Tesla can detect aftermarket hacks designed to defeat EV performance paywalls
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
I'd rather have a car I own, all things being equal. All things being unequal too, actually. Tesla cars would need to be much better to compete, given the licensing versus ownership model.
I imagine at some point, Tesla will switch to car-as-a-service models. I guess most companies already have those in the form of leases, but I don't lease cars.
Change it all you want, but don't expect Tesla to fix your car once you've messed with it yourself. And don't expect to sue them when autopilot kills you, because it's not their responsibility any more.
A judgement call is made? If Tesla could provide evidence that you are the one that caused the damage, then of course the warranty shouldn't apply.
Individual components when modified will affect the system as a whole. For instance modifying the battery pack to supply a higher peak current will increase the max performance of the motor but did you void the warranty of the battery, the motor or both?
I know of a case where the engine on a new Audi RS6 died, and Audi refused the warranty claim because a custom exhaust has been fitted, claiming that it affected the operation of the engine and destroyed it. The case went to court and Audi was unable to prove how a custom exhaust could cause the crankshaft to snap in the middle - and the court ordered them to pay for repair.
There's loads of nonsense around this, with dealership frequently telling customers that if they fit their own parts they lose the entire warranty - nope, that's just not the case at all. Using your own oil, filters, brake pads and other consumable items does not void your warranty as long as they are "equivalent" items. I even heard a dealership tell a customer once that fitting tyres without manufacturer approval(MO in this case) would void the warranty - I told them that if that's the case, why is their own parts department selling entire sets of them as "original Mercedes accessories" then. The truth is it's bullshit, that's just not how warranties work.
There just aren't many user serviceable components in a Tesla. It's basically a computer, a battery and an eletric motor with a body sat on top.
Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act has been ruled to preserve the warranty for unrelated failures on modified vehicles.
https://www.sema.org/sema-enews/2011/01/ftc-validates-right-....
It's not perfect because anything that increases the power of the car could be argued fairly convincingly to have contributed to the failure of another driveline component, but if you increase the power on the car, your windshield washers and trunk opener (as examples) are still covered as before.
However, as they are the primary supplier of parts and service, they can probably make your ownership experience fairly miserable. They might also be able to revoke access to new updates, to the supercharger network, or other Tesla-provided features that aren't protected by the Magnuson-Moss Act. (Even if they just did it for a while until the case was heard, it could be annoying.) Look at how dismally they treat 3rd-party rebuilders of crashed/flood Teslas.
If you want to heavily modify a car, there are many other more platforms that I'd think are more suitable than a Tesla in terms of long-term supportability. (Not a Tesla hater by any means[0], but I think of them as close to the Apple of cars. You're paying a premium to play in their walled garden area and if you want to break out of their garden, they don't make it easy/attractive to do so.)
[0] Mild disclaimer: I'm short $TSLA since very recently, but that's purely price-action-related, nothing inherently against the company.
Tesla will have to prove that your modification of the car caused the issue/defect. At least in the USA.
In real life people just generally eat it.
https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/sweeter_lemon_la...
In your scenario, that's also exactly what small claims court is for, or also contacting the manufacturer directly. In another scenario, a ground wire went faulty and a (shadier) dealer tried to get me to pay for the cost of the diagnostic. I said I can chat with GM about that cost and they very quickly said they would waive the fee.
Have you ever heard of someone having an alternator go bad and then the dealer blaming an aftermarket part on it in the first place?
I've never had dealers seek out aftermarket modifications when I get service done at all. They just want to get cars in & out quickly, and they bill the manufacturer for warranty work anyway so why would they care if you had related aftermarket modifications? They only push back if they think they won't get reimbursed by the manufacturer for the warranty work. Which would tend to require "obvious" data showing modifications as a likely suspect.
Tesla changes this by having the service centers also be owned by the same company footing the bill. So this is likely to be way more common of a battle going forward, though.
Some Audi dealers would void almost your entire power train warranty for simple things like an aftermarket cold air intake.
That's all that's described in this article. This is not an isolated article. You can see articles about:
* Tesla stripping features from cars when people resell them
* Articles from small repair shops, unable to work on Tesla vehicles because of locked-down software
* Articles about Tesla's surveillance on car owners
* Deactivating vehicles it doesn't think should be driven (e.g. ones from serious accidents)
* Forcing updates
And so on. With Tesla, you clearly don't fully own your car.
https://jalopnik.com/tesla-remotely-removes-autopilot-featur...
The car was bought from Tesla, but the features was disabled AFTER the sale, and indeed, after a resale had been agreed to. So it's not quite with no involvement from Tesla here, but I've seen ones in completely private resales too; just can't find them right now.
Edit: Autopilot didn't engage, that's weird...
For the private sell situation, this is close to what you might be thinking of[0]. Supposedly the story is: Tesla bought a car back, however then sold it to an auction house and enabled FSD as a "demo". The auction house mistakenly listed the features as being enabled, and when the car sold Tesla never disabled the FSD demo. When the user then privately sold the car to a new owner, the new owner performed the ownership transfer, however either a human or some automated system saw that the FSD demo was enabled and disabled it.
0: https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-disables-autopilot-on-...
The closest thing you'll find is that Tesla sold a used trade-in that originally had Autopilot. The car was not advertised to have Autopilot in the used listing, which is kind of a key point that people "forget" when citing the case. Tesla apparently semi-frequently disable features in trade-ins and resell the trade-in as a lower-spec car (for less money).
Tesla made the mistake of not disabling autopilot before delivering the car to the second owner, who believed they hit the lottery and got free autopilot. Recall that the car was sold used as a non-autopilot car. Tesla later corrected the mistake, and it generated a shit-storm.
I agree it's creepy that they can turn off features of a car that has left the factory, but they don't routinely do it for features that people has paid for.
The difference between a license/lease and ownership is who has that power.
Yahoo was an awesome company for the first few years. Companies change. Amazon and Google are not exactly in an upwards trajectory right now either, although for many years, they could do no wrong.
I 100% believe Tesla will treat its owners well while it's in the exponential growth startup phase, and doing well. It's counting on word-of-mouth for continued growth. If I buy a car which I have licensed from Tesla, I'm hedging on that continuing. Once growth stops, companies enter the phase where they start to milk existing customers. If a company runs into financial problems, it enters a phase where it needs to exploit existing customers.
That's for one person. If we all buy a car from Tesla, we're all giving up power as consumers for the long haul.
Someone needs to create a database of 1) what cars contain LTE modems and 2) how to modify the car to disable/compromise them (e.g. how to unplug or block the antenna).
Where is my Tesla-homebrew?
States that use fuel taxes to fund road improvements will need to find other ways to tax electric vehicles and data derived from DCM will help them. Plus, autonomous transport will need to communicate.
Are you thinking about eCall? That is only supposed to be activated during an emergency.
https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/security-and-em...
I'm not sure I'll make the rest of my time out without buying something newer and "digital", but I fully intend to keep my stone age motorcycles for at least as long at I can legally ride them...
The car doesn't require connectivity. Although it sure is nice being able to pre-heat or pre-cool your car before you go drive it.
There are also jailbreak options for Teslas.. you too can run a virtual machine inside of your entertainment computer.
And ban auto companies from offering first-party, non-vehicle services.
They're welcome to spin off divisions, who can compete with everyone else.
Between that and DLC style options, they'll price anchor everything so the only option that makes any economic sense is to lease. Watch for 2nd and 3rd owner leasing options in the next 20 years IMO.
If they have the ability and the inclination to remotely disable features, you don't own the car.
>Section 103 (17 U.S.C Sec. 1201(a)(1)) of the DMCA states:
>No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
This clause is talking about DRM, which I am fairly certain is about the duplication/distribution of copyrighted content, which is not what you're doing if you bypass protections on your Tesla.
Tesla could probably try to argue that the DMCA applies to parts of their firmware, since as far as I'm aware it still holds for some parts of other vehicles.
So as long as you don't duplicate their firmware, the grounds to not have you modify it are very questionable.
In fact the most likely case in which that would be necessary is if it had been stolen
It's more as if you bought a laptop, and in order to overclock it, you had to void the warranty. (which is, of course, entirely the case for almost every laptop on the market).
Overclocking can cause harm (worse battery life, excessive heat). That potential for harm is a plausible reason to void the warranty.
Tesla is just voiding the warranty as a punishment for opting out of their software-gated features. Those features aren't harmful to activate.
How is that different from increasing the maximum acceleration of a car? Worse battery life and excessive heat. It is entirely possible that people think Tesla is greedy instead of Tesla choosing one trade off at the expense of another in software.
Tesla's more expensive models often share the same battery and motor but they tend to push the hardware closer to its limits which also results in higher wear and tear. High performance cars usually need more frequent maintenance. It is entirely possible that warranty on the cheaper model is longer than on the higher end model and by installing the upgrade Tesla can no longer guarantee that longer warranty or any warranty at all.
Is it only possible or is it a fact? If it is only possible and not a fact then it is a fact that warranties are the same.
If I buy an abandoned house full of booby traps, or some property contaminated by toxic waste, or a wrecked car, I probably won't be able to use it "for what it's for" as is.
These things are still "mine" in two senses:
1. a property rights sense — nobody can just cart them away! That would be theft!
2. the sense that I have the legal right to do whatever I want to them in the process of fixing them up. I can take a wrecking ball to the house and build a new house. I can take apart the car and replace parts of it. Nobody has a legal right to stop me from doing these things.
But nobody's obligated to help me do that fixing-up, or to give me the money to do it. It's my responsibility, if I want the thing to work. For these sorts of items, you go into the purchase knowing that the purchase itself is only the start of what you'll have to pay to get a working product out the other end.
If Tesla is guilty of anything, it's false advertising: implying that they're selling you a car, when they're actually selling you a willfully-misbehaving robot that would have to be modified to turn it into a car.
But make no mistake — you own that willfully-misbehaving robot. Just like you own the wreck, or the waste dump.
-----
Given an entirely autonomous robot (like a self-driving car), though, there is an interesting edge-case, which (thankfully) has not come up yet in the real world: the product you "own" might be programmed to get up and leave on its own.
You have, as the owner, the legal right to stop it from leaving. You might even have a legal right to demand the robot's release and return, if someone else picked it up. (Weird pet-ownership and/or slavery vibes from this sentence.)
That, however, might conflict with another consideration. E.g., if Tesla or another autonomous-robot company gets slapped with a government-mandated recall notice, they might be legally obligated to summon your car back to their factory, at least for repair.
The edge case — the part current case-law doesn't yet cover — is the following: if you've disabled their ability to do that, and then your car later explodes because it didn't receive the mandated servicing... are you liable, because you disabled the recall summons? Even if the government never explicitly mandated you to stop using the car and send it over to them?
> For Vehicles other than Roadster, you may opt‐out from our automatic collection of Telematics Log Data by sending a written request to Tesla or by adjusting the privacy settings through the touchscreen of your Vehicle, if such functionality is available and has been enabled on your Vehicle. If you opt‐out from collection of such Vehicle data, please note that we will not notify you of issues applicable to your Vehicle in real‐time and this may result in your Vehicle suffering from reduced functionality, serious damage or inoperability.
> You may also opt‐out from transmission of any data between your Vehicle and Tesla as follows: (a) for Roadster, by switching off the modem in your Vehicle, or (b) for other Vehicles, by sending a written request to Tesla pursuant to Section 11. If you exercise this opt‐out, please note that we will be unable to notify you of issues applicable to your Vehicle in real‐time and this may result in your Vehicle suffering from reduced functionality, serious damage or inoperability and it may also disable many features of your Vehicle, including periodic software and firmware updates, remote services, interactivity with mobile applications, and in‐car features such as navigation and location search, Internet radio, voice commands and web browser functionality.
Alternatively, you can remain fully plugged into their cloud services, get all the latest software updates, and that could come with new notifications in the UI that third-party modifications have been detected which could damage the vehicle.
I think a better comparison would be a locked bootloader with remote access built in (and phones are already this way more or less)
My understanding is nobody else can fix it either, since Tesla doesn't allow 3rd party repairs and presumably doesn't sell parts to 3rd party repair shops.
So now you have a broken $40k driveway ornament. Who do you get to fix it if you want it fixed?
There are laws regarding car warranties that would make Tesla's behavior illegal, if they voided your warrenty.
Cars have been around for a long time, as has the laws regarding them.
People have a right to repair their car, this is reflected in the law, and unless the specific modification to the car is directly related to the "failure" that you are making a warranty claim on, it would be illegal for Tesla to void the warranty.
Just because a company is a tech company does not mean that they can get around laws that have existed for a long time, regarding this stuff.
'prevent manufacturers from using disclaimers on warranties in an unfair or misleading manner. Prohibits tying arrangements that condition coverage under a written warranty on the consumer's use of an article or service identified by brand, trade, or corporate name unless that article or service is provided without charge to the consumer.'
This is utterly mistaken.
You can charge anywhere, using a wide variety of chargers, ranging from very fast ones to electrical outlets (hopefully at least 220v because regular outlets are very slow), or even off the grid from solar if you're set up for that.
Since oncall and other services showed consumers are willing to incur ongoing fees, I think we'll see each part of the car beyond safety features tied to a sub model with no option to just purchase unless mandated by law.
Like with a lot of features, this will be introduced on so-called premium brands first. Unless you insist on having one of those (which you would probably lease anyway), you can easily avoid dodgy subscription features.
Software-wise, we already lost to monopolies of FAANG. The privileged few use Open Source and distributed sharing platforms, but the general public has little choice but pay recurrent and ever increasing fees.
I have a choice because I choose to have options, but many consumers won't care or understand options are limited to them if they don't take a stand for their choices.
If people who work at these companies want to continue to rationalize these models are ethical, then that is their choice as well. They just shouldn't be surprised when their models are pulled out from under their feet later.
You own a tangible good but you only have a license to intellectual property.
When cars were all hardware it was simple. But now they are more and more software and you only get licenses to use that software even if you do own the hardware it runs on.
Cars are becoming like smartphones and computers.
This actually all started with things like books: You own the book but not its contents.
I'm strongly against a hybrid model in which I purchase and own the car, am responsible for maintaining it, but I can't tweak it on my own to do whatever the hardware is safely capable of. I actually wish there are laws protecting the right of the owner of any hardware to tweak anything they own. I mean, it's my property after I bought it.
- safe
- simple
- electric
- cheap
- mass produced
- open hardware
- public road certified
The Dacia Spring Electric [1] might get close.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Mustang_(first_generation...
Price list: http://www.bmh-ltd.com/mgbshell.htm
Article: https://journal.classiccars.com/2018/02/14/need-new-body-vin...
EDIT: looks like yes: https://revologycars.com/
For me, that car is perfection
I hate software that changes constantly and is mostly out of my control, and will avoid it when possible. For that reason I'll never buy a Tesla. Some people love software that updates constantly and, IME, those are the same people who really like their Teslas.
Owning a car certainly shifted my lifestyle, but it didn't change my preferred car type.
It's almost like the car is a hostile entity, loyal to its manufacturer instead of its owner..
Who do you think will get the blame?
One can say that Tesla is further still limiting liability by going to these measures, but if other manufacturers have not chosen to take such measures , even with the same practical liability and ability to do so, then one can surmise that Tesla is acting in a way that is against consumers who feel strongly about personal ownership and right-to-repair/right-to-modify.
If car companies considered liability to be the penultimate measure of success they wouldn't sell 500+ horsepower sports cars. The risk is worth taking for a chance to capture the market sector. Same here -- Tesla might find this a good business decision, but a portion of their market will be inevitably lost on matters of personal principal.
It's up to them whether or not that gamble is worth taking. Given that sports-cars and car modification in general seem to have been on a downward decline, they're probably correct to assume such postures; but i'm not a fan.
But what I am talking about is the MSM and they having field day. "Tesla autopilots off a bridge", "Telsa hacked, killed driver" etc etc.
And bad press is a real threat for business, especially when it comes to comes to safety of the driver/passenger.
For the downward car modification trend, I get the impression it's improved protection from manufacturers that are the reason, wouldn't you agree?
Nobody blamed Honda for the Fast & Furious movies, for example. Nobody blames Chevrolet for lowriders. Nobody blames Ford for these asshats: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVyBaX6sCd4
There's vanishingly few examples of modified cars generating mainstream media shitstorms. Appealing to fear is rarely a good justification for stripping rights & freedoms.
I don't care? That is not an excuse to overrule existing US law, which gives consumers a right to modify cars that they own.
Replace car for OS, phone, IoT device, app, ...
Welcome to surveillance capitalism
Seems like there's a market for a reverse-engineered version of the hack, priced at slightly above the cost of materials (which I suspect to be around $50 at most).
You're basically paying for the warranty extension and that doesn't seem that bad to me. Feels more like overclocking to me.
- What if some external accessory or change was made without the owner's knowledge?. As cars become more software dependent, steps like these might become necessary.
- Manufacturers obviously want to take their hands-off during warranty claims if the car has been tuned or modified.
- The owner in the issue mentioned above hasn't had any issues while driving except a notification that wouldn't go away. As long as i can modify my car and drive it without a hassle, i would like my car to tell me what changes have been made to it.
And to some extent, rightly so. The mod in the featured article has a mode that disables traction control. I would not want to be responsible for the outcomes if that has bugs in it.
Yes, someone could tamper with your car, which would be bad.
But honestly Tesla is the one who changes things without the owner's knowledge. Updates - when they give any description at all - describe bug fixes and upgrades. However look at the tesla forums and you'll find that tesla software updates are just as likely to downgrade your car.
I can recall updates lowering the range, reducing regen, lowering performance and very very frequently breaking things that work fine.
And lots of people were perfectly happy with older versions of the software and have declined updates -- only to have them forced on the car. That seems to be a good way to make an enemy.
These are basically the same arguments that are used to justify Apple's walled garden and refusal to support side-loading, and all the same objections apply.
All we need to do is look at how John Deere is screwing over farmers to see why a walled garden approach to products is extremely dangerous for consumer rights.
I just wish the government would step in and regulate away this behaviour, as it's clearly a market failure. I can't say I'm getting my hopes up...
Should whoever built your house be notified if you modify it after buying it? After all, those changes could have been made without the owner's knowledge.
0: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1599508800&dateRange=custom&...
In theory, Apple could detect this (previously jailbroken state) when they plug in your device at the store to do diagnostics, but (at least 5 years ago) I’ve brought a few “restored from backup” devices in for service and they don’t say anything. I guess as long as it isn’t currently jailbroken, they don’t care.[c]
[a]: /Applications contains apps that come with the device and can’t be removed (such as Settings, etc.); Cydia installs itself and any apps you install through it into this folder. OTOH, apps installed through the App Store go under /var/mobile/Containers.
[b]: The reason being: pre-jailbreak, / is mounted read-only, but /var/mobile is read-write. So iOS works on the assumption that any app installed to /Applications can’t keep its config files with it, so they’re put in /var/mobile/Library.
[c]: Simply hiding the icons of Cydia and apps wouldn’t be enough to convince them as jailbreaking involves disabling a few daemons (the biggest is the OTA update checker; they don’t work well with a jailbroken device), so Apple’s diagnostics would probably show that some daemons aren’t running (that normally would be).
I recently replaced my starter motor ('09 though, so I definitely don't have the feature,) so I'd be wary of that, but don't they fit longer-durability starter motors in those cars?
Actually, come to think of it, (please correct me if I'm wrong) they probably keep the fuel pump primed while 'on' but at a stop, but I'd be concerned about the lack of oil at engine start. I always was told to turn the key to on, wait for the ~2 seconds for the fuel pump to prime and after you start the engine, and let it run a bit before starting to drive.
My cynical side wants to think the start/stop is a planned obsolescence 'feature,' but obviously I don't really know for sure.
It's an attempt at squeezing the tiny last bit of fuel mileage out in the standardised tests, and they obviously don't care if it wears things out faster...
It's not uncommon to find models with a wide range of power outputs but the exact same mechanical parts, and the only difference is the program in the ECU. Before electronics, the difference might be in a few small parts[1]. If you spend long enough staring at parts catalogs you can easily spot such things.
[1] One of the examples that immediately comes to mind is with diesel engines --- you can change the fuel injectors to tune power over a very wide range, limited only by your acceptance of fuel consumption and emissions. All the load-bearing parts of the engine (block, rotating assembly, etc.) are exactly the same: http://forums.aths.org/Attachment20581.aspx
Seems like the detection feature from Tesla is meant to provide this, rather than preventing 3rd party mods. As I would never connect anything to my cars IT systems, I would happily receive a warning if the car did detect something like that.
Unless we are talking some Ocean's 11 style scheme where you make a tuner company just to get their exploit into cars, all to be turned on at once on the big day.
Typically you'd find one online and look at the reviews and ask people on forums about it.
The aftermarket car audience is very online, much like HN. Getting into it, again like with programming, requires a fair bit of knowledge/mistakes. But, you gain knowledge and get better over time.
If the electronics screwup your OBC, you can just get a new one. If they screwup your wiring or blow your engine, well, you don't get into cars if you don't want oil all over your arms. Blowing things up and rebuilding engines is part of the 'fun'.
That same argument could be made for just about anything being sold -- the original owner could still exert control over your purchase because their reputation might be damaged if you weren't careful. You're not wrong that the court of public opinion can be vindictive, but I think that's by far the lesser evil compared with not actually owning the things you buy. We grant exceptions here and there (can't use your baseball bat to kill a person, usually), but none anywhere nearly as invasive as prohibiting any activity that might give a former owner bad PR.
The fact that Tesla has an automated means of enforcement is a big part of why this is coming up at all. They don't have to wait to figure out what the courts say; they can use software to do what they want till they're explicitly forbidden.
True. And until the law says otherwise, they can continue to do so.
> You're not wrong that the court of public opinion can be vindictive
This cannot be overstated. I don't entirely agree with Tesla's approach (as an owner of several of their vehicles, and having to go through contortions to get some issues resolved), but I understand the why.
And then later when they catch up, the laggards add similar safeguards.
Usually there are valid reasons beyond just the usual “protect profits” this gets portrayed as. Even if that’s part of it, it’s often more about protecting the brand and product safety.
Autos are different from some products in that there are real safety issues if stuff is not done right.
Yes.