.