Tesla Owner Billed over $14,000 for Accidental Full Self-Driving Purchase | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Owner Billed over $14,000 for Accidental Full Self-Driving Purchase

thedrive.com

53 pointsjacquesm63 comments

> Writing on Twitter, Preuss notes "If you double click the shift panel twice and accidentally engage the auto-pilot in Model 3, Tesla will automatically charge you $14100 if you didn't previously purchase auto-pilot."

This can't be right, what's next, your car is upgraded to a performance version when you press the acceleration pedal too hard?

Just wait for the "Full Self-Full-Self-Driving" version that buys FSD for you when it detects you're getting bored at the wheel.

> This can't be right [...]

Yeah, I agree. As much as I hate EULA's and "Are you sure?" confirmation dialogs, THIS is a scenario where that's probably a good idea.

OTOH, the customer might have gotten those, but was just conditioned to "click-through" them like anything else? Maybe he didn't even perceive them, it happens!

For every purchase over a certain price this should probably be legally mandated. The same thing happened to a number of parents who had kids spend $1000s on the app store before they became more aggressive with deciding with how things can be purchased.

I believe all of the hardware is installed in every model 3 by default, allowing the ‘full self driving’ upgrade to be sold at the flip of a switch.

IIRC this is true of the Model 3 and the Model Y, and possibly certain generations onwards of the S and X — though I’m less sure about those two.

The real problem is that "full self driving" doesn't exist (and isn't even close to existing), but they're selling it.

* For small values of "full".

This sounds like the scammy computer sales company I worked for as a teenager.

We charged $120 to upgrade to a black tower and monitor (white towers and monitors were so last year at the time), but surprise surprise... if you didn't pay for the upgrade, we gave you a black tower and monitor anyways as a "gift to you".

All of our computers were always black.

What I don’t get is until “full self driving” is available, how can we know what hardware is needed to achieve it?

Here's the fun part: the hardware already changed, twice, since that claim.

They might be thinking as follows: a human can self-drive a car. If we give the car enough sensors to get all the sensory data that a human driver gets, then implementing self-driving is just a matter of software.

But how do they know they’ve given it enough sensors?

They can be confident sure, but as we all know confidence is the food of the wise man but the liquor of the fool.

I'm just speculating, but you could test this as follows: transmit the data from the sensors and let a human driver control the vehicle remotely using video and audio feed that they collect from the sensors. If this turns out similar to driving a car in person, then they could deduce that they do collect enough data for self-driving.

But that only proves that they've got enough sensors to allow a human to drive the car.

Until the car is actually self-driving they won't know for sure if there are enough sensors for self-driving.

They're making a statement of fact based on a leap of faith.

Ah, the eternal 'small matter of implementation', I've heard that one before.

I’m pretty sure this guy is lying. The only way to purchase these upgrades if they didn’t come with your car is through the Tesla phone app or website. You literally can’t do it using the shifter as claimed.

Funny how we are both downvoted without anyone disputing what we say.

vrrooom vrrooom, "that'll be $3000, sir"

$10 nozzle repair requires new battery pack for $16,000. Call it what you want, but that is not green car.

Yes, that's a straight lie.

Autopilot is standard and free. FSD costs 10k, not 14k. It is not possible to buy FSD throught the car.

There's a price breakdown in the article:

* $3`000 Autopilot

* $10`000 Self-Driving Capability

* + Tax

Author also said Tesla refunded it without a fuss, so they acknowledge accidental purchases are possible

I've seen ",", ".", " ", and "'" in natural languages, and "_" and "'" in programming languages, but where in the world are thousands separated by backticks?

I'm going to guess Switzerland. (The linked answer specifies apostrophes rather than backticks, but IMO either is reasonable).

https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/23667/is-using-a-comm...

Yes, I saw the Swiss apostrophes in the Wikipedia article that question links to (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator#Examples_of_...), but there are no backticks mentioned there (hence my question). The only times I've seen backticks or grave accents used in place of apostrophes, it's been done consistently (I'm guessing some keyboard layouts don't have apostrophes?), while orangepanda used an apostrophe too, as if the backticks were a deliberate choice.

Autopilot is built in on every Tesla Model 3 and enabled ty double gear shift press.

It wasn’t always standard some cars came without it before they made the standard range+ the base model. The part about it being purchased by just pulling the shifter is a lie though you can only buy these up grades from a menu in the Tesla app.

That sounds like a legitimate concern.

> The Tesla owner noted that the purchase may have been made through a different method than the one he quoted, but was made without any authorization regardless.

So it's not from double clicking the shift panel in the car while dirivng as per the original tweet?

How was it done then? Clicking things in the app/website? Because that's an entirely different thing.

I'm calling BS.

> So it's not from double clicking the shift panel in the car while dirivng as per the original tweet?

Here’s the tweet where he said that: https://mobile.twitter.com/deesix/status/1420433764002373636

It reads to me as him saying there are multiple UI paths to make the purchase, he doesn’t know which was used because he wasn’t in the car. But the fact that another driver could trigger a $14k charge to his card on file (assuming that part is true) is concerning regardless.

Edit: after reading some comments from Tesla owners, I think my “assuming that part is true” was generous.

The UI paths are through the website and through the app, not through the car.

You would have thought the author of this article had pissed in everyone's cereal.

There's no way you should be able to click enough buttons in a car to be automatically billed $14k without seeing at least one prompt that says something like:

"You're requesting 'feature X' to be installed. Do you understand that we're immediately going to charge you $14k?"

...and then requiring some sort of PIN or password to confirm. It doesn't matter that they reversed the charges.

Also, they can call it "Full Self Driving," but that doesn't mean the car actually drives itself or that it's a good idea to use it or that it's safe. I'm honestly shocked that they haven't been charged with fraud.

You literally can’t do what the article claims. You can only buy those upgrades using the Tesla app on your phone or web which you have to login to with a username and password. The guy in the article is lying.

Possible avenue: parent requests access through the app, son grants it, parent then makes stupid move, son assumes it went through the car, only belatedly realizes it may have been the app (or after having this pointed out to him by netizens).

> Given that even most smartphones require a thumbprint or PIN entry to spend as little as 99 cents, it's a little horrifying that you can get billed fourteen big ones from a couple of mis-swipes by anyone who sits in the car.

Either I’m getting old, or inflation is hitting our language over here too. There’s one more digit than I was expecting on those ‘Fourteen Big Ones’.

What do you mean? "Fourteen big ones" = 14k.

Maybe I'm old too.. I would of said 14 big ones = $1.4k (a big one being a one hundred dollar bill).

I’m old too, and inflation has not been kind to the hundred dollar bill. I cannot justify calling that a “big one” anymore. Welcome to the new century, I guess.

Ahh, I see, maybe you're right, I don't know.

The headline sounds like they selected the wrong option on the Tesla website. Not from accidentally turning on the functionality in their car.

And there is quite a bit of discussion about whether or not that is even possible.

Paypal (with all its problems for the seller) would have never allowed that. I've never understood the culture where we are ok with people randomly charge us without asking.

It's the sales equivalent of sexual abuse, where consent to buy something is assumed on the justification of "you know you wanted it, you wouldn't have had your finger that close to the Buy button otherwise".

The authorization (consent) was given the moment the guy linked his creditcard with 14k+ credits to his tesla account.

Then, he gave the login to a third party.

Lots of things that one should simply not do, and is not the fault of tesla (which should have spend the time to at least have a confirmation prompt, I totally agree, but that's an extra service to the not-so-very-smart-people who blindly link their creditcard to stuff)

> The authorization (consent) was given

It was not.

And then refunded it.

I’m unclear on what the story is here.

14K is a big scary charge to appear on a credit card.

It's not a micropayment, nor a casual sum of money unless one is a Sheik I guess. It's uncanny and a newsworthy item for a slow news day, maybe?

If done without any prompt it also seems like it is illegal. How can you enter someone into a purchase agreement without their knowledge. Even if they refunded it, that is a seriously dodgy thing to try and do.

attention

Surely they were able to sort it out with Tesla (some other comment here mentions Tesla refunded it without a fuss), so why is it even news?

Article: here is the darkest dark-pattern you will ever see IRL.

HN readers: this is our beloved Tesla, so how can we downplay it?

Doesn't make sense as a dark pattern, people will just reverse the sale and cause increased workload for Tesla. Why make such a bad faith assumption?

I don't think it's intentional but think it's still possible for it to be a net positive. All it takes is one person who was on the fence or else too rich to bother deciding "oh well" to make it worthwhile for Tesla

This is every Apple and Tesla thread. Goes to show how much people love their products.

Wondering what would happen if they actually paid using bitcoin. How does refund works in this case?

Heh, self-purchasing self-driving capabilities. Skynet would be proud!

Amazon invented 1-click purchasing. Now Tesla comes with 0-click purchasing.

My five year old son bought a diamond pack of 99 dollars inside a mobile game. A day after I activated one click purchase. Well ain't too bad. But still. But 14000 sounds redicilous.

Hope you got that reversed.

If there had been any issue with getting the charges reversed, I would have been much more concerned about this. I still think any large purchase ought to be confirmed before being processed BUT, the ability to reverse the charges without significant difficulty goes a long way toward mitigating the problem.

Until the charges start getting more difficult to reverse, of course. Or until you fail to notice your accidental purchase for longer than X amount of time. Or until you have some bad luck preventing you from doing anything about the accidental purchase for longer than Y amount of time.

Dark patterns with potentially tens of thousands of dollars of downside should always be named and shamed, even if they're not immediately dangerous. We can't trust circumstances will stay the same forever. There's a reason nukes are difficult to fire.

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