Tesla remotely removed autopilot features from used Tesla without notice | Hacker News Reader

Tesla remotely removed autopilot features from used Tesla without notice

jalopnik.com

500 pointst23452 comments

I'll be honest, while the facts definitely matter for the individuals in this case, the whole idea that this scenario can happen in the first place is very unsettling to me. Prior to this incident, I had overlooked the degree of control Tesla has over their products and made owning a Tesla one of my medium-term life goals for the environmental benefits.

However, upon seeing how they exert the control they have over a vehicle's functions remotely has caused me to rethink whether or not I trust them enough to purchase a product. I can accept unintended bugs, this is a risk I would be willing to take (and hopefully neither me nor my family would suffer terribly for), but for the vehicle itself to have a feature enabled upon sale and then have it disabled after an audit is beyond what I can find acceptable. I understand some fault may rest on the dealer if they misrepresented how they were allowed to sell the car, I'm not talking about "did the customer pay for this feature or not". I'm talking about how such a significant, and expensive, feature of a car can be arbitrarily, and unilaterally, toggled at the whim of the manufacturer.

Frankly, I no longer have the confidence that the legal, economic, nor, sadly, the modern moral system of the United States will provide sufficient protection to regular people anymore for these kinds of cases and trends. The encroaching subscription model of commerce is slowly taking ownership away from individuals of the very things they rely on in their daily lives and I don't like it.

> owning a Tesla one of my medium-term life goals for the environmental benefits

Sorry to jump in but just in case keep in mind that pushing an old ICE car has usually a lesser impact than buying a new one, it can take years until the difference in consumption cover the impact of the building process and the materials extraction and transport.

The best option for the environment would be going without a car at all, like many people in Europe do. Unfortunately people have created environments and societies where they are chained to car ownership.

In Europe in dense cities. In France near Paris for example you can clearly see the distinction when you go further in the countryside[1]. Anecdotical but I know very few people under 40 who own a car in Paris:

[1] % of families having at least 1 car, 2012. Zoom on big cities (Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux...) to see the difference: http://map.datafrance.info/logement?coords.lat=48.8732963701...

> The best option for the environment would be going without a car at all

Indeed. This is what I do (in the US). The second-best option for the environment is to buy a used car. Environmentally speaking, a used ICE car beats a new electric one.

US is not really saying enough. I live with my gf in NYC and we had no need for a car. If I got one for free I would have tried to sell it as soon as possible.

Now we live in bay area suburbs with a dog, and one car is absolutely needed if you can afford it. If we had kids it would have been almost impossible without a car.

The real solution, at least in metro areas, is using public transport instead of driving. And that is another reason not to buy a Tesla, because of the Musk empire's ongoing crusade against public transportation. Dollars spent on Teslas are dollars available for advocating/subsidizing Loop-type and Boring Company projects that drain the public coffers for transportation infrastructure. I'm sure different people have different opinions on ethically how the anti-public-transport conflict of interest stacks up against the good done by making electric vehicles sexy, but for me they approximately cancel out and there's little virtue in buying a Tesla instead of a very efficient ICE or hybrid.

That's what I always say, if you want to be eco and you want to drive electric, by an electric bike.

They have tiny batteries compared to electric cars and thus an almost negligible impact in comparison, enough range for 90% of your commuting needs, can keep you moderately fit, and you still have enough money left to drive your ICE for longer stretches.

That’s not a very attractive option for those of us here in the north. Being buried in snow, slush, and ice for six months of the year makes biking very unattractive.

I live in Germany, and except for the occasional snow I find it easy to ride a bike most of the year.

And the countries further north I understand, but then those are a very small part of the world population, so I don't think the impact is that high, even if they drive ICE.

I live in Utah, and we're known for snow, yet the bike paths are clear most of the year. I bike most of the time, and honestly, I prefer biking in winter to the summer because it's easier to layer up than cool down. When it snows, I take mass transit because I hate driving or cycling in the snow.

I own a hybrid, which is a nice compromise between electric and ICE. I can go on long car trips without worrying about recharge stations and I save a ton on gas the rest of the time. I mostly use our car for shopping and family trips, and it often goes days without being used.

My bike currently isn't an ebike, but I'm considering getting a conversion kit, which is way more powerful than the ebikes available in stores (the store models need to follow the law, aftermarket parts leave that up to the user).

The US will never adopt public transportation as their primary means of mobility. Never.

There will be skyscrapers in the suburbs before Americans deign to ride a rail car to work en masse. We will have AR-based work-from-home before Americans wait at a bus stop in any meaningful size cohort.

There is simply too much mistrust in those systems and too much desire for independent mobility.

Additionally, US cities are built for individual, single-rider automobiles. It sucks real bad, but even if 100% of americans decided that we hate cars and driving, we’re still stuck physically with thousands of acres built upon individual mobility and no mixed-use whatsoever, situations where you have to drive 3+km just to buy a soda.

It’s madness, and the madness is actually encoded into the physical structures as a sunk cost. We have to work with and around that in any practical way forward, which is terrible.

> I had overlooked the degree of control Tesla has over their products and made owning a Tesla one of my medium-term life goals for the environmental benefits.

Less mad electric car manufacturers are available. Typically more environmentally friendly for most users, too; Tesla are very much on the heavy end, so you have a lot of sunk cost that's really only helpful to people who need as much range as possible.

> I no longer have the confidence that the legal, economic, nor, sadly, the modern moral system of the United States will provide sufficient protection to regular people anymore for these kinds of cases and trends.

This is echoed 100% in many consumers around me in meatspace.

what is meatspace

the real world; contrast with cyberspace

Oh God why

Ah, kids these days...

https://wordspy.com/index.php?word=meatspace

Weird to consider that what I consider common Internet idioms were invented before many current legal voters were conceived.

I’ll leave this link here:

https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

Big Brother and Big Mother were let in because people opened their wallets to buy Teslas, carry around iPhones to track them and install Ring to invade their neighborhoods. This is what anarcho-capitalism results in: political/institutional corruption that amplifies inverted totalitarianism for the nearly exclusive benefit of the very rich. Without sensible regulations (limits and protections), we are doomed. Some people need to clear this waxy build-up of libertarian utopian nonsense that was invented by the Koch's and their economist buddies lionizing Ayn Rand from between their ears before it causes any more damage to society.

> ...for the environmental benefits.

Is tesla really considered that enviromentally friendly?

Isn't the real reason to pick a tesla over another electric car, that teslas are considered cool and give higher social status?

I bought mine because it is quite fast and has the best charging network at the moment.

Don't really care what anyone else thinks about it. And I find it hard to believe that anybody really thinks Model 3s are cool. They look pretty goofy.

Yeah, they are a little goofy. But other car makers looked at it and said "I can top that". And they did. I don't know why car makers want to make their EVs look so bad.

Totally agree. At this point, even though theyre cool, I would never buy a Tesla for the simple reason that i am not going to pay 60k plus to not own the thing.

Tesla needs to come out and say, this software has a lifetime guarantee and we will never revoke the license. Anything short of that and you would be dumb to buy it.

But the software was never paid for. It was only enabled in the first place by accident.

If you don't have a software license, should you be able to use their software?

I agree you should be able to hack the car, write your own autopilot, or whatever, but I don't think you're entitled to someone else's software just because it exists.

Perhaps Tesla should eat the loss because this was their mistake, but this is not what is being discussed in this thread.

Well, it is whats being discussed. They should eat the loss. I cant imagine the couple thousand dollars is worth the bad PR

You misunderstand.. people like my parent are saying "if i bought it it should be mine" .. except they are discussing something that was never purchased.

If you scroll this thread, it's abundantly clear that many people are not reading the article and drawing their own conclusions based on the headline.

Based on my reading of the article, the customer bought the feature. Tesla didn't mean to sell them the feature, but they did. If there's another way of looking at this, I don't personally see it in the article text.

> When the dealer bought the car at auction from Tesla on November 15, it was optioned with both Enhanced Autopilot and Tesla’s confusingly-named Full Self Driving Capability; together, these options totaled $8,000. You can see them right on the Monroney sticker for the car:

To me, that reads as Tesla accidentally selling something that they didn't mean to sell, at a price they didn't mean to offer. But that doesn't change anything from the customer's point of view. The customer/dealer bought the addon package that was advertised by Tesla itself as included with the car.

A company shouldn't be able to sell me a device with features advertised as enabled, and then after the purchase is over retroactively decide, "we didn't mean to do that, so let's just pretend we didn't." What they're doing here is trying to retroactively alter part of the transaction, which is crazy. It's the corporate equivalent of me buying a car for $30,000, and then issuing a chargeback a month later because "that was an accident, I only meant to offer you $22,000. So let's pretend that you accepted that."

Edit: reading more comments, I'm seeing people say that Monroney stickers aren't applicable to used cars? Is the argument that the sticker on the car shouldn't be taken as advertised features? But even then -- wouldn't Tesla be required to tell the dealer what features the car actually had?

They way I understand it is this

1. Original Owner bought the feature

2. Original Owner traded in the car to Tesla

3. The used car dealer bought the used car @ auction from Tesla but did not "rebuy" the feature

4. Tesla screwed up by not "disabling" the feature before attempting to double-dip and recharge the dealer for something the original owner bought

5. a few days after the sale tesla did an audit and found they did not get their double-dip extortion fee and disabled the feature

6. the dealer sold the car thinking it was just a glitch

7. new owner not happy

More importantly: 4.5 > Tesla provides dealer with description of car including said features!

It was on the Monroney label so it's part of the car. How bad Tesla is at keeping track of what is paid for or not is irrelevant.

>but I don't think you're entitled to someone else's software just because it exists.

I think differently. IF I buy (A) in good faith (B) a perpetual license (C) manifested by the rights holder into physical media, THEN I am in fact entitled to it.

> owning a Tesla one of my medium-term life goals for the environmental benefits.

Besides the fact that owning a Tesla is barely going to do anything for "environmental benefits" (but it will make you feel good), why not considering other EV makes? Tesla is all over the news but other models are available with almost the same performance and lower prices.

Out of curiosity, what other makes/models are equivalent to Tesla's lineup?

Porsche Taycan Turbo S is similar in terms of speed+acceleration to Model S, while lacking a bit in range (190-200 miles vs 370 miles) and being much more expensive overall ($79k vs $185k).

Unfortunately, that’s the closest comparable EV that is available today. I am not comparing to any vehicles that arent available yet on purpose.

Note: i intentionally picked the longest range models of both cars, but it was mostly to prop up Porsche, because even the cheapest Model 3 in production beats Taycan with 220 miles of range.

Note that's EPA range. The taycan dramatically beats it in real world use while Tesla tends to do worse than rated. There are a number of tests out right now showing the Taycan gets as good or better range than most Teslas (the difference is even more dramatic when you include charging time).

The only head-to-head range test that's been published to date shows that a brand new Taycan has about 3% less range than a 2-year old, used Model 3, at 95 mph on the Autobahn (and other tests show that the Model 3 has about 15% less range than a Model S).

The Taycan does significantly beat EPA in low-average-speed, "spirited driving" tests with the A/C and heater turned off (usually in the mountains, and never head-to-head against another EV that might also be its EPA). "Car people" are impressed by these tests because gas cars are known get poor MPGs in sprited mountain driving. "EV people" are unimpressed by these tests because they know the true test of an EV is high speed cruising, where aerodynamics matter and regen doesn't.

So, while it's impressive that the Taycan comes close to (but does not beat) its EPA range in real-world highway cruising, it still has less range for 3x the price.

Wait, so your "similar" car has half the range and is more than twice the price?

I know, right? The hypocrisy. Could've at-least went half the price and mention Chevy Bolt, Volt - whatever their naming scheme of GM cars sucks.

Then again it's from different users posting the replies.

Still, who suggests an electric porsche at twice the price and half the range. By buying an Tesla you get more value, brand equity and the feeling of "doing" more good than any Porsche purchase would be and you'll support an American company vs a company that shoes in an EV because they should.

That was the exact point I was trying to illustrate. The closest EV that comes to Tesla cars in specs is a car with half the range and more than twice the price.

I'd love to hear what you think is even close to performance/features per dollar.

Did you look at the Chevy Bolt?

I'm sure he has - I have too. It's not comparable. Sure, if you only care about range vs. dollars, it's close to a base model 3... but it feels like a cheap Chevy, doesn't have nearly the acceleration performance, and the driver assist isn't in the same league.

Keep in mind, this is coming from someone who owns Chevy Spark EV (the smaller, cheaper, precursor of the Bolt basically).

For a full replacement for ICE cars (instead of owning 1 ICE and 1 EV), there's really no substitute for a Tesla.

I'm on my second Spark EV and when it came time to go all electric replacing my Honda Fit I looked hard at the Bolt because I like small hatchbacks. Now every time I pass one in my Model 3 I'm glad not to have made that mistake. The Bolt isn't a bad car, but it's not at all comparable to a Model 3.

Yep, same here. I planned to buy a Tesla for environmental reasons when my current 15-year-old car gives up the ghost, but I had no clue about the sort of shenanigans described here.

There is absolutely no way I'd knowingly "buy" a car [or other major product, for that matter] which was subject to this sort of postsale unilateral manipulation on the part of the manufacturer / seller.

To my way of thinking, it's similar, but much worse, than the situation with HOAs [which I also decline to support]

edit: I'd already started switching to bike for commute and errands; now I'm even more inclined to continue in that direction rather than look to EVs

Not just control, but they gather a huge amount of data from the cars as well, including video from all the cameras. Heck, for the Model 3, there's a camera inside the car pointed at the driver. It's very creepy.

Teslas do not upload their video anywhere. I have seen no proof otherwise, and nobody who monitors their car's wifi (watching for software updates) has noticed. Where have you found this information?

It's unlikely that the internal camera is used for data collection by Tesla. It's something they've put in the car to monitor passengers for their planned autonomous taxi service. Source: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1113977924947009536

Here are Tesla's data collection policies, which includes remote image and video clip collection: Telematics log data: To improve our vehicles and services for you, we may collect certain telematics data regarding the performance, usage, operation, and condition of your Tesla vehicle, including: vehicle identification number; speed information; odometer readings; battery use management information; battery charging history; electrical system functions; software version information; infotainment system data; safety-related data and camera images (including information regarding the vehicle’s SRS systems, braking and acceleration, security, e-brake, and accidents); short video clips of accidents; information regarding the use and operation of Autopilot, Summon, and other features; and other data to assist in identifying issues and analyzing the performance of the vehicle. We may collect such information either in person (such as during a service appointment) or via remote access. Source: https://www.tesla.com/about/legal

Wait, what the f? They put an internal camera in it? And their data collection policies explicitly reserve the right to remotely access it - all all other data?

Hell to the nope. And to think people were scared of smart TVs! It sounds like this has literally everything bad that people were scared of with Smart TV ("infotainment system data"), with the added fun feature of filming you and tracking everywhere you go.

I am not reassured by "it's unlikely...". Tesla is not distinguishing itself in the field of restraint.

I share in these concerns. Tesla collects information during crashes but will not ordinarily release any of it directly to the owner of the vehicle[1].

All modern Teslas passively use the cameras outside of the vehicle to monitor your driving to compare and improve their own self-driving algorithms, which is part of the reason the hardware is present whether or not you paid for the upgrade[2].

There's also the problem of forced updates, where some updates (particularly safety updates) must be installed, whether you want them or not[3]. In an extreme case, such as the aftermath of the Tesla battery that caught fire in China, they are believed to have solved the problem by limiting the maximum charge of the battery in software, reducing range significantly for a minority of drivers[4].

In all of these cases, user-control is sorely lacking.

[1]:https://www.consumeraffairs.com/news/tesla-blames-drivers-wh... [2]: https://medium.com/@trenteady/deepminds-ai-learned-to-play-s... [3]: https://www.wired.com/2012/09/tesla-over-the-air/ [4]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/4/20898741/tesla-cars-nhtsa...

This seems like an overly dramatic response to what is a very unlikely scenario. If you check the Consumers Reports owner's ratings for Tesla vehicles you can see that they score very highly, even the model X with the flying doors. They must be doing something right to have such a high percentage of happy owners.

You are very perceptive with the "subscription model of commerce" thing. I do not like it either. But as for this:

> I can accept unintended bugs, this is a risk I would be willing to take (and hopefully neither me nor my family would suffer terribly for)

I will never buy a car that has computer-controlled systems complex enough that a software bug could kill me.

This restricts your choices in the US to cars sold before 1998 when air bags became mandatory. Air bags, anti-lock brakes, and stability control are all controlled by complex computer systems and absolutely could kill you. Electronic fuel injection and engine management are also complex computer controlled systems, but less obviously lethal.

Out of curiosity, what do you drive now?

> Air bags, anti-lock brakes, and stability control are all controlled by complex computer systems and absolutely could kill you.

They are not complex in the way I was thinking. Functioning airbags and anti-lock brakes have been around since the 1980s. Analog sensors react to inputs, sometimes send it to a computer, which performs the right actions based on those simple inputs. Traction control has been around for almost as long.

I don't know for a fact that nobody has been killed by these simple systems malfunctioning, but I would be very surprised if anyone had.

I'll take any of your book recommendations, in return for mine: "Normal Accidents" by Charles Perrow. My takeaway from that book is: once you get past a level of system complexity that no _single person_ can reason about, system accidents are inevitable.

> Out of curiosity, what do you drive now?

1987 Mazda 323 GTX (4WD turbocharged hooligan edition of the 323/Familia). I am happy owning one of my dream cars :)

Airbags are not a simple system that just reacts to impacts. They have to categorize the impact and the occupants of the vehicle and decide which if any airbags to deploy and at what time. Getting this wrong absolutely has killed people. For example deploying a passenger airbag when the passenger is too small or out of position can be fatal. Failing to deploy the airbag because misjudging the position or size of the passenger or the nature of the crash can also be fatal. The systems to decide this are not at all simple and involve multiple accelerometers and and sensors throughout the car.

Hang onto that 323, sounds like a fun car.

If Tesla starts triggering airbags in the faces of people who fall behind on their car payments, I won't buy those cars either.

They already demonstrated the technology when they spontaneously upgraded cars in Florida during the hurricane.

Back then, it was a move benefiting drivers (and rightfully applauded), so no one seemed to stop and think how they were even able to do this. Now we're seeing the same technology in action to the detriment of the driver.

The real story is totally missing at this point, so it’s not surprising that the discussion has gone totally off the rails.

My understanding is this; any time Tesla buys back or is returned one of its cars, all optional features are cleared off the car.

If you sell your used Model S or Model 3 with FSD back to Tesla, one day in the future you may see that VIN for sale on Tesla.com or elsewhere, but the FSD, Acceleration Boost, Homelink, any software upgrades will be cleared off, and available for purchase optionally by the new owner.

In a private party sale, the optional features that are currently active on a car will always stay intact. Tesla does not and will not remove a feature from a car unless they have legal possession of the car.

The software features on the original sales sticker are irrelevant. The used car dealer bought a car from Tesla without EAP or FSD, and we have no documentation to say otherwise. The feature was disabled while the used car dealer still had the car, before it was sold to the now current owner.

When the car was returned under lemon-law back to Tesla, they have every right to reconfigure it however they see fit.

If the used car dealer can provide documentation that Tesla sold them EAP or FSD then it’s a different story. That has not happened.

this is definitely not true speaking as someone who just bought a used Tesla from Tesla with all software features

I’m not saying you can’t buy a used Tesla from Tesla.com with FSD or Acceleration Boost, I’m saying that they are selling that feature over again to you at that time.

There are dozens of forum posts discussing this over the years on Tesla Motors Club and Reddit. [1]

People get confused because a site might list a car based on the VIN as having FSD but on Tesla.com the car is listed without FSD and the price is lower.

It’s up to Tesla to decide if they want to try to sell a used car that they own with or without certain software features. It all comes down to the sales contract between Tesla and the new owner (in this case the used car dealer) which is the key piece of information missing in this story.

[1] - Just one example...

https://www.reddit.com/r/RealTesla/comments/cx3dww/more_proo...

So does that mean if you sell a Tesla back to the company, the don't take into account the fact that you paid for FSD?

Also, when people buy a used Tesla and add FSD, do they charge the same price as buying it new? Most Teslas aren't that old, but I could imagine if you bought one with 25% of its useful life gone, you'd find it pretty unfair if they asked 100% of the FSD price.

Also, just on a price discrimination basis, I'd think people who buy new Teslas are willing/able to pay more than people who buy used ones.

> the don't take into account the fact that you paid for FSD

Correct, if you trade-in your car to Tesla, they do not consider software upgrades as having any value. If you want to recoup any resale value for FSD you need to sell to someone other than Tesla.

Parent noted you can buy all the fancy Tesla features on a used car. That doesn’t change the fact they were disabled when Tesla dealership took back possession of the car then later you paid to unlock them upon purchase.

It does seem like a wash however, not “paying twice” for the same features. The resale price is lower for Tesla without those features. And on a lemon law return nobody actually paid money for those features in the end anyway.

If what you've said is all accurate, then yeah, absolutely 100%.

Imagine if you return a MacBook to Apple. As part of refurbishing it, they disable half the RAM (make up a reason, it's broken or whatever). And then sell it to someone described as in its current state.

Heck Tesla could take the engine out and sell it as a lawn ornament. As long as they're not committing crimes by misrepresenting what they're selling.

> as-is.

with original RAM advertised, or the new advertised RAM advertised, or no mention?

Or if you bought a MacBook and they wiped all of the software you bought from Apple on it and sell the hardware as is?

That’s what happens, no?

The problem here is the lack of disclosure that the car didn’t have FSD. If Tesla buys a car they can resell it with whatever features they’d like.

Another HUGE part of this is if you are going to sell your Tesla to a third party, you cannot guarantee the feature set they will get. So, if you pay $8,000 for auto pilot etc. you should not expect to recoup a dime of that money when you sell the car to a buyer who has read this story.

Seems almost equivalent to selling a personal computer with a copy of Photoshop on it. Before you sell it, you're probably going to want to wipe the hard drive, and therefore Photoshop is gone.

I don't know the legalese behind Tesla's features being "licensed" or "sold" as a part of the car, or to the owner, or what the right outcome is here. I get both sides of the argument though.

I get the analogy. My point is most people buying used cars will not see used cars and used computers as analogous.

And the other point is, even if someone sells a car that supposedly has FDC and EAP enabled it would be foolish to pay for it. Because Tesla can "audit" and remove it on a whim.

No, if you buy a car with FSD or Autopilot, Tesla won't remove it on a whim.

Anyone read the Tesla Digital Rights Management small print on this? If I buy a car with extra options (leather, premium stereo etc) I would subsequently sell it with those options. It appears Tesla are removing the digital rights options the PO would have paid for, reverting the car to a base model with option buy new subscriptions - is that correct or do I misunderstand?

You misunderstood. If you privately resell your Tesla, the purchased licensed software stays with the car. This car was sold and priced by Tesla s not having autopilot. Consequentely, they removed it, when they discovered, it was still activated. But a car purchased with the autopilot option, keeps it.

> a car purchased with the autopilot option, keeps it.

What evidence inspires you to say that? Do you have private information showing that Tesla did in fact say: "the sticker is wrong, the test drive is wrong, this car doesn't include FSD"?

According to the story, Tesla sold this vehicle at auction with FSD enabled, and with a sticker saying it had FSD.

In the absence of other evidence, that means Tesla sold the car with the autopilot option, and then removed it.

Tesla cars are resold privately every day and no one reported that the autopilot was removed. Also the story was corrected and the sticker applied to the original sale of the car (the car was returned to Tesla), not to the sale of the then used car by Tesla to the dealer.

> Also the story was corrected and the sticker applied to the original sale of the car (the car was returned to Tesla), not to the sale of the then used car by Tesla to the dealer.

I'm reading the story now and don't see that in there anywhere.

That said, it's clear that the sticker describes the car and the price from the original sale. It's not clear whether that sticker was also displayed at the auction, and now that you mention it, the story doesn't say.

But I've bought cars at auction before and they were always sold as-is. I'd be livid if the seller broke in a few days later and sabotaged a feature on a car I bought as-is, with the excuse "we didn't mean to include that feature".

That should be something Tesla and that dealer need to work out. What is written in the sales contract and what rights come from the fact, that the car was handed over with the autopilot being active. That is what lawyers are for :).

I think the difference is that most computers don't come with a fully-licensed copy of Photoshop when they're originally purchased

Or a sticker saying "Photoshop included".

On the other hand, if FSD is treated like software, you should still own a license for the FSD software, and be able to use it on a new Tesla without paying for it again.

But somehow I suspect Tesla won't allow that either, and they'll try to argue that every buyer (even used) has to pay them for FSD on every car.

Or they'll switch to a subscription model where you have to pay every year.

Of course you can. If you bought the car with auto pilot, you can sell a car with auto pilot. Tesla has nothing to do with it. The article describes a case, where the dealer seems to have bought a car without autopilot.

No, the car had autopilot when Tesla sold it (Nov 15), then Tesla later removed AP, after they sold the car (Nov 18), because the new owner hadn't paid for AP.

Autopilot was active, but according to the article update, not purchased by the dealer. The deal between the dealer and the final owner of the car didn't play a role in this.

The dealer was the owner when Tesla disabled AP, not Tesla.

That's a third-party dealer who bought the car at auction, not a Tesla-dealer (which don't exist). The dealer is a private party. It shouldn't matter whether the dealer or Alec was the owner, the point is, Tesla wasn't.

The question is, whether that dealer bought the car with the autopilot included. If yes, he can sue Tesla, if not, then it was ok for Tesla to disable it. And the updates point to the fact, that the car was sold without autopilot as a feature.

> And the updates point to the fact, that the car was sold without autopilot as a feature.

What updates point to that?

The sticker says the car had AP, the disclosure doesn't say otherwise, and everyone seems to agree the car did in fact have AP enabled when Tesla sold it on Nov 15.

What evidence says Tesla sold the car without AP?

It doesn't matter that Tesla's records say the car shouldn't have had AP, it did have it.

It also doesn't matter whether Tesla wronged Alec or the dealer here. In either case, if the story is accurate, Tesla sabotaged a car they'd already sold because they accidentally left a feature enabled that they didn't want to.

The sticker refers to the first sale of the car, not to the sale of the then used car by Tesla to the dealer.

Even if the sticker wasn't shown at auction, Tesla isn't off the hook.

Cars at auction are typically sold as-is, and when they are sold as-is, the seller can't say "Oops, we forgot to disable that feature" and then disable it a few days later.

Who owned the car before the dealer bought it? Tesla.

Did Tesla sell a car with FSD to the dealer? No, Tesla sold the dealer a car without FSD, but the feature was incorrectly enabled in the car that was delivered. This tends to happen because features will only come off after the next software update is applied.

By the way, there's a similar issue with used cars that originally came with "Free Unlimited SuperCharging". This is another case where if Tesla buys the used car, or it's returned to them, they will resell it used without "Free Unlimited Supercharging".

The problem is when third-party dealers purchase off-lease Teslas which originally had "Free Unlimited SuperCharging" even though Tesla will always remove that feature when the lease is over, the used car dealer could lie to the new buyer that they are getting FUSC with the car, when in fact they will not.

For example: https://forums.tesla.com/forum/forums/free-unlimited-superch...

Who sold the car with a federal disclosure window sticker that represented it had full self-driving capability installed? Tesla.

Who failed to include any mention of removing that equipment that was included in the legally required lemon disclosure statement? Tesla.

Who allowed the dealer to inspect the car and test drive it in a state where the equipment and features that were listed as included equipment were present and working? Tesla.

If Tesla wants to remove features when they resell a car, that's fine, but they have to disclose it, and they can't misrepresent those features as included in the material and documentation provided. That would be fraud.

> Tesla sold the dealer a car without FSD

Where do you get that idea? If that picture of an invoice is to be believed, even Tesla agrees the car did have FSD when it was sold on Nov 15. And nothing seems to say otherwise.

You may expect, for whatever reason, that a used Tesla doesn't include FSD even if the sticker says it does and the feature is enabled on a test drive, but that's not a reasonable expectation.

In fact it's quite a surprise, so Tesla needs to make it very clear that that is the case, and there's no evidence here that they have done so.

Apple’s refurbished products have absolutely been scrubbed of any extra software added by previous owner.

Yeah, and it's clear the computers come wiped. The issue here is that they sold the car with a sticker that included several mfr-added features and then later took them away.

It's not clear what the dealer thought they were buying from Tesla nor how the dealer represented the car to the buyer. The brand new sticker is generally not used in a pre-owned sale. There would be a new sticker.

That’s not a great analogy.

Apple sells a computer with an extra Siri service. You return it and they resell to another consumer who has the option to purchase the Siri package.

Seems reasonable to me.

It can be looked at like if you buy Final Cut Pro from apple, when you trade in the MacBook they reset it thereby removing that application

The next owner doesn't get final cut pro just because you purchased it

In that case, the original owner keeps their FCP license. Does Tesla allow auto pilot to be transferred to a new model?

If you sold FCP back to Apple with the computer, it’s all fine. Problem is - Apple gives laptop with licensed FCP to computer dealer to sell, dealer puts up price for “MBP+FCP”, then Apple remotely wipes it claiming it was there by mistake. At the very least a large misstep for Apple, and misrepresentation on the dealer’s part. Customer who buys it did nothing wrong.

That I'm not sure of, anyone have experience with this?

> Imagine if you return a MacBook to Apple. As part of refurbishing it, they disable half the RAM (make up a reason, it's broken or whatever). And then sell it to someone described as in its current state.

This is more like you bought a MacBook from Apple, which had 8GB of RAM, but when you downloaded a software update, half the RAM was disabled. Then when you complained, Apple said "Oops, we shouldn't have sold it to you with 8GB."

> Tesla does not and will not remove a feature from a car unless they have legal possession of the car.

Well it seems they have done just this.

> If the used car dealer can provide documentation that Tesla sold them EAP or FSD then it’s a different story. That has not happened.

Others have pointed to the Monroney sticker in the Jalopnik article, which lists this feature.

From what I gather, Tesla did have possession of the car when they removed the feature.

The Monroney sticker shows the original sales price and options of the car, right? The sticker is not a certification that all those features are still present on the vehicle.

What’s missing from this story is if there was a sales receipt which listed FSD between Tesla and the used car dealer.

Based on the dates in the Jalopnik article, I think they removed it after the sale to the dealer:

> Tesla officially sold the car to the dealership on November 15, a date I’ve confirmed by seeing the car’s title. On November 18, Tesla seems to have conducted an “audit” of the car remotely. The result of that audit was that when the car’s software was updated to the latest version in December, the Enhanced Autopilot and Full Self Driving Capability (FSD) were removed from the car.

The disclosure statement needs to clarify any changes between the sticker and reality, and they showed that it did not indicate the removal of those features.

> What’s missing from this story is if there was a sales receipt which listed FSD between Tesla and the used car dealer.

That seems unlikely. Cars at auction are usually sold as-is.

> The feature was disabled while the used car dealer still had the car, before it was sold to the now current owner.

This is not what happened according to the article. A person bought the car with those features still existing on the car then ran an update. The update removed the features.

I wouldn't be surprised if Jalopnik purposefully left out or changed information. I was a reader of theirs for years, but they are CLEARLY anti-Tesla, and honestly anti-electric car.

An update to the article says, Dealer: "I bought that vehicle personally, and used the full self drive on it multiple times. It was working fine. One day, a random message popped up saying your autopilot has been upgraded after a software update. Then it disappeared. I figured it was a glitch. I already had an agreement with Alec to purchase the vehicle."

Interesting. Hard to reconcile with what the article says:

> The dealer bought the car on Nov 15

> Tesla removed AP on Nov 18 (according to the note in the invoice)

> Alec bought the car on Dec 20.

If that's all correct, the dealer had the car with FSD for only 3 days, and without FSD for over a month.

Perhaps Tesla marked the car for removal on Nov 18th, but it doesn't take effect until an update is pulled.

The timeline doesn't really matter much IMO, the issue is whether the dealer knew or should have known that the update was coming when they purchased the vehicle.

It would be pretty typical used car dealer behavior to buy the car for cheap, knowing the feature would be removed, and that they could get a buyer to pay for it, and then deflect the blame to Tesla.

I would bet that the dishonest part of that is "I figured it was a glitch". I mean come on, you believe that from a used car dealer? The classic comment on getting someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on not understanding it comes to mind.

On the other hand, there’s this other saying that we should never attribute to malice that what can equally be attributed to incompetence.

I agree with you that it’s suspicious, but then again, it’s also easy to see how a notification for a software update would be overlooked as not important.

this seems like they were fixing a bug. The previous owner had autodrive enabled but never actually paid for it. Sounds like a small claims issue to determine how much money the dealer is owed for buying a car that doesnt have everything it was supposed to come with.

I guess this hinges on whether people know that Tesla does stuff like this and would in this instance. If you do know, and you should know, then you wouldn't misrepresent a car as having a feature just because it technically does have the feature, weird as that sounds.

I'm not clear on whether the dealer did know or should have known that the feature would be removed. If yes, then the window sticker or the functionality working after the sale is irrelevant and it's the dealer that screwed the customer not Tesla.

Funny that less than 24 hours ago there was a story on the front page of HN full of moral outrage about a Ford car that was still being accessible via the app after someone's lease expired on the car. In that case the dealership didn't do a reset of the software after the lease ended.

This has happened multiple times with Teslas, too.

im super lazy; can you link to the docs that cover this?

Homelink is not software feature on Model 3 (anymore), requires installation of hardware module.

>>The real story is totally missing at this point, so it’s not surprising that the discussion has gone totally off the rails.

The real story is it seems there is no bounds to the amount of excuses Tesla fans will use to justify unethical behavior by the company. The mirror with Apple fans is astounding

In fact I wonder how many Telsa owners are also hardcore Apple fans as well, the psychology is very similar

>> any time Tesla buys back or is returned one of its cars, all optional features are cleared off the car.

and you have no ethical or other problems with this?

>>In a private party sale, the optional features that are currently active on a car will always stay intact.

There is zero rational for you to make that claim, and zero supporting evidence that this will remain the case in perpetually. In fact it would not come as a shock to me if this is a way for them to limit private party sales by lowering the value of the cars. Especially if they start getting less and less trade in's as the EV market becomes more saturated in the next 5 years

>>The software features on the original sales sticker are irrelevant.

That is the entire point, they should be. Disabling those features so they and double dip on the sales is HIGHLY unethical IMO

>>When the car was returned under lemon-law back to Tesla

Where was it stated the car was returned under a lemon-law

I think there is a bigger issue with the idea that, just because they don't remote-brick your cars today just because they feel like it doesn't mean they can't or won't someday in the future.

I 100% won't buy a Tesla because you have no way of knowing what you own, and might find out that you own nothing at all someday of you make Elon unhappy.

From what I've seen, Tesla doesn't normally remove features when they sell used vehicles. This used S for instance comes with FSD.

https://www.tesla.com/used/5YJSA1E26HF231679

Having said that, what they did was bootsy and I suspect illegal. If they want to remove something, do it before they sell the car. A seller should not be able to go back and remove something, tangible or not, after the sale, just because they intended to remove before the sale and forgot to.

I mean, if you buy a Tesla you know you dont own a car. You are just licensing it. I refuse to support a company that makes me sign a f*ing gag order for the privilege of their car. https://www.slashgear.com/tesla-on-offensive-against-nhtsa-g...

Screw Tesla and the Authoritarian Technocratic hell they want to enforce on the automotive industry.

I cannot fathom how someone can be a tinkerer of things and support a company that continues to barely support things like the magnuson moss warranty act. Companies like Tesla prove we NEED right to repair.

I am genuinely curious how the community feels about Tesla's hostility to third party repair and open documentation.

What happens if someone tries to fix the car and hurts themselves and now tesla enabled that behavior. Safety first.

Same exact thing with ANY other automaker.

Really? Are you a child that can't handle tools? I'll make sure nobody hands you scissors.

Poe's law in action[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

Well shoot, my sarcasm detector was off there. But I appreciate you pointing out my mistake instead of just downvoting me. Thanks (genuinely)

I think I'm fine with it, as long as they continue to sell best-in-class vehicles and provide quality service. Third-party repair and open documentation are nice, but not must-haves for me.

That is the point: do they sell the car to you, license or rent it? It does not look at all that they sell it.

As long as I get to drive it, the distinction isn't very material to me. But I guess I'm not the type to work a lot on my car.

As the case in the article shows, this hurts the resale value of the car. If I spend $10-12k on software upgrades for a vehicle, and can't recover any of that money upon resale, I would call that a material distinction.

Every other car loses a high double-digit percentage of it's value the second you drive it off the lot. Resale value of cars doesn't seem to impact much in the consumer's mind

You can resell the software upgrades you bought. This article talks about a case where the dealer (according to Tesla) had not bought the software.

Does the feature get attached to the car, or is it associated with the first human licensee?

If the car had the license, and the car was returned and transferred to a third party dealer. Then the OEM decided that the entitlement no longer existed.

I'm not aware of any other scenario where a core component of a car isn't linked to the car. If Tesla didn't fuck up, they are applying Microsoft/Oracle software license terms to the car.

The license is attached to the car. According to the article, Tesla claims the car didn't have a license (but the software activated) when being sold to the dealer.

At some point you'll probably want to replace it with something newer. The distinction becomes very important when you sell it. If buying a used Tesla means features are disabled then the resale value is going to be lower.

I’m not either. But if Tesla is going to do this, they need to shift from “selling” the car to merely “leasing” the car.

They sell the car and the software. You can resell it. In this case Tesla disputes that the dealer bought the software in the first case, otherwise the dealer would be able to resell it, as all Tesla owners who sell their cars are doing it.

Only their batteries and EV tech are best in class, their cars are actually quite badly made and plasticy compared to most luxury cars in the same price range as the Model S.

If everyone starts to go full electric I think Tesla will become "just another car brand that was once first at something" similar to how Audi was champion of four-wheel drive at some point. I guess at that point they'll change their policies to better fit with the general public buying cars and used cars. Or the others will see an opportunity and go the Tesla-route and we as consumers end up worse off than before.

we'll soon find out in next 5 years, as the big car brands launch their new ev line-up.

Agreed, fit and finish in the Tesla models is terribly low end. More like a 90's Ford Taurus than any other upmarket brand.

They don't: https://www.consumerreports.org/car-reliability-owner-satisf....

Edit: As bm1362 says below they've since regained it, but it's still not best in class. From the article: "The Model 3 is now the fifth most reliable out of 12 luxury compact cars in CR’s ratings of predicted new-car reliability, just below the Audi A3 and above the Acura TLX and Mercedes-Benz C-Class. The Model S is the second-most reliable out of four ultra-luxury cars, just below the Genesis G90. "

They regained the CR:

https://www.consumerreports.org/car-reliability-owner-satisf...

If you are a tinkerer who is upset by Tesla's control over the software in your vehicle, you can disconnect the data connection in the car. You purchased the car and you can use the car how you see fit. You did not purchase a free, unrestricted, and perpetual license to use Tesla services. It is no different than purchasing an Apple or Android phone and having to abide by Apple's or Google's ToS to get the most out of the device.

How far is the modding scene there? Can you activate functions (which don't need an online connection obviously) if you've cut the cord? Are people actually meddling with it?

Would this void the warranty? I assume if the vehicle malfunctioned in any way, or caused an accident, Tesla would say it was your fault for disconnecting.

Of course, one could make the argument that since they sometimes push out updates that have bugs, it's actually safer to drive the car with a static feature set that the driver is familiar with.

It is unclear whether this voids the warranty. Tesla, like other manufacturers, leaves open the possibility of voiding a warranty for improper repairs, but I'm not aware of any cases in which Tesla has actually gone that route.

Also regarding your last point, OTA updates can also provide added safety. For example, there have been similar software issues with the anti-lock brakes for both Teslas and Toyotas. Tesla was able to fix that problem and push out the updates in a few days. Toyota also had a quick fix, but actually deploying the update to cars required a recall and for the update to be manually installed by a technician. That extra barrier to getting the update unquestionably resulted in unsafe cars being on the road much longer than if OTA updates were possible.

There is no doubt that some of the OTA updates increase vehicle safety. I was just pointing out that one could make an argument that it is not anti-safety to prevent updates from being applied. It's just a matter of what is more important: the new things being added, or having a better understanding of how the vehicle will consistently behave.

The Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act makes it illegal to void the warranty for modifying your vehicle.

They would need to prove that failure was a direct result of your modification.

It won’t void the warranty but most automaker shops won’t touch anything you’ve modified. So the warranty is pretty much void for said modified parts.

Toyota won’t touch my modified Tacoma suspension and I’m fine with it. They are more than willing to fix anything else.

They sell something that feels like a free, unrestricted, perpetual license to use the services "that come with the car". But when you buy a car it's natural to think that it's yours in full, as much as a banana you traded for a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in the lunchroom was unequivocally yours.

I agree that legally it's probably no different than any other modern TOS or EULA: you own nothing, you have no rights, the company can do whatever they feel like and change those rules at any time. I hate the amoral, greed-driven, power-differential-enabled lack of true ownership that these agreements cause. I like the idea of something a simple right to use a Tesla service that lasts as long as the car does.

I'd be willing to come to an agreement on where in the ship-of-Theseus debate the car is no longer the car, so you don't have vehicles that have been crushed in trash compactor being stripped for their Supercharger license or SIM card and that Supercharger connector/key installed on a Leaf or SIM card installed in a phone, and you don't have used, serviceable vehicles sold without those licenses. I'd prefer open to the idea that those rights are separate from the vehicle, purchased by an individual, able to be sold by an individual.

I wonder whether my son will think he owns his car or the software that runs on his computer 30 years from now, or whether he'll just be subscribed to services that provide a temporary, revocable, non-transferable right to everything he uses.

To be clear, I'm not judging anyone with those beliefs. I just think people should be clear about this situation. You own your Tesla just as much as you own any car. Probably the second most important distinguishing factor of Teslas (behind just being EVs) is the connected services that Tesla provides that no other automaker is even close to providing. I don't think it is unreasonable that using those services comes with a ToS. I would much rather my car automatically keep my maps and GPS updated rather than having to schedule an appointment for service at a dealer and pay to get those updates which is how some other auto manufacturers handle the process. You are free to disagree and to vote with your wallet by not buying a Tesla.

Apple's Authoritarian control over their products is why I have never and will never own an Apple product,

Google is starting to approach my breaking point as well. I have used LineageOS devices in the past for this reason.

I will not own a Tesla Product for this reason either

In Europe this would be very straightforward. The car is not "as described" in the sale. Return it to the dealer who has to make it right: add the missing feature, agree a discount, or give a full refund.

e.g. https://www.consumereurope.dk/menu/laws/danish-laws/danish-s... § 42 onwards.

same would apply to the sale between Tesla and dealer.

of course, but the burden of proof is on the dealer

And I'm pretty sure Tesla will have lawyers who will pull their general sales conditions saying that the $8k self-driving option is a nominative, non-transferable software license and will likely win in court.

I'm not sure some EULA overpowers the law.

Also the validity of software EULA in the EU is still blurry for me (definitely not expert), to my knowledge they are not more enforceable than conditions of how you are permitted to use any object you bought. You own it, you are free to use it as you want basically (at least it was right during retail CD years). SaaS circumvent this because these are conditions to use a service.

I don't think there's just one answer to EULA validity in the EU, but rather there's a bunch of shit in EULA's that is enforceable in the US but have absolutely no basis in all/some EU countries.

For example, shrink wrap EULAs have not been considered binding here.

And any lawyer who wasn't bottom of his graduating class will say they it's a one time upgrade, tied to that VIN, in the same way that an upgraded interior or larger set of wheels is.

If this optional upgrade can be renegotiated at time of future sale, then any and all other upgrades must necessarily be renegotiable too.

I don't think Tesla wants to have to replace interiors every time someone resells a vehicle.

Except that it is a transferable software license, as Tesla owners sell their cars regularly and of course the autopilot and the self-driving option stays active. Whatever exactly went wrong in this case, this has to be a very individual thing where it is unclear whether the car ever had a valid license for the autopilot.

The whole approach of making software unsellable is very American. Here in Europe we have a guaranteed right to sell used software.

For example, Autodesk turned their 3ds max from $5k once into a $6k annual subscription. As a result, people started buying used perpetual licenses to avoid the overpriced subscription. Autodesk is denying those used license transfers in the US, but they have to tolerate it in the EU.

As a result, advertisement, movie and CGI studios in Europe gained a competitive advantage over US companies because the weak US laws failed to protect their own studios from predatory pricing.

And for a CGI animator making $3k monthly, those $6k in annual software fees really add 16% to the gross price, so enough to drive customers elsewhere.

Anyone actually pays those exorbitant prices? I thought they were just for bribery-fueled wholesale deals, everyone else just pirates them. Know a lot of animators and no one ever paid for those.

I doubt that. Maybe they don’t have a license personally but the studio they work for sure has, or they are just one disgruntled employee away from getting a friendly reminder from Autodesk

LOL i know a media rendering farm, a big one, that uses pirated Adobe software of all kinds. Asked how do they deal with licensing they just say "but well we are a Russian company, we are not concerned with this, licensing is a Western concept".

The notion of "registering an app" ("зарегистрировать приложение") in Russian means "finding a crack".

It's a lot of money, but if you are making a living professionally, in such a specialized profession too which can warrant charging more, you should pay for the tools you use.

A plumber has the choice of buying the MegaPlumberPlus (making it up) for a high price but that makes them 10% more efficient, or weld together their Plumbathon. Doesn't matter what the cost of the MPP(tm) is, it can not justify stealing (pirating in sw) it. Not in a moral, nor legal way.

For a private person doing private stuff on their own computer perhaps many would say morally this is grey, but if you live from it? Pay'em or don't use it.

Yep, we just bought a second-hand Microsoft SQL Server 2016 licence for like ~$1000 for a 100-user licence, just because a company migrated to 2019 and they are legally allowed to sell their old licence. The licence activated with MS after a quick phone call and we have all the invoices etc. No problem at all.

Your company is in the UK?

No, Poland, sorry.

Just as well. After the Brexit transition period ends on 31/12/2020, those laws may not cover UK consumers anymore unless the Parliament creates an equivalent law for the UK (unlikely).

Britain is keeping all existing EU law, so they will have to actively decide to repeal it off they want that.

Why dont they just hack it.. ?

Huh... the US has a first sale doctrine so it should be legal to transfer a license.

In the US, software is "licensed not sold" so first sale doesn't apply.

Well it does apply to retail software; oem means you have to resell the hardware too. Everything else is subscription which is the real meaning of licensed.

That's exactly how this should/would work in the US. I'm not sure why the owner didn't raise hell with the dealership when the car was not as described.

When you buy a car in America (some states?) you get a Lemon Law disclosure explaining your rights in these types of situations. The Tesla owner should be able to return the vehicle (I'm not sure if a refund for the feature alone is written into the law).

IIRC, the lemon law only applies to new cars, not used. In this case, it wouldn't help.

Ah, thanks for the clarification.

Tesla already has a history of retroactively taking stuff from you - especially if it's a salvaged car.

Here's what a comment on Tesla Motors Club says you should be prepared to lose on a salvaged car:

>For anyone purchasing as salvaged Tesla, they should assume Tesla will cut them off from supercharging, software updates, Internet access, and internet use by the media player & navigation system - until Tesla has re-certified the car. Until then preparing for other charging options is prudent.

At least to me that sounds like a lot of things that they can just take away from your car with a flag.

These are all subscription services which are not covered on any car.

In my case (not a tesla): software updates are only installed iff there is a recall notice. One time they installed an update because they had to wait anyways but that was not guaranteed and a service from the mechanic.

Most internet uses in cars (if not all) are bound the a person, not a car. Selling it most likely voids that subscription. In my case the uses are free for 5 years for the first buyer and a paid subscription afterwards. Most likely tesla does something similar.

Supercharging: See internet. Though I see plenty of them advertised with it. Maybe this is different in the EU.

Features (as in, bought features in feature packs or options) on the other hand are something of value (even if only software) added to the car and cannot be taken away without compensation or reimbursement. Unless you had a subscription but that is not the case in this instance.

But they still sell the car for a whole lot of money. The more honest approach would be to only offer rental/subscription cars, if essential features such as charging your friggin electric car can't even be guaranteed after purchasing the damn thing.

Using an apologetic tone for the scummy and exploitative business tactics employed by these companies is exactly why people like GP don't have faith that "...the modern moral system of the United States will provide sufficient protection..." anymore.

They don't remove charging. They remove the ability to charge your car for free. I completely understand that.

Think about it. Somebody could buy a Tesla charger circuit, install it to another car, and get free charging for life. The same happened with 3G enabled Kindles.

Okay, the point about free charging is fair, I didn't know that. But as far as I understand Tesla Superchargers are so superior to conventional charging in terms of speed that not having them available is a huge drawback to a Tesla owner. Maybe I'm wrong on this as well.

>Somebody could buy a Tesla charger circuit, install it to another car, and get free charging for life. The same happened with 3G enabled Kindles.

That sounds like the way it's supposed to be. It's how cars have been handled for decades and the tinkering and experimenting I'm sure lead a whole lot of people to find fulfilling interests, hobbies, maybe even carreers. It's funny, on the one hand companies seem to have no interest in funding the education of their employees anymore but on the other they also want to completely control access to their tech and how it's used.

EDIT: Made the same mistake again. Of course I don't advocate for people just mooching off of Tesla's superchargers, but the ability to be able to do with my property as I please.

I'm all about "you buy it you own it" and rights to repair. I wouldn't make a fuss if somebody unlocked the autopilot or the full capacity of their battery (yes, that's a software lock too). You don't own the supercharge network it's an external service.

>But as far as I understand Tesla Superchargers are so superior to conventional charging in terms of speed that not having them available is a huge drawback to a Tesla owner.

That's highly dependent on your use-case. For the average driver, you install and use a level 2 charger at home every night and wake up to a full battery. Superchargers typically only come into play on long road trips, and you can still pay to use them outside of the complimentary charging they provide for new sales.

> Somebody could buy a Tesla charger circuit, install it to another car, and get free charging for life.

Who owns that Tesla charger circuit? Somebody paid $5000 for free supercharging for life, and presumably the "key" or whatever is loaded onto something.

The thing is: Tesla wants to be a scummy company and remotely take away that key from its users upon sale of the vehicle. Is not "free supercharging for life" implied to be tied to the car (or more specifically, the car's charging circuit)??

If it is tied to the car itself, then the "key" should be tied to some component that "defines" the car, like maybe the motors or the battery pack. The software can check to see if its still connected to the same battery-pack token or whatever if you really want to verify things (with logic used every 10 years whenever battery packs are replaced).

-----

If Tesla wants both, they can have both with proper engineering effort. However, they're being lazy if they are just cutting off users without any recourse.

Very good point, I didn't know there was a supercharging line item.

I understand your point, but they talking about salvaged cars. Usually, they are built from multiple cars. If you cut two teslas in half. One has autopilot one has free charging. Then you make a two cars from one part of each car. What features should get the new cars?

If the key tied to the charging circuit. Would it be fair to pay that extra $5000 if the charging circuit fails and you have to buy a new one? And if you can transfer that, what happens when somebody fixes the old one?

What I want to point out that "for life" services shouldn't be tied to complex things.

Nope, they have definitely removed supercharging entirely from salvaged cars.

https://youtu.be/okLgtYgnd7A

I agree that these are all subscription services that are per-user and not per-vehicle, but there comes a point where such subscription services are vital to basic operation of the vehicle. Imagine for a moment that one has to have a subscription for a gasoline-powered car to enable pumps at gas stations. Without the subscription, the driver would be forced to buy fuel from stations not affiliated with the subscription service, likely at a much higher charge or more difficult transaction. At the extreme of this example, one would have to carry gas cans with them to fill at these non-sanctioned pumps and later fill their car from the cans, because the non-subscription pumps are forced to use a different size nozzle that doesn't fit the car.

This sounds extreme, but it's the direction we are going with electric cars and and manufacturer-controlled and locked down vehicle systems. I am 100% on board with electric vehicles (I've gone as far as planning out a gas to electric conversion for an older truck), but not at the expense of true ownership of one's vehicle. If Tesla wants to put their brand image above and beyond my complete ownership of a vehicle I purchased outright, I simply won't ever own a Tesla even if they become less expensive than the non-electric equivalent.

Thats the situation, but are you really ok with that? And if so, why?

I have zero issue with features being lost in a salvaged car. those are entirely at your risk purchases and worse some salvage cars are just unsafe for both driver and others sharing the same road.

that they can be sold and be allowed back on the road opens the manufacturer to a whole host of liabilities. The insurance company declared it not worthy of repair so if state laws permit them to be titled why should the manufacturer provide any support or be compelled to do so?

anecdotal, we have a neighbor in our subdivision with two salvaged cars. both have been given plates by the county to allow them to be driven. both have body damage including a Nissan Rogue which has no back window and one rear passenger window is gone. So who is liable for mechanical failure or even software failure when this car is in accident? I am not even sure it has functioning air bags.

* for clarity - I am against a car being sold and losing features as shown in the article, that car was not a salvage title

> why should the manufacturer provide any support or be compelled to do so

I don't think anyone is asking for that.

The ask is 'don't disable existing paid-for features on the car, thanks'.

The legal reductionist version of this situation is buying a house and finding that 2 rooms got demolished because the builder had a lease agreement on those with the previous owner.

Once that car is yours, the software on the car is yours, too.

It boggles my mind how the manufacturer modifying a car they don't own isn't computer trespass and/or straight theft as they deprive you of the rights of ownership.

They'll make some assertion along the lines of granting a license to specific configurations of the control software of the car.

This is part and parcel of why I think IP on software is increasingly rearing it's head as an anti-pattern. Right of First Sale goes right out the window with the "marriage" model of smart appliance ownership we seem to be converging on via contract law.

It's also bizarre that people, especially on here, in this thread, think it's ok for a business to retroactively take away a feature that was already paid for. That price you paid on the used car has those features priced in. This is some weird crabs-in-a-bucket behavior but driven towards protecting a corporation.

Except vehicles are salvaged when the cost of repairing whatever damage was done exceeds most of the FMV according to the insurance company's appraisal process.

It's often entirely disconnected from the vehicle's safe operation. Some vehicles/damages are just expensive to repair and/or don't hold their value well.

I'm currently sitting on a vehicle which was in a minor fender bender but since they creased the quarter panel the insurance company totaled it. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the car besides a cosmetic dent, I drive it daily, its operation is unchanged.

If it were a Tesla, apparently I'd be losing access to all sorts of stuff I purchased like unlimited supercharging just because someone dented my car and the insurance determined it was too expensive to fix.

That's unacceptable in my view, but I already would never buy a car riddled with surveillance systems and unattended OTA software "updates", I'm definitely not in the target market for Tesla.

> opens the manufacturer to a whole host of liabilities

I don't think so. How would the manufacturer be liable for a failure due to a repair made by someone else? Has there ever been an incident of such a case?

> The owner in question, who Jalopnik refers to as Alec, purchased the car last December. The dealer bought the car a month earlier from a Tesla auction, with both “Enhanced Autopilot” and “Full Self Driving Mode” features intact

> TESLA: Tesla has recent identified instances of customers being incorrectly configured for Autopilot versions that they did not pay for. Since, there was an audit done to correct these instances. Your vehicle is one of the vehicles that was incorrectly configured for Autopilot. We looked back at your purchase history and unfortunately Full-Self Driving was not a feature that you had paid for.

So Buyer 1 bought a vehicle from Tesla that in fact had a feature. Buyer 1 then sold to Buyer 2, advertising this feature. Now Tesla is saying "Full-Self Driving was not a feature that you had paid for". That's incorrect under any interpretation of the events. Tesla could say that it wasn't a feature that Buyer 1 paid for, but Buyer 2 definitely paid for it because it was advertised as having the feature and that would have impacted his willingness to pay for the vehicle.

The way Tesla has worded this makes it seem like they would potentially disable features for people who buy Teslas used — regardless of whether the first owner paid for that feature — on the grounds that "X was not a feature that you had paid for".

I don't see how the $8,000 (or less, since it's a used vehicle?) that Tesla would get from this would be worth this terrible publicity.

Interestingly, they also said that you can’t get refunds for accidental purchases because you can’t just pay for a new roof on your house and then ask for a refund after it’s done (or some analogy like that).

Yeah no that’s bullshit, software can totally be removed, as we see here.

> Tesla could say that it wasn't a feature that Buyer 1 paid for

Tesla sold the car to Buyer 1 (the dealer) with the feature enabled. I think that means that it was in fact a feature that Buyer 1 paid for, even if they didn't purchase the feature in a separate transaction.

If you sell someone a house with a roof, you don't get to go back and say "sorry I just noticed that the roof upgrade was never purchased for this house so I'm going to remove the roof unless you pay another $6000."

Exactly. All Tesla is doing here is destroying the resale value of their cars.

If Ford sells me a car that has ADAS installed, it's listed on the sticker, and the features work, then the price is completely immaterial and if they later try to disable it remotely I can't imagine the courts would look favorably on that.

This just killed any remaining desire I might have had to buy anything from Tesla.

> Exactly. All Tesla is doing here is destroying the resale value of their cars.

Not just the resale value, but the value, full stop. If I buy a car, I'm more worried, at least in the short term, about its features ceasing to work for me than I am about their not working for the next buyer.

This article doesn't make clear if the sticker on the first sale listed this feature. I think this could be relevant if Tesla were dealing with Buyer 1, but totally irrelevant with regard to Buyer 2 (who would have never seen the sticker from the first sale).

> This article doesn't make clear if the sticker on the first sale listed this feature.

See the Jalopkin article which makes it clear that it did by showing the Monroney sticker from Tesla's auction to the dealer: https://jalopnik.com/tesla-remotely-removes-autopilot-featur...

There is no Monroney sticker for an auctioned car. Monroney stickers only come on new cars, not on used ones.

I could see an argument that Buyer 1 was accidentally given this feature, if it was not advertised as present, and if there was no way for Buyer 1 to know the feature was enabled at that time (auctions probably don't have test drives).

Under those circumstances, the fact that it was in fact enabled was sort of a windfall to Buyer 1. If Tesla could have pulled it back and notified Buyer 1 prior to the subsequent sale to Buyer 2, maybe this wouldn't seem so bad. But to hit Buyer 2 with this — especially since Buyer 2 is a person, not a business — makes this very unsavory.

> I could see an argument that Buyer 1 was accidentally given this feature, if it was not advertised as present

That's not what happened here. Tesla specifically advertised the car as having these features when selling it to the dealer. See the image of the Monroney sticker half way down this page: https://jalopnik.com/tesla-remotely-removes-autopilot-featur...

Is Monroney the auction company?

Its the name of the window sticker you see in new cars that shows the features, mileage, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroney_sticker

One issue that I have with that explanation is that the Monroney may not necessarily be the sole contract between Tesla and the dealer. Without hearing the dealer's side of the story, this part is hard to know conclusively.

The Monroney sticker is only valid for new cars. Yes, the car had FSD when it was new. What Tesla alleges is that when they re-sold the car at auction, they didn’t include FSD.

Let’s say a car had a motor swap from a V8 to a V6, and is then sold at auction. Pointing at the Monroney sticker to say the car was sold with a V8 is not relevant.

Except it wasn't swapped ,it had the v8 in it, as also advertised, and then post auction they broke into your garage and swapped for the v6 because they were unhappy with their final sales price. If the sticker was on the car uncorrected, I beelieve it would hold up in court as advertising.

My mind also went to the PR cost. Why try to go after their customers for their own mistake? The customer didn’t choose the pricing structure, they did. Put it on the P&L, move on and do better.

> I don't see how the $8,000 (or less, since it's a used vehicle?) that Tesla would get from this would be worth this terrible publicity.

Isn't Larry Ellison on the board for Tesla now? Pretty sure the terrible publicity Oracle commonly gets hasn't bothered them in the slightest.

Autopilot must be a really high-margin feature for Tesla. $7k for basically a remotely-managed software license the end-user has no real control over. Once the costs of development, maintenance, and labor are recouped, then each successive AP activation is a big extra margin for Tesla over the normal vehicle price.

The entire "Autopilot" feature is technical ability driven by marketing to pump more money out of their car sales. Good business for Tesla, but a shitty thing to do to consumers to treat autopilot as an owner-dependent feature and not as a feature that could be handed off. That's one of the biggest negatives to having cars that can innately phone home to the manufacturer - it gives Tesla the power to giveth and taketh away at their discretion, and leave the car and consumer S.O.L.

> That's one of the biggest negatives to having cars that can innately phone home to the manufacturer

Versus buying a dumb car and never getting upgrades?

I'll take the "risk" to get sentry/dog/camping mode as free updates vs having to buy a new car every time I want a new feature.

I can really live without updating my car. Last year I used an electric company car to drive home. Or at least that was the plan. After half of the way a warning light flashed up and the display told me to stop the car as soon as possible. That I did. It completely shut down after stopping. Nothing worked anymore besides warning lights, otherwise it was completely dead. Had to leave the car behind and walk home (short trip, I was just lazy because winter).

Next day in the morning I tried to start it up and it actually worked again. The display just shortly displayed 'update complete'. Made me laugh. I believe the error was related to the battery being low while it was really cold outside and the update notification was unrelated. But I guess you could call that "camping mode".

Still left me with an appreciation for my old car, which is too old and stupid to receive updates and is really dependable without me treating it that well.

That sounds like a real life nightmare to me. I have to be able to depend on my transportation. It’s going to be excessively costly and stressful for me to rely on someone else in that case. Completely unacceptable behavior from a car.

"Had to leave the car behind and walk home"

Funny anecdote but imagine someone with mobility issues getting stuck in the same situation.

In this case, though, the "upgrade" was the loss of a core feature.

The chance of winning camping mode is not worth the risk of losing autopilot, for most people.

The guy didn't pay for autopilot...

He purchased a car which was advertised as including autopilot. That sounds a lot like paying for autopilot to me.

Dumb cars are nice. My car is so dumb that I can start it without a battery, so long as I have a sufficiently steep hill or a few people to push it.

My car is so dumb that it doesn't brick itself when I change the suspension or put a bigger turbo on it. Though it might send a piston into orbit.

You don't need to be nannied by your car.

Further, it takes a naive level of trust to be okay with an "essential", non-subscription item depending on the benevolent existence of a 3rd party. Be it vehicles, machinery, firearms, combine harvesters or front door lock.

Even if you can start it without a battery in there please don't. The battery keeps the voltage down and without it - even if it is otherwise empty or unusable - you could easily damage the electronics in your car.

Yes, but if it's a choice between getting my car started and having to redo the electronics (which I can do with 3rd party parts, as I please) or getting stranded on the highway, I am happy to have the ability to choose.

Sure, but it is just about leaving it connected. Your car will jump start fine like that anyway. I take it you don't lose your battery on the highway :)

> the end-user has no real control over

End user has the same control as over any feature of the car.

If you buy Tesla and then buy FSD and then sell that car to someone else, FSD stays with the car. It would be absurd if it worked any other way.

In this case, the car was sold back to Tesla, a dealer bought it from Tesla and sold it to someone. Tesla determined that the car was configured with FSD even though the user never paid for it.

Now it's a he said / she said situation.

The user got screwed because he lost FSD that he thought he had.

The question is: was he screwed by the dealer (who mis-represented availability of FSD) or was he screwed by Tesla (who mis-represented availability of FSD to the dealer). Or maybe the dealer misunderstood.

Either way, this should be straightforward to resolve.

The buyer should be made whole by the dealer, because dealer sold the car.

The dealer should be made whole by Tesla (if Tesla indeed misrepresented the car).

All parties have relevant documents so it should be clear who's responsible for what.

> End user has the same control as over any feature of the car. If you buy Tesla and then buy FSD and then sell that car to someone else, FSD stays with the car. It would be absurd if it worked any other way.

People are having FSD disappear from their cars and having to produce invoices showing they bought it in order to have it restored. How do you do that when you bought it used?

https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/lost-fsd-earlier-thi...

You have misinterpreted what the article documents:

> In this case, the car was sold back to Tesla, a dealer bought it from Tesla and sold it to someone. Tesla determined that the car was configured with FSD even though the user never paid for it.

The dealer purchased the car from the manufacturer and the window sticker (required by law to be provided by the manufacturer to prevent dealer fraud) listed the “FSD” feature as included with the device. The purchaser bought it with the understanding that that list of features was correct. The dealer had no say in the matter either way.

You don’t have to take my word for this: the Monroney sticker is actually in the linked article.

Legally this is unambiguously fraud by the manufacturer.

I agree with your analysis - the beuyer did pay for the feature, but there is one detail you got wrong: a manufacturer Monroney is only required for new cars.

But Tesla sold the car to the dealer as a NEW car, slightly defective, hence the sticker.

The customer needs to go to the dealership and get their money back, and the dealership needs to go to Tesla and get their own money back

Unless I am woefully misinformed, Tesla is absolutely 100% not allowed to sell a lemon buyback as a new car. It's a used car, and on top of that it has to be disclosed as a lemon buyback.

I'm not familiar with US laws around these stickers, but that doesn't sound like a get out for Tesla. Not being legally required to provide a sticker doesn't (or shouldn't) change the fact that, if the manufacturer provides a sticker anyway, it must be accurate.

Agreed. It may not have the slam-dunk legal authority that a monroney sticker on a new car would have, but it is still documentation that shows features and a VIN, and including it in the car is tantamount to claiming that the car has these specifications. It was foolish of Tesla to include it.

> It was foolish of Tesla to include it

I think it was correct for Tesla to include it and I think their policy of non-transferable licenses is exploitative. Not legal in the EU but they can get away with that crap in the USA.

I'm surprised that they removed it because it's on the monroney sticker.

I bought a BMW that was supposed to get the new/shorter 36 month maintenance included. But the sticker was still referencing the 48 month plan. I didn't even notice.

BMW must have ran an audit, and know what they did? They honored the sticker and said something like "Your monro sticker was wrong and said you get 48 months maintenance, so you get 48 months maintenance"

I think this just goes back to how they are inexperienced and not a real dealer. I'd expect they'd lose any court battle surrounding it. It's the whole point of the sticker.

They have an agreement with most of their customers to skip real courts and go to a private court that they pick.

Surprised why? Companies do illegal shit all the time and get away with it. Just recently Lenovo did not cancel my order for a p1 laptop after almost two months, way longer than the 30 days of their estimate and allowed buy federal law. What can I do? Nothing. Just like the guy in this story. He has no recourse against Tesla and I doubt he'll get it from the dealer either. They will definitely win in court. The dealer probably will too. The customer will get stuck with this.

When laws aren't enforced, their existence is irrelevant. We are seeing this with this monroney sticker and I'm sure this is the standard, default policy of Tesla. Hell, even if there's a class action lawsuit, Tesla will not admit fault, they will not change, and the only people who will get actual compensation are the lawyers. It won't hurt Tesla so civil penalties are just as ineffective as the law in this case. Corporate profits over everything is the norm. Let's not pretend that the law or civil suits get in the way of that now. Hell, can you even sue Tesla, or do they require arbitration?

> What can I do? Nothing.

I assume you used a credit card? Seems quite likely they can take care of that for you.

They are refusing to refund it. Yes, I can charge back and will. But I was referring to what can I do in response to Lenovo. There is a law but it's useless. So I just get fucked over with no recourse. I can't sue then and the ftc doesn't give a fuck and won't pursue the issue so they will keep fucking people over since there is no recourse. I cannot get justice.

On a brand new car it's not negotiable, the Monroney sticker always wins. Always. No manufacturer would have been any different because there is plenty of precedent and they would have lost 100% of the time. But in the case of a used car, that sticker is no longer legally binding, which is why this Tesla situation is even a scandal to begin with.

> It’s a peculiar situation that raises hard questions

I disagree. They sold something, and the resell does not change anything in their side of the calculation. It's not like due to that sale, their backend suddenly has to do more work than if the car had stayed with the original buyer.

So the only "argument" tesla can really bring forward why they want this customer to pay for those features a second time is "because we can make them."

Not a hard question in my book.

From reading the article, it doesn't sound like Tesla actually "sold" the features to the original owner (which went to auction, and then was sold).

Instead, it sounds like Tesla goofed and enabled some features that should never have been enabled, and then clawed them back after the car changed hands several times (original owner -> auction, auction -> dealer, dealer -> customer).

The problem is that with so many parties involved, nobody is going to jump up and make it right for the final customer. It sucks for the customer.

The solution? Tesla needs a feature where resellers can initiate an audit of the car and Tesla can provide a certificate of the features that it commits to supporting. That would greatly reduce these kinds of problems going forward.

Those options were listed on the Monroney sticker (in addition to actually being installed). Those are required by federal law to be accurate. Anybody who bought the car either new or used, would expect anything listed on the Monroney to be part of the original specs.

So, if I buy a car and rip out the radio, and then resell it, a used buyer down the road should refer to the Monroney sticker and demand that the seller put in a radio?

Can't tell if you're serious or trolling, but giving you the benefit of the doubt... No, this is like selling me the car, stealing it's radio a week later, and then telling me via email that you really didn't mean to include the radio.

The Monroney sticker is just proof that the car WAS ACTUALLY SOLD WITH THE OPTION, which contradicts Tesla's claim that the car was not sold with the option.

The car was sold with that option to the original owner. It was then sold back to Tesla at some point, and they (in theory) removed that option, though it seems like they failed to perform the update on the car to make that go through.

The Monroney sticker shows that the car had that option when new. It doesn't apply to resale, ever - there is no Monroney sticker for used cars. Nothing says it has to have that option forever - Tesla can remove it if they want, when they own the car, just like they could take out the back seats, or the radio, or put in a bigger battery, or lock it into permanent valet mode.

I am a little concerned that they issued the update after the car left their possession, so it really hinges on what they told the buyer. If they incorrectly represented to the buyer that the car had that option, through some part of the sales contract, then they definitely need to honor that. But nobody has provided any evidence of that. If they were simply silent on the issue, then it's more gray. The analogy I've given elsewhere is if a car was equipped with a lifetime Sirius satellite subscription that is supposed to expire on transfer, and then Sirius cancels it after the sale, then that seems fair.

You are correct that the Monroney only applies to new car sales, so it's not part of this sale other than serving as a piece of information about the original build.

But, a buyer who saw the sticker would reasonably think "oh, this car came with FSD," [physically uses FSD to confirm], "Yup, has FSD! Cool, it's worth $4000 more to me now." Whether or not the sales contract listed FSD is irrelevant if the car left Tesla with the option installed.

> Instead, it sounds like Tesla goofed and enabled some features that should never have been enabled, and then clawed them back after the car changed hands several times (original owner -> auction, auction -> dealer, dealer -> customer).

Not that you're arguing for Tesla, as far as I can tell, but this sort of thing doubtless also happens with non-IoT devices, and yet manufacturers of those don't feel that they can come and repossess the parts that they didn't want you to have. (The grocery store, for example, frequently has notices that ads were misprinted, and they won't honour the advertised price; but they can't track me down afterwards and take back 30% of the produce if I got it at the reduced price.) This is not a new problem; it's a new, and bad, solution to a problem that should be the manufacturer's alone.

In the UK at least the customer would be well protected (assuming that the dealer they bought the car from was still in business etc).

The car was not as described, so the dealer they bought it from would have to compensate them appropriately for that as contract has been breached.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15/section/11/enact...

In the US probably too, but the customer would have to sue the dealer to get what he paid for.

The dealer purchased the car from Tesla at an auction according to Jalopnik, and as another commenter pointed out, the feature is documented on the Monroney sticker. It doesn't matter whether or not the first owner paid for the features or not. The car was re-purchased from Tesla (even though it was the dealer buying at an auction.) Tesla advertised that feature to the customer [the dealership], and it's value took the feature in to account.

Whether the original owner paid for the feature or not is irrelevant. The dealership paid for the feature, and it's on the Monroney sticker. Tesla can either honor the claims of the Monroney sticker, or face the consequences.

The real kicker is that before Taleb brought it to light, Tesla support was telling people who accidentally purchased the Autopilot feature that "sorry, we can't undo the purchase/the feature is added, and it's permanent".

It's probably accurate in that they (Tesla support) can't/aren't allowed to undo the purchase.

"Can't" does not mean the same thing as "it's against policy."

"Permanent" does not mean the same thing as "we can reverse this at whim, but only when it suits us and not you."

And like that debacle, maybe what's about to happen is Elon is realizing what an ongoing PR disaster this is going to be, with the number of used Teslas going up every day. Any moment, perhaps, he will tweet a policy change.

Here’s the inside scoop - older vehicles used to be much easier to enable autopilot and other paid features, so many places online sold much cheaper upgrades to autopilot and FSD. Tesla has a record of all purchases and the factory state of the vehicle. If the software has been illegally activated they are within their rights to disable the upgrade. This has nothing to do with the license being tied to a person, free supercharging is the only thing tied to a user.

Think of it as buying a concert ticket - you get to the venue and they tell you it’s counterfeit. Do you blame the venue or the seller? If they had bought the vehicle from Tesla it would have been a very different story.

And for the uninformed folks having a cry about disabled supercharging on salvage titles. Supercharging is automatically disabled on all cars when a serious collision is detected. This is to prevent a rapid and massive o rush of charging current flowing into potentially damaged batteries or HV wiring. Supercharging is a massive amount of energy dumped into the vehicle at once, hundreds times more than a regular home outlet, if something is wrong in the car it could start a fire. The majority of salvage titles have had an airbag deployment and this is one of the triggers for disabling supercharging, salvage title or not. Service will inspect the vehicle and if satisfied of the safety will enable charging again. I think it’s a brilliant feature, and very safely focused.

The Monroney sticker shows the car was sold new with FSD enabled. Are you claiming the dealership faked the sticker?

I was under the impression that Tesla sold direct and not through dealerships?

This car was a lemon, sent back to Tesla, sold via auction to a normal brick-mortar dealer, who then sold to the end consumer.

The original Monroney sticker had FSD listed as an included option (just like upgrade wheels, or a tow package on a truck). The car delivered with it installed. The car made it through several changes in ownership (orig buyer -> Tesla -> dealer -> final consumer) with it enabled, as indicated on the original spec list. Nobody other than Tesla ever had any reason to believe the option was not included - because, IN FACT, it was included. Until Tesla decided they wanted to repossess it after the fact.

This would be akin to Chevy deciding after sale that the upgrade wheels weren't actually supposed to be installed, and coming to your house in the middle of the day to remove them.

This is a much clearer timeline than I got from the article and it goes against what the GP seems to be claiming. It's very dubious that a fresh account would be in both threads about this event claiming they have the "inside scoop" and implying that the feature was added "illegally". Very shady.

Can you point to the auction paperwork to confirm that Tesla's sales contract with the auction buyer said the car had FSD? It seems to be a critical missing link in the story.

To go along with your narrative, it's not hard to imagine that a car sold used might not have the original upgrade wheels, or might have had the tow package removed.

That's possible, but according to both the dealer and the eventual owner, both were able to use the features... assuming that's true, the contract is irrelevant - the car was sold with the options included, Tesla doesn't get to disable them after the fact because they screwed up.

As noted in other comments, the Monroney only applies to new car sales, so it's not part of this sale other than serving as a piece of information about the original build. A buyer who saw the sticker would reasonably think "oh, this car came with FSD," [tries FSD to confirm], "Yup, has FSD! Cool, it's worth $4000 more to me now."

There is no license agreement by a secondhand buyer.

Why should Tesla be permitted to reach into a car I bought from the classifieds, and reconfigured using my own skill (flipping a bit from "disabled" to "enabled")?

Consumer protection should be strengthened so that this kind of behavior is illegal.

> Think of it as buying a concert ticket [...]

A more appropriate analogy would be if their seats were already reserved and couldn't be resold.

The hardware is already there, Tesla is just being (as another poster noted) a "Authoritarian Technocratic hell."

I mean the hardware to run photoshop is in your computer, so I guess Adobe should just give it away?

The hardware runs the passive safety features of the car includes as standard in all vehicles. Forward collision warning, lane departure, emergency braking. It’s not a matter of the autopilot computer only being used for autopilot

> I mean the hardware to run photoshop is in your computer, so I guess Adobe should just give it away?

Whose fault is that? On multiple occasions, Tesla themselves have said "All vehicles are equipped with all the hardware needed for FSD, it's just a software upgrade".

_We_ are not saying the hardware is/should be free (obviously there was a cost at some point), _Tesla_ is saying it's in the baseline cost.

Very safety focused- Sure, now for the open market part. How about we try to find a third party shop that has access to repair and re-enable that Tesla's Supercharger mode?

Across the USA there are shops working on exotic cars, hybrid vehicles and full EV's. You dont hear about Nissan all electrics or BMW all electrics exploding all over the place. Its insane to claim Tesla's are so advanced and so magical that an ASE certified mechanic cant work on them.

If FoMoCo or GM did this everyone would claim Antitrust. MS cant force you to use IE, but Tesla, they are the golden boy on wall street and no one is willing to hold them to the same standards as other Automotive manufacturers.

Tesla has a bunch of certified body shops and they have the correct software to diagnose and modify the vehicle...check your receipts.

Same for bmw, and all other exotic cars. Hell even Apple.

Tesla has locked down their third party repair options to only where required by law. The deliver the minimum viable product. And since you mention apple https://apple.slashdot.org/story/20/02/06/2015209/apples-ind...

Since you seem to be under the impression that Teslas are friendly to work on please take a moment and Enjoy this lovely youtuber who spends his time pissing off Tesla: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfV0_wbjG8KJADuZT2ct4SA

Also on the apple front: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl2mFZoRqjw_ELax4Yisf6w

"If the software has been illegally activated they are within their rights to disable the upgrade."

But the article says that the features were enabled when Tesla sold the car to the dealer at the auction. If Tesla sells the car with the feature, however it has been activated, then it behooves them to not remove it. Otherwise they are making their listing of the car fraudulent.

> Do you blame the venue or the seller? If they had bought the vehicle from Tesla it would have been a very different story.

The article states the following:

> The dealer bought the car a month earlier from a Tesla auction, with both “Enhanced Autopilot” and “Full Self Driving Mode” features intact, according to Jalopnik, which reviewed documents related to the car’s ownership and sale.

Tesla chose to sell the car with these features enabled and then disabled them after the sale.

I get what you're saying and I appreciate the insider perspective, but I have to say as a customer the idea that the manufacturer can change my vehicle after I bought it is such a huge no way, red flag kind of thing. Maybe the feature was stolen, or accidentally activated, or whatever, but no part of me is comfortable having a car where Tesla can just turn something off remotely.

People keep referring to the Monroney sticker here. It’s irrelevant. Yes, when the car was new, it came with FSD. Then Tesla took it back as a trade, and while it was in their possession, they deleted the features. They are well within their right to do that, since they own the car.

There is no Monroney sticker for used car sales, so the one the article shows is a reprint of what the car had when sold new, which is no longer accurate. Just as it would be inaccurate for a gas car if someone had done an engine swap from a V8 to a diesel.

The one and only issue is whether Tesla represented that the car came with FSD in the sale at auction to the dealer. If they didn’t, then the dealer doesn’t have a leg to stand on here, unfortunately.

Another analogy - I might buy a car at auction where the Sirius radio works, because the old owner forgot to disable it. If they disable it later, then I would only have a claim if the seller claimed that the car came with lifetime free Sirius. Just because it worked when I bought it, doesn’t mean it will keep working, if it wasn’t intended to be included with the car.

As others have noted, Tesla does not remove features except when they are the owner of the car. The only exception being, “lifetime free supercharging” does not transfer with change of ownership, except on the oldest Model S cars out there.

Tesla seems to have admitted that they removed this feature when they weren't the owner, according to the picture of the in the invoice that says AP was removed on Nov 18, after Tesla had sold the car (on Nov 15).

I imagine their actions were based on the idea that AP is software and not included in the sale of the car. That's how computers are sold, but it is tremendously surprising for a car and a dangerous precedent.

A modern car (especially a Tesla) is driven by software. If used car buyers don't own the software in the car, do they even own the firmware that drives the car?

You are correct. I should have said Tesla INTENDED to remove the feature while they were in possession. Perhaps they removed it on paper, but didn’t go through the step of removing it via a SW update. More to the point, they don’t arbitrarily yank features off of cars in the field, though of course they have the ability via SW update to do so - they could lock me out of my car right now if they wanted to, or set the stereo to play Baby Shark on repeat at max volume and disable the volume controls. All possible.

The point remains, if they intended to remove it, and notified the purchaser that the car didn’t have the feature, then I would side with Tesla, though it’s indeed very sloppy. Again - it would be as if I moved into a house and the lawn guy kept coming for two months because the previous owner forgot to cancel the service. On the other hand, if the car was represented to the first buyer (the dealer) as having FSD, then Tesla is on the hook.

I’m sure the lawyers will figure it out ...

> and notified the purchaser that the car didn’t have the feature

If you mean before the sale, then I agree. If they clearly told the buyer in advance that FSD wasn't included (despite the sticker saying otherwise), then not actually disabling it until a few days later isn't an issue.

But if there were evidence of that, I think Tesla would have responded. I'm sure a few people there read Hacker News.

And I fear the only thing the lawyers will sort out is who has more money to pay lawyers.

No, this didn’t happen. It was on the window sticker, and the feature was never removed from the vehicle until after the new owner already had it. Tesla may be within their rights to remove it while they own it and then sell it as a car without, but they didn’t remove it. They sold it with it. Then later they removed it. That’s unacceptable.

It’s sloppy, yes. To me, it comes down to what they did or didn’t tell the first buyer in the sale paperwork.

If they were silent on the issue or listed the car as having AP, AP worked at the time of sale, and the car was originally equipped with AP, then I side with the dealer. If the paperwork indicated no AP, or listed all the features on the car but not AP, then the dealer made an error.

Doesn’t matter. Auction vehicles are sold as is.

If it needed repairs, it would have been the buyer’s problem. If the seller auctioned something for too low a price, or unintentionally gave the buyer more than intended, too bad.

Once it is the new buyer’s property, they have no right to revoke what is legally owned by the winner of the auction.

Looking at it from the original buyers perspective, When they sold/traded in their used Model S to Tesla did the price they get take into account the self drive feature, or do Tesla pay the same trade in regardless of software features? If Tesla aren't buying back the feature then it makes it even less enticing to buy it on a new car as it has 100% depreciation! If they're paying for it at trade in then removing it before they sell it on then thats kinda fair enough its a bit like a dealer taking in a car with fancy wheels and putting stock ones on before they sell it on, sucks for the used buyer if they then have to pay full new price to add that feature later but... Although in this case it seems the issue is that Tesla sold a used car with a feature and then decided to take that feature back, which is theft in my book pure and simple.

It sounds like it was returned due to lemon law, which I imagine means the original buyer received a full refund. That's probably also the reason the feature was removed - they probably meant to disable it before selling it on. However, they didn't, and that's their mistake to accept - they can't just revoke features after they've already sold it without agreement from the buyer.

Can you point at a source for the auction paperwork? The article doesn't have it.

The Monroney paperwork is provided by the manufacturer as a legally binding assertion of the features the vehicle was sold with - there's a copy of that in the article.

That's for new cars. This wasn't a new car.

I'm not 100% sure of the law, but I wouldn't expect that to make a difference. The manufacturer may not be legally required to include the document if the vehicle isn't new, but if they choose to include one, I expect that it would still be required to be accurate and would still be legally binding.

> do Tesla pay the same trade in regardless of software features?

Yes, they do not give you any value on a trade-in for things like FSD. This car in particular, however, was a lemon buy-back, not a trade-in.

Tesla is kind of hostile to second hand market. No spare parts , no service history info, unauthorized repair disables charging etc.. Basically Apple mentality.

Car with a good maintenance should last 20 years. Not like a phone that gets thrown away every 5 years.

This is outdated. Tesla now publishes a full parts catalog. You can call up the parts desk at any Tesla Service Center and order whatever part you like (for the most part, a few critical parts are restricted). I believe they do ask for a VIN number, though.

Have you actually tried that?

Unless its changed even more recently - they _do_ publish a parts catalog.

And every single item, down to the most commodity screw/bolt doesn't list a price, just says "Contact Tesla for Sales". And according to at least a few people who have indeed contacted them, "Sorry, that part is not purchasable".

Basically as if a state said they had to make parts available to be (potentially) purchased online, and they had followed the very letter of the law.

Doesn’t Tesla understand that this behavior diminishes the value of their current customers’ cars. If I currently own a Tesla and want to sell it, who would want to buy it knowing that Tesla could remove features anytime. They have just decimated the value of their cars. The market will correct their behavior.

This is just not true. Anyone who owns a Tesla car can go to their owner's page at tesla.com and see exactly what features the car was sold with.

If Tesla were thinking ahead, they'd have already realized that FSD should be offered as a license assigned to the user, not the car. Someone who has $7K of sunk cost into the brand itself is definitely going to lean towards a Tesla as their next vehicle, if buying a Ford/Kia/Hyundia/Jaguar/Audi/Porsche/whatever means losing that license.

I'm not sure how anyone at Tesla thinks it's a good idea to remove options from a 2-3 year old car.

They don't. According to Tesla that feature was enabled by mistake and never paid for.

Whether you believe Tesla, is another matter but it's not like they remove features people paid for.

>They don't

They don't think it's a good idea but they do it regardless?

Nobody ever got fired for doing exactly what the process said they should.

Someone in the chain that handled this ticket probably just didn't realize this was a case of broken process that would lead to a newsworthy bad outcome so they didn't escalate it and instead did what the process told them to. Maybe there was a perceived bigger fire to fight that day or something. It's really hard to build a support system that is highly averse to any perceived risk or monetary loss to the company without having things like these slip through the inevitable cracks in your processes.

+1- and so many companies have gotten themselves in trouble for this. Some employee follows a policy blindly (even when it shouldn't apply or should be escalated) and then the PR blows up...

> Someone in the chain that handled this ticket probably just didn't realize this was a case of broken process that would lead to a newsworthy bad outcome

All the more reason to avoid Teslas and any other equipment that can be modified remotely after the sale.

If I believe Tesla thought that is the case, it's still an unholy PR trainwreck to do this. Who signed off on it?

Business 101: if you give someone something, even by accident, it's NEVER going to end well if you try to take it back. You have two options: accept it as a sunk cost, or lose the customer forever.

> or lose the customer forever.

And probably lose several future customers as well.

Removing it after it was returned to them, and restoring it to a standard model as far as possible for maximum resale opportunity, fine. Selling it on to a dealer, including the additional features as part of the package, and then revoking those features them after the sale, is incredibly stupid and sounds illegal.

If you're thinking of buying a new Tesla take this into account, as it will probably affect the resale value

It won't.

When you buy FSD and sell the car, the FSD stays with the car.

This is a muddy situation where car was sold back to Tesla, dealer bought it from Tesla and sold to a third party.

Dealer claims it bought the car with FSD from Tesla. Tesla claims the car never had FSD and it was enabled by mistake.

Someone is lying but it's a one off situation.

You don't loose $7k feature when you sell the car, it stays with the car.

>Tesla claims the car never had FSD and it was enabled by mistake.

How on earth can the car both never had FSD and having FSD enabled by mistake? The car either had FSD, or it didn't.

All Teslas are built with FSD hardware included. If you pay the extra $7k or whatever it is, they just enable it for you in software. In here, they are just arguing that it was enabled by mistake and the customer never paid for it in the first place.

That's like how the BMW E46 comes with cruise control. All of the circuits to enable cruise control are in the cars from factory (except maybe not for the earliest model years). However, if you chose not to get a multifunction steering wheel, you can't activate it.

What if a customer ordered a car without the multifunction steering wheel and BMW accidentally built it with it. Couple of years forwards and someone notices that for some reason, the order sheet and the build sheet do not match. The owner takes their car to be serviced and the BMW technician switches the multifunction steering wheel panel with the blank steering wheel panel.

How can BMW at that point explain that the customer never paid for cruise control and therefore they never had it? The manufacturer shouldn't punish the consumer for their mistakes.

Which honestly doesn't sound relevant to the purchaser. My understanding is that the Monroney sticker stipulates exactly what features are included in the vehicle, as provided by the manufacturer. By purchasing the vehicle, the customer has paid for exactly those features.

This is like them saying "Oh, we forgot to charge your dealer you for the premium interior and lighting" (which is listed on the same sheet as a $5000 option) - your response would quite rightly be "Tough, I bought it from the dealer at the agreed price based on the features listed, it's mine now"

Absolutely, and as others have already pointed out, it's on the dealer to put this right. Either refund the customer, pay for the upgrade, or take the car back.

I think Tesla might have turned it on to recertify the vehicle before auction, and forgot to turn it off.

And a system's audit revealed the discrepancy, and rather than just eating the loss, they decided to turn off the feature.

Or maybe it wasn't malicious, and the OTA update system had it listed as non-FSD and sent it an update which bricked the FSD.

Except the FSD was also on the new-car Monroney sticker, as shown in the article. As far as anybody outside Tesla can tell, the car was originally sold with FSD. It appears the owner had it, used it, then got caught in this update nightmare.

Ah. Missed that part. Thought it was just after it was sold back that it got turned on

> You don't loose $7k feature when you sell the car, it stays with the car.

Well, seems like FSD is not something that is really tied to the car but a checkbox in some configuration for the car.

Tesla gives, Tesla takes.

That's kind of scary.

(sometimes accidently)

If a car manufacturer accidentally sells a car with an upgraded interior priced as a non-upgraded interior, once it's gone, they can't chase down whoever owns it and swap out the seat leather.

They fucked up, too bad, so sad, try again next time.

Turns out that’s not the case with software

A decent lawyer will make the case that it either is or Tesla should be in the hook to renegotiate every upgrade, every time the vehicle resells.

I am pretty sure it is. Stealing something that someone legally bought from you back again because you made a mistake when calculating the sales price is blatantly illegal, regardless of whether the "stealing process" includes breaking up the car door and ripping out seats or unchecking some checkbox in a remote management software.

The latter is much easier, but not an iota less illegal from the viewpoint of the law.

Which is why the last car I bought, I intentionally chose something that had practically zero software.

> You don't loose $7k feature when you sell the car, it stays with the car.

... revokable with a change in the EULA? Does the EULA have an arbitration clause?

It would be a dumb move to pull this trick, but then again, what they did here was a dumb move. You can't trust the bean-counters to be reasonable when they see a way to get more beans.

> it's a one off situation.

Doesn't matter. The fact that Tesla can alter the vehicle according to their whims makes the car undesirable to me.

can't imagine there will be many car brands left without that capability in 10-15 years.

You're probably right. That also doesn't matter. I won't be buying them.

Too late, I already bought one a few months back. And I am absolutely concerned about what incidents like this will do to the resale value. Thankfully I don't have any optional features like FSD on my car, but still, perception is more important than reality and reduced demand will definitely have an effect on the value.

This is absurd. It’s theft, plain and simple. Tesla wants to habe each owner of the car pay the $7,000 software update option, yet when someone pays for it, they refuse to transfer the license to the buyer’s next car.

I'm not sure this is the case here.

I think they're implying the original owner may not have paid for autopilot, and perhaps had it activated through illicit means, like persuading an employee to tweak a database.

Be that as it may, in the meantime the car returned to Tesla's ownership who then advertised it as having those options. They need to reactivate it for this car (forever), apologize for the misunderstanding and then case is closed.

> who then advertised it as having those options

That's what the dealer claims.

Tesla claims this feature was never bought for this car.

You can choose to believe one party or the other, but don't present that belief as a fact.

Well I did read the article and it has what seems to be a sales sheet for the car from the auction, on which you can see those features listed.

It is a bit confusing that some are marked included and some have a price tag, but if you add up all the price tags you get the advertised price, so I think it's reasonable to assume that everything listed there is included in the purchase.

There are also screenshots, supposedly from the car, showing that the car has those features activated.

Now, I'm not going to independently verify the claims the article makes and I'm for now assuming it's presenting the case in a fairly unbiased way.

It seems to me then that Tesla's position is that since the activation was done without payment and their knowledge (again, I believe the article for now), then they have the right to deactivate it.

And I would agree with them if anyone other than Tesla themselves had sold the car at the auction. But they did, they said the features were there and they have the authority to add them, so they should. They didn't verify the car properly before selling and that's on them.

The fact that this was a lemon law buyback suggests to me that the original owner did pay for the feature, but then got a full refund. Tesla intended to restore it to standard features but accidentally sold it on before doing so, and in doing so asserted that it still included that feature.

Legally, I think that leaves them in the same position as if they'd intended to remove the premium interior but sold it on before doing so - tough.

If I have a computer with a big pile of really expensive software on it licensed to me, and I sell you that piece of hardware, without formatting the disks, does that mean I’ve sold you those licenses?

I think any reasonable take here is “no, you did not”.

A Tesla is a computer that just happens to have wheels.

In this case, it sounds like someone bought a second hand computer that happened to have an unlicensed installation of some software, and the license was revoked. Perhaps the car was ex-demo before the owner who auctioned it off did so.

Now, there’s a separate question around the communications over this, and the dealer/end customer being mis-sold, and they’ve stumbled there, but this is more of a gap between expectations (it’s a car!) vs reality (it’s a computer).

If the computer is specialised to the extent that the software is only useful on that one computer, and you have no ongoing use for the software without the computer, and perhaps you even advertised the software license as part of your sale...

Hell yes you transferred that license.

I think this analogy depends entirely on communication and your ability to defend what you think of as your property. Applying the reverse logic, is it theft if the person uses that software that you sold them access to?

As far as I'm concerned, someone's property is what they can defend as their property. If someone has access to a license that you didn't intend to sell them, but also doesn't impair your ability to use it, then you now both have that property.

Otherwise, if you clearly communicate that it's part of the deal, but then keep a backdoor in, and remove the software from the person's new computer, that's theft.

The only way I'd argue that the software would remain yours after the transaction and when you forgot to exclude it, is if you maintained access to it somehow. Whether the person keeps it or not is up to their goodwill or ability to use the licenses. In the old days, if a computer came with a Photoshop license on it, it's yours.

Could Tesla owners really keep the FSD 'license' when selling a car and use it with their next Tesla? I have never read about anything like that. I thought the features were tied to the car, not to the owner.

it seems in this case the expensive software was never licensed to begin with. It was on the PC by accident so to speak.

Its like buying a PC with an internet activated piece of software which is later deactivated remotely because the software detected it was never licensed.

BUT Tesla and others in the chain should not have listed it as an extra and those are now required to make this right. This could mean accept the return of this product, or leave the feature activated

That's really not how it is sold.

If you want to stick with the computer metaphor, it's like Tesla sold you a computer with some paid-for firmware options enabled, tied to that device, that cannot be transferred to any other device, then pulls them post-resale.

Tesla needs to pick: either it's software licensed to you as a person and therefore transferrable to another car, or it's software tied to a specific car and therefore transferrable to another person.

I would say this is very similar to Cisco saying that the IOS license for their switches is non-transferable. You go buy a switch on eBay, and you'll have to pay a license fee to Cisco.

Mind you that this is not legal in Europe. Licenses are transferable regardless of what American corporations say.

Tesla may want to claim it is a computer with wheels but the state disagrees -- you don't have to register a computer but you have to register a car

If you believe that, then Teslas have zero resale value. Unless they state that they will honor their agreements I wouldn't dream of buying one

Even funnier, if you, say, get cancer and die, and you leave your girlfriend your car, she can't have autopilot without ponying up again, even if you lived with each other for decades.

Tesla is another arbiter of control in the guise of being good. Haven’t trusted them for years, would never buy one.

Even since they made autopilot standard, I still find this whole payment structure hard to swallow. I would understand the idea of end of life support or even a monthly subscription because I wholly embrace the idea of more maintainable code and features in cars. It’s not realistic to expect all of that for free in an as of yet imperfect technology. At a bare minimum, the infrastructure needs to be managed and maintained. This is a bit idealistic, but it may hopefully even lead to better industry standardization in the future.

With that in mind, the whole lump-sum pay structure just feels grubby. What if I buy the car, pay for the features, decide I don’t like it and sell it in a short period of time? Granted, it’s likely a poor financial decision on my part, but I’m left with no way to recoup that part of my investment. Rather than being a depreciating asset, it’s not an asset at all. Worse still, tweaks to refund policies are likely to be unsatisfactory. I already said I’m willing to pay something, but the choices I’m provided are to either demand an refund, the process of which feels like wasting everyone’s time involved, or make an arbitrary donation of capital to Tesla, Inc. Meanwhile, the terms continue to change for new buyers and aren’t evenly applied to old or used buyers. Just do the math for me, let me sign up and be done with it. Software is soft, water is wet, etc. If they don’t get this in check, the old guard could eat their lunch like people keep predicting.

Just be glad they let you keep power steering and ABS.

Coming soon: Airbags-As-A-Service.

$1 / minute of driving for the airbag to monitor crash conditions and deploy

And none of it is refunded when you discover it's a Takata airbag that may have killed you when it deployed.

* Full Airbag is not currently complete and will be provided as an over-the-air update at some point in the future

I think it's just a matter of time until Tesla moves to a subscription model. The current model of selling FSD as an early adopter package relies a lot on the promise it will be there soon and the expectation that the value (and price) will go up. If Tesla doesn't deliver on their FSD promises before current owners start looking for their next car, there's a huge risk of disappointment. These will be customers who paid thousands of dollars for FSD functionality that they never got.

Turning FSD into a subscription solves this: allowing customers to take the functionality to their next car keeps the current customer base happy and avoids messing up resale value if Tesla does not manage to deliver FSD on current hardware. It also creates a huge incentive for current owners to make their next car also a Tesla.

Tesla is already starting to offer premium functionality such as entertainment on a subscription model. As soon as FSD is good enough that people actually want to pay monthly for it (and not just the promise of it), I expect Tesla will do the same for FSD (and maybe even for other things like performance upgrades).

But to sell a subscription you have to have a product. You can sell FSD “capability” now, but if they switched that to a subscription they’d have to say “sign up to this list to start paying the subscription when we actually have FSD”

They have a product, it is just misnamed. FSD gets you smart summon, navigate-on-autopilot, AP lane switches, and autopark. It should be called enhanced autopilot, because actual FSD is so far away that nearly all current Teslas will be crushed before it's a real thing.

This reminds me of Sony removing OtherOS from the Playstation 3. Users had to choose between updating their software and losing the ability to run Linux, or never being able to play online or buy a new game. It is outrageous for company to remove advertised features after the fact, and I haven't bought a Sony device since.

This is one of the main reasons I won't buy a Tesla. They can just turn off things you paid for at will.

The other is they won't open up their parts for people to work on their own cars. That's one of the main reasons used Teslas are so expensive. I mean even salvaged Teslas are really expensive.

But in this case Tesla had not been paid for this. Not by anyone.

The title of the article implies that they have, but if you read it you see that they have not.

IMHO that not true:

They sold a car. That car had certain features enabled.

That normally that feature would cost extra or is not explicitly listed in the contract doesn't matter at all. It was enabled in the car so anyone inspecting the car clearly saw the feature when looking for it.

It's like selling a car and then telling the buyer a month later "oh btw. the second row of seats in your car was not listed in the contract (even through you saw it when buying) so we went to your car used our master key to unlock it and removed the seats, you can always get them back by paying another 8,000".

Companies who accidental sell more then they want normally live with that loss and accept it as their error (which it IMHO obviously was).

If I sell you a laptop with a copy of Omnigraffle that I bought using a stolen credit card, and the license gets revoked, who is to blame?

This analogy is wrong because legitimate actors performed every transaction in the chain in a fully legal manner. There was no stolen credit card, no shifty advertising, no nothing that was wrong.

Tesla screwed up.

FSD in an old vehicle like this doesn’t even do anything. It’s a placeholder feature, you would never know if it was on or not, there’s zero customer facing features in the fsd package on -older- vehicles.

Newer vehicles, yes, FSD package has features.

It at least theoretically entitles you to a free upgrade to the newer self driving computer, which then activates the new features.

> But in this case Tesla had not been paid for this. Not by anyone.

Tesla specifically sold the car with these features when it was auctioned: https://jalopnik.com/tesla-remotely-removes-autopilot-featur...

If you fix your Tesla by yourself.. they can just turn off super charging if they want. It's bullshit

>Tesla has recent identified instances of customers being incorrectly configured for Autopilot versions that they did not pay for

Can you "pirate" Autopilot? Like enable it on cars which didn't come with it, where the buyer originally didn't pay?

According to this source, yes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22267407

Maybe original owner pirated it before getting Tesla to buy it back?

The original monroney sticker had EAP and FSD listed, so nobody pirated it.

> Oh hey, we realized our internal inventory system had this car with 16" wheels but it actually has 18".

> We're taking the 18s back. Here are some 16" steelies

Pretty sure you'd get shot in some parts of the world for trying that.

And in other parts of the world, you'd be paying for two sets of legal council and returning a set of 18-inch wheels.

So they basically "accidentally" sold more then they wanted to and then went after the customer (which by now happened to have changed) and forcefully toke it away.

(And yes this can only be described as forcefully taking away something because they never did something like informing the customer that an accident happened and cooperating with that person to resolve it. Normally it would be common for a company which did such a mistake to either just "eat the loss" or sell the remaining part under a 50% and upward discount or so.)

> So they basically "accidentally" sold more then they wanted to and then went after the customer (which by now happened to have changed) and forcefully toke it away.

And who ostensibly paid for it. Tesla can state that it wasn't paid for (I disagree) - the buyer can say "I wouldn't have paid $x if it didn't have FSD, _per the manufacturer sticker_".

Is the software upgrade tied to the car, or the individual? I think something like this will require legislation. If I buy a car with a feature, and I am paying extra for that feature, then I expect it to still be part of the car when I sell it, since that was part of the value to begin with.

If Tesla wants to argue otherwise, that the software is tied to the individual, then I should be able to either:

1) Sell the software itself to whoever

2) Transfer the software to my next car

Both of these should be options, since in the case of #2, the next car may not have the same upgrade.

It makes me question the methodology Tesla uses for refurbishing and reselling a lemon.

It would’ve been pretty easy to restore non autopilot software (as this event shows) before they sold it.

After seeing the way this is handled, I for sure wouldn’t be willing to spend $8K on a feature that can be removed so easily if I was configuring a new Tesla - regardless of whether or not private party sales have different policies.

The SAAS model is less appealing when it comes to durable goods.

Indeed, maybe we shouldn’t allow software features to be rolled back after the car is delivered.

I decided against Tesla in 2017 when I bought my first EV. I wasn’t into the complete lack of control in ownership - no ability to order parts or do my own repairs, vendor lock in for onboard DC fast charging equipment, cars made on “beta test” like production lines in tented parking lots, the chance of nefarious software updates from Tesla (or others) bricking functionality the car; or causing security issues.

Maybe the buyer should’ve done more homework, call Tesla before purchase and verify features?

It’s a bad situation for the buyer; and another reason I have added to the growing list of reasons not to buy a Tesla.

The vehicle had the Moroney sticker. That is legally required to be accurate. The buyer had no reason to contact Tesla because Tesla themselves stated the car had this feature when they sold the car to the dealer.

So what it sounds like happened here is:

Tesla sells vehicle, original owner doesn't buy FSD. Sells vehicle back to Tesla.

Telsa turns FSD on, maybe as part of the recertification process, and forgets to turn it off.

Telsa resells vehicle to dealer, listed with FSD. Dealer resells to current owner, with FSD.

Systems audit at Tesla reconciles the sales data with the car features data, and rather than just eating their mistake, they turn off FSD.

This reminds me of Samsung disabling the Galaxy phone SPO2 oxygen sensor in Samsung Health but only for Canada. To me selling a phone with a certain hardware feature then disabling months or years later without notice is fraud. My dad used it frequently since he has COPD and is on supplemental oxygen (yes I know it's not a medical device but it's a ballpark).

Bottom line: The car dealership and / or new owner have a case here.

Since Tesla itself sold a car that had autopilot features, it is expected that those features would remain. The dealer bought the car and the fact that it had autopilot features (auto park I suppose?) when the dealer bought it, they were able to test the car and use the feature to assess and market the car's abilities.

Basically it was what it was at the time of the (original) sale. If Tesla wants to be more careful about this in the future that's OK, but they need to remove those features before any party is accepting it in a sale.

I think the owner needs to send a lawsuit to Tesla that offers court, settlement of $8000 or the features to be turned back on - and that's being nice - since at this point the owner has probably gone through the wringer of social media nightmare scenarios at this point.

I, like everyone else here, was initially outraged that this could happen and I immediately thought "Oh Tesla, what have you done to your public perception". This is just not what people are expecting and this scenario works against Tesla being embraced by the "every man".

However, I did have another thought that I have not seen talked about - does the person that originally bought the car still have autopilot? In other words, if they buy a new Tesla, does it automatically come with autopilot? Is the purchase of autopilot linked to the person and not the car?

Though I still don't like that, I could be at least be persuaded to accept that paradigm.

> Is the purchase of autopilot linked to the person and not the car

No, it goes with the car. It stays with the car indefinitely unless you trade it in to Tesla, in which case they will give you no value for it (because they are the license grantor, it has zero value to them). As long as the car never gets owned by Tesla again, the feature follows it around until it meets the crusher.

What if the “license” to use FSDM belongs to the user and not the car? What if the original owner comes back and claims that he bought the license and he should be allowed to use it in his new car rather than go with the old car? Is that an unfair demand.

That is how it works for my Tesla. I bought one of the original 10000 or so Tesla and they came with unlimited supercharging. Tesla told me that I will have unlimited supercharging even if I get a new Tesla which I think is a better solution than it going away when I sell the old car.

In my view, if the buyer and seller were acting in good faith and if the vehicle was equipped and sold with optional features included, activated or installed, as a result of an error claimed by the manufacturer, the optional features are deemed included in the purchase price at the point of sale.

The bad faith in this case points to the manufacturer for attempting to reclaim ownership and control of something it unwittingly transferred and sold to the buyer.

Same account was created 22mins ago and has posted this same text on both of these Tesla posts? Honest question do you work for Tesla PR?

Other post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22266418

Sure, fine. I don’t have a problem disabling the feature if it was activated illegally, and I don’t have a problem with them disabling supercharging if the airbags have deployed.

This doesn’t seem like either of those scenarios though; the functionality was paid for, and Tesla disabled it when the vehicle was sold. That, I think, is a huge overreach.

And how does it work if I had a Tesla with FSD, sold it and bought another one? Does it get transferred to my new car?

Does your interior upgrade transfer too?

A slippery slope we're standing on.

> Does your interior upgrade transfer too?

Obviously not. But that's the crux of the issue, FSD is not assigned to the owner but the car, apparently. But the article claims that it does not stay with the car.

I think the real underlying issue (said elsewhere in this comment section) is that Tesla accidentally turned FSD on when recertify the car and their internal processes reconciled the mistake by turning it off, rather than eating the mistake.

Or the car got an OTA update for the tranche without FSD, because that system had it as non-fsd.

No, FSD stays with the car.

According to the article, it does not.

The article does not say that. The point here is, that supposedly the dealer who sold the car had bought the car without auto pilot, but it was active when handed over. If he had bought the car with auto pilot from Tesla, it would have stayed with the resale.

(All sides now have to check the contracts carefully to find out who actually bought what)

Seems to me that it depends on if you buy the software for your account or for your car. Both are valid buissness models as far as I am concerned. If you buy it for your account you should only have to pay it once and then migrate it from car to car. If you buy it for the car it should be bound to the car.

Then shouldn't any other upgrades you buy be tied to your account?

Heated seats? Leather? Why should we treat meat space items differently than digital space ones?

Because when you sell the car, and do your account migration you can't remove leather digitally. Seem rather clear.

> Why should we treat meat space items differently than digital space ones?

Because they are different? Because people want to?

So just because it costs something to remove meat space features and doesn't for digital?

Seems like a good reason to disallow OTA up and down grades

Let's say you buy a house with an IoT refrigerator.

Should any non-subscription upgrades to said refrigerator be invalidated because ownership changed?

Should Samsung be able to disable supercooling mode?

What if the fridge was recertified by Samsung and they turned supercooling on and forgot to turn it off before reselling it?

If Im buying a house, the last thing I want to think about is a refrigerator license.

If Im buying a refrigerator and the conversation turns to licenses, im just going to nope out of that, I just want something that works

Read my first actual post. My point was not that they should be able to just do that. My point is that it needs to be contractually clear what is gone happen. What are parts of the car and what are services you are buying with your account.

Neither way to do it is wrong and suggesting so is just dumb, the same trade-off exists all over the place in other industries as well.

You could totally remove heated seats digitally though. Just disable the heated seats button via a diagnostics computer. No need to remove the physical button or the actual heating elements.

Yeah but you can't grantee that any other Tesla a user has can activate heated seats. Whatever model you go with it needs to be clear when you buy it how its gone work.

So it is a real question. How can they get away with it? I genuinely love Tesla as a piece of technology and I think they brought ridiculous amount of progress to otherwise stagnant market.

That said, how is that legal? To me it is as bad as disabling brakes or changing the way battery behaves.

News like that make me hate the future.

I guess the real question is, is autopilot a service (i.e. requiring realtime use of remote infrastructure) or is it a feature that functions independently? In the second example, Tesla would be just arbitraging legal curiosities surrounding EULAs, which is kind of shitty.

Yep Tesla is committing an unforced error. Yanking shit from a purchased car is uncool. Since somebody payed for that feature, it has value. Tesla should have cut a check to the present owner for the value of the feature that was being removed. Bad move Tesla.

This sort of thing is one of the reasons why I avoid hardware or software that phones home and/or engages in automatic updates. I can't imagine a circumstance where I'd buy a Tesla or any other vehicles that are controlled by the manufacturer.

That's beyond fucked up. This essentially guarantees no market for second hand Teslas in the future. It was already questionable with the battery situation whether these cars would sell on the used market after say $100k miles or whatever the initial battery is limited to before it dies and requires an expensive replacement. But now it's clear. I certainly won't be buying this garbage. This is not revolutionary. With no resale market, I doubt they are even more environmentally friendly than ICE cars which can and are resold and won't need expensive battery replacements. This is devolution not evolution. So much for Musk's genius. He seems more like the typical silicon valley billionaire asshole that he truly is every day.

Read the article. Nobody paid Tesla for these features. The title implies that the owner change triggered the disabling, but that's not at all what happened here.

If I am buying a used Tesla and I will pay more for it if it has the features. I wouldn't assume those features are a mistake and will be turned off.

I agree, and that sucks.

Fact remains that nobody paid Tesla for that product.

The dealer bought the car from Tesla with the features enabled, so I would say that they did actually pay Tesla for them.

Read the article again.

Why don't you take your own advice. The dealer clearly paid for it and the buyer paid for it from the dealer.

Further, this is not the only instance.

> I sell dozens of Teslas a year, and sold my father in law a Model X P90D with ludicrous speed package. 60 days after the purchase of the car, Tesla removed his ludicrous speed package. Upon complaints to them they said he never paid for it. We have video evidence and multiple pictures of the vehicle with it. They even removed the line under the P90D. I am still shocked at these acts.

Tesla can claim it was not paid for, but that in no way makes their claim valid. The car had this feature and they took it away. They are thieves.

[1] https://jalopnik.com/tesla-remotely-removes-autopilot-featur...

I love the stock. However, I've taken to looking up YouTube videos and fixing my Ford Escape 2004. I work from home and don't burn a lot of gas. It's got about 100k miles and with decent maintenance the baby should be good for another 100k miles.

Though intimidating at first, at the end of the day there is the satisfaction of figuring out how fuel pumps and ignition coils work. I wouldn't recommend any painting in your garage though!

If I buy another car, its going to be a Tesla - not used. I'm generating more electricity and donating it to the power company for pennies on the dollar. Until true Autopilot, backup sensors and a rear view camera are good enough.

Wow. My takeaway: Buy direct from Tesla, or risk having a sub-optimal ride.

Seems a bit evil to me. I can't imagine another car manufacturer penalizing you for buying from somewhere else.

VaaS (Vehicle as a service) coming to all vehicle and tractor manufacturer's near you!

I wouldn't mind it. I would be fair and square. You could have two options:

1. Buy a car as is: Pay your car upfront. No updates after purchase

2. VaaS: No upfront cost. Constant updates, monthly payment.

This current situation why I hate IoT devices. You pay upfront and hope they still provide the service after n years. It makes no sense for me, why would somebody provide a service without an ongoing revenue.

You can already have that right now. It's called leasing. After a few years you give the car back and get a new one.

I recall a documentary where they had a bunch of Electric vehicles out on lease. The company wanted to take all the vehicles back off the market so they went to all the owners to take the cars away.

The owners liked the vehicles so much they offered to buy them outright from the company so they could at least keep the cars they liked.

They raised the few million needed to pay off everyone's lease.

Company refused and took all the cars away anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

The company is General Motors and the vehicle the EV1.

I remember that story. Basically GM ran a little EV business for a while, then cancelled the project. Then were attacked and hated far more than, say, everyone else in the world who never bothered making EV's in the first place. Always seemed warped to me.

#1 would be wonderful except that by offering #2, the vehicle will ship unfinished with the only tested functionality being the update mechanism.

Funny, but I don't talk about the same manufacturer. Think like the cloud providers: #1 Buy a server from Dell #2 launch an AWS EC2 instance.

Cadillac (GM) had a subscription service for a while, then sort of cancelled it, and is now bringing it back.

https://www.bookbycadillac.com/

Brazilian here. An Uber driver told me he's on a rolling rental from a big car rental company. Montly payments. Insurance and all maintenance included. May switch the car for another in the same category anytime for any reason or no reason. (Slightly annoying noise in the glove compartment lock? Switch it!) May deliver a car in any branch in the nation and pick the other up in any branch in the nation, allowing to virtually take your car over air travel to any served city. Seemed like a really good deal, and I'll definitely look into it before buying myself a car again.

This makes me wonder if someone could jailbreak these cars and offer the features for free. Seems like for $7000 for a feature there must be huge incentive to do so.

Wasn’t there an article recently about someone ordering this feature accidentally, and Tesla saying it was non-refundable? Talk about having your cake and eating it.

I will never buy a Tesla based on this. Just, wow.

I've done the same with Adobe CC products. The second they implemented the SaaS model to please Wall Street analysts and their recurring revenue obssession, I started looking at alternatives.

Adobe Animate -- > Hype Professional (one-time fee) Adobe Illustrator --> Affinity Publisher (one-time fee)

For music, I just gave up on Spotify entirely and now purchase either vinyl or buy MP3 albums on Bandcamp, which fortunately houses the types of independent artists I prefer anyway.

Update: it seems that Tesla agrees with most commenters here :) and in the meantime reactivated the autopilot on this car.

Isn't this the same as saying I bought a used smart TV from someone and it didn't come with their Netflix account?

This, and Elon's treatment of his first wife are why we wont be buying any Tesla products.

Serious question: Are any Teslas compatible with openpilot?

The older ones with first gen autopilot are, yes

Can they do this while the vehicle is driving?

No. It requires an over-the-air update to be installed. Car must be parked. There are some YouTubers who have managed to start an update while driving.. It's obviously not recommended. The update install doesn't start without the driver pushing a button though.

Jalopnik has been shitting on Tesla and the EV industry for years. This article is 100% sensationalized for the clicks and benefit of their owners.

It reads like a fact-based, non biased article to me. I suspect you agree with this assessment too which is why you resorted to attacking the blog's owners instead of trying to disagree with any parts of the story.

And this is why i will not buy a Tesla... but I will buy their stock. Companies with sh!tty consumer attitude do well.

I'm not so sure about the stock. This line in the article:

> The car was sold at auction as a result of a California Lemon Law buyback, as the car suffered from a well-known issue where the center-stack screen developed a noticeable yellow border.

makes me think that soon (say the next 2 years) there will be a shitload of Teslas - which were bought during their mass adaption time - which will start malfunctioning because of wear, and the company will be in pretty deep shit, with a lot of customers with no cars and long waiting times for the service. Hmm, and how is their parts distribution network?

So what you're saying is you like companies with shitty consumer attitude? Because that right there is exactly how you get them and ruin the business landscape for everyone else.

I mean, you're incentivizing the behavior by extending them the funding to operate. "The Market" is you, and you are "the Market".

Well, sadly yes. Amazon is a horrible company (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/05/amazon-wo...) in many ways. Yet the stock has made Jeff Bezos a bizzilionaire.

I have no plans to ever work for Amazon even as a software developer - but I wish I had bought the stock.

I held Wells Fargo for awhile - specifically because they bragged about how good they are about extracting fees from customers. I would never bank with them, I use credit unions exclusively.

With the Trump deregulation mania encouraging stuff like this (https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/07/us/florida-weed-killer-sprayi...) I will need lots of money to escape as a climate refugee.

Tesla might be "the F-35 of personal autos", but it kind of makes sense for have the AI part of a product be SaaS. The company invested a ton in R&D, and it's also liable for the damages (including deaths!) that the feature might produce if it malfunctions (hence they'd want it disabled after N years period where supporting it is no longer cost effective - even the fact that a city's roads configuration drastically changes 10 years in the future independent of the car could make the self-driving system unsafe, it's a systems issue here, no longer and "isolated product"!).

We're probably going to start seeing this more and more with "truly smart" devices... Though we do need ways to re-sell software licenses for firmware and stuff while they are still supported, even if separately from the actual hardware.

Makes sense or not, it should be clearly stated in your purchase contract and made public.

The feature in this case was never payed for it seems. By nobody. It was wrong to list the car as having the feature. Which is why it can be deactivated, BUT this means the buyers have a right to return it up the chain to whoever made the mistake first.

The buyer (and perhaps the dealer) did pay for the feature though when they bought the car with it described as having the feature.

If you, the manufacturer, put a sticker on a vehicle and it says "FSD" and names a price, and I buy that vehicle?

I _have_ paid for it. I may not have paid list price or as much as you like, but you can't say "Oh, it wasn't paid for".

"Includes FSD, $x"

"Sorry we meant 'does not include FSD, $x'" _AFTER_ two sales.

I love the way everyone takes this at face value and it's just true now.

I guess it's why we have fake news, just say it once.

It's clearly a mix-up they will fix.

It's probably when software updates happen it checks to see what to update on the account and deletes everything else.

But lets not think to hard. Not like anyone here has made a mistake coding or had to deal with middle managers.

And there are clearly issues with the ability to remote delete, Kindles had their OMG Amazon is deleting books period, and it sorted itself out.

It also allows you to get updates, that's pretty OMG too quite frankly.

> It's clearly a mix-up they will fix.

Perhaps. But speaking for myself, that's not the point. The point is that this is a great example of the risks of having stuff that can be updated by the manufacturer. We see similar things happening (albeit at lower price points) in software all the time.

This is an example of why I object to software that phones home and/or engages in automatic updates. It puts far too much control in the hands of companies.

> I object to software that phones home and/or engages in automatic updates

But Tesla's don't auto update. So it's not on topic.

We have to stay in reality.

Updates push us forward. It comes with risks but so far the rewards outweight the risk.

Elon made a car that can update! That's fucking amazing. It's what he does. Changes the game. Makes NEW things that push everything forward. It's a new way of thinking.

These comments seem straight from TSLAQ but sadly don't seem to be from that intelligent evil which would be interesting! just seems like stupidity.

A $50 billion+ company that works on reputation will ruin that for $7000?

> But Tesla's don't auto update.

Good to know -- so users can simply elect not to accept updates? What about when Tesla changes the operating characteristics of the car, is that always optional? Is accepting the change this article is talking about optional?

If so, then I have no objections, although I will still never buy a Tesla or any other vehicle that phones home.

> Updates push us forward. It comes with risks but so far the rewards outweight the risk.

Perhaps. But as long as it's the owners who get to decide whether or not the risk is worth it, that's fine. If the manufacturer gets to make that decision, that's not fine at all.

It's the kind of mixup that can be fixed... after someone makes it a huge PR nightmare for them. Otherwise they would not give a shit.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com