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Comment by himinlomax | Hacker News Reader

I can see one good reason: the rest of the auto industry is playing catch up with Tesla. Nobody else afaik is even able to do over the air updates (reliable updates, that is). They have a charging network, the competition basically doesn't and can't seem to get their act together, and that's not even really a technological issue.

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Isn't the "charging network" a thing that shouldn't be vendor locked?

Imagine if every petrol pump was tied to specific makes of cars?

Any current vendor lock-in of charging is surely at risk at being legislated away, by insisting that EV charging is done through a standard port like refueling petrol/diesel vehicles.

If governments were serious about electric vehicles as a way of improving air quality they would legislate that already.

Tesla payed a lot of money (billions) to build the super charger network. Money no government or other company seems to want to spend. Legislating away vendor lock-in would just cause companies to be even more averse to capital investment in recharging infrastructure.

Elon has received billions from the US government across his companies. It'd be a slap in the face to the entire US population for Tesla to have a 100% proprietary charging network when we helped get the company going.

Did he? What kind of government money did Tesla get? I am not aware of any specific money paid to Tesla, only general benefits for electric cars, which were paid to the buyers, not Tesla. Not like GM, which got billions in a government-bailout, which they used to build their charging network /s.

You mean the $451.8M Department of Energy loan they used to buy the old NUMMI Toyata plant? Yeah.... They paid that off nine years early with interest. Try again.

https://www.tesla.com/blog/tesla-repays-department-energy-lo...

Meanwhile, why don't we talk about the GM bailout money?

If you can cite a source for the "billions" you mentioned, that would be great to read, since I must've missed that one.

I'm pretty sure that Tesla managed to get at least 400,000 cars sold in the US before fully phasing out of the tax credit. That's between 1.5 billion and 2.5 billion, depending upon how you estimate it.

EDIT: Also, this amounts to fewer than 50,000 cars in revenue. Sales restrictions in various states have probably cost them more in sales than they gained in tax benefits.

I'm not sure you understand how the BEV tax credit works. First of all, it's the customer that gets the refund NOT Tesla.

Second, the buyer has to owe enough in liabilities to be even be eligible for it.

I absolutely do understand that. But there are economic principles at play here too. A $7,500 rebate is effectively a lower price without costing the manufacturer anything.

While it is true that the buy has to meet the $7,500 threshold for that to work (which is not insignificant) for much of the lifespan of rebate availability, the cars were averaging >60k. Hopefully most people buying cars in that price range have incomes that make $7,500 in tax rebates possible.

By the time that the prices had dropped to 50k, the rebates where closer to $3,700. How many were sold at each range and what percentage of the rebate was accessible? Hard to say... thus the range of possible subsidies.

Either way, though, this was effectively a big help to the business.

It is now a hindrance as every other EV maker (except soon GM) gets the subsidy to compete against Tesla which no longer does.

Yeah, definitely... and it looks like Ford might actually enter the phaseout next, making it purely a subsidy for foreign automakers.

Keep in mind I said "Elon's companies", not "Tesla"

$4.9 Billion in subsidies as of 2015 across 3 companies

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-201...

We can talk about Gm if you want but I don't see how its relevant to my original point. Are there gas stations where only GM cars can fill up?

Again, that article is inferring that Solar and BEV (Alternative fuel and Energy Source) sales equates to Elon getting government money.

Everything that generates a receipt or purchase order when dealing with the U.S. government is a publicly available record and can be requested via the FOIA act (Just like the DEO grant).

Did you notice how none of that where presented in the article you linked?

I'm pretty sure gas station networks weren't built with public money. And other companies are investing in charger networks: https://ionity.eu/ or https://www.electrifyamerica.com/index

At least in the EU I'm 99% sure that the EU will mandate (if it hasn't already) a standard charging interface. Don't know about the US, it's a bit like the Wild West in this regard...

The EU has a standard charging interface, Type 2 (AC) and CCS (DC). The Model 3 has both and most superchargers in Europe got retrofitted with CCS-Plugs. Cars of other manufacturers currently still cannot use it however.

Ionity just came out with a _500%_ increase in cost of charging starting in February.

https://electrek.co/2020/01/17/ionity-increases-electric-veh...

Tesla charges about €0.33/kWh at most in Europe whereas Ionity will be charging €0.79/kWh .. which will make EV charging even more expensive than gas at that point.

This type of crazy price structures are why none of the EV charging networks can get enough traction / users to actually be profitable and build even more stations.

Electrify America is mainly funded by VW as part of the Diesel-gate settlement. So not entirely voluntarily.

Tesla has consistently said the Supercharger Network is open for any manufacturer to adapt. "

"Tesla is aware of these problems. CEO Elon Musk first floated the idea of sharing its Supercharger network in 2015, but with only a few hundred Superchargers operating at the time, the proposals did not gain any momentum."

"Tesla’s chief technology officer JB Straubel has strongly suggested that plans are now underway. He said to Electrek: ‘For things like Supercharger, we are actively talking to other carmakers and we are trying to figure out a structure to work with them.’"

From: https://autovistagroup.com/news-and-insights/tesla-points-op...

But instead of doing that, other manufacturers designed much inferior alternatives that are a UI/Customer experience nightmare to use.

Tesla Supercharger:

1. You pull up.

2. get out of the car.

3. Plug-in the cable and charge.

It's that simple and intuitive. You get billed from your Tesla account. Because the transaction is tied to your VIN.

Other EV/High Speed charging:

1. You pull up.

2. Get out of the car.

3. Figure out how to use the menu.

4. Grab your wallet to either pay via card or RFID.

5. Pay and cross your finger it works.

5. Finally you can charge.

I feel like you're painting the second option as bad when it's exactly the same flow as buying gas. Nothing about paying for electricity needs an account and more than buying gas does. I agree that Tesla's system is pretty slick but the alternative isn't bad.

When your stops are 15-20 minutes instead of 5, every small reduction is even more critical.

In theory yeah it shouldn't be that bad. In practice there are many different third-party charge providers, and they all have their own RFID cards you have to order in advance after setting up accounts and adding payment methods and whatnot. Or if you don't have the special RFID card that matches the station you want to charge at, you might be able to download an app and set up an account on your phone, but a lot of charging station apps are buggy and hard to use. Many of these third-party charging stations are also unreliable, or only have one or two plugs which may be occupied when you show up. In practice the whole third-party charging ecosystem is just a mess and the Supercharger network has none of these problems.

Holy hell the future is awful. How did these companies manage to mess up "swipe your credit card for electricity?"

The alternative is worse. It doesn't really matter if it is the same as ICE. Every time I use my credit card at my local gas station it asks me if I'd like add my phone number to receive text ads. Every time. Telsa is not going to let that happen. People are paying for a premium for electric cars still and that premium should come with something better than the alternative. Telsa has delivered on that. The concern is that traditional car companies aren't. Telsa made the decision early to own the process from beginning to end. Just as Steve wanted with Apple when he came back. They do not want to be dependent on a third party for their customer's experience with their products and their dedication has shown through the lifetime ownership of their vehicles.

Not only that, thieves are very crafty nowadays with skimmers even with card that have EMV chips.

I remember being paranoid everytime I would gas up and check the pump because I have been skimmed once. All of that is eliminated on Superchargers.

Another benefit I forgot to mention:

"The company also doesn’t take advantage of the extra travels during states of emergency and it generally offers free Supercharging in the affected areas."

https://cleantechnica.com/2018/11/12/tesla-opens-up-free-sup...

Imagine getting free gas during a calamity to get safely to your destination.

"The difficulty of submitting payment for fuel" isn't something that customers have been too concerned about in the century-long history of gas stations.

Whenever a customer experience a new paradigm that makes sense, the old habit seems so outdated and inconvenient.

Just imagine yourself not having to go to a gas station to fuel for a year, because you can charge at home every night. You wouldn't want to go back.

This from the country where you still pay in the station some fixed amount before you then go fill up? Do some states still ban you filling your own car?

People never used to have difficulty phoning each other too.

they do "over the air" updates? Of the software that powers the vehicle?

Isn't that an _exceptionally_ dangerous vector?

It depends on how they do it. It very well could be :)

yep

In what way? Sign updates, validate signature, and only apply when car is off and at home charging. Maybe some POST/rollback logic even possible. It's not much different than going to a dealer to get ECU flashed.

In the way that it suddenly becomes technically plausible to make a certain % of vehicles turn into oncoming traffic on a Monday morning.

Make every car on a particular road at a particular time, hit full speed and hit a particular target.

Cars are like crap missiles so making them potentially exploitable is a bit risky.

But even non OTA cars with lane assist and such have this same threat vector. If attacker compromise the vehicle code supply chain to introduce such a thing, whether it got loaded via OTA update or flashed by dealer when I took it in for service makes no major difference. If anything, it's more likely that OTA updates mean they can remediate REAL bugs that save lives across a vast majority of cars in record time (vs recalls and in person flashing).

over the air means automatic though. At least with dealer flashing, a poisoned chain has less impact because its slower and less broad. With a fully automated process you run the risk of it being a vector for terror attacks,

Sure the point that non-OTA (i.e. just 'software in cars') still permits more localised attacks (e.g. assassination) but OTA represents a huge honey pot of power that I would argue is an inherent danger.

I personally feel like there's a whole bunch of stuff we really shouldn't be automating and specifically attaching to auto-update until we've got a better handle on zero days as an industry.

Maybe I'm too optimistic but I think the net risk is reduced with more readily access to updates. The terrorism line just really doesn't strike me as a likely threat. Regular bug fixes and improvements to daily use are likely to save far more lives. Besides, there should be so many audit/checkpoints in front of the release chain, that scenario just seems implausible (but I do conceed that stuff can also fail or be bypassed- let's hope Tesla and other manufacturers have decent IS engineering)

The update process would definitely be atomic -- you either update successfully or stay where you are. Different ways of doing this -- something like OSTree would be my first choice for automotive otherwise you're sending the full image OTA and you need enough flash for a full A/B.

I guess that's why it is not so easy. Volkswagen is struggling https://www.autoblog.com/2019/12/27/vw-id3-ev-software-issue...

It's very dangerous, but it used to be considered extremely dangerous to update anything in production until the likes of Google started doing it nearly two decades ago. The secret sauce is to use DevOps: automated testing and so on. But it's a culture the auto industry does not have. They can't do it for the same reason most banks for example can't do it (yet), and it's taking them years to get there.

Not if done correctly and you take security seriously. Most auto manufacturers outsource software development and engineering.

Tesla also offer pretty good bounties every year on PWN2OWN:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/tesla-car-hacked-at-pwn2own-co...

https://www.thezdi.com/blog/2020/1/8/pwn2own-returns-to-vanc...

Ye but transitioning from impossible to plausible carries an inherent risk. If that honey pot is attractive enough then it will gain more attention and increase the chances of zero days.

The potential impact of an exploited zero day in this context has the potential to be immense and that's the risk that troubles me.

Charging network doesn’t matter. You can charge an ev at home. The number of times you need to charge elsewhere is far far far lower than it is for internal combustion cars.

If evs are truly the future then homes and apartments will have charging.

Charging network matters. Else EVs will never be a consideration as a primary car. Ask any Tesla owner and they will tell you (even though usage is occasional).

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