Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

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The whole idea of an internet connected car that constantly 'phones home' without any easy way to bypass or disable is kind of mind boggling to me.

I don't understand why after this people weren't in an uproar.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/business/tesla-battery-ir...

When Tesla decided generously to temporarily grant residents fleeing a hurricane an upgrade that allowed full usage of their battery.

People's lives were literally in the hands of an optional, upsold firmware softlock.

The fact that it's come to that is completely appalling. When the manufacturer of your car has the power to save your life because if they didn't they'd suffer bad publicity is disgusting.

And the fact is, the only reason why hackers are able to gain access to vehicles, the only reason for any of it is because companies have decided cars need to be a service provided by them so they can keep making money after the initial purchase.

People buy cars so they can travel freely without relying on others. Making cars reliant on a third party server for something as basic as the ingition goes against the entire premise of owning a car.

>People's lives were literally in the hands of an optional, upsold firmware softlock

People's lives are literally in the hands of optional firmware softlock all the time in medical devices that you can find in hospitals. If the hospital doesn't pay for x feature or for support technicians to service them, then some people could actually die.

Saving lives or not, you can't blame a company for not giving you for free features you haven't paid for.

Also look to Boeing 737 Max crashes caused by the "base model" lacking relatively cheap safety indicators and redundant sensors.

Didn't the option just cover the AOA disagree indicator? AFAIK even the planes with that option only read from the pilot flying's AOA sensor before their fix was implemented.

Not to mention that that indicator isn't a physical light with hardware and wiring, but merely an on-screen icon on the central display panel.

I blame companies for not doing what I want all the time. If you don't complain, you have no right to complain.

> If you don't complain, you have no right to complain.

A beautifully stated maxim I’ve never been able to articulate. As an immigrant from the USSR to the US, I believe this mentality is what separates the First World from the Second.

> If you don't complain, you have no right to complain.

Damn this is heavy.

Exactly. There's so many expensive treatments, devices, software, etc. that don't get offered to everyone. Unfortunately everything has a price

My workplace is currently struggling to sell a more expensive device, where in the majority of the cases it will offer no advantage over the original device, but in some cases it will be life saving.

Naturally, many health services are dragging their feet on wanting to buy our device.

I for one am glad Tesla did the right thing and were pro life saving. Thats what makes Elon Musk an of the box thinker.

The Tesla softlock was not a feature, though, it was an artificial limitation being placed upon the operational capacity of your car. It's like Dell selling somebody a laptop with two of its eight processor cores turned off, and then forcing them to pay a fee in order to turn the cores back on.

I agree with the OP that it is a disgusting business practice at best, and totally indefensible.

So companies are not allowed to differentiate product models through software, only through hardware?

I don't think a two or three line IF statement really qualifies as differentiating a product through software.

Seems like a waste of resources to build a car capable of 300-400 miles but software lock it to 200 miles. Ideally not okay but obviously we live in a profit seeking world and Elon and co are no different.

I blame companies for creating pricing structures that deny people the full use of hardware they supposedly own. I know it's standard practice. Lots of standard practices are bullshit, and this is one of them.

Wait till you see Apple...oh wait.

100%.

I would like to hijack the comment chain to point to the right to repair movement in agriculture [1]. There will be some hearings in Nebraska [2] about the issue where lobbyists will try to shoot it down again.

[1] https://www.agriculture.com/machinery/repair-maintenance/rig...

[2] https://legiscan.com/NE/bill/LB543/2021

Hmm, that makes me wonder. If right to repair exists, could someone "repair" their tesla in such a way to get full access to their battery legally?

>Saving lives or not, you can't blame a company for not giving you for free features you haven't paid for.

Who's fault is it? The person who dies because they couldn't afford a firmware unlock which in most cases is a sunk-cost that's locked purely to produce profit?

Sorry -- that's too much of an ethical/moral opinion -- and honestly edges near victim-blaming; making lots of money in life isn't something that is guaranteed by any shot.

I'm of the opinion that anyone with actionable ability to change a situation -- and then chooses not to act on that ability -- is to blame for the situation progressing.

I hope and wish for public companies to attempt to act altruistically -- and the ones that don't should be held responsible by their audiences. The BioMed profit schemes out there are devious and for-profit-engineereed, no doubt about that; commonality doesn't make those practices morally appropriate, though.

Unless you are telling me that tesla sells cars for a loss (like an inkjet printer), the Tesla owners already paid for the feature. It just has been limited for some extra margin which clearly is not essential else the car would not have been sold to begin with.

Its plain rent seeking and frankly should be illegal.

Walk a mile in manufacturer shoes. Let's say you run a company producing a hardware product. And you invest in developing a software feature which improves your product. It costs money. This software feature also needs tiny modification of original hardware product by replacing couple parts with better ones with price difference of 0.001 cent/per piece . So your options are:

  Start producing two separate models of you product, greatly complicating supply chain and logistics
  Discontinue old product and produce only improved version
  Produce only new HW but introduce software switch, to allow users to keep purchasing cheaper product without new feature, while simultaneously allowing users who need new feature to pay premium to cover your development costs

> Saving lives or not, you can't blame a company for not giving you for free features you haven't paid for.

Yeah, you can.

Non-payment should be handled by the legal system, not back doors built into software.

> allowed full usage of their battery.

I thought on the checkout page Tesla was pretty explicit that they were selling a 75 kWh model with discounts thrown in for artificially software-restricted 60 kWh version.

If an ICE brand sold two trims of the same vehicle - the cheaper one with the smaller tank or worse fuel economy, is it as appalling and aren't they endangering the drivers of the budget version?

I have trouble putting my finger on exactly why this feels wrong, but to me, the idea of buying a car - buying anything that has hardware in it that I have to pay extra to activate, it just seems wrong. I suppose it's the sense of wastefulness, or perhaps the idea that the extra widget could break and take down other things along with it.

Consider how you would do this with a battery. The battery has to have extra cells in order to have extra capacity, and the software allows the user to use or not use the extra cells if you pay for the privilege. But if one of those extra cells fails, the entire battery pack does as well.

In your example, the hardware IS configured differently, and there's no sense of waste or increased failure therein. You bought a car with a crappier engine or a smaller tank, and that's what is in it. There's no software key to fix it. Something about the idea of software letting you access hardware you already paid for (even if you didn't pay for the software to use it), just feels wrong.

On the other hand, the extra cells give you more wear-leveling, right? So, in theory at least, a 75KWh battery limited to 60KWh has a longer lifetime than the unlocked one.

It's not wear levelling, but yes, my understanding is that Li-ion batteries still last longer if you don't fully top them up and don't fully discharge them.

What kind of warranty does Tesla have on the batteries? Is it conceivable that a firmware change that prevents fully topping up or fully discharging the battery statistically saves Tesla money in its warranty costs?

To preface, I think the 60 kWh models were unpopular, and Tesla eventually removed them from the lineup.

But your argument suggests that auto manufacturers will be penalized for making premium features easily upgradable, and lauded (or at least given a free pass) for selling premium features that are pain in the butt to get upgraded, even when it’s artificial busywork.

E.g., the navigation maps on my 2013 Lexus can only be updated by the dealer and carry a $1,500 fee. There are obviously easier ways to make the navigation upgrades easier, but I suspect if Lexus made it too easy, that would land them in hot water with the same kind of argument (and probably generate quite a bit of wrath from the dealers).

> Something about the idea of software letting you access hardware you already paid for (even if you didn't pay for the software to use it), just feels wrong.

isn't this what iPhones do, at the end of the day? in effect, by not being able to load applications of your own choosing, you accept the implicit limiting effect of the software you're given, similar to the bargain (?) described here.

Why yes, that is what iPhones do. How about that.

It feels wrong because it is wrong. When you buy physical things, you should be paying the total cost for the hardware to be manufactured, distributed, and finally recycled or disposed of. When you buy something, you should own the hardware and should be free to do what you want with it.

I would like governments to make this clear in law, but I understand why some people feel might feel this is an overreach.

We can try and avoid buying hardware that has software restrictions, but without laws ensuring we can run whatever software we want on our hardware, manufacturers will take these rights away from us.

We are living in an age of environmental catastrophe, and I think we need to appreciate our physical things more, build them to last, and have laws that help us get the most out of the things we build.

Intel don’t have production runs of CPUs with different clock speeds. They make a batch, test them then work out the clock speed that batch is good for. Then sell them at a variety of prices. You can overclock and 90% of the time it’ll be fine. Maybe it dies after 5 years instead of 10. Or maybe after a week. In the case of Tesla maybe that move took brought forward the EOL of the battery by 2 years or maybe 2 weeks. Even our bodies don’t work that way - our brains prevent us from using our full strength except in extremis because if we did our muscles and tendons would be seriously damaged. Soft limits are everywhere.

The word for CPU manufacturers making multiple SKUs is “binning”. Every processor wafer made could attempts at an 8 core beast, but if 1 isn’t working, they disable another and sell it as a 6 core. If the chip isn’t stable enough for hyperthreading, that feature is disabled. Unstable at high frequencies? The turbo clock is lowered.

Are the manufacturers benevolent in this? Not always. Sometimes an 8 core chip will be locked to 4 just to make more lower end SKU pieces available for purchase. Or Intel disabling overclocking so you have to buy a “K” processor that costs more.

But when people say things like:

> When you buy physical things, you should be paying the total cost for the hardware to be manufactured, distributed, and finally recycled or disposed of.

They’re ignoring the fact that soft limits actually can make manufacture cheaper. The reason Intel/AMD/etc don’t have a separate silicon template for every SKU is it’s too wasteful (money wise). Each run has a setup cost, and if that can be lowered by reusing the same wafer template, they do that. It’s cheaper to have less manufacturing SKUs and just disable features later.

In addition, when soft limits are used on chips, it actually prevents waste. Imagine if the yield on an 8 core wafer was 70%. That means only 70% of the produced chips works at spec. The other 30% would be tossed if binning didn’t happen. By binning, that 30% can be sold (with reduced feature sets).

>It’s cheaper to have less manufacturing SKUs and just disable features later.

I think you missed the point. If the chips are not stable or have a problem core, then fine, dial them down and sell them as capable of doing less.

But if a chip _can_ do x+y and but you lock y away because you don't want your customers doing y, then there is a problem we should address.

They do make software limitations to make it fit inside their product line. If only one out of eight cores is dead it’ll likely get sold as a 6 core chip not a seven core. If the clock stability limit is slightly too low it will get binned 10% lower for no technical reason.

If they didn’t do this everyone would be returning the 6 core versions of a chip until they get lucky and get the 7 core. People already do this a little with overclocking capable chips.

Maybe you’d argue they should sell a 7 core chip as well for a slightly higher price but that also means having more product lines and increased manufacturing costs as a result.

> I have trouble putting my finger on exactly why this feels wrong, but to me, the idea of buying a car - buying anything that has hardware in it that I have to pay extra to activate, it just seems wrong. I suppose it's the sense of wastefulness, or perhaps the idea that the extra widget could break and take down other things along with it.

Wastefulness may be distasteful, and you are welcome to boycott companies you feel are wasteful, but I don't think wastefulness should be a crime. If it's cheaper for Tesla to store unusable battery cell tech in your car than to throw it in a landfill, do we really want to make the landfill the cheaper option?

> If it's cheaper for Tesla to store unusable battery cell tech in your car than to throw it in a landfill, do we really want to make the landfill the cheaper option?

The end result is the same, isn't it? An unused battery cell that is driven around until the car is scrapped and goes to landfill. The case could even be made that carrying that extra weight for the lifetime of the car is more wasteful than throwing it away at the start.

I think more likely, if such wastage were a crime or at least financially discouraged, Tesla would do the obvious thing and just design a more modular battery with a way for them to either install or not install the extra battery cell, which is a much more desirable outcome than the current situation of wasting battery cells.

Wasting the planet's finite resources should be discouraged, either by law or financial disincentives.

I agree that it feels wrong but what about this scenario:

A company produces an item with two features A and B. It costs the company $200 to build a fully featured item. It now builds two of them for the market but also realizes not everyone needs both A and B. Yet they'll still need to earn back the production cost of $400. So instead of selling fully featured items for $200 they sell one soft-locked version with only one feature for $100 and the fully featured one for $300. More people who can benefit from the product/more customers while still earning back the $400.

> the idea of buying a car - buying anything that has hardware in it that I have to pay extra to activate, it just seems wrong.

I made this point in another thread but this seems to be appropriate too.

If you use an iPhone or android you are under a similar regime. The hardware is capable of running any set of instructions that can exist. But it is artificially restricted to the subset found in the app store.

You can pay an extra fee to partially unlock it. You still cannot fully utilize it though.

AMD and Intel have been doing this for longer than I've been buying computers. You go to your local computer shop and want to buy a 486. You have a choice between buying a 486DX that is expensive and can perform floating point arithmetic quickly, and a 486SX is cheap and cannot. The 486DX and 486SX are the exact same hardware, but the SX has the X87 FPU disabled. You might say well yeah, but that's just a computer, not a car, but in 1990 you could easily spend $20,000 on a home computer with all the bells and whistles, which would be in the ballpark of $40,000 in 2020 dollars.

Intel, AMD, and NVidia still do this. If anything, they're better at it today than they were back then.

> I have trouble putting my finger on exactly why this feels wrong, but to me, the idea of buying a car - buying anything that has hardware in it that I have to pay extra to activate, it just seems wrong.

In the 1970's Opel sold a model (the 'Kadett') that had an optional RPM indicator. But in reality all cars had that indicator installed, if you paid to buy the option the dealer would remove a blank plate that obscured the indicator.

This has been happening for a long, long time. Back in the day, we had an voice-mail system with a certain amount of storage. When you paid to increase the storage a technician came on-site and removed a bolt that allowed the hard drive head to move farther into the disk. Camera manufacturers are a recent example. There are firmware "hacks" that allow you to access more advanced features from a less expensive body.

Are these things bad? Maybe, but if you were the manufacturer would you rather source 2 (or 15) different components or just use 1 and modify it to fit the need and price point?

Reminds me of drilling a hole in an LD 3.5‑inch floppy disk to format it as HD and gain 720 kb. Not very reliable, but it did work.

ICE Trim Extended Range and Trim Poor have the same gas tank, but Trim Poor’s firmware won’t use your last 10 liters of fuel

But that's not the correct analogy. It's more as if Ford would sell you a pickup where part of the loading area is fenced off and if you pay extra they send you a key to take out the artificial smallifier they added. Or they sell you a car that refuses to fill up unless you buy the $50/month "extra fuel" subscription.

Am I the only one that remembers cars getting hijacked *while driving* because core systems were connected with the entertainment system [1]?

The whole 'lets smartify everything', 'control everything' or even 'collect usage information' is exhausting. We have collectively given up our freedom in the name of 'comfort' and often for features that nobody really needed but became mainstream.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...

I certainly agree with what you're saying. However, isn't this standard in many devices nowadays? Your iPhone can run any set of instructions, but it is artificially restricted to the subset found in Apple app store. It's the same thing in the car.

In general it can be assumed that any apparition of software in any piece of hardware is just a case of practical implementation of "organised scarcity".

I wonder how long before there is a large enough backlash from customers that "works fully offline" becomes a marketing label.

I'm sorry, but what the fuck? Who asked for this?

That's a really silly and wrong way of looking at it. Tesla has down society and you a great service by including additional capacity in your car above what you payed for. If they choose to let you have it for free, pat on the back for them. If not, then it is no different at all from someone dying in a Ford Focus that was only front wheel drive where all-wheel drive would have saved their lives.

Is the AWD drivetrain included in the base model?

No. It is only a single motor in the SR model.

by including additional capacity in your car above what you payed for.

The batteries have been already manufactured and you physically have them in your possession as they are there in your car; they just chose to artificially cripple their capacity in software.

If not, then it is no different at all from someone dying in a Ford Focus that was only front wheel drive where all-wheel drive would have saved their lives.

If the FWD version also came with all the parts that the AWD one has, but they were simply disabled in software and only acted as dead weight, people would be just as furious (and no doubt someone would find a way to reenable it.)

While agree the focus metaphor isn't a great one but you are also miss-selling the Tesla situation here.

Tesla restricts your battery usage for battery life purposes.

This allows them to sell you a vehicle that has a charge matching what they claim while also having a battery life matching what they want it to be.

SSDs work similarly. You don't sell 1 TB of SSD storage you sell slightly more than 1 TB worth. Then you wear level between cells to ensure the whole thing lasts a lot longer. (Batteries are nice because losing a cell isn't losing data but the fundamental strategy isn't anti-consumer)

This is fair point. Adding batteries also improves max output (performance).

Letting you use the extra batteries will create more warranty issues later which are not subsidized at the price you pay for the car.

Imagine cars came with governors for instance that could restrict speeds and acceleration to limit wear and tear on a vehicle and provide the consumer with a lower cost upfront thanks to less warranty work needed. Similar concept.

They choose to artifically cripple their capacity in software so more people can afford the car. Apparently they should only be selling the most expensive version according to you?

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