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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

And I don't want them to succeed because they are actively hostile towards 3rd party repairs and car modifications, plus their current model 3 microtransaction bullshit scares me as a customer, I'm dreading the moment other companies catch on with that. I'm specifically talking about the fact that the base model 3 ships with heated seats out of the factory but you can pay to have them unlocked with a software update. I suspect that having them enabled with a simple software mod would get you accused of piracy since you're using something you haven't paid a licence for(even though you've obviously paid for the hardware)

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Personally speaking I would not want to share a road with an autonomous car that had been tinkered on by some random Joe. Autonomous farm vehicles or something, sure, but public roads are way too risky. This is not the desktop environment of your Linux laptop, it’s monstrously complex software controlling thousands of pounds of metal and batteries.

See, I don't agree at all. Just like all cars have to pass a pretty strict annual inspection to be on the road, I imagine autonomous cars will have to go through regular assessment too.

More specifically, I'm bothered by the fact that if you get into a crash in a Tesla, Tesla can disable your car and stop it from activating unless you do repairs at their approved dealership. You can't just buy parts from a scrapyard and get it running again, Tesla is the gatekeeper and they don't let anyone else hold the keys(they don't even release service manuals unless absolutely required by law). In contrast I could buy a brand new Mercedes CLS with its very respectable smart cruise control and Mercedes can't do anything to stop me from replacing the engine, the head unit, or fixing the whole thing if it's totalled - they just can't. It's not a freedom I'm willing to lose by buying a Tesla.

We don't have open source implantable medical devices either.

I would expect autonomous cars to be have doubled down security against tinkering although I personally don't like that. The reason is purely public safety. If someone could re-program autonomous cars to slam into public crowds and places, imagine the havoc it can cause. A malicious actors can just walk in to parking garage, put in some wires and reprogram every vehicle they can get their hands on - imagine those scenarios.

You can already do that with existing cars(pretty much anything that has power steering, so last 30 years of cars) and yet you don't see people hijacking vehicles left and right this way(or any other way, you can cut someone's brakes in 5 seconds and yet it's extremely rare). I think this is a made up problem.

It's not about usual hijacking or rigging. It's about telling car to speed and slam into pedestrians if it sees large enough group of them, for example, and until that time it can just behave normally. Think of terrorists getting access to programmable robot that weighs over a ton, that can accelerate to 60 miles/hr under 5 seconds and it can identify objects in its surrounding.

So.....a new Mercedes with driver assist package then? And Mercedes will not stop you from modding their cars to your heart's content, you don't have to ask them for permission to work on your car like you have to with a Tesla.

>Autonomous farm vehicles or something, sure

I knew I'd find someone here who hates when John Deere locks down their vehicles, but is fine when Elon Musk does.

How about a random joe tinkering with his brakes? My redneck neighbors replace their own brake pads.

> I'm specifically talking about the fact that the base model 3 ships with heated seats out of the factory but you can pay to have them unlocked with a software update.

If you think this is a new thing, you haven't followed the car industry much.

Just as an example, my 2002 el cheapo Peugot was bought without the option to show instantaneous MPG/average MPG/range/etc. Spend two hours soldering/gluing on the missing $2 toggle switch, ask a friend with the Peugeot Planet update tool to enable it in software, and Bob's your auntie.

It goes much further than that though, especially when you get into chip tuning. Software upgrades that add 50 horsepower to your engine output are commonplace.

But as for the "actively hostile to 3rd party repairs/mods", this part scares me to.

I can sort of understand the software differentiation - I have no issue with Windows Home and Pro editions having different price points even thought the code on the disc is identical for instance(maybe that's hypocritical of me?). But I do have an issue with paying for hardware(heated seats in this case) and that hardware being disabled until a payment is made. I don't know, it just feels different.

You're putting the cart before the horse on the heated seat argument though. It's cheaper to have one factory line for the seats. Ideally you would pay the same price for the car without heated seats whether or not the hardware was physically there.

It's the same thing they ran into with the software locked batteries. The goal is to have minimal overhead to try to drive costs down on Model 3, and making the SR just a software limited version of SR+ actually ends up pushing the overall cost down, rather than having to set up an entirely different line that does the cloth seats and the aluminum roof.

Think about it from a supply/configuration/logistics point of view. It might be cheaper to make 500k cars with 100% heated seats rather than 250k w/ heated and 250k w/o heated. Even if BOM cost is lower, the additional complexity due to the logistics and supply chain probably means it's more expensive to have both variants in production. That way people who want heated seats are subsidising the lower overall cost for those who don't. It also allows the next owner of the car to pay for that option at a later date if they want to. Almost every industry does this (there was a good case about oscilloscopes a while back, where the cheaper, lower bandwidth models just had a low-pass filter circuit installed).

It makes sense economically, but still feels paradoxical. A similar example would be building houses with 3 bedrooms, where 2 bedrooms remain locked and inaccessible unless you pay for them. So a significant proportion of the population ends up living in 1-bed houses even though there is no scarcity of resource.

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