Tesla Gave Me Control of Their Site Forums | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Gave Me Control of Their Site Forums

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> [I bought a $19K car because:] After we got stranded without gas for the 3rd time I knew I’d have to take the plunge and buy a car.

Or you could, you know, get the gas gauge fixed or stop trying to micro-optimize the last 25% of the grocery gas discount. Either of those would cost 50-300 times less than $19K...

Even cheaper, keep a gallon in the trunk.

(Ideally one that seals properly)

(don't do this)

Why not? Is there a disadvantage outside bad smell?

Fumes can accumulate and create a fire or health hazard.

No container is perfect and a slow leak of evaporated gasoline into the enclosed space of your trunk is a fire waiting to happen.

Gas eventually goes bad (over a period of 6 months or so).

But the real reason is that you are carrying enough energy to carry you, 4 of your friends, and 3500# of automobile 35 miles away in a container not designed to avoid spillage, venting vapors, nor survive a collision. (That "aside from the bad smell" is dangerous, both to mammals and from an explosion risk perspective.)

Is it impossible to buy a container designed for that?

Rotating the gas is easy.

There's such a container already included with the vehicle: the fuel tank.

Snark aside, if people have a hard time remembering to refuel then there should be some technology to remind them. Something as simple as a phone reminder would do the trick.

Like perhaps a gauge that could indicate how much fuel is remaining in your tank? They could even include a little light next to the gauge that comes on when you're really low.

The needle sitting on zero, and the little fuel pump icon being lit up isn't enough?!

1) Estimate your miles per gallon. The google can tell you this. Round down - give yourself an MPG - just to be safe

2) Research your fuel tank capacity (Also a google-able event)

2) Fill your tank completely

3) Reset your tripometer; drive until it nears the magic empty number: (Fuel Tank Capacity)x(Adjusted MPG). When it's within 10% of that number, you should consider adding more gas. If it's even closer to that number; you should really considering adding more gas.

4) Reset the tripometer every time you fill up

There are racing fuel cells (essentially a permanent install) that could be safely used. You're now probably entering into a state law territory as to the legality/inspection requirements for fuel system modifications.

(You're also leaving the path of "saving money" vs fixing the gauge or just using 1/2-3/4 of the factory tank using ded reckoning by trip odometer. Typical fuel cell at Summit Racing is over $200 plus plumbing parts needed plus installation labor.)

Definitely gets into interesting territory! It's not cheaper than fixing the gauge, but it gives you even more opportunity to optimize those purchase coupons.

Not that bad in 6 mos, I parked my van for a year and a half and started up just fine with the 1.5 y/o gas and ran well after that - and the gas tank is no doubt a worse environment than a small dedicated sealed tank designed for the purpose.

I agree it's not a great idea, but where did this idea that "gasoline goes bad in 6 months" come from? I've let gas sit in a tank outside for a year and had no problems starting the engine on the first try, so I'm skeptical.

Gas very much does go bad, though the speed varies

https://www.livescience.com/58117-does-gasoline-go-bad.html

Ask anyone who has ever left untreated gas in their lawn mower over winter. It takes a drain and some work to get the mower started in the summer. Throw in 1oz of fuel stabilizer, and all is well.

(So the obvious answer is to put fuel stabilizer if you are going to store gas for > 6 months. It only costs a few cents per gallon)

100LL (aviation gasoline) also is much more stable over time. Ethanol polluted gasoline is less stable over time. All I can buy locally at filling stations has ethanol in it, so I try to run the last few mows of the season (and last few snows of the winter) on avgas.

Where do you even buy a can of AV gas?

My parents recently (2-3 years ago) started their old generator, probably bought after the massive ice storm of 1998, and the gas that was still in it was enough to start it.

They do have gas problem every year with their snow blower, it's systematic, they just don't put enough care about it.

Is there anything about the generator that could have helped? Is there's fuel stabilized that can last a decade? We were pretty happy to see it start such "easily" and be able to plug our essential stuff on it without having to go buy gas.

For the generator, if permanently installed, I'd see if you could automatically exercise the generator every month. (DC/site generators are often exercised every 14 days.)

If it's a portable generator, either put 100LL in it or (even better) run it entirely dry (to shut down) when done using it.

To your stable fuel question, for a permanently installed unit in a residence, I think it's incredibly hard to beat natural gas as a fuel supply for it.

Agreed, I would run the snow blower dry at the end of the season. The amount of gas it would retain isn't worth it clogging up the works.

It's pretty common for home generators to be natural gas. If gasoline, maybe keep the gas outside of it and rotate it every 3 months. I.e. have a 10 gallon can of it you buy in Jan. In april if you haven't used it yet, use it to fill up your car, and buy a new 10 gallons in a can. That way your gas is at most 3 months old, at the cost of having to lug around a can 4x a year. You could likely reduce to a 6 month rotation and not have much difference either.

Their first and second car were bought brand new. I think they were just looking for an excuse to buy.

It's not hard to own a car without a gas guage.

I would like to know how this guy is going to get stranded less often in a Tesla. At least with a fuel burning car he can call roadside assistance to bring him some gas. When his battery is flat they can’t bring an extension cord though.

What a world we live in that someone so careless has so much money to throw at his problem.

Well, depends how far outside the box you can think: https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupportmacgyver/comments/9wlmd6...

I sense a market here: supercharge trucks. A truck with a buttload of diesel, a 1000kW generator, and an assortment of charging hookups.

No need for the generator. Just a big battery onboard and a DC-DC converter.

Generator is probably a better option for these though because then they can just get refueled instead of having to wait to get recharged themselves. It'd allow them to service more vehicles while being lighter.

While it would work, it would be horrible marketing for EVs.

Why would someone reasonably care what equipment is onboard the service trucks? I've never inquired as to what's inside the Mercedes Sprinter vans they use for roadside assistance when considering buying a Mercedes.

It would be great for actual roadside assistance though, fuel is way more energy dense and energy specific than the best batteries, using batteries would mean way less ability to actually assist.

An alternative would be an SMR (and possibly a bank of caps) but I don't think any of the currently working or even close to working designs would fit on a regular trailer (the KLT-40S seems to be the lightest working SMR at 80t with water, the rest is 150~1500t).

A battery would work just fine. DC-to-DC transfers are efficient, and fast.

Battery would greatly limit the amount of assistance which can be provided, and greatly increase the trailer's weight.

A diesel generator set that can output 100kW continuously for fast charging starts at around 2000kg / 5000lbs. You can fit a lot of battery capacity for a lot less weight that that!

You really can't. The 85kWh Model S battery pack is more than 500kg.

An 85kWh pack can easily sustain, say, a 100kW discharge rate. You could even double that and still be half the weight of the generator set [^].

A 10 minute charge and you'd have topped up the stranded vehicle with 16kWh, enough for 50 miles or so travel to get home or to the nearest fast charger. And you'd still have plenty left in the pack in the unlikely event of further callouts.

[^] (Modern EV packs already have significantly higher energy density than the old 85kWh Model S, by the way).

Remember, you'd only need to charge each vehicle enough so that it can reach the nearest fast charger, so you wouldn't need a huge battery to service multiple vehicles in a day. Besides, how many "out of charge" breakdowns is a single service van likely to encounter in a day?

A DC-DC transfer would enable fast charging rates with relatively compact and lightweight equipment. A diesel generator that can output, say, 100kW continuously is pretty big and hefty!

Those are still pretty sparse outside of California so the distance could be pretty far. Check out the list for NC there's 13 for the whole state at the moment.

That's true. But by the time EVs make up a significant portion of the vehicle fleet in those areas (enough to justify a rescue van with onboard charging!), chargers will be much more common.

Also, by nature, most "ran out of charge" incidents will happen near a charger (or near home, etc) because the driver thought they could make it. It's not likely that someone would drive off into some really remote area with no idea of where they would charge the car.

I'm not a mechanical or electrical engineer by any means but how hard would it be to have a swap-able batteries like in the old cellphone days?

sorry I had to https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/21/the-tesla-battery-swa...

look at smartphone and laptop batteries now compared to 10 years ago. battery swapping used to be a thing when companies were cool with right to repair and independent shops fixing products; not so much now. look up louis rossmann and the way apple dealt with him (spoiler sending customs to take everything under the guise of using fakes)

If you have a couple of hours, watch some of these: https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertMurraySmith/videos

He's developed carbon only batteries/supercaps that beat Lithium ion batteries by something like double the capacity. Some of what he is working on can be overcharged at high voltage and the cell comes to capacity in a very short amount of time.

I think I remember his videos, one went around during the whole graphene craze on reddit

I'm not an engineer, but I think it would be infeasible for batteries with current battery tech, and have a good range.

The Tesla Model S 100kwh battery is about 1300 lbs, and it's a structural member of the car, so removing it is not a quick operation. That's about 25-30% of the weight of the car, just for the battery. The battery essentially is the floor pan.

Even an 100 mile battery would still weigh something like 400lbs (plus the weight of the support brackets/frame), and it's hard to put that somewhere in the car where it can easily be swapped, and also not make the car handle poorly.

This is definitely possible - see Tesla’s prototype battery swap station they ran for a short while off the I5 in California.

Inventory management would be a nightmare though, considering the range of physical dimensions, weight, battery specifications etc. Often none of these things are standard even across a single model range let alone the entire industry. When the batteries are often over 1000lbs and large, it’s difficult to carry a range of spares. I’d imagine it also might be a pretty tough job even in the easiest cases for a single roadside mechanic to perform, given the sizes and weights involved.

There’s also the thorny issue of battery health - what if the replacement has more or less charge cycles than the existing battery? This can materially affect the resale value of a vehicle. At least cellphone batteries were tiny and cheap.

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company)

> When his battery is flat they can’t bring an extension cord though.

You can push it to recharge though. :D

Roadside assistance companies including AAA now have options for EVs

> I would like to know how this guy is going to get stranded less often in a Tesla.

Being stranded was a result of the car having a non-working fuel gauge. The $19k fix was buying a Nissan Altima, not the Model 3. I have no idea why TFA opted to open with this, but the quote and the corresponding introductory paragraph really have no relation to Tesla or the model 3 or the rest of the post.

These are the best people to buy used cars from; they always take care of them well. /s

I have a Chevy Venture with the gas gauge problem. Although the gauge doesn’t work, the low fuel light still turns on when two gallons are remaining. I’m skeptical that they ran out of gas unless one person drove home without refilling and didn’t tell the other.

And it is not worth trying to fix it, as is the case for most electrical problems a Chevy Venture tends to have.

All that means is you have a different fault then they do. There's two major ways a gas gauge can fail measurement and display. Sounds like yours was the latter where the in tank levels still get measured properly but the in dash gauge is broken.

Yes, but this is “the” gas gauge problem with the Venture. The temperature gauge has the same common issue; the red warning light will come on but the needle won’t move.

He has a blog about his pursuit of such discounts, though, so the economics are different for him.

Yeah, this sounds like a way, way more complicated solution to a relatively simple problem than it needs to be. Someone decided to take the path of most resistance.

I don't know the last time the fuel gauge on our '81 VW camper worked (before we owned it, for sure). The trip odometer, however, continues to function fine. We haven't run out in the three years we've owned it.

How hard is it to hit the Trip button every time you fill up so you'll know when you're close to empty?

With customers like this, who needs hackers?

The customer support story was bad enough, and I mean this from Tesla’s perspective. I do fault Tesla for not just saying NO when a customer “complains” they want to change how their car is configured after they take delivery.

There are a lot of Tesla owners who have some real issues with their cars that they would like to address, while this guy is calling in to get more forum posts. This guy, who after getting direct replies from Elon on Twitter complains they don’t respond quickly enough on Twitter.

This guy, who after getting mistakenly elevated privledges in the forum, proceeds to poke around the whole site, fuck with settings on his own threads, start a conspiracy theory, and then crash most of the entire forum!

This guy, who now thinks he should be paid a bug bounty for that (rather than being brought up on CFAA charges?)

Disclaimer: Took delivery of my Model 3 last Saturday and really enjoying my new spaceship.

If they'd said "now is the last opportunity to decide X" that would be fine, but they said something else and then couldn't work out how to do it.

He tried to report the forum thing and was ignored for a period of time.

You should be able to get customer support without tweeting the CEO.

[disclaimer: I'm jealous of your spaceship]

They do say that all over the site, in their deposit agreement, and in their purchase agreement. The problem is it also says any changes can impact your delivery date.

So I don’t blame a customer for wanting a change but not wanting to reset their place in line.

Case in point, I ordered the upgraded 19” wheels, because I didn’t like the look of the aero rims. I didn’t realize at the time you could pop off the aero faceplate and have nice dark colored rims underneath. And I have the dark grey metallic paint which would have matched.

So now I have silver rims which I plan on powder coating to match the dark grey, which I paid $1,500 extra for plus another $1,000 to power coat, when the aero rims with the faceplate removed would have been perfect.

But I didn’t want to bump my place in line, so I left it. And I didn’t tweet, email, call, beg, escalate, and blog about it to get it “taken care of” specially.

It’s not fair to the thousands of other early adopters to monopolize their limited customer support resources like that and squeeze them for special treatment.

Of course the squeaky wheel will get the grease. When something goes wrong with my iPhone that is a bit fishy but probably because it got dropped one too many times, sure I press Apple to go above and beyond to make my day a little better.

With Tesla I personally think it’s my responsibility to go at it the other way around. They need customer advocates not customer leaches.

It’s part of being an early adopter to a company that is running everything so close to the wire in order to radically change a very stagnant (and in some ways corrupt) industry.

And the main issue was caused mainly because a moderator deleted a forum post because it was critical of Tesla.

I wonder how that moderator feels now, he just wanted to hide bad stuff about Tesla and it backfired hard.

I read the post, I don’t know that I would have left it up either.

The biggest problem is the guy humble bragging about all the special treatment. “I got to add FSD for $3k after delivery!” — “They promised me free lifetime LTE!”. “I just really really want to make sure I get all these free extra goodies, and they haven’t promised me them in writing after 3 days!” (These are not exact quotes)

You post that in a forum and now, what is everyone else’s reaction going to be?

And finally, “I found a defect after delivery, they took the car back and are fixing it. They scratched my car during the repair and now are bringing it to the body shop to touch up” isn’t exactly a complaint. That’s about the absolute best service you can get from a dealer.

He wrote that he had email confirmation for what he requested, is this false? is anything false he reported in the forum post or the tone was the cause for deleting it. There also should be clear rule for when a post is deleted

On a company forum? This is not Twitter. I would assume the rule is “any post can be removed for any or no reason at any time.”

Here’s what Tesla says about reserving the right to remove posts or suspend accounts:

https://forums.tesla.com/node/58282

My point was just that there’s a business reason not to leave a post up about a gripe for special treatment that goes against their stated policy. I completely agree there was nothing wrong with the tone of the post and that it was factual.

The stated purpose of the forum is specifically not to post your gripes as a way to get special treatment from Tesla customer support. Tesla provides the forum as a space for enthusiasts to geek out about their spaceships. If it became a place to rant for special treatment it would devolve quickly and probably be shut down.

This does not look good though, deleting critical forum posts or facebook posts and only keeping the nice ones, I know companies do this but from my experience the posters are contacted and the company support will try to solve the poser problem.

It’s not a customer support forum!

So the forum is missing a section for support or criticism by mistake or is intentional, sorry your fair complains are off topic, please go to reddit (though you will probably get downvoted or deleted there too)

I wonder what Tesla did to ensure no backdoors were left behind. Drupal even evals PHP code in it's database in some cases.

This is extremely irresponsible, and never should've even been possible to occur in the first place.

Imagine all the possibilities past goofing around:

1. Could sell account contact information. (The least threatening option.)

2. Could make posts to influence Tesla stock price, either negatively or positively. Either way, the stock would likely go down sharply afterwards if this happened.

3. Could social engineer financial information from customers.

4. Could lead users to phishing sites or malware with hype of a fraudulent announcement.

As per usual, Large Company Ignores Report of Serious Problem and Then Has To Deal With Negative PR From Ignoring Said Problem When They Can Easily See How Many Other Companies Fell Into This Trap And Tries To Pretend They Do Not Ignore Problems.

> This is extremely irresponsible

Innovation is a game in trade-offs. I’ve been, in the past, super critical about Tesla trading off customer safety in its autopilot branding. This time, however, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Tesla is scaling production on the world’s best-selling electric car, a jewel in a world ignoring climate change. They have more important things to be doing than keeping forums humming. This is a good case of knowing when to ask for forgiveness.

They weren't (AFAICT) trying to make innovative web forums. They weren't (AFAICT) pulling overworked battery engineers off their workstations to handle phone support.

Even a third-party hosted web forum would have done better than this, in cost and security. This isn't the price to be paid for electric cars. This is just carelessness.

> This is just carelessness

Right. A lack of care given to this. Because it was—properly, in my opinion—being diverted elsewhere. They needed a forum, someone quickly spun something up, and then that someone properly stopped thinking about this and got back to work.

They can't hire enough people so that the care isn't "diverted"? The same person that put up the forums is also doing some "important" work on the cars? Come on, now.

What boils down to a defense of "it's okay to be careless with X when you're doing more important work on Y" is on-its-face ridiculous to me, in three ways. One, the sentiment itself. Two, the implication that properly taking care of your IT/web stuff is less important and/or handled by people that usually do "more important things". Third, the idea that two important things cannot be done because one of them is more important... since when are proper IT/web security AND producing a good product mutually exclusive?

It sounds more and more these days like "innovation" is just becoming an excuse to do other things improperly. Innovation is great, just not something to be worshiped at the expense of all else

> since when are proper IT/web security AND producing a good product mutually exclusive?

Since finite resources. It’s not okay. But it’s an acceptable transgression given what they’re doing and how close to the red line they’re operating.

Pulling back from that redline to keep every piece of IT infrastructure up to date and secure would be a bad strategic trade. Waiting until a problem and then fixing it makes more sense. Lazy versus eager allocation.

another report of how tesla moves fast and breaks things :(

... it sounds like an internal system which scope has been expanded to include customer support as the company grew (unaddressed technical debt) and they forgot about identity management.

I'm not shocked though. It is perfectly in line with: https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376

Every time I reach out to Tesla to find something out it takes forever and usually I have to call and wait an hour on hold to get the answer for the question I asked in email. I have been directed back to my MVPA (the purchase agent who insures your paperwork is complete and the delivery location has its ducks in the row) more than once to get something answered that Tesla's phone support could not provide!

Got to love it. Tesla support and service if anything shows a major reason the dealership network is not obsolete. Now I own a TM3 and like the car very much but it does have a few panel alignment issues that I am going to get worked on when the tire rotation comes due. While I think there are truly bad dealers out there most name brand dealers have to compete with others to get your service dollars but Tesla doesn't. Hence they can leave you in limbo.

Back in 2013 when I had an issue with my previous car the dealership actually got the regional rep in to approve a fix that originally was denied. Who can go to bat for me when Tesla says no or just ignores me?

personal experience dealing with support:

My current outstanding question is, what is this check I received from Tesla for? It is a couple hundred dollars but with no explanation for what it is. There is nothing on my account page. My query is weeks old. Then again I had to call and and reach out to my original delivery agent just to get Tesla to pay off my trade forty five days after the deal had been done. This became an issue because the state wanted insurance on a car I did not have, the lien holder wanted insurance on it, but the insurance company was like you sold it, you have documents to that effect, you cannot have insurance.

Really, my experience has been very good. I ran over a nail and not only did they get a tow truck out to me and provide a replacement tire within 1 hour they also came to my office to swap the tire out. Without any cost to me.

Tires are one of the easiest things to fix and/or replace.

Lets not judge a company based on trivial issues.

EDIT: I changed my own tire with 0 experience ever.

> people who now buy a Tesla via my referral code will get 6 months of free supercharging.

What a world we live in, when cars have referral codes

> What a world we live in, when cars have referral codes

I honestly prefer referral codes than having to listen to car ads every time I turn on the radio/tv

I recently bought a Model 3, but the 6 months free of supercharging is almost an insult of an incentive.

Even if I supercharge every time (about once a week) for 6 months, that saves me $168 (seems to cost me less than $7 per supercharge). So the incentive for referring someone to buy a 50k car is... $168.

Also, Tesla encourages the use of home charging over supercharging which many have interpreted to mean that supercharging is bad for battery life.

>Also, Tesla encourages the use of home charging over supercharging which many have interpreted[sic] to mean that supercharging is bad for battery life.

I'm not sure what wizardry Tesla batteries use for their supercharging, but it was my impression that you always want to charge lithium batteries at <1C to extend battery life as long as possible.

> Does Supercharging affect my battery? [0]

> The peak-charging rate of the battery may decrease slightly after a large number of high-rate charging sessions, such as those at Superchargers. To ensure maximum driving range and battery safety, the battery charge rate is decreased when the battery is too cold, when it is nearly full or when its condition changes with usage and age. These changes in the condition of the battery may increase total Supercharger time by a few minutes over time.

[0] https://www.tesla.com/support/supercharging

My car dealer gave me a card with a discount written on it for anyone I gave it to, and told me he'd send me $50 for anyone I referred as well.

Haha ouch, what a f-up.

Looks like the forums are based on Drupal 6 (maybe 7). I have not so found memories of developing a few Drupal sites back in the day...

Haven't used it, but from what I gather the latest Drupal is a complete rewrite using Symfony, so they hopefully dumped most of the legacy bad parts

Drupal 8 uses symfony. This forum appears to be running Drupal 7:

The problem with Drupal is not with the "latest Drupal" - it's with the older versions, and the many sites who cannot/don't upgrade.

I still have nightmares from huge, almost infinitely nested, undecipherable and undocumented arrays.

One small error and you spent hours finding the culprit, digging around in the source code...

The technology used is relevant, it could have been made in Rust,GO, ES7 or other cool thing, it was a human error. They probably need to restrict who can make people Admins and put a big warring when you are about to create an Admin.

I never said it was Drupal's fault.

It was just a comment regarding the rather unpleasant development experience.

Sorry, I thought your comment was related to with the article.

The fun just keeps coming. We've killed Tesla's forum now.

  Service Unavailable
  The server is temporarily unable to service your request. 
  Please try again later.
  Reference #6.6d0fd717.1542635887.2b540b\

Edit: It's back up now. It appears to be running Drupal version 7. Wonder if it's patched?

based on the contents of the publicly-available MAINTAINERS.txt file in the root, I'm gonna guess no...

I missed this screenshot earlier: https://i.dansdeals.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/11015004/...

"There is a security update for your version of Drupal...There are security updates for one or more of your modules or themes..."

And then this: https://i.dansdeals.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/11104508/...

Shows that's it's version Drupal 7.59 and Mysql version is 5.7.14

So it has at least these issues: https://www.drupal.org/SA-CORE-2018-006

Sounds like patching wasn't the issue - it was just poorly configured (ie no restriction on who can become an admin).

Right, but poor practice in one area usually means the same for other areas. It's Drupal 7.59, which isn't terrible, but does have open vulnerabilities.

If this is true, Dan needs to shut up, get a lawyer, and read up on the CFAA.

"And does anything get cooler than this to avoid parking tickets?"

Seriously? No wonder so many people in Palo Alto / Bay Area hate Tesla drivers...

I'm surprised they don't use Discourse for the forums

Well, that's horrifying.

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