This sentence is interesting to me. It tells me that now mechanics need to learn programming skills to be successful. Software really is eating the world...
> Dead-end jobs followed – washing dishes, polishing rings at a jewelry store, ringing orders at a record store and, finally, fixing Volkswagens at Uncle J.O.'s auto repair shop.
> The tinkering that's required of mechanics appealed to the teenage hacker. The $6-an-hour job "was the first time I ever felt like I accomplished something at work," McGee said.
> On breaks, covered in grease, he'd write inventory and customer tracking applications for the shop.
https://www.wired.com/2000/12/the-great-american-mcgee-game/
Paid someone to fix my air conditioning vents though because I'd have to half disassemble the interior of my car to do it and I knew it would take me longer to do than I could have the car out of commission. I really hate the vacuum controlled vents in mid 2000's Ford trucks. I had a vacuum leak - somewhere.
The most extreme I did was to replace the car body after an accident I had (slippery road) in my own garage. After a week or something I got a running car again, with a different color and car body number but whatever ^^.
Most programmers I know tend to be handy in some way, whether that's fixing their own cars (myself), wood working, or some other skill which requires them to think through problems and work with their hands.
I actually view fixing cars as not only a hobby of mine, but as a fall back career should I ever become bored of software or need some quick cash.
I can relate to that. In fact, I find it downright relaxing being able to work with wood (I like to restore mid-century furniture as a hobby) and compared to all those digital, virtual tasks and projects it's so refreshing being able to physically touch, feel, see and use the result of one's work.
We joke that the big difference is that I got AC during the summer and he doesn't.
Absolutely agreed. I think "what if this fails?" a lot in situations that most likely really don't require it.
I'm not the OP but I hope that helps.
This translates very well I in most task oriented jobs, like, maybe your average programmer won't be able to invent a new gourmet dish but I expect most of them to be very competent cooks with a recipe on their hands.
Interestingly, I find the musician mindset is also very similar, particularly musicians who compose or improvise.
Software mechanic says: I don't mind getting my hands dirty while doing intricate work (computers, who understands 'em?). Janitorial work seems to be regarded as lowly drudge work, even though being a good caretaker/warden means preventing problems from occurring in the first place, like watering the garden and keeping leaks in check.
Everyone is trying to keep a cupboard in order somewhere :).
I'm sure that the software in modern cars causes all manner of stupid problems that never existed before, and could be easily eliminated by giving the mechanics access to the source.
I think the effect of this sort of DRM is underestimated in many conversations about post-scarcity.
People don't seem to appreciate that cryptography will create programmatic scarcity where previously we only had scarcity due to physical laws.
That's a lie. Yes they have DRM in place to artificially limit the range of certain models, everything else you said is mischaracterization, misrepresentation, and lies.
They saw opportunity in offering different ranged batteries of the same model, however the cost to produce two different battery capacities was too high. Instead of hiding this fact from the consumer, they instead offer it as an upgrade path if you one day have a need for the additional range.
This sort of thing is done all of the time in manufacturing to streamline costs. They even do it with their Autopilot system, all Model 3s come with the same sensor package but the feature itself is unavailable unless you pay to unlock it.
There's an advantage to doing this in that you do not have to guess at what consumer demand will be because you can lock/unlock features as needed in software based on consumer demand.
OK let's see where is this lie...
> (grandparent): Tesla set up DRM to artificially limit the driving range
> (parent): Yes they have DRM in place to artificially limit the range of certain models
OK no lie here. So it must be in the second part of GP's comment?
> (gp): until you pay them a ransom to simply let your car drive longer distances
> (p): they instead offer it as an upgrade path if you one day have a need for the additional range
So you just confirmed everything from GP's comment, where are the "mischaracterization, misrepresentation, and lies" you speak of?
Tesla didn't take anything from the buyers of the car owners who paid for 60 kWh capacity. It gave them what they wanted, it just happened to delivery it in a vessel that could hold 75 kWh.
Rather, the car buyers were offered the option to purchase the exact same car at a reduced price because it was artificially limited to 60 kWh.
I'm not clear what people are upset about. Are they saying Tesla should have made 60 kWh packs or sold the 75 kWh packs at two prices and hoped most people would opt to pay more money?
In the former scenario an owner of a 60 kWh car would have to replace the entire battery to upgrade or trade in their car to a higher capacity if they found they needed it. In either case their costs would be higher than just paying to unlock the restricted capacity.
In the later scenario Tesla loses money because no one opts for pay them more money for the same product.
In some cases, someone takes something from you and then offers to return it for a ransom. That sentence wouldn't make sense if the entire thing, including the initial taking was itself "ransom". Ransom is just the second part.
People are rightly upset at the very concept of artificial limitations. The more stark it is that a price has no connection to costs but merely to a marketing game, the more offensive it is.
I'm not saying the answers are easy, but there's a level of transparency and honesty we can rightly expect in our system.
So, if to produce products economically and satisfy market demand, we find we must rely on some people paying extra money and others paying less (because such a setup allows the low price to be lower and thus to reach more customers), then we can flat out say it. We can say, "this is the same product, same features, same cost to the company, but by artificially limiting the features, we can get some people to pay extra and then pass on some of that as a reduced starting price".
At least then people won't feel like they are being marketed to dishonestly. Of course, people can see reasons to object to the idea of artificial limitations, such as how they privilege the wealthy in ways unrelated to actually needing to use their wealth to cover additional costs (it's different to have rich people have extra software features than for rich people to have more land or other actually scarce resources).
Anyway, "ransom" is indeed a framing, but it's not crazy, it's reasonably honest. For example, people describe running a crowdfunding campaign to pay for existing software getting freed under an open-source license as a "ransom".
We could accept that Tesla's ransom approach is a good solution. Or we could suggest something else (maybe some sliding-scale pricing?)
In general, prices in our market are screwy and people intuitively get that. The more screwy or manipulated or dishonest they seem, the more annoyed and distrusting people feel.
Yes, people would feel different about literally getting cars with physical differences, but you're right that purposely producing a worse product at very-little cost savings just to hit the lower price point isn't actually better in the big picture.
And that a company should either not sell a product at all, or only sell it completely without restrictions or limits?
Otherwise it's dishonest and ransom?
If you hire a man to mow your lawn do you have a right to be upset that he refuses to clean your septic tank for the price you paid him to mow your yard? You are after all paying for labor from a tool that's capable of doing more than just cutting grass.
They paid for x range and received x range. They were given a standing offer to increase that range for a cost significantly less than the cost of replacing or physically upgrading the battery.
Now if they had paid for 120kwh batteries and received 120kwh batteries that would only deliver 100kwh of range then we'd be having and entirely different conversation.
Flag / downvote is essential, or we would just get spam or become Reddit. But currently there is no way to disagree without punishing.
As it is, many are afraid to post anything other than echo-chamber because they might get downvoted.
I reserve downvotes for absurd or baseless remarks, attacks, and other noise.
People like to downvote off topic or sarcastic remarks, I generally ignore them (neither upvote/downvote) because I think making light of topics isn't necessarily a bad thing and can engage people in a discussion.
* I say generally because no one is perfect and I don't strictly adhere to the above.
Then why, if you pay for 100 kWh capacity, and they give it to you in a battery capable of 120 kWh capacity are they suddenly cheating you?
Did you pay for the higher capacity? No.
Did you get the capacity you paid for? Yes.
Are you able to buy up to the higher capacity? Yes.
You paid to eat 4.
Those other two cost a little extra to eat.
You can't eat them, until you pay for a catalyst that renders them edible.
I do not care that Tesla shipped more battery personally. Just got sucked into the analogy here.
Source: granddaughter orders nuggets any chance she gets
Tesla didn't sell the vehicle as having a different curb weight, or a specified number of 18650 cells contained in the battery pack. They sold it based on having a 60 kWh capacity which it does.
Why do you feel entitled to the additional 15 kWh?
You're not getting downvoted because you're wrong. We know you're right. But you're telling us our feelings are wrong, and people don't take that well haha. We all agree on the facts.
Calling it ransom or extortion isn't just misleading, it's an outright lie.
You're free to feel what you want about the situation and express those feels but I feel that it's harmful and toxic to then make false assertions because you feel bad about a situation.
The thing is, it was their decision to give a battery capable of 75 kWh, not mine. And it's OK that they have software to limit it to 60 kWh. But it's not OK (obviously in my opinion) for them to prevent me from modifying the software to bump it up to 75kWh. I bought the car, I should be able to do what I like to it.
I actually don't really even have a problem with them including some sort of DRMish thing to prevent me from changing the software, but it shouldn't be illegal for me to try to circumvent it. Again, I bought the car, it's mine now, I should be able to do what I like with it.
I understand that Tesla didn't make the IP laws. What bothers me is that they use those laws in this manner.
Imagine that instead of having a single Tesla, there were two identical companies each selling half of what the actual Tesla does.
Now one of them could offer an unlocked 75kWh version at $1 more than the locked-to-60kWh version (since they cost the same to make and they are profitable) and would capture all the market, so the cost of those two products should be the same.
So Tesla essentially can only do this because they have a monopoly on Tesla-or-functionally-identical cars.
A good example is Intel and chip manufacturers locking their cpus to a specific frequency when they are capable of higher so they don't have to manufacture the same cpu with different frequencies.
This seems more wasteful because you have to mine extra lithium, manufacture extra batteries, install them, haul them around -- and this makes your car perform worse. All on the off chance someone later decides to buy up to the extra-power version?
One's a great way to use extra parts that would have been scrapped. The other's just wasteful...
I guess the closer analogy to CPU binning would be if they found a fault in a P100’s batteries and sold it as a P85 instead of replacing the battery. CPUs aren’t a great analogy though, since the unused material in a Xeon-E that failed binning and became an i3 is pretty minimal.
Sort of... sometimes CPU manufacturing processes are too efficient or mature and they produce more higher spec parts. They don't then lower the price of higher spec parts, instead they under clock the CPUs and lock them so they can't be clocked to their higher spec.
People caught wind of this fact and began overclocking their CPUs beyond their rate specifications. This started an arms race between CPU manufacturers and buyers. Intel at one point was, and possibly still is, laser cutting the CPU PCBs to physically prevent changing the clock multipliers after they're set.
They received the performance they paid for and the option to increase that performance for a cost less than full replacement of the battery.
The battery / range thing no so much.
Offer a lower range option.
If the cost of retooling a line to make 2 battery types, or setting up a new line from scratch results in a greater cost per unit, regardless of capacity, than 1 line producing the single high capacity battery then why make two battery types?
Are you saying they should just offer only the higher capacity battery at a lower price or just tell the lower range customers to fuck off with their money?
What if you could satisfy both potential customers and offer the lower range customers the option to upgrade in the future at a cost lower than replacement of the whole battery?
What if you could also offer them a good will gesture of added range if they're fleeing natural disasters?
Is that ransom?
Would you be outraged to discover your printer's print speed was artificially capped to not erode the market for a faster model?
Or that your CPU wasn't running at it's maximum potential?
Does it only become outrageous or random when the manufacturer offers you the option to unlock it's full potential?
What about Labor? If you pay a yard service $50 to clean your property and they do it in 4 hours but your neighbor, with a 2x larger yard pays $75 and they still complete the work in 4 hours. Do you demand a lower rate? Faster service? Both?
The fact of the matter is if you paid for 100kwh battery and they give you a 120kwh battery that will only put out 100kwh are you being cheated or held at ransom? Or are you just getting what you paid for?
Why are you entitled to get anything more than what you agree to buy?
That doesn't make me less upset that my chip has wasted potential artificially locked away.
Sometimes, how you treat your customers doesn't have to be unfair for it to make a negative impact on customer vibe/relations.
Tesla produced two identical cars that cost exactly the same to manufacture. They offered one at a cheaper price but with a restriction on the battery capacity. They sacrificed their product margin to offer customers a vehicle they wanted or could afford.
They also said "hey if you want the additional capacity you can pay the difference to unlock it."
Good, solid discussion. Nice to see.
If you buy a 2ghz CPU and it turns out it can run at 2.5ghz but is locked at 2ghz, are you being cheated or getting what you paid for?
This ruling says you have the right to remove that limit.
They weren't ransoming anything. They gave the customer the range they paid for and never took anything away.
The context here is more like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system#Ransom...
This isn't a Threshold Pledge System either because there's no contracted good being withheld.
It's not that simple. If your battery breaks out of warranty or starts loosing charge, you can't go to Tesla and say, "hey, I paid for X range and I'm not getting it anymore, fix it." If you do, they'll say, "sorry, physical batteries decay, not our problem", which most of us would agree is a reasonable response. Tesla gave you the hardware, it's not their responsibility to make sure you take care of it.
So in this scenario you're not just purely paying for range, you're also paying for hardware, which has its own warranty period and physical constraints/downsides that Tesla is not responsible for.
In the same vein, if somebody came out with magical tires for the Tesla that managed to effectively increase your range by a substantial amount by having better grip or less friction or something, you wouldn't expect Tesla to go to drivers and say, "hey, you're paying for range. You can't install those tires because they would cause you to get more range than you payed for!" Most of us would call that reaction unreasonable.
So in that scenario, you're also not really paying for the actual range you get, you're paying for a kind of "potential" range that could be increased or decreased depending on other factors outside of both yours and Tesla's control.
The reality is you're not really paying for the range or the # of cells. You're paying for a kind of bizarre combination of both. The physical hardware is your responsibility to take care of, but also you're not allowed to use it in a way that Tesla doesn't like. If you come up with an unrelated way to increase your range, you can do that. You haven't signed a contract that says, "I will stop driving if I've gone more than X miles without a refill, period."
It's understandable to me that different people have different opinions about how those two things should be combined and where it's reasonable for each party's responsibilities to end. For example, the CPU scenario you've listed is fairly common, but most people don't mind because it's not illegal to overclock your CPU. That's a big differentiating factor.
I understand that you disagree with the word "ransom" but it seems pretty obvious to me that that's an opinion, not a statement of fact. The original poster was using a shorthand to suggest that Tesla's attitudes toward consumer rights were unreasonable. I don't see a problem with that.
You do raise an interesting point though about failure. Cells don't fail at the same rate and packs are designed to disable cells (possibly groups of cells) that aren't performing within acceptable operational parameters.
So given that these "ransom packs" are capable of 75 kWh but only deliver the 60 kWh the customer paid for, how do failing cells impact overall capacity?
Since over charging and completely discharging lithium cells shortens their life does that mean because they're never allowed to use their full potential would they actually last longer than a true 60 kWh pack?
I am not a mechanic, but off the top of my head, they should last longer, depending on how Tesla has implemented the limit. If Tesla put the artificial charge limits in the middle of the actual capacity, then that would mean you never discharge the last 7 kWh or overcharge the last 7 kWh. If they just make the battery shut down 15 kWh early, then I doubt the gains are as significant, since plugging in your car overnight will still charge it all the way to the top (which from my understanding is the more harmful thing to do).
I'd be very interested to see some research done by someone who knows more about batteries than me, would make a cool technical breakdown. It seems to me that (just like CPU throttling) battery "throttling" could potentially be a useful way to decrease failure. Of course, if you think back to Apple's kerfuffle with throttling iPhones as batteries aged, you can have a good, justifiable customer result that still makes customers angry if they're not informed or suspect you have other motivations.
To bring this conversation back to the original point of the entire thread, it is (for now) legal to circumvent DRM for maintenance. So question: your battery starts failing on your Tesla car -- you buy a completely new battery from a non-Tesla producer that supports 75 kWh. You get a non-Tesla mechanic to install it. As part of the installation process, you break the DRM and allow the battery to be used to its full capacity.
Problem? No problem? When you bought a Tesla, were you paying for a 60 kWh rated battery or were you paying for a 60 kWh car?
Followup question, suppose you find out that Tesla (or any other electric car company with similar policies) has implemented battery throttling poorly for your car. Rather than rotating cells or putting a limit on how full cells get, the battery throttling just disallows a few specific cells from getting power -- so effectively, its as if you literally have a 60 kWh battery with a few (disabled) extra cells stapled on. Your battery range starts decreasing over time, and a mechanic breaks the DRM, which restores most of the failed capacity, which puts you back up to close to your original range.
Problem? Have you violated your contract if the car battery never got above 60 kWh?
And of course, finally you have obvious question, which is, 'if you buy a Tesla car and immediately break the DRM as soon as you get it home to get extra capacity, is that a problem?' Which, yeah, that's a problem. Tesla will not be happy with you.
The difficulty of looking at Tesla's policy as if it's a pure contract is that the physical constraints get in the way -- in other words, it's not a completely encapsulated system. If you look at something like being charged per-mile in a taxi, it's easy to completely divorce that from the physical process. You're charged per-mile that the taxi drove. Doesn't matter how it drove, doesn't matter what the actual cost of driving it is, doesn't matter what the implementation details are -- you're being charged for a result.
Similarly, if you buy something physical, then the physicality provides a reasonable set of consistent restraints and rules. Doesn't matter if it breaks later, doesn't matter why you bought it. In that case, only the physical reality matters and very few contractual things get in the way.
But with Tesla, you've got both systems clashing with each other. It makes sense to say, "okay, you payed for a 60 kWh battery and got a 60 kWh battery." But you didn't really get a 60 kWh battery. You got a 75 kWh battery that has extra restrictions. So you can't completely ignore implementation details, because you're still buying a physical battery, but neither can you take the entire system apart or universally mess with those implementation details.
I think the capacity limit isn't a function of the car itself but rather the battery pack installed.
In other words, if I bought an after market 200 kWh battery pack 5 years from now and installed it in my 60 kWh Tesla and it registered as a 60 kWh battery pack, I would burn Tesla to the ground.
0: given sufficient digging around in low-level settings and availablity of a appropriate clock source on the motherboard
Did Tesla sell you a 75 kWh pack that will only deliver 80% capacity?
Or did Tesla sell you 60 kWh of power?
I would say it's the later and you're with-in your right to circumvent the DRM and boost your failing pack back up to 60 kWh or less.
They didn't sell them a 300 mile range then knock it down to 250 when they rolled off the lot. They didn't send them a letter saying "if you want your range back send $$$ by 10pm tomorrow."
The customer paid for 250 miles, they provided a car that could go 250 miles and additionally said "if you would like to upgrade to 300 miles we can do that for less than the cost of a full battery replacement."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_pledge_system#Ransom...
I'm genuinely asking this because I often question whether it's true that "everyone should learn to program", or it's more like, "we have a programmer shortage".
You could buy a commercial product to do what's fairly trivial (write to a couple of HW registers) that only support select models (because they all have their own registers/addresses). You could also just learn what HW registers are and some general techniques to change them and figure it out for any model that rolls in the shop as you need it. The better mechanics can even extrapolate fixes to completely new but related issues.
I don't think the parent was saying either of those things. Cars are no longer mechanical devices; they're full of computers now. In order to service any modern car, you need an increasing level of computer tools & training. This has been a growing problem for a long time for independent mechanics who have had no choice but to refer people to the dealerships, due both to proprietary digital systems in the cars, and to the copyright laws that prevented legal home and third-party repairs.
> so why would every one need to learn to program something that could be made by one and sold as a commercial (or open source) project?
Maybe this is a theoretical question, as opposed to a practical one? Car manufacturers today are, by and large, not shipping open source products, and until now it has been illegal to reverse engineer those products, so no open source project could legally exist.
* BTW, total tangent of a side note, but might be interesting to you: the US Department of Defense (and I think other branches of the government too) define "commercial" software in a way that includes open source, in other words open source is commercial. The reason is that OSS comes with a license, it's not to do with whether the software costs money, nor whether the source code is distributed with the software. https://dodcio.defense.gov/open-source-software-faq/#Q:_Is_o...
I find this a bit scary --- mainly because I'm used to cars where the (mechanical) parking brake also can be an emergency brake, and the solid linkage between the lever and the braking mechanism means it is still usable even if all other power is lost. (It's also analog, unlike the "push to set parking brake" on/off behaviour --- especially useful for modulated emergency braking.)
Will that commercial product still be sold in 30 years to help repair a "classic" Tesla?
Now I operate a laser cutter, have a fairly extensive AutoHotKey script, can navigate my way around the post processor that generates the particular dialect of G-Code our laser prefers, and know a touch of python.
I'm definitely an outlier, but I'm not the only computer-nerd-come-metal-fabricator I've worked with.
I’ve never made a boiler. I probably could, but I’m not even qualified to weld pressure vessels. I’d pass the weld tests with a couple of days practice though.
And now I have several machines that one generally doesn't find in a second-story urban walkup. (Getting a 400-ish-pound lathe up the steps was how I found my limit there.)
I wonder of there would be a market for a purely mechanical (modern) car like the old days.
(One of the beauties of mountain biking I see being lost is the ability to fix maybe 90% of problems with a small pack of tools that you can carry about with you. I can see electric bikes being problematic for that. They will get you further from civilisation and fail worse).
Then again, when I put it that way I begin to worry about mechanics unwittingly infecting cars with malware...