Jailbreaking Used Teslas
vice.com
vice.com
This is why I don't want a car connected to the internet. The behavior of my 50k vehicle should not change unexpectedly because some guy in silicon valley pushed an update.
This near-7-year-old link[0] always make me laugh.
This thing is definitely not internet connected. The basic trim does not even feature a radio at all, only standard space to fit a 1-DIN radio yourself. It has manual (roll down) rear windows.
I don't know about the US, but I would be surprised if you can't buy an F150 that has no internet connection?
Here's a list maintained by a company that's in the business of downloading and analyzing Event Data Recorder information: https://rimkus.com/media/pdfs/Event-Data-Recorder-Vehicle-Li...
The only Porsche that appears on the list is the Taycan. I don't see any Ferrari cars on the list.
Edit to add from a below comment I made: I mean more in the scenario of a cell going bad, causing a fire, then maybe blowing up the car and causing collateral damage. As I understand it, this would be covered by the car's insurance, right? If so, Tesla shouldn't be locking the chargers (Maybe Tesla would need to verify insurance before allowing supercharging then). But if it doesn't, or if the car is uninsured, then I can accept Tesla not wanting to be held liable for the damage to their station or other owners' cars for batteries that might have undetectable damage.
I know that people here won't be super surprised by this concept, but I still think it's worth getting the wording right.
Just as with music and videos and games, I think one should be disallowed from calling something "selling", "buying" or "owning" if what's really being done is "licensing". Yeah, I'm from the "words matter" police. :)
I doubt we’re the only ones; the HOA depresses the price of the house.
In my mind, a house + HOA = condo, regardless of whether it shares a wall with someone else, and we’d pay accordingly (50-66% as much, tops).
HOAs are evil and I wish they could be outlawed.
As far as I can tell, aren't HOAs just 'built' out of standard contract law?
I would like to see laws make HOAs invalid and null and void. If you own something you should have full control of it, to the extent that it doesn't adversely influence the safety of the community. So yeah I'm okay with laws saying you aren't allowed to store a pile of hazardous chemicals that could be a safety hazard to neighbors but I'm most certainly NOT okay with laws telling you how you're allowed to landscape your garden or what color you can paint your house or what your fence or driveway looks like or whether you park your car in your driveway or garage. To me, owning means I make the rules, to hell with contracts, it's not a rental.
Unless it's in some historical district where we're trying to preserve the historic look, that I'd be willing to make an exception for. But definitely not in random suburbs.
Well, but that's just an issue of definition. By your peculiar definition, it just means that you don't own the home that comes with HOA encumbrance.
I don't think your peculiar definition is the same as the law normally uses. By itself, it's as fine a definition as long as everyone is careful in their use of words, and doesn't try to draw build moral arguments from issues of definition.
I'm not a lawyer. But I suspect that your first paragraph mentioning issues of discrimination might be able to have some legal firepower. I doubt you'd get much mileage out of anti-trust concerns, unless a particular HOA was dominating a housing market?
As for your second paragraph: those sounds like excellent reasons for an individual such as you or me NOT to buy a home that's part of a HOA. But they furnish no reason to outlaw HOAs, ie to forbid other people from forming them or joining them.
The movies and TV on streaming services are not yours because you don't control them and they can be removed at any time. Market salability is another question entirely. There are items you can own you might be prohibited from selling on an open market, such as a landmark property or a particularly destructive weapon.
And as you have correctly discovered, cars catching on fire is a very regular event that is covered by insurance. Does your supermarket make you sign a liability waiver every time you drive onto their parking lot? No, we have mandatory insurance and other higher-level concepts to do away with all of this overhead that we would otherwise incur doing the most trivial of "transactions".
The charger should be designed to withstand abuse and vandalism. It certainly should be handle a short in a charging system.
Yeah you can say it if your goal is to create some political fear-mongering radio advert for some inspection program ballot initiative, doesn't make it true though.
There have been many studies about the efficacy of vehicle inspection programs. The TL;DR of them is that while throwing up a bunch of red tape can keep junk off the road and this can affect the accident rate but the effect is negligible or near the noise threshold. People in well maintained cars making bad decisions is the source of the overwhelming majority of accidents. The brakes going out on some shitbox are basically a rounding error. Salvage cars breaking for reasons having to do with whatever accident they were in is even rarer than that.
Salvage vehicles are a rounding error compared to old junk shitboxes. So take everything that studies have shown about inspection programs and move the decimal a couple places.
It is not Tesla's car. They don't own it anymore.
The liability would be the same for any other car.
> this would be covered by the car's insurance, right
Yes. Which has nothing to do with Tesla.
> then I can accept Tesla not wanting to be held liable
Tesla does not own that car. The car would be the same as any other car that Tesla does not own.
And after you jailbreak your Tesla and cause an injury accident, who's to know? Just say you didn't, and it was Tesla's defect. Of course Tesla is concerned.
The Tesla belongs to the user. It no longer belongs to Tesla. That is all that matters.
> Of course Tesla is concerned.
Their concern is of no importance to me regarding things that they no longer own. I simply do not care what their concern is on anything that is no longer owned by them.
If there were 2000 cars that were jailbroken, and they all crashed in the same way due to the jailbreak.. don't you think they'd figure out that the jailbreak was the problem? It's not that hard to tell if the software has been changed from stock.
If they all failed differently, and had different accidents in different scenarios, you're going to have a hard time proving a manufacturer defect.
Yes, and those rules and laws say that the car belongs to the consumer, and the consumer can basically do whatever they want to that car, regardless if Tesla doesn't want that.
Tesla has no legal right to prevent someone from salvaging a car that belongs to the person.
A consumer has the legal right to salvage that car, no matter what Tesla thinks on the matter.
Right to repair laws are on the consumers side, not Tesla's.
This is well established law, that has been in existence for literally decades, and Tesla does not get to ignore these well established laws.
The fact that "Of course Tesla is concerned." is not my problem. It is not the problem of consumers, who have legals rights. And I don't care what Tesla is "concerned" about, because consumers have the legal right to salvages cars, and Tesla does not get to ignore these laws.
> Tesla is indeed responsible
Sucks to be Tesla then! They can shut down their business and stop making cars, if they don't like the laws that allow consumers to salvage cars.
"And after you do your own brake job on your Honda and cause an injury accident, who's to know? Just say you didn't, and it was Honda's defect."
This applies to any kind of thing you do to your own car. There's always some chance that something can go wrong and cause a huge wreck. There's always a part that can go bad, and there's always going to be someone who lies to cover up or blames the manufacturer.
You could drive your wheel into a curb, damage your suspension, and then have it fall off a week later and crash into oncoming traffic. And still blame the manufacturer for it.
The point is, you don't need to modify a car, or jailbreak it, or anything for these lawsuits to happen.
I think companies like Tesla are correct in blocking access to their own charging network and I have no issue with another company blocking access to theirs. However I do not agree with the idea Tesla can block you from using another fast charging system.
I'm strongly in favor of greater re-use of these enormous machines that require intense capital investment, and valuable and limited resources to create.
Yes, though as long as Tesla is up-front about their restrictions, people can take those considerations into account when they make their capital investment.
An environmental car is something like a LEAF.
A 20 year old car might have a market value of $500. If somebody keys it up and down both sides, it's totaled and gets a salvage title, because that's more than $500 worth of paint damage.
In some cases a car gets stolen, the insurance pays out because they can't find it, then later they do find it and there is nothing wrong with it but the policy is already paid out so now it has a salvage title.
It has nothing to do with the safety of the car.
They won't because they're either doing the same, or hoping to do the same in the near future.
My guess is they know when they have bad accidents where they have an issue and quickly pay out and secure NDAs. (They prove this when they aggressively contest claims made by customers in public)
Eventually, an autopiloted Tesla will cause an accident affecting something like a 10 passenger limo or interstate bus that will trigger an NYSB investigation. That’s likely to crack the facade on all manner of bullshit the company does.
Reminds me of DJI drones which every now and then ask you if you want to update the software, but updating the software only would cause you to have more restrictions on your flight, not less.
Don't fix shitty products.
Don't buy them in the first place or we won't have anything nice left.
No need for a dummy load. A cell modem that never received any signals never transmits.
Certainly they can't prevent you from charging and driving around your wrecked Tesla on your farm or whatever?
Its only fair. After all, the new owner just bought a hunk of metal from the previous owner. They still need to purchase a license for features like starting the car.
Actually for a number of years there have been companies that disable car ignitions based on car payment status.
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/gadgets/remote-kill-switches-di...
only if I want to. In many cases I keep using old version.
>"Everything is going towards subscription models."
That is a wet dream that will not materialize for many vendors or will fail after a while.
But I wouldn't accept my motherboard supplier locking hardware features behind software updates either. Like if my can do pci express 16x. I wouldn't think it is right that it only does 8x unless I pay for a software unlock
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5398555
basically adding or removing a few resistors made card performa like other models costing hundreds of dollars more.
Surely you did. You just didn't pay attention. You paid for a bigger package (i.e new UI)that included driver updates as well.
I think the law will only change for worse. It all starts with the DRM/DMCA.
However, some parts of the world are more enlightened when it comes to consumer rights. For example, the EU has at least attempted to make constructive regulatory interventions in the interests of consumers as technologies have evolved, even if their success has been mixed. Here in the UK, aside from EU rules we're inheriting after Brexit, we too have some solid basic consumer rights laws of our own. The EU+UK market is already larger than the US one, so that's a pretty big incentive for Tesla not to try those sorts of games around these parts. And if we get reasonable treatment, maybe that's enough for customers in places like the US to demand the same standards.
No...?
I don't think Telsa falls under this unless they let you take a car for free and require you to pay monthly for the car to actually turn on.
That's more of a zipcar.
By using Free Software?
And one has not needed to pay a separate fee for OS upgrades in quite some time. Linux has obviously always been free. macOS since at least Mavericks - if not earlier - is also free of additional charge.
In searching for more information, I found https://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/POWER5/ipha2_p5/... which talks about activating and deactivating not only processors but extra storage.
It doesn't seem like that would work very well for most laptops and phones, given how people won't pay for online backup or anything above the minimums.
Anyway, IBM had a vision of "computing on demand" many years ago but it wasn't in the cloud, it was in your data center.
If they gave you beta motor logic they'd have to fix whatever would burn or fail.
Indeed they're trying to milk the software side. But it's business as usual I believe. You paid for some specs, everything else is off contract. Unless they promised otherwise.
A pure software update fixing an existing issue I would say no. Car companies have recalls all of the time paid for by the company when something doesn't work as expected.
A software recall should be treated the same as a hardware recall.
The question is basically whether it's an issue or something that works as intended but could be better.
To be fair, this doesn't seem to have stopped Tesla before.
(A similar thing would hold for business models like selling printers for cheap but making the cartridges expensive, etc.)
To my mind, any product sold can have integrity checking, but as the owner I should be able to disable it if I want to.
A more fitting analogy would be Apple charging you to upgrade your BIOS.
Updates to things I trust my family's life and health to should be classified like recalls, a sign of manufacturer failure and not a consumer privilege.
To be scrupulously fair, that's true of all software; it's just more important for safety-critical software, because safety-critical software is more important.
But modern luxury cars also feature many components that have little to do with safety.
If you buy a camera, you get free firmware updates; your phone gets free updates,...
I can think of a ton of examples where what you're saying is nonsensical.
I can download games and play them whenever.
If I want phone service I have to hook this phone up to a service provider.
If I want music I have either put an mp3 on the phone, visit youtube, subscribe to a service like spotify or google music.
Apple Music is a seperate service like spotify correct?
Venders will bundle in their own services into the os menus in order to extract additional cash.
Apple Music isn't a feature of the iphone os. It's an ad designed to trick you.
Even before Tesla you already had car manufacturers that basically locked out performance behind a pay wall even tho the car itself was identical to the “sport model”.
Many of the German manufacturers had this practice for a decade if not more, the extra price difference is basically their estimated cost to the changes in MTF between when you push your car to 80-90% of its capability to 100%.
And even before Tesla you already had aftermarket products and services that were designed to unlock that extra performance and yes they did often at least in principal voided the warranty.
We also see this in other things too you have differential pricing in say electronics and electronic components too, sure some of it is binning but not only quite often the "enterprise" tax is just the fact that these parts will be run longer and under more stress so their MTF is different.
An HDD in a home computer will be under very different loads than one in a NAS. And quite often there aren't many physical differences between the drives in some of the lower end models there are no differences at all and in some cases non-NAS drives might actually be "better" than their lower-end NAS counterparts.
What you are paying for when buying a WD RED isn't necessarily a more durable drive, you are essentially paying a premium for future warranty claims, it's essentially an insurance scheme in which WD RED NAS drives are defined as higher risk than say their Black or Blue series.
For example same block, heads and intake but different (cheaper) pistons, valves, springs, injectors, etc ... Sure you can easily dial up the power on the cheaper engine to match the expensive one, but at a higher risk of breakdown.
BMW is probably the biggest offender in this regard and you can buy the “unlock cables” for the older (<2015) models on EBay later they switched to a software lock, which you can also hack.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/BMW-E60-Sport-mode-unlock-cable-w...
You can also tell there is no difference in the valves, pistons or pretty much anything else since the part numbers in the service manual are identical.
The only difference in parts comes to the trim and the breaks on some of the models.
Personally, I would argue that the most important principle to protect the customer is that they should get what they pay for when they choose to buy a product. That product should not then be retrospectively nerfed through software shenanigans, either for them, or for any future owner they sell the product on to. This is one idea that car manufacturers have been flirting with recently, and IMHO we should stamp on it hard.
Another idea, but to me a clearly distinct one, is that a manufacturer of a combined hardware/software product might develop software-only improvements after the product has been purchased. In this case, I would distinguish explicitly between fixes for problems where the product wasn't performing as expected at the time of purchase (things like safety issues or security vulnerabilities that clearly shouldn't have been there in the first place) and enhancements (things like performance improvements or additional functionality). Again IMHO, the former should be supplied free and unencumbered to all customers, as they are essentially fixing a defective product. For the latter, I don't have a problem in principle with the manufacturer charging for the upgrade, as potentially it incurs additional costs and risks, and it brings a genuine benefit to the customer that they didn't have at purchase time.
A third idea is a manufacturer deliberately shipping a product that isn't using the full hardware capabilities because of artificial software limitations. They might also then offer upgrades for sale later, which is really just a special case of the enhancements-after-sale idea above. Once again IMHO, charging for these enhancements is still OK even if they manufacturer knew in advance that they might ship that software later on, as long as they were honest about what the customer was actually buying at the time of purchase and they didn't claim or imply that those enhancements would become available for free or on any other specific terms that they don't then honour.
There are at least two good reasons for taking this view. One is the general principle that if someone has bought a product of a certain specification for a certain price then that transaction is then concluded. Just as I don't think the manufacturer should be allowed to move the goalposts after the sale in a way that harms the owner, I also don't think the owner is entitled to free extras from the manufacturer that weren't part of the sale. The other is the practical reality that hardware+software products are enormously complicated, software is never perfect, and the idea that a manufacturer should be liable for not shipping optimal software from day one or prohibited from continuing to do work that might develop useful improvements that benefit customers in return for further revenue is kind of silly if you think it through.
One very important issue I'm glossing over here is whether the terms of the original sale were fair to the customer. This is a standard problem in any sort of retail environment, and we usually rely on some combination of competitive markets and government regulation to protect the little guy. But these are also separate issues to the ones above that would have to be considered on a case by case basis.
The way out of it is through competition. My 2c
[0] https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/antifeatures
[1] https://www.thecarconnection.com/news/1121248_mercedes-benz-...
[2] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/03/business/bmw-options-soft... , discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23763560
Rich Rebuilds on YouTube has documented his entire ordeal with them.
I don't think I believe Tesla's mission statement about the environment if they are so willing to generate all that e-waste.
These things take time to develop culturally, if they even do. If they just do it, it will antagonize consumers. ATM, I doubt it's worth it for Tesla.
Meanwhile, they are already selling software, and it seems pretty lucrative. Whether it's taxing used car sales or voluntary upgrades, it's all just software revenue. Unrepentant antifeatures are more of a "late stage" game. There are plenty of less controversial and more lucrative ways for Tesla to make money with software, especially platforms. Tesla now has one, and even if they don't increase production (they will).. it's a growing platform.
...That's not to mention the 800lb gorilla software upgrade.
Agree on the principle though. Everything is becoming a hunk of metal running never software we don't own.
IMO, the really unpopular moves are likely to come from traditional OEMs. They're playing the game of tight margins and high volume. More incentive, at least for now.
You know, it's an electric car, ignition is something you don't want to ever encounter with it.
It doesn't follow you from car to car.
Then, what is the justification of Telsa's " you did not pay for it" given to second hand owners as seen in this article?
This is really disingenuous and in total contradiction with Musk's "your car is an appreciating asset".
"fuck you, give us money".
Tesla is free to do whatever is supported by contract law as it relates to software licensing, including stripping licenses off vehicles when transfers (like trade ins) done through Tesla (versus a private transfer).
Disclosure: We own several Teslas.
Personally I believe that the current licensing situation may be good for company profits, but presents a net negative for society. As a result I'm always happy when I see it being discussed rather than simply accepted as "the way things are".
There is a belief that when you buy a car, features you paid for should not disappear for the sole purpose of ripping off customers. I don't accept that shit, and will never buy from companies with scammy practices like this
>Tesla
I wish it was just tesla. BMW does this too, and I'm sure there are other cars I will never buy for this reason. I don't really care, I have other choices.
And the rest of society is free to use the legal system against Tesla, and to change laws so as to punish them specifically, or the court system. And I personal hope that such things could be applies retroactively.
There is a lot of shady tricks a lot of companies do (but not all of them), like planned obsolesce, but disabling features of a product retroactively and demanding you pay again to re-enable those features is not a common occurrence and even worse in my opinion.
> I mean, they aren't giving it away.
Tesla wants to get paid for the same thing more than once. If they made sure the customer knows from the get go that some of their features are really subscriptions to a service and not ownership, then OK, but that's not what they are doing.
Not sure if you meant to reply to that.
There's one case where Tesla apparently messed up and didn't remove the package from a car they re-sold until after sale. I can't find any other cases of that or removing packages during private sales.
edit: This seems to be about Tesla discouraging salvage cars rather than private sales of non-salvage cars.
The insurance companies would much prefer minor repairs than to write off the whole asset, but they can't get quality work done to the asset.
This practice is driving up _everyone's_ insurance rates.
I guess it might affect everyone if it increases liability costs in cases where the Tesla driver is not at fault, but I imagine that’s an extremely minor portion of expenses considering the tiny proportion of Tesla cars.
Either way, you paid for it, and even it it's technically "totaled" it's still fucking yours. When Tesla disables functionality remotely, they don't say it's because the warranty ran out or because it's unsafe now, they say they are happy to re-enable it for fresh money.
That's why I wouldn't buy a Tesla (or any car of a manufacturer pulling the same crap) now, and if I did already buy one, would be looking into filing a class action against the company, because remotely disabling features like that that you already paid for is fraud.
Even if you buy a used Tesla direct, it can take _months_ before they get it to you.
Technically, the insurance company probably owns it as they paid you for it after declaring it totaled.
That's what insurance companies do when they total a vehicle: they buy it from the insured and sell it to somebody else at an auction.
A sale is a sale.
Refusing to activate a car you have the legal title to in any scenario is almost certainly illegal, whether you "salvaged" it or not, for instance. Some of the ways they restrict your car they already sold you, the way they use your cars sensors to collect data for their use, even if those sensors are disabled for the owners' use (Autopilot not purchased), etc. are probably one good lawsuit away from being thrown out.
It is amazing that ludicrous performance mode is a software upgrade. That makes for amazing margins.
I personally don't support any attempts by auto makers to make cars more disposable.
My other car is newer but still with low mileage and in excellent condition.
It's not really that hard, but so much has been done deliberately to make it more difficult. I'm finding older vehicles more and more desirable than newer ones.
But if you still want to use a 3rd party tool you pay $100 a year for an autoauth subscription that supports all tools an independent shop could possible have among all their employees. That effectively allows the 3rd party tools to request FCA unlock the SGM so they can program the car directly with aftermarket tools. And if you just don't want to deal with chrysler or care if nefarious actors can potentially hijack and program your car over a cellular connection. You can replace the SGM with a bypass and even ditch the cellular connection. Or you can add another OBD port for yourself by plugging in at the star port. Or use something like the 8+12 method.
So its not like John Deer or Tesla where you can't do anything. Its more like if you owned an Apple computer and Apple allowed you to purchase their software to work with it. And did so at a very reasonable price (comparatively) any independent shop could afford. But also allowed you to register with a auth service that allows you to disable all the stuff blocking you from doing things with 3rd party software.
If we're going to go down this road of cellular vehicles I really hope FCA being out there ahead of others rubs off on how other manufacturers handle it. I think its a pretty good engineering design to address modern concerns as well as support independent shops by extending access to their tools to work with. You don't have to worry if Autel or Snap-On understood something well enough to program the various modules correctly. But you can still go that route if desired.
Plus you only get those subscription services for as long as FCA decides they want to sell them to you. Will they still offer that 10 years from now? 20? Consider me extremely skeptical.
WiTECH isn't entirely brand new here. This release (WiTECH 2.0) is a continuation of WiTech 1.0 (installed software) that has existed for decades with full support for all OBD2 model years up to 2017. v2.0 is all web based so you can print off whatever you feel is important while you have an active subscription.
You can still get a haynes, chilton, etc manual but I feel we're comparing apples to oranges there. Those sorts of things are not shop manuals + dealer tools even on a 30 year old car. I'm pointing out that the dealer tools are starting to be within grasp of a shade tree mechanic and they're letting YOU service the modules. You don't have to settle for a reverse engineered manual based on a teardown or 3rd party tools. But they aren't stopping you from using those either. I appreciate it with how computerized cars are getting. Who else lets aftermarket flash modules with OEM firmware updates? This is the exact opposite direction tesla has been going in.
All that said. I very much respect a carbureted vehicle that only needs a dull spark on 6 out of 8 cyls to get you down the road. No question about it.
"In Oklahoma, the insurance companies will declare a total loss and deem a vehicle as salvage when the damage is greater than 60% of the fair market value of the vehicle."
PBR is ~$3K, anything more severe and they will write whole car down due to cosmetic damage.
Other features, like unlimited supercharging on newer cars (older unlimited supercharging followed the car) or free data were only for the original buyer, and they will remove those when they resell a car.
He paused and thought about it and said "we'll look into it".
So there's hope.
I take it most crashed vehicles written off in this way can't really be used for parts because Tesla is sabotaging the market for used vehicles and wants to boost sales of new/replacement parts at dealerships, correct?
Also, is the warranty of a Tesla voided if an independent repair shop makes repairs with such parts?
Constant replacement eliminates any possible "green" savings.
I totally agree. The right to repair[1] should be the basic premise for any device you expect to last more than a couple of months.
I can’t really take it in for third party repairs. They seem to refer to me as part of their “fleet”. What data are they collecting? I can’t use it on Uber?
A side effect of this approach is that you could get a new Tesla and log in to activate the features you already paid for. If you crash your Model 3 and insurance buys you a new one, should you have to pay for Autopilot again?
That said, that approach may piss off people as well. Imagine paying $50k for a Tesla, and only being able to get $30k when you sell it because you paid $20k for features that won't transfer over to the new owner. Even worse if your new car isn't a Tesla: that money would be lost.
From a little bit of reading, it really seems like TSLA is trying to have it both ways on this, where it can just disappear after any private transaction?
The fact that there's question here is insane. This should be an easy question to answer from the purchase agreement, but I downloaded a purchase agreement I could find, but it didn't say anything about FSD.
Has anyone here bought a Tesla with FSD? Did your purchase agreement say anything on the subject?
why?
This Serfdom As A Service crap has got to stop.
Bicycles are still good.
There's an easy fix for that: add the option to transfer the Autopilot to another account. Then you can sell off the Autopilot as well.
Given, of course, Tesla being willing to allow that, or if not, sufficiently consumer-friendly legislation.
First, if a dealer advertises a car with a feature and the car is missing that feature, then you have recourse -- with the dealer.
Second, how does Tesla even know that a car has changed owners? What triggered Tesla disabling the feature at this time for this car?
I mean look, if you want to sell your Tesla back to an official Tesla dealer and they have an agreement with Tesla to disable software add-ons before reselling... then that's Tesla's right. But then the purchaser would never have seen any extra features enabled in the first place -- there would be nothing to complain about.
So what is actually going on here?
That isn't the case, though. I paid for FSD on my model 3. If I trade it in for a Model Y, I don't get to transfer my purchase, but you know that they're going to charge someone else to enable FSD on that vehicle. It's double-dipping.
Battery safety and compliance testing is going to be a big industry in the next decade as a result IMO.
meaning all warranties are voided and Supercharging is disabled, even after the repaired vehicle passes a high-voltage inspection by Tesla’s own repair staff.
To an extent, it even makes sense for FSD. If you're going to take on that much risk and liability, you don't want to rely on other people.
We need new frameworks to handle this kind of stuff.
https://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-...
Normally a car is serially produced by established factories, and sometimes even re-using parts from other models. And this car will still be in use 20 years later with no restrictions on its features except wear.
While a Tesla is manufactured in a brand new factory with no previous precedence of parts or processes.
And on top of that, it's re-sale usability is apparently garbage. So we'll see a bunch of old Teslas litter nature because no one wants them.
Do they view it as a property of the account, and any Tesla for the account has FSD?
Or do they view it as a property of the specific vehicle that somehow vanishes in a transaction?
Then it would seem to me, in the Jalopnik article that Tesla was just in the wrong in this instance. They could have disabled the feature when they sold the car, but once they transferred title of it and it retained that feature, they should no longer be able to revoke that feature.
I bet there's a market niche for what you're describing
I think price is the big issue. The batteries and motors are expensive in a variable cost way. Most of the features use relatively inexpensive sensors or components and have low variable cost. So a consumer sees all these features as justifying the high cost. Removing those features probably wont make it much cheaper (unless maybe you're a separate company that doesn't develop/engineer those features at all).
Edit- I've always missed the true small trucks like the 90's era rangers and b2000's. I feel like that's an excellent place for a new ev truck startup to begin. The new rangers and colorados are as big as the old f-150's.
Ford did make a 2000 era electric Ranger though. Perhaps success of an electric f-150 will enable electric trucks in general, and smaller trucks again.
I think solutions like this will be best for the near future for folks who want a car with an electric motor, rather than a cell phone you can rent to drive places.
It seems like every manufacturer is generally going higher and higher grade on feature set and (some) performance metrics, and saying "screw you" basically to maintenance, repairability and general comprehensibility concerns.
The cars I've owned from the 60's up through the 90's all had wiring diagrams that would fit on a few pages and could be maintained, largely, with a handful of tools in a normal suburban driveway. Newer cars seem more and more to require specialized tools or equipment and are harder to debug. Generally the maintenance / repair process is aimed at shops and professionals, not the end user. This specialization is brittle, and unlikely to survive any significant systemic shocks. We've been locking ourselves into this model for decades, and I don't see an easy way out.
I look forward to some high quality open source EV hardware becoming available eventually. That's probably when I'll get an electric car.
Yeah, my old 89 caprice had a computer, but the wiring wasn't too bad. Of course the self diagnostics were not very advanced which makes some troubleshooting more difficult. Ah, the days of bending a paperclip and sticking it into the OBD port...
The over the air updates from tesla that adjust things like the pedal heights and performance characteristics of the motor makes me want to avoid them.
The private seller can only sell the car without asking for money for the software features and the new owner instead has to pay Tesla again. Brilliant!
Sorry quick search but take a look at this (paywall but you get the jist):
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-16/musk-stan...
The price was decided upon purchase and unless it specifies limits it’s “lifetime”
Serf mentality.
I don't want this business model, so I haven't bought an EV, since basically all the EV manufacturers have adopted it.
"This business model" is why I unashamedly burn fossil fuels.