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Comment by GhostVII | Hacker News Reader

The worst part isn't even listed in the article - Tesla is remotely disabling fast charging on all salvage cars across all networks, regardless of what the actual damage is. If it was just limited to the supercharger network I would somewhat understand, it's their network and I don't think it's a huge deal to disallow salvage cars on it. But they are removing the ability to charge even at third party chargers, basically removing any ability to go on a reasonable road trip with your car, with no warning. Completely insane, especially since many salvage cars just had body damage.

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.

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What if one were to unplug the cellular antenna and prevent an update from happening? Or does the car detect that condition and yell at you?

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.

You don't need to leave the antenna unplugged as that could trigger detection or burn up the antenna signal amplifier. You can put a dummy load on the antenna connector instead, nothing whatsoever will be able to detect it, and the radio hardware will never send or receive any signals.

Well, the software could have a deadman switch that locks up when they can't phone home for a while?

It communicates with the charger, right? So the charger could just go online and refuse service.

Don't fix shitty products.

Don't buy them in the first place or we won't have anything nice left.

> burn up the antenna signal amplifier

No need for a dummy load. A cell modem that never received any signals never transmits.

Untrue, a cell modem can attempt an initialization sequence and you would never know about it.

Any car in the EU that is changed after certification needs to be recertified or have the update tested. The day Tesla updates something that causes someone to get hurt Tesla will be sued into the ground as all software updated cars that haven't had their update tested are illegal. It is also illegal to change a car to make more HP (there's a limit, AFAICR it is at 5%) without getting it recertified. While Tesla don't give a f... about legality some (like me) have been through the process of recertification on way less changes than Tesla does. It is both time-consuming and expensive and the testing was insane. It baffels the mind that none of Tesla's competitors has cried foul yet.

> It baffels the mind that none of Tesla's competitors has cried foul yet.

They won't because they're either doing the same, or hoping to do the same in the near future.

Frankly a lot of stuff Tesla does makes me wonder how they can get away with it but I guess they're operating in a permissive regulatory environment.

They benefit from being a first mover with more information than the regulatory bodies, who are also badly fragmented and less then effective in this administration. Cars are regulated by a confusing patchwork of state and federal regulation.

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.

Same except s/connected to the internet/connected to the internet via tivoised software/. I think a car one connected by https://github.com/commaai/openpilot might be cool.

Does it disable the ability to charge, or the ability to fast charge?

Certainly they can't prevent you from charging and driving around your wrecked Tesla on your farm or whatever?

DC fast charging gets disabled.

But it is impossible to get a car that is not connected to the internet today, unless you find out how to disconnect it yourself.

This near-7-year-old link[0] always make me laugh.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-exec-gps-2014-1

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dacia_Duster

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?

You probably can buy one with no network connection, that the user can use, but that doesn't mean that it isn't connected for other purposes.

Eh. Why spend the cash on a chip and service when the vehicle will need to be services eventually and all info can be downloaded then?

good point. but real-time data is probably a bit more valuable.

Yeah, the majority of Dacia models doesn't even come with an air conditioning by default. It's extra, but you know what, I like the idea that it can be left out :)

Air conditioning didn't really use to be a standard thing in European cars until quite a lot later than in the US.

you can go buy a brand new Honda Civic today that has no cellular modem.

I'm not doubting you but how did you check your claim? (but either way, no cellular modem doesn't mean no wireless connection)

Every modern car has a black box that can be subpoenaed for accident information and may expose other incidental information.

Is it connected to the internet, as the parent comment claimed?

Not quite all vehicles yet.

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.

Yup, this is part of the reason I just bought a Dacia Dokker. Another reason is that there's no touch screen anywhere.

There are still excellent cars without cellular links, like Mazda --still with refined driving and excellent reliability.

Surely the people salvaging these cars would be happy to enter into a contract with Tesla to accept all liability (including superchargers/stations) for damages caused by the car they fixed up, then, right?

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.

If use of an object requires an ongoing contractual relationship with a specific entity, you don't own it.

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. :)

What about buying a house that is part of a HOA?

I think HOAs are a scam. We recently bought a house, and simply didn’t consider anything with an HOA fee (we made exceptions and considered arrangements where the HOA was limited to private road maintenance).

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).

I don't own a home but if I did I sure as hell am not paying any fees to some scammers and sure as hell am not listening to some idiots who think they have any say about how I landscape my yard.

HOAs are evil and I wish they could be outlawed.

What kind of change in law would you like to see that would outlaw them?

As far as I can tell, aren't HOAs just 'built' out of standard contract law?

Yes, but so are non-compete agreements and discrimination, and laws can make those contracts invalid.

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.

In a free country, why would you take away my right to join an HOA to protect the home I own? The 1sr Amendment guarantees freedom of association.

Sounds an awful lot like mob “protection”

> 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.

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.

An HOA isn't theoretically better or worse than a state government.

I once read that the test of whether or not you own something is, "Can you sell it?" In this vein, movies and TV shows you "buy" from Apple, Amazon, etc. are not yours.

I don't think that's the right test. The question is do you control it? Can it be modified? Can it be defended? Transferred or loaned to someone else? Copied?

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.

Of course “when applicable”. You can’t copy a physical object physically, and technically can’t even copy a physical object by recreating it without violating some trademark or the maker’s copyright.

Then some things are owned by nobody. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fideicommissum

Somehow, things work in a sane way with ICE cars and gas stations.

This is nonsense. Chargers should be designed to protect themselves. It a defective car can damage it it's only the charger's manufacturer fault.

As others have explained, once car and charger have done their handshake, charging is about as complicated as a toaster oven and there isn't really anything the car could do to damage the charger.

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".

But Tesla is bound by the Magnuson Moss Act. They can't reduce the functionality of a product after the fact.

The charger should be designed to withstand abuse and vandalism. It certainly should be handle a short in a charging system.

Can't this be said of literally any car? A badly repaired car could cause a 12 car pile up and kill 17 people because the breaks or power steering failed at the wrong time. This actually seems tremendously more likely than the scenario you name. It seems like Tesla's actions are a pretty transparent effort to control the market to maximize profit.

>Can't this be said of literally any car? A badly repaired car could cause a 12 car pile up and kill 17 people because the breaks or power steering failed at the wrong time.

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.

These are wrecked cars, however. Who is to say that the batteries don't have hidden damage that could cause them to blow on a fast charge and cause a fire? We already know Teslas have fire issues.

That's what insurance is for.

> would be happy to enter into a contract with Tesla

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.

A defect that is the fault of the manufacturer is certainly a way to sue Tesla for 'cars they don't own'. Happens all the time. Daily.

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.

> And after you jailbreak your Tesla

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.

Good for you. But society has rules and laws, and Tesla is indeed responsible for failures in design or manufacturing. As evidenced by hundreds of lawsuits of other manufacturers, for a century.

That doesn't mean that a handful of people with jail-broken cars are going to be able to get together and prove a manufacturing defect.

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.

> But society has rules and laws

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.

Let's apply this scenario to a non-Tesla car. And instead of a jailbreak, you decide to do your own brake job on your car.

"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.

Does Tesla sell cars? Or do they sell car-shaped things that run on licensed software?

I will be blunt, I really wish "salvage" cars had no right to exist. There is insufficient consistency between states as to what can be titled as such and still driven on our roads. You can get on the road most of the time just fixing cosmetic items and inspection in some states more concerned with emissions than much else; some states don't even check for working ABS or airbags.

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.

The article claims that many cars are declared "salvage" merely due to Tesla's expensive repairs, which they claim is caused by their (unique?) restrictions on parts availability. As such, Tesla would arguably be responsible for the fact that the cars are "salvage" in the first place.

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.

> 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.

Sure, I can agree with that. And we can also be critical of Tesla for it. It does run somewhat counter to their environmental mission.

Tesla has an environmental marketing, not an environmental mission.

An environmental car is something like a LEAF.

Agreed about it being marketing, I should have said something like purported mission.

Salvage just means the insurance company paid out the policy rather than repairing the car.

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.

In some sense I agree that the certification process is way too loose for cars, but 1) it's more than salvage cars that are the issue 2) it's not really clear that remote disabling a feature is doing anything to help.

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