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Comment by osamagirl69 | Hacker News Reader

Given all of Tesla's shady business practices, this doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

Tesla has really made huge progress in modernizing cars (making them electric and not terrible, getting rid of middlemen, continuous/rolling product updates, infotainment that is not slow/terrible, etc) I just really wish they would have focused on the positive parts of the future and left the negatives behind (remote lockout of features, vendor lockin for service, and generally trying to screw your customers at every possible turn...)

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A list of many such claims made by Elon Musk can be found here: https://elonmusk.today/

Ctrl+F for "tesla".

Elon Musk is unethical and it’s amazing how he has gotten away with so much simply by associating himself with positive trends. People see him and they think about clean energy and space colonization, but they ignore his casual disregard for human life evidenced by misrepresenting autopilot’s current and future capabilities, leading to at least 5 deaths at this point. He has also promised to cure autism via Neuralink, a baseless claim. He claimed that a monkey has controlled a computer at Neuralink, almost certainly untrue. He has destroyed his skeptics through questionable tactics, Fossi, Martin Tripp, skabooshka, Vernon Unsworth. The man is a disgrace, but his fans defend him as if he was the Messiah. How people can rail against Trump while supporting Elon Musk is mind boggling.

Most founders keep to themselves because they don't want to overpromise. Musk does the total opposite, by tweeting all the random thoughts in his brain and I suspect it mirrors his thinking and the thinking of other founders (Zuck, Page, etc..) closely. The latter are just much quieter. Anyone would look stupid with their unfiltered thoughts broadcast to millions, but it's one of the things that people like about the dude.

People say the same thing about Trump. I say when you’re a billionaire and have millions of followers it’s important that you self-filter and choose your words carefully. Quite literally people may die if you don’t.

> Quite literally people may die if you don’t.

I never liked this argument. Partly because if you take it to its logical conclusion, any sufficiently successful individual would be paralized - which is an obviously wrong conclusion. The more successful you are, the freer you should be.

The solution is to also look at gains, not just losses. Billionaires can kill people with a tweet, but they can also inspire and, yes, save lives with a tweet.

?!? Your last sentence seems to demonstrate exactly why they should self-filter and choose their words carefully.

You can be incredibly successful and not be famous. That's fine.

But if your success includes fame then... I like my social leaders to be nice to their own social group and not kill them very much.

If you agree the words are powerful I would hope you agree they should be used carefully.

> The solution is to also look at gains, not just losses. Billionaires can kill people with a tweet, but they can also inspire and, yes, save lives with a tweet.

If I save six lives, I can then kill six people?

Would Tesla or SpaceX be what they are if not for the extreme reputational risk of saying "we're going to do X"?

Maybe. But it's hard not to see the parallel between massive risks taken and massive progress made.

I say that there are a lot of countries on the planet where you don’t have the option to speak your mind honestly. I’d rather live in the one that is rewarding Elon.

Freedom of speech isn’t the issue. He can be allowed to say what he does, but that doesn’t exempt him from the public consequences of lies and abuse.

It’s admirable that a company can reach a $200 billion valuation in the USA weeks after the CEO tells the SEC to suck his cock. The issue is with investors who aren’t questioning if that’s a sign of lack of ethics.

What’s the ethical failure here?

I would agree that it doesn’t look like good judgement- but shorts are literally betting against him and his company. It’s not obvious to me where that behavior (crowing against his adversaries) crosses a line into being wrong or evil.

Lets examine autopilot's 5 deaths compared to human drivers?

There are roughly 3 billion autopilot miles driven [1] and we'll take your 5 deaths as a given [0]. That's 1.7 deaths per billion miles.

Overall US deaths is around 15 per billion miles driven (in 2000, before Tesla) [2] ... around 8x worse than autopilot. Is autopilot saving lives?

Expecting zero mishaps is not reasonable because all software has bugs and bugs can be reduced with effort while compute power improves with time. Humans on the other hand will not likely improve.

0. citation needed? 1. https://electrek.co/2020/04/22/tesla-autopilot-data-3-billio... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...

Your reasoning is broken.

Human miles include all conditions/situations. Autopilot disengages whenever it is convenient and human handles all harder situations.

How about comparing same type of miles?

Most crashes aren't in difficult situations.

https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

Current self driving stats in general are meaningless because all that driving is done under constant human supervision. But if the car drives itself for 20Km and then needs intervention to avoid a fatal crash it will still count as another 20Km of self driving with no incidents. The human saves don't make it into the publicized stats.

There are 2 stats that could prove meaningful for this: some average of distance driven between human interventions, and percentage of driving conditions covered. Then compare this to human stats, I'd assume the average human driver might go 10000Km without incident while covering 90% of driving conditions (like everything except extreme weather or road conditions). A self driving car would have to match that.

In other words AP only has 5 deaths because those were the only drivers who left it unsupervised. I'd guess that if every car in the world today would suddenly be driven by a computer we'd see worse numbers than with human drivers one way or another (efficiency, deaths, etc.). Self driving today is great as an assist, with the human still fully in control.

People need to lookup the definition of autopilot. It is not self driving.

Simpler option: don't call it autopilot if it is shown that it misleads people.

In my 2015 Model S it is called Autosteer in the settings, the manual, and in the instrument cluster when messages appear related to that function.

How many of those 15 deaths are in a car that costs as much as a Tesla, and therefore can be expected to have the same safety features? How many are in 25 year old cars? If you claim that driving a Tesla on autopilot on a freeway is safer than a 30 year old $2000 clunker, I won’t challenge that. If you say it’s safer than a $50,000 Audi that’s highly debatable.

Not only that, but how many times would autopilot have caused a fatal accident if the human driver hadn’t intervened? Tons of YouTube examples would suggest quite a few.

They also have a history of reverting back to poor worker treatment. I forgot the statistics, but the accident rate for their workers is quite high. I recently read an article about the lead safety engineer being told that Elon Musk doesn't like the color yellow, so that's why they couldn't paint yellow safety lines on the ground. Just think about that.

When a worker complained of being called the N-word at the Fremont factory, Elon sent out an email saying that people need to grow a thicker skin [0]. IMHO this is a stain on his reputation that he cannot erase even if he wanted to.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2018/01/12/577565279/tesla-faces-complai...

Tesla injury rate is now lower than any other US auto manufacturer per their recent 2020 report.

Are you going from their own blog post? I would be suspicious of any claims by Tesla. Also, it has been reported that they underreport injuries.

Musk continually pulls the same tactics that Trump does, except that Musk is applauded for it. The methods are the same: lie, confuse, insult, make grand claims.

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-factory-injuries-incom...

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/03/07/tesl-m07.html

Wouldn't it make sense that all manufacturers are doing the same thing then? Therefore it just becomes a case of who can juice their numbers best?

Which shady business practices, specifically?

You call it vendor lock-in, I call it avoiding dealships, eliminating shady warrantee programs, and eliminating the hassle of finding reputable 3rd party servicers

if you don’t live close to a Tesla service center it’s a massive hassle...and even then the backlog can be quite large and take much longer to service

There are advantages to not being close to a Tesla service center. It means that you're more likely to be serviced by a mobile technician, which is amazingly convenient. Just leave your car parked in your driveway and it gets fixed without any inconvenience to you. It would be more annoying for big things, but for little things it's awesome.

why would you own a tesla if you didn't leave near a tesla service center?

anticipating the reasonable response to this question -- i'm guessing if you own a tesla and you don't live near a service center you know what you're getting yourself into.

reno only recently got theirs, for instance, and they're just a few miles down the road from the gigafactory. but reno was full of tesla's even before the service center opened.

EDIT, cause downvoting: my point is, i wouldn't lease a toyota, with its free/included oil changes, if i didn't live near enough to the toyota dealership to show up every 10K miles easily. i may, however, buy an older used toyota if i was happy enough going to jiffy lube (or similar). applying same criteria to tesla and proximity to their repair locations.

I own a Tesla and live 200 miles from the closest service center. If you have a problem, chances are that it can and will be fixed by mobile tech. I had a problem with my door handle (a typical problem in early Model Ss). Mobile tech came to my work and swapped out the handle in the parking lot. I never saw the tech. When I got an upgrade to the latest autopilot computer, a Tesla tech came to my house and did the install, which took a couple of hours, in my garage. I just left the garage door open so he could get in. And no oil so oil changes aren’t an issue. I get the occasional tire rotation at a local tire shop and that’s it for maintenance.

I think this is the main reason I cannot justify Tesla for myself. It feels like I am purchasing a piece of software I have to call Tesla support for. No one else can help. And it is not a cheap toy. The support may be quick and it may even be convenient.. I don't know if it is just me being old or general weariness with the recent efforts to subscribe to me various 'features' ( Tesla is certainly not the only one trying to get that market ). I do want to be able to either do it myself or pay someone other than Tesla to do it if need be ( I hopefully won't, but I want the option ).

Well because you want a Tesla and you assume it will be as reliable as other modern cars. I own a Mazda and the nearest Mazda dealer is about 170 miles away. I’ve only had to go there once for airbag recall (I change my own oil).

And even if you didn't change your own oil, you wouldn't need to drive 170 miles to have someone do it for you.

Not sure why all the traditional car makers haven't caught on and put DRM on the oil system. They could take cues from both the inkjet printer industry and Tesla.

The classic auto industry and the ecosystem were formed around the current rules and changing them is hard. But when reinventing the car (electrifying for example) it's an opportunity to start over.

To take an example from the IT world, PCs and their OSes stayed so open because that's how they evolved when the industry first appeared. But phones and tablets offered the opportunity to lock down everything.

So I'd say that the future path of the connected smart car is closer to that of phones today.

Oh, I am sure there are people working on it.

But I think you may be onto something. Tesla is setting a bad example for other car makers. They can point to it and say, why can they do it and we can't?

Brief jump into the future. I get to see my new BMW default skin package expire and car turn dull grey, lights losing its exclusive green sheen, and warmed leather seats fold in to be replaced by, the horror, standard seats with warmers firmly shut off. They may as well brand me cheap.

My main complaint with their service model is that it is basically impossible to do service on your own car. I have never taken one of my vehicles to a dealer, or a third party service shop, aside from getting tires mounted and smog checks done. This is made possible because I only buy cars which have parts and service documentation available, but as time goes on it is harder and harder to get this information. Tesla is actively working to make this impossible, and this in combination with the required always on telemetry is why I ended up purchasing a Fiat instead of Tesla--despite it being a quantitatively and subjectively worse car.

To be fair, a Fiat is a qualitatively worse car than pretty much any other car.

Tesla lost its way years ago with their wallstreet obsession. Their main product is stock.

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