Tesla remotely unlocks Model 3 car, uses smart summon to help repo agent
tiremeetsroad.com
tiremeetsroad.com
If Telsa are also granted the rights within the court order to assist the bailiffs, then presumably it would be a fully legal action.
At the end of the day, you sign a contract wherein you agree to keep up payments on an item, and if you don't the item will be repossessed. If you don't like those terms, don't get stuff on payment plans.
I recall buying a used car where the bank lien had to be removed prior to transfer.
P.S. Looking around a bit there is a lot of variation on how this works depending on locale. So I guess lease vs. finance is just another way things can differ out there.
No doubt it would be fascinating to see how each state does it. I only have experience with a few.
You are the owner, they simply have a lien on the vehicle which is noted on the title. Once you pay off the loan, they send you information to get the lien removed and a clean title.
Car loans are secured on a car. If you want to just borrow money with no security you can get a (likely far more expensive) unsecured loan if the bank judges this to be a good risk, or take an overdraft on a current account or use a credit card, all unsecured debt.
No, the listed owner on the title is the owner, no matter who has possession of the title.
Bottom line, the government just makes it obscure and difficult to determine the real dynamics between the two parties, and the weird interaction it may have with existing laws governing theft/ownership.
Some states in the US also handle mortgages like this.
Source: Trying to get a bank to remove the lien after it’s fully paid off can be a real source of frustration.
The way all of this works varies by state though. Some states issue a title electronically when the lien is released.
Kinda nice when you trade in a car you still owe a bit of money on, as you don't really need to bring anything with you other than the key and your drivers license; the dealer does all the work getting it cleared and transferred.
I guess it's different mostly in name though, they still have strong rights to the vehicle.
Many people are surprised by this. They assume repossession means the loan is paid off - until they discover they've lost their car and are still on the hook for more or less the current market value.
In general:
Lease - Finance company owns the asset, you are obliged to service the payments. You may have an option to transfer title at the end of the period (depending on jurisdiction).
Loan - You own the asset, secured against the asset.
(There are some UK/US-specfic product types due to difference in things like tax law)
Leasing (in general) is popular as it has tax-advantages for smaller businesses/individuals around depreciation, which can lead to good pricing for end lessee.
(source: Made software for the asset finance industry for a decade or so in the UK/EU + US)
This is the law. It is working as intended. It's also moral - If you enter into a contract to buy something on credit, you should uphold your end of the contract. Specific instances have been wrong, and we can argue the merits of this particular case, but car manufacturers assisting the new owners of assets that have been repossessed in securing their asset is at worst morally neutral.
1. Unsecured loan - if you have the credit facility available then you can borrow an unsecured amount of money and purchase a car. Neither the seller nor the bank have any ownership interest in the car. The loan isn't secured on the car. You are free to sell the car on and transfer its title to anyone else. If you default on the loan then different proceedings may take place to recover the money owed, but that may not necessarily include re-possessing the car (if it's valued under GBP3000.00). The loan company can come after any of your assets.
2. Hire Purchase - the seller lends you through a credit company the price of the car (and interest). The seller transfers the title of the to the credit company. You do not become the "owner" of the car, instead you rent it until such time the total amount of the loan is paid off. You don't have any right to sell or transfer ownership of the car. If you do the unfortunate buyer of the car may wake up one morning to find that it's been repossessed. This is why as a buyer performing HPI checks for any outstanding hire purchase or secured loans on the car are fairly important.
There are also other schemes such as leasing which make it more obvious that if you don't keep up with the payments then the seller or finance company can come along and repossess the car.
In those states, you have the title and the bank has a lien on the title.
As advocates, companies are fickle and unreliable.
Presenting as advocates, companies always stress how aligned their interests are with customers'. We'll, that's true until it isn't. Once it isn't, it flips.
That's useless. Better to keep in mind that companies aren't your advocates. They're your salesman.
A Google, FB or Tesla just isn't structurally built for that.
From what limited knowledge of law enforcement I have (and it's very little, I admit), it's reversed: everyone by default is legally obliged to assist a law officer, on their request, to enforce the law and order; there are some limits beyond which explicit court orders are required, but those limits are rather broad.
Are bailiffs law officers in that sense?
Cars with remote summons features today basically just crawl forward a few metres to help you get out of a parking spot. They aren't self-driving across town to a repossession lot, if that's what you're thinking.
Tesla is evolving country music: not only will your girl leave you, so will your truck.
To me the problem isn’t that they might, but that they can. I guess the fault is technically on the person who rented something under terrible terms, but the problem to me is that over time terrible terms seem to win out over reasonable ones.
Not to mention, if Tesla is capable of doing this for rentals, I have to assume they are capable of doing it for any Tesla. Which is not great.
That probably won't make them cause damage immediately -- I assume there's a set of sensors that will apply brakes rather than hit a wall or a detected car -- but there's a lot of chaos to apply that way.
I wonder if Tesla's EULA immunizes them against such breaches.
Tyranny of the marketplace, I guess. If most people are not bothered by the terrible terms, then the selection of items with non-terrible terms will be correspondingly small.
Case in point: I'd like to buy a TV (even at a higher price) that does not have ads all over the interface. From what I can tell, as of right now there are approximately a handful of such TVs, not counting older models that probably aren't produced any more. And of course out of that handful, most are not very good in other respects..
I don't know how to solve that apart from regulation, which is often a very poor solution.
I don’t give my mortgage company a copy of the keys to my house.
Presumably if the rate of mess is low enough and there are extra cars, you would just request a new one. Then they punish the person who left the mess or odor, disincentivizing them from doing it again. Probably need cameras monitoring the inside of the car.
While I honestly don't expect door to door self driving in most places for decades, a lot of people who don't use cars much probably underestimate the degree to which many people customize their vehicles. And even if they sit a lot of the time, most of the cost is often in miles, not time.
Imagine then making those vehicles larger to enable not only a decrease in traffic, but an increase in housing density, local infrastructure in walking distance, and economic growth.
Imagine if we then realized we could charge that elongated car as it's driving if we put electric lines above streets.
Oh, and why not increase rolling efficiency while we're at that, and make the task of self-driving simpler by embedding signaling infrastructure into the road itself.
You just imagined buses, trolley buses, and streetcars respectively.
Which is what makes the most sense, and will continue making the most sense for vehicles that don't sit in your garage most of the time.
There's more to car ownership than being able to get from A to B in principle.
Once you add immediate availability, individual vehicle preferences, having your stuff in the car already, the ability to keep your stuff there once you arrive at your destination, never having to think about small, but normal usage damage (especially if you have kids), or, conversely, having the vehicle just as clean as you want it...
...you will see that garages aren't going anywhere any time soon, self-driving cars or not.
And that we'd be wise to develop actual public transport infrastructure for the people who really do only care about getting from A to B, with some acceptable wait time. It's a win-win for everyone.
My pessimistic prognosis is that the development of the self-driving car will make the taxis slightly cheaper, but instead of paying your Uber driver, you're going to be paying engineers, maintenance, and cleaning staff.
Because it was basically 100 years ago when the car industry sought to dismantle that infrastructure, and succeeded.
That is to say, there's enough there to suggest that this wasn't the free market answering solely to consumer demand.
If you follow the same 100 year trajectory in other countries, then you will see an uptick in car ownership for sure, and infrastructure adapts to support this (highways/freeways/motorways), but it's not nearly as drastic as it is stateside.
Of course, the US is a large place and even its states are larger than other countries. And it hasn't existed in its modern form for more than a couple of centuries whereas the civil infra on the other continents has been around for at least a full millennium and most likely longer than that (e.g. Roman roads in the UK that would date back well over 1000 years). So the US got the luxury of a blank slate and, well... see what you got from that.
At the same time...car manufacturers had the perfect opportunity to seize so they could sell more cars and thus have civil infrastructure designed around the fact that everyone has a car. If someone at that point in time had more money than Henry Ford they could have dumped it into trams and trains and the landscape would have been significantly changed.
As the Wikipedia article you cited elsewhere discusses, streetcar systems outside the US went out of business at the same time as those in the US for the same reasons.
[1] No, kids, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? isn't real history
When there's funding for highways but not rails, the results are unsurprising. The benefits of public transit are a positive externality[1][2].
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Positive
[2]Real history is way worse
There's no public transport in the US, aside from a few exceptional places like NYC, Seattle, Boston (maybe), and, like, DC.
Uber is so popular because it actually allows you to get from A to B, for some money.
But I love the circular logic of "nobody wants the buses, why fund them" — "you can't get anywhere on a bus, why fund them" — "look how few people ride the bus" etc.
I could rent every single one of these, but don't because the economics don't make sense, and the use model would otherwise lead to a lot of inconvenience.
Except it didn't work for ZipCar or the rental agencies that have added hourly options -- sure it's not bad, but is it really pushing people out of car ownership? No...
Ride sharing similarly hasn't worked to push people out of car ownership either -- it's just killed traditional taxi services by compensating drivers less and eliminating the flag down monopoly some cities have maintained (a taxi medallion in Boston/NYC used to be worth hundreds of thousands... no one wants them now)
All these share options work for low use scenarios like the city dweller who wants a weekly trip to a shopping center, but for the daily commuter/driver it won't ever make sense... and it'll never make sense for those that need to keep things in their car like child seats, diapers, a walker, tools, etc...
Bike/Scooter shares haven't eliminated personal ownership either because of the scarcity issue at peak times.
Have these people never been in the back of a taxi, or any kind of public transit?
In the early days, it was great. But once membership increased, there was an increasing chance that I would get a car that was not particularly usable.
Filthy on the outside (dirt, mud, etc) and/or inside (dog hair, bodily fluids, etc).
Or a car that had one or more warning lights illuminated (check engine, brake, no wiper fluid, low gas, etc).
And each time I had to phone into Zipcar support to report it (and/or swap cars), otherwise the next user could report it -- leading to me being charged some cleaning fee or such.
The best experience I had was in Seattle when I entered a dirty Zipcar and called support who said I had to take the vehicle to a car wash otherwise they would charge me a cleaning fee.
While I understand I could have probably escalated to someone who understood the situation ("oh? you just got into the car 5 minutes ago?"), I decided it was a better use of my time to avoid short-term car rental programs altogether.
Less hassle with verifying who actually trashed it, but also if you have to stare someone in the face after your ride, you'll probably be more respectful of the car.
But really, there's just not a satisfactory solution I can think of to make me want to use the service.
A couple I know in SF don't have a car but they seem to make a lot of use of cars in some form or other pretty regularly.
Likely, they'll pass the animal on to a shelter and give you the info as to where to pick them up. It wouldn't be considered "stealing".
Google actually seems like they will be first to full self driving. My biggest fear is that they continue to have zero interest in being an actual car company and keep all their Waymo tech locked behind their taxis and Lyfts are replaced by Waymos with no reduction in price, just a loss job for the person who would normally drive the Lyft. Other companies follow suit and the self driving car dream is ruined to make C suite executives richer.
No, I don't prefer software subscriptions with monthly fees. I don't find the "maintenance" required for software annoying or onerous. However, I really don't like car maintenance. Waiting for an oil change, tire replacement or rotation, or really any repair is the worst part of car ownership and I could die happy never having to do any of that again. I don't place a lot of value on ownership in general because of maintenance or storage burdens.
I do like pay-as-you-go for most of the stuff I use, for whatever it's worth. Food, electricity, gas, that sort of thing. I use cabs when I go on vacation and look for opportunities to travel by bus, train, or plane instead of driving. A self-serve on-demand auto rental service would be ideal, for me.
To be fair, most of those maintenance options do go away with fully-electric vehicles. For example, you could lease a Tesla Model 3/Y. The process is impressively streamlined: pay $100 using Touch ID and Apple Pay, then select a pick-up date on the calendar. Now you have a vehicle with basically no maintenance, apart from topping up wiper fluid. All managed with an intuitive and highly-polished mobile app. In 3 years, repeat process.
My intention isn't to advertise for Tesla. I'm just pointing out that options exist nowadays for people who dislike the entire hassle of vehicle ownership (dealing with dealerships, negotiation, financing, scheduled & unscheduled maintenance, etc.)
I very much prefer owning a car over renting because I can leave things in the car. Like child seats, but also extra clothes, diapers, a phone charger, some snacks etc.
I definitely understand why folks want to own a car, keeping useful tools in there makes a lot of sense. I don't have that same use case but I get it.
Soooo many questions.
...being plugged in to a charger (that doesn't have some sort of automated disconnect) would also be disable.
The question is valid though after you've put the kid in and you're on 30 second excursion to push the shopping carriage back... what if the car is recalled? Seems like a potential disaster and tragedy.
Smart summon on a M3 (what the article is talking about) can back out and navigate parking lots... although horribly and slowly. But it's not just a straight line.
Its major flaw is thin upright things like small trees or poles (although this may be better on vision only cars, I’m not sure). If it sees a person or child in its path, it’s just going to stop.
...and auto pilot won't drive into giant barriers in the middle of well-marked, and mapped, highway divide either, right?
I avoid Costco like the plague because the experience is always bad for my mental health. I'd rather pay a few extra bucks to avoid oblivious giant cart drivers, having to show multiple forms of ID , having my receipt validated before I can leave, having to figure out how to transport stuff to and from car, etc. Plus, there is no consistency in the non-grocery inventory. You're forced into the "we _have_ to buy these pans today because we never know when they'll be available again!" psychological trap.
It's just a very inconvenient shopping experience in my opinion. But I know I'm the only person in America who feels this way.
Walmart and Target: slightly better experience, slightly more expensive.
Supermarkets and Malls: better experience, more expensive
So I guess, you aren't the only person in America, but people make the choice to accept the burden for the price savings.
I generally hate supermarkets and malls. Annoying music, questionable `sales` pushed on aisle end caps and elsewhere, etc. Not the experience I'm after.
The Walmart near me has the main entrance to the parking lot at the opposite end of the store. There is also a long protected cart path going down the parking lot.
The Costco on the other side of town is almost as good as the Walmart.
If the operator was ruled at fault, they would receive consequences.
Are you insinuating that Tesla operates on a higher level than the law and is receiving special privileges vs other automakers, or are you saying all automakers should be more accountable? What event are you pointing to they should be more accountable for? Or is this all just a vague hypothetical?
Are you sure there would be any material consequences for the board and leadership?
Holding companies to the same standards as members of the general public runs into an issue of how large an impact they have. A Surgeon is going to make mistakes that kill people, but just because people are imperfect doesn’t mean effectively banning surgery via sending every surgeon to prison after their first mistake is appropriate. Roll up to a single hospital and mistakes are inevitably common, roll up to a hospital network and serious mistakes happen every day. The only way organizations at that scale can operate is with quite a bit of slack.
I’m not advocating for life in prison for the top brass, but some prison time surely.
Unless we just start issuing fines and warnings to the regular people to deal with manslaughter of criminal negligence.
The paradox here is that aviation for example is filled with cases of negligence causing large numbers of fatalities, while at the same time the industry has become extremely safe. It’s not that negligence has become more common it’s simply rolling the dice more frequently. By comparison having someone install solar panels on your roof is stupid dangerous at scale, but individual homeowners don’t notice that risk. Should we send every homeowner that had solar installed into their homes to prison? If not why should it apply at a larger company.
It’s not that these companies get a special expedition, it’s that everyone gets that same exception. Killing a pedestrian for example rarely results in prison time. People are often punished more for a DUI without an accident than a sober fatality caused by simple negligence.
I don’t think you understand though how bad Boeings case was and that we will never be rid of that kind of risk taking when the trade off for the risk takers is piles of money if it goes right but essentially a slap on the wrist if it goes wrong.
M3 = BMW M3
Model 3 = what you're talking bout
If a remote party can, by design, lock you out of your car and take control of it without your consent, do you even really own the vehicle in the first place?
Others have argued "well, you don't own the car, the bank does", but unless Tesla is somehow unable to do this with cars not owned by a lienholder, that's kinda beside the point as far as I'm concerned.
A lot of Teslas are also just leased.
As an aside, how often is it for the manufacturer/dealer to own the bank that issues auto loans. I got mine from Capital One, and I assumed most auto loans outside of the sketchy loanshark used car dealers were issued by the big national banks
The used market is likely different but for new cars from Dealerships, GM Financial, Toyota Financial, Ford Credit etc are Billion Dollar subsidiaries.
Edit: reading some other comments ... I'm talking about the traditional financed purchase of a car, not a lease. Agree that for a leased car (which is quite common now though I've never done it), the ownership stays with the leasing entity.
When you live in a title-holding state, the title will be issued to the registered owner/operator of the car, regardless of lien holder. Though your lien holder will receive a separate document verifying their connection to the loan, you will be in possession of the title itself.
There are only nine title-holding states: Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New York, Oklahoma, Wisconsin. In the other 41 states, titles are issued to the lien holder of your vehicle until the loan is fully paid off.
From: https://www.rategenius.com/resources/titles/#:~:text=There%2....
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Motor_Credit_Company
There have been quite a few years Ford made more profit as a "bank" than they did from making and selling the cars. If you get a new Ford from a dealer and request finance/lease options, its pretty typical for Ford Credit to provide the backing.
Still in the UK, although I suspect that holds more generally, when you buy something using a loan you own it. What you bought may be a security for the loan but that's different. Leasing a car or using a lease/purchase scheme is also different since leasing means you rent but don't own.
We really need to move to strong crypto.
It just feels like a betrayal. Your car is loyal to the manufacturer, not to you. It will act in a manner directly opposed to your best interests as the owner if company that sold it to you orders it. I understand that's true for most software these days, but that doesn't make me any happier about it, and it really feels worse when the software in question is inextricably tied to and in control of an expensive piece of physical hardware that you purchased.
Directive 4: [Classified]That is why there are legal contracts. This is just automated repossession.
There is value in adding friction to enforcing law/contracts: I don't know if FSD-repo crosses the line for me, but I know automating enforcement is bad for society.
What if everytime Tesla cameras detect the car speeding, or has crossed double-lines, it helpfully charges the fine to the linked credit card? After all, its just automated ticketing, right?
A lien-holder determined that the lender wasn’t paying the bills, so they manually made a decision to repossess the car. Just like with any other brand of a car, they reached out to the dealership (in this specific case, manufacturer is the same as the dealership, because Tesla sells directly with no franchises) and requested a way to access the vehicle. Normally it is done via a key copy. In this case, they used a digital version of it. Not that it matters meaningfully at all, but the car didn’t drive across town to the repo parking lot, current summoning feature cannot do that (the distance limit for the feature is a few hundred feet iirc).
And why does it matter if it was made easier to actually repossess the vehicle? It isn’t related to the automated ticketing analogy at all. There was no automatic detection, only automated enforcement. Just like with speeding tickets, i am totally ok with the cop not wasting his and my time writing me the ticket manually or making me wait for it by email, if it instead can be automated with a digital ticket/infraction in the system that i can check out when i get home.
To be more clear on why i think it is a bad analogy. Automated ticketing is automating human decision-making, which is an ambiguous blackbox process open to interpretation. As you said, doing so leads to a lot of unintended consequences. Actually physically repoing a car (after a manual decision to repo the car was made by a human) isn’t automating decision-making. The decision has already been consciously made, and there is not much room for interpretation when it comes to the physical process of repoing a car. The only variable is if the lender decides to hide the car or do something equally dumb, so it is not a good variable to have. And remotely disabling the car based on a manual human evaluation just seems to make the process of repoing it less prone to unintended bad variables.
The problem here is that Model 3s are apparently "loyal" to their manufacturer rather than the owner, regardless of who that owner is (whether that be a lienholder, the car's "user", or anyone else that's not Tesla).
That Tesla used that misplaced loyalty to give the car back to the lienholder in this case is irrelevant to my point.
"I know what this person's key was when I sold him the car. Here, have a copy."
VS.
"I have full control of this person's car, even though I'm not the owner. Here, let me remotely disable it for you."
As an example, almost every new Ford sold in the USA since 2019 has standard 5G/GPS remote connectivity; even the cheapest entry level cars at Ford like the new Maverick can remotely over 5G unlock doors and remote start the engine (just like the 'owner' can in the Ford pass app, now standard spec on virtually all Fords.). The manufacturers of course love the extra usage metrics and can also over the air sell upgrades like 5G hotspot access and so forth. Many cars now have 5G/GPS receiver for metrics even if no connectivity or nav features whatsoever exposed to user.
My point is; aside from the use of "summon", this kind of locate, remote unlock and start by manufacturer is available on almost all new cars sold today, no matter how cheap - the 5G remote access tech has become increasingly ubiquitous. This is not something unique to the way Tesla creates it cars at all, especially in 2021.
> https://www.ford.com/support/how-tos/fordpass/fordpass-remot...
Is there at least a license agreement you are showned at and have to agree to upon delivery? Can you operate those vehicules offline by choice?
With actual possession of vehicles going down, in favor of leases (or leases-to-buy) and short term rentals/"ride-sharing", and with ever more permanent monitoring, the future seems to go into a direction where you're required to have a constantly available data connection in your car back to the car company or lease company, and they will be able to remotely disable access if you don't pay up. And they will probably consider loss of such connection as "tampering" and disable the cars until it gets online again.
Right. But there is another issue especially with vehicles... You need insurance to operate them on public road. And insurers like to monitor things now that the tech is available/becomes available...
And the current US government wants your car to monitor your "impairness" as well[0] and brick itself if it considers you impaired.
Do you mean DRM?
> For example the law that was just passed that new cars will have to come with alcohol detectors
On the one hand, this is a welcome innovation because one is free to do whatever they want as long as that doesn't endanger others and drunk driving does endanger others quite a lot. On the other, if you own your car, what's to stop you from bypassing the detector like some people would bypass the seatbelt beeping thing?
https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-exec-gps-2014-1
I too wish that there would be an easy way to disconnect my car (it is of zero use to me).
In Europe, eCall (automated emergency call) has been mandatory since 2018.
I don't like this type of advice as everyday technology gets more evil. It's shifting the blame to the consumer instead of the makers of the evil, and it's nearly impossible to follow. I'm a software developer/tech nerd and couldn't tell you which cars do and don't track you, and we expect the average purchaser to know..? It's not like the window sticker will say 'hey this car tracks you', that detail will be in the middle of a 30 page dense legal speak document that almost nobody reads.
It's very similar to when a large food conglomerate does something terrible and people try to boycott. I'm completely aware of the terrible things food company x did and try to be at least somewhat informed with my purchasing, but food company x has 50 subsidiaries who have 50 subsidiaries, etc. I don't know about you but when I go shopping I don't have all day to google on my phone if the specific product I'm looking at is 4 levels down from evil company x. And I have a relatively large amount of free time in my life at the moment - it's a completely hopeless endeavor for someone with kids or other responsibilities that significantly cut down on their idle time.
If only our government would step in and you know...stop companies from getting away with evil things.
my phone can communicate without a sim card (at least with 911)... and I have no clue if my car has a sim card or if it needs one.
> don't buy a car that tracks you
For that, you probably need to buy a car that is at least 20 years old?
A few.
Thank you but no. Tesla sales are skyrocketing because people want smart car that makes their life easier, safer. Legacy car makers also trying to keep up with trend.
It's a typical misconception. You were young back in the days the car didn't have all this amazing features. Not having this features doesn't this car magical just because of your sentiments about you been young. Driving a dumb car will not make you younger either.
I'll surprise you, most of tesla owners pay extra money ($10/mo) to have a better connectivity. Not the other way around.
About a year ago I took my fancy EV on a ferry. I kept it on and ran the air conditioner because it was hot outside. Partway through the crossing I guess the suspension sensors interpreted the boat rocking as "something is seriously screwed up," and it locked the brakes and wouldn't release them when it was time to disembark. I had to sit there in my fancy EV looking like an idiot while everyone filtered around me and I took another trip across the water with cones around the car.
When I frantically called the dealership in the middle of all that, they said, "Sorry, your car has decided that it isn't safe to drive. You'll have to get it towed in so we can take a look at it. Oh, and since you're on a ferry, our roadside assistance won't help you. Good luck!" When I asked the ferry staff what I should do, they replied, "Uh, usually we just ask the owner to shift into neutral, and we push the car off." Only the car decided for me that this wasn't a possibility, and the brakes remained engaged with no way for me to disengage them.
The next thing I did after I finally got back home was research which cars I could still buy today with manual transmission and an emergency brake attached to a lever and a cable. It's not at all about holding onto my youth. It's about being the final authority over my own goddamned property.
True that I bought a brand that doesn't have a long history of EV tech. However it does indeed have a neutral button. It's just that after throwing itself into some exception state, "shifting" into it by hitting the button on the console would highlight the "N" letter as if it acknowledged my "request," but some logic in the car simply refused to actually fully execute my "request" to shift into neutral. There was no "STFU and do what I say; I don't care what your logic thinks about the situation" because the product managers and/or engineers who built it had the hubris to believe they had thought of everything and there would never be any need for that mode of operation.
If I can physically pull a manual transmission stick into the neutral position and release a brake cable, my car will roll. After my experience on the ferry, I no longer want any software logic at all being able to prevent my car from moving when I want it to move. "Just find a car brand that has better logic that you can probably rely on" isn't the solution I'm looking for. Software systems in cars are way too complicated, and there will always be corner cases. I demand a failsafe manual override. I am the one driving the vehicle, and I make the ultimate judgement call on what it does and doesn't do.
One car I found that has manual transmission and a pull-lever emergency brake is the 2021 Subaru Crosstrek. The manual transmission Crosstrek reportedly doesn't have EyeSight, and hence there's no automatic emergency braking (AEB).
https://www.subaru.ca/content/7907/media/General/download/C1...
There is no need to send everything to the manufacturer and a way to avoid that should be mandatory.
It sucks, and I hate it. But the car isn’t any additional problem.
I do know you can drive the car while the computer is rebooting (when it's rebooting the screen is completely black and you have to gauge your speed by comparison to other cars the road), so in theory it seems you don't need the computer for basic driving, which would suggest maybe what you say is also possible, if there's a setting for it.
I haven't checked because I like the benefits of being connected — starting and stopping a charge remotely, seeing the state of charge while it's charging somewhere far away, opening / closing windows, unlocking the car, flashing lights or honking horn to locate car, preheating, and coming soon, seeing car's location on a map when it's being driven by someone else, viewing live dash cam (sentry) footage while the car is parked remotely, etc. etc.
I mean I do see your point but I've listed some of the benefits, and life is full of tradeoffs. I'm not saying that the takeoffs that work for me would ever in a million years work for you.
It would also be great if all of the above could be done through a neutral third party or through one's own server. But as a startup that was struggling at the beginning, that probably wasn't the low hanging fruit for Tesla to work on, and there are benefits for Tesla to having the connection be to Tesla. And some of those benefits accrue indirectly back to consumers through safer cars, better accountability for accidents, and better data for future self driving software.
I'm concerned these features in specific may be used by abusive spouses to track and control their partners (or extract revenge upon them). It's honestly pretty grim when you can't even use the "shared" (abuser likely would be the sole 'owner' on the title) vehicles to escape an abusive situation. Any upside of this kind of feature is very must overshadowed by the abuses enabled.
Additionally, I'm sad that if I do something stupid in a parking lot (say I fall and hurt myself) that the video can be recorded by any number of vehicles and posted to facebook/youtube/etc for yucks. Nothing can be done about it, there's no way to stop it. I hate it, though, and I hate that people are excited for these terrible slipshod "features" that won't help them as much as they hurt others.
She found out when I used it coordinate a birthday surprise at our place, I could tell when she left her office and was about 30 minutes away.
Management of driver profiles is still a work in progress for example. Some things work great and some features simply aren’t there yet. For example I have issues with music handoff between two different drivers on one family Spotify account (where each driver has their own Spotify account using their own distinct email). They could easily make it so that it knows by phone proximity which driver is in the car, and play only their music, but they haven’t gotten to this yet.
Anyway, in addition to stuff like music profile improvements, I’d expect privacy options to get better too.
The parking lot thing, I don’t see the harm really until the day when the likes of Google has a car gathering these recordings.
> People are discussing: if the car has to choose between running over a pedestrian and sacrificing the driver's life, what should it choose? Well it's obvious: the driver pays for the car, so they wouldn't buy a car that kills them in case of an incident.
I guess now that we're headed straight into cyberpunk, the driver's wish turns out to be not that important. The overriding concern is actually: what will make the company look better. If swerving into trees wins points for Tesla for saving pedestrians' lives, so be it.
I consider myself bullish on this tech, and I have worked closely with autonomous robotics, but I didn't expect it this soon.
Twistiest, maybe. Most dangerous, not even close unless you or someone driving towards you do something dumb.
Historically Autopilot's weak spots have been crappy/ambiguous road markings, low speed corners on high speed roads, and large vehicles stopped on/across the road. This video hit none of those points. The lane markings are clear, the posted limit is low, and large vehicles aren't even supposed to be there.
It's just CGP Grey, not NHTSA. Hyperbole is to be expected.
I know he's a darling among the chattering tech class, but it's been several years since he jumped the shark from "insightful, carefully researched, and well thought out" to "just another vlogger doing and saying what is needed to get views."
1. I find it very unlikely that Tesla completely scrapped the previous system to start from scratch for the FSD beta. 2. If they had, that would make me even more suspicious of the new system because that would mean no one would understand its weaknesses yet.
Either way, being most interested in where the previous generation system and other semiautonomous systems have historically failed makes sense.
> it works amazing without markings on the road at all.
I have yet to see any videos of the new system handling poorly marked high speed roads one way or another, but the crash where it tried to veer in to oncoming traffic doesn't provide confidence. All the unmarked/poorly marked roads I've seen so far have been low speed residential/urban, and even there performance has been unpredictable at best. Let's see it on a highway where night time rain has made the markings hard to see. Let's see it when snow covers the road and your only hing or lane
The state of the art is such that it can simultaneously be amazing and terrifying to think that normal people are allowed to "test" it wherever they feel like trying on public roads. What it does with the limited inputs it has is incredible, but at the same time it has dangerous failure modes that do not seem to be predictable even to those who use the system regularly.
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Don't get me wrong, there is nothing I'd love more than never having to manually handle a traffic jam, or "go home car, I'm drunk", but the way this is being released will kill people.
There were no obstacles that Teslas have had trouble with in the past, like stopped firetrucks, ending lanes, or people changing tires.
We will not have fully autonomous vehicles in our street until we ban human driven vehicles and completely rework our infrastructure, aka probably not in our lifetime.
Look at that video, it's comically bad: https://www.reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars/comments/rgiu8m/the_fu...
- British Columbia Highway 5 (Coquihalla Highway) Daytime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIF79ZlWcOI
- The Coquihalla Highway at night: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hM3BPOLVoUg
- Alberta Highway 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re-Ap5fboi8
It was originally hosted http://this.deakin.edu.au/culture/car-wars though is no longer available there. https://web.archive.org/web/20170105065118/http://this.deaki... has it.
As much as the idea of full self driving is nice in theory, living in the northern midwest and having times in the winter where the traditional rules of driving go out the window when there's a question of "drive in the middle of what might be the road or find the ditch."
I'd like to see driver assist and some augmented reality for driving. Things like "driver's seat with bumps on the back to assist in awareness of 360° objects around the car". But self driving? I'm not sure I trust it yet or will for another decade or two. Developing software, I've seen how the sausage gets made - that doesn't inspire confidence.
I'm with you on the seeing the sausage made. I work in software development and algorithm research (though in a completely unrelated, but much better funded and cutting edge field) and the idea that we're anywhere close to truly level 3 autonomous driving, let alone 4 or 5, is laughable.
I love technology enhanced features, like radar cruise control, lane detection, etc. But only as extra sensory input for the driver, not replacement.
Edit I chewed out the billing dept not the renter lol
Would I be really annoyed if it was my car? Yeah, but at the same time it’s up for repo either way.
We already knew that Tesla HQ can control the cars for service and such
For me neither. As much as I admire Musk for being the driving force behind the progress that his companies are making for electric mobility and especially space launch but a guy who fetishizes a dystopian cyberpunk future and works on hooking up brains to computers might have slightly different vision for the future than you and me.
Repo agents, for decades, will roll up on a vehicle and hook it up to a tow truck and take off. People go out of their way to hide their vehicles, or block them in with other vehicles, when they haven't paid their loan and know their vehicle is now eligible for repossession.
This just makes it safer for the repo agents, because they can recover the vehicle faster and don't have to risk some nutjob running out of a house/apartment/office with a bat/gun/knife trying to confront them because someone was like "Dave, someone's hooking your car up to a tow truck".
No need to fret the future my friend. The future is now. This dystopian future people keep fearing is happening now. It is the present reality.
Things are literally better now than ever before. More access to food, healthcare, and literacy on average for everyone in the world. More protection of basic human rights on average for everyone in the world.
If now is the dystopian future, when in the past would you like to time travel to? Before or after polio vaccine? Gay rights? Before/after Abolition of slavery (in select countries)?
You think comedy is just saying things that are false?
Oh look, I'll just say the opposite of everything - haha wit!
It sounds plausible, but almost illegal ? I'm in EU so don't know how really things work over there, but I would assume Tesla would need a judicial order siding with the bank to be able to do this ? I mean it's probably not the wild west over there. Or is it ?
https://www.frenchentree.com/french-property/law/so-you-cant...
What happens if you don't pay your mortgage where you live?
And in first case even with court order there is good question about other creditors...
I hope the repo person realizes the future will need that type of job less and less.
It's a bit like not keeping up your mortgage repayments, and the bank remotely locking you out (or in?) your house — except it's a bit worse, because the mortgage provider wouldn't have to use GPS to track where you and your house are. Perhaps that's not a shocking idea in the USA, but I think it is in the EU. I'm not for or against, just explaining where the shock factor is coming from here.
Now for my own opinion: The header here shouldn't be "Make sure you keep up your repayments", it should be "Don't buy stupid shit you don't need, can't afford, and is controlled by someone else".
Having eg a private security guy working at your grocery store is not privatized law enforcement. That's the equivalent of a bar bouncer watching the property, not the equivalent of law enforcement and they don't have the legal powers of law enforcement either.
But the fact that bounty hunters and "repo" like in the article exists makes it a lot to me.
^There are rules on how late you have to be though- it’s not like they are taking your car after you’re 1 day late for the first time. The required amount of lateness depends on the state. And they are only allowed to take property that was used to secure the loan. In the case of a car loan that is usually the car itself.
It does make sense, especially if it's not abusive (e.g. one month behind equals reposession)
The court typically only gets involved if the lender has reason to believe you might do something malicious and can convince the court to execute an immediate right to seize the vehicle (quickly after default). A court can also order a person to return the vehicle, if they've managed to successfully evade the repossession action by hiding it. This is a good thing so long as it's reasonably balance (ie the consumer doesn't get their vehicle repo'd on day one of being late), so our court system isn't filled up with car loans.
Repossession of any kind (car, house, etc...) is typically an option of last resort for the bank after the debtor refuses to work with them or enter into other agreements that could help. They really just want to keep collecting payments from you.
Why do they do this? Did the bank pay Tesla to do so? (I'm sure there must be some incentive system here).
Until someone reports this happening first hand, I'm going to assume that either a lot of details are missing or that the story is straight-up fake.
If a car was used as collateral for a loan, then bank would need a judicial order. But common way to buy a new car is leasing, where the car is owned by the leasing company during the period of the contract. If the contract says that lease is terminated when payments are not done, then i do not see why would leasing company need judicial order, when it is legal owner of the car (unless there is a specific legislation related to such kind of leases).
It's probably possible, and dealerships usually work with repo men/banks, but the point is, the article certainly did nothing to verify anything.
Is there already a design doc for that somewhere in Teslas ticketing system?
Funny thing is, the initial sell of Tesla was 'high performance', the kind of driving which tends to encourage high-risk behaviours.
so now it is "you can buy this great car with all this high-performance stuff, but we'll know every time you use it and dock you on insurance rates to compensate"
The issue would be if they start doing this for illegal parking or similar stuff.
For one, areas of unrest are already restricted by physical police and national guard barriers. For example, during the unrest in 2020, Chicago physically raised its drawbridges. Anyone who really wants to get somewhere difficult would probably choose a bicycle or legs, so you need physical police barriers in that case.
Refusing to drive you to the gun store sounds kind of silly when the government would more easily just ban gun stores (the right to bear arms doesn't include the right to buy them at a retail store). I realize you're just giving out an example but it was not a great one. Preventing you from driving somewhere is a simple as putting up a gate and closing it.
Also, driving at all is not a right. It's a licensed privilege that can be taken away if you break traffic laws or drive while intoxicated.
I think your perspective is coming from a car-focused area of the country (which is most of them). But, someone in NYC or Chicago might point out to you that they use a transit card that has the ability to track their movements through stations, and that they mainly travel by buses and trains that have government-owned surveillance cameras all over them. Despite this, it has has failed to turn into any kind of dystopian urban nightmare.
What I'm getting at is that the technology is blamed for things that are actually just public policy, laws, and law enforcement. The privacy implications for using a smartphone in the Western world are a lot different than in China, even though the technology itself is identical.
What we actually need is legislation surrounding automotive communication and centralized control and privacy. The rights that automobile owners have should be better enshrined in law rather than trusting auto manufacturers. This, I think, will eventually happen. We're still sorely lacking a general nationwide privacy law on the Internet in the US.
And while driving on public roads is not a right, I still want my vehicle to start regardless of the governments opinions on whether I should be traveling :)
I chose guns because it was something that large corps like to virtue signal about. Also, while the bill of rights does not protect buying guns at retail, most of the cries for increased gun control actually want people to be forced to buy firearms in a retail setting so that the transfer can be tracked in the nation DB, which does not happen with private sales.
Also, multiple cities literally shut down transit during the protests last year due to "safety". https://www.masstransitmag.com/safety-security/article/21140...
No government was involved here, just a private company, who has the freedom to do as they please with their property and the responsibility to protect their assets.
> People that live in Chicago or New York choose to give up their ability to travel without the need for the government that is their choice.
What you're implying here is that city dwellers are government-dependent babies, which is very condescending to them. Choosing to drive your car on the public roads of your suburb or rural town doesn't make you any less dependent on society or the government.
Yes, transit systems had cuts due to ridership and revenue issues, and shut down at certain stations during unrest. Do you think a bank should keep its doors unlocked when there's unrest going on outside? These city transit systems were exercising their personal responsibility to protect public property, right?
> Again I believe in personal responsibility and freedom, I choose not to have that level of reliance on others.
Like it or not, you rely on others. There is little choice involved. There is almost no way to end that relationship entirely.
You probably drink from water that was managed by a government, and your poop is taken away either in a public sewer or on a septic truck driving on a public road. Unless you literally live out in the woods off of the land and never leave, you are a part of society, and libertarian hyper-individualist rhetoric can't change that. "Freedom" doesn't mean you're just allowed to do whatever you want at all times regardless of how it affects other people, but a lot of Americans have misconstrued the concept of freedom to mean just that.
Freedom as in democratic freedom has a lot more to do with freedom of speech, press, and elections. It doesn't mean you're free to drive on a road that is closed.
I was very clear in stating that I believe we need laws to prevent technology from becoming dystopian, but also I don't believe technology reaching the most dystopian version of its theoretical capabilities is inevitable or even particularly common. We can blame the technology all we want but it is rules of society that protects us from its abuse, not "personal freedom and responsibility."
The irony of your messaging is that your belief in freedom and responsibility would have to be applied to corporations as well as individuals. If you're free to make any choice, so are companies. Again, Tesla is, allegedly, exercising its own freedom and responsibility to protect its asset by repossessing its car.
Self-driving, interconnected cars could be an incredible boon to public safety, as car crashes are one of the top causes of premature death. Cars that can talk to each other and basically never crash into each other would be a dream world. We can talk about how technology would turn that into a surveillance dystopia, or we can build systems, laws, and checks on power that would make that technology enhance everyone's lives without significant downside or encroachment on "freedom."
The fact that Tesla cars are connected to a central server isn't the cause of abuses, it's the present legality of their harmful business practices. A great example: the car dealer system that Tesla lobbies against was put in place to protect consumers against overbearing manufacturers. Has that worked? In some cases, yes, in some cases, no.
In our present and most definitely not-libertarian society, the government has at least curbed unchecked corporate power by enacting laws like HIPAA that protect consumer rights and enforce interoperability. We need similar legislation and enforcement for non-healthcare technology. We need our own GDPR, but better, more comprehensive, and better designed. That will be difficult to achieve given the corporate influence on politics, but I do think we'll eventually get something, because even the elites in our society need protection from companies who want to exercise their freedom.
>What you're implying here is that city dwellers are government-dependent babies, which is very condescending to them. Choosing to drive your car on the public roads of your suburb or rural town doesn't make you any less dependent on society or the government.
I am not implying anything, I am stating my opinion that the people that choose to live in those cities have decided to trade personal freedom and privacy for the luxuries that come from living in those cities. These are tradeoffs, I chose to build a home in rural America with the goal of trading luxuries for personal freedom and privacy, as well as a reduction in crime.
And I realize why the transit systems had cuts and why they shut down due to unrest, but that is some of the freedom those who live in major cities give up. I am not far from the Twin cities metro and I was able to get in my car and drive to Minneapolis the morning after the riots started to personally look at the damage.
I do have a well and septic system, every few years it has to be pumped, you are right about that. I never said I was not part of society, nor did I say that my lifestyle is not dependent on society's infrastructure. I choose to live on the end of the spectrum to reduce my reliance on others as much as possible because I have personally seen and learned first hand what government oppression and social unrest can do to dense communities.
AFAIK under US law Tesla is well within their rights to use their technology to repossess their cars if they want to, or enforce whatever restrictions they want on the use of their vehicles, but it won't be from me. I am not advocating for tesla to be stopped by the government, I am simply asking for people to think through the consequences of their purchases. I completely agree that tesla is free to do what they want as a corporation(within the current laws), and I am free to not buy their vehicles as a citizen, you are correct about that.
You can feel free to give up your freedoms in the name of public safety, and eventually I will be forced to as well, but I will continue to resist as long as possible. I very much enjoy the act of driving to the point of it being one of my hobbies, I am in no rush for the impending future of driving being a luxury for the rich. I distinctly remember the feeling of freedom I got when I got my driver's license at 16 and bought my first car, it was actually a pretty critical point in my life and allowed me much more autonomy, freedom, and responsibility than I had ever had before.
I just really think that your desire for federal laws for privacy protection are wishful thinking and quite unlikely to happen, hell our current president has actively tried to ban encryption without backdoors on a few occasions(actually indirectly causing pgp to be developed https://www.wired.com/2012/12/joe-biden-private-email/), this seems actively antiprivacy to me.
Not that payments shouldn't be kept up to date. But that it moves decision making on the issue to a corporate entity a million miles away and you can bet there won't be any accounting for personal situations, or admin errors, or anything else. Your car will just be gone.
Sorry, f@ck tesla on this.
That's how you get insane squatting laws where you can't remove people that are illegally occupying your property (house, apartment, etc) for years. The process becomes badly choked in the sob story process which the squatter takes advantage of.
And very obviously all that would happen if you allowed the sob story process to become common in auto loans, is a huge backlog of people would become delinquent and abuse it, knowing they can drag out the consequences for a very long time.
Mail goes to the wrong address, e-mail ends up in spam (looking at you, Google), a pin code is lost, meaning you need time to identify yourself or etc etc etc and you're basically lucky or not as to you you're dealing with as to how it gets resolved.
Many people living on the edge financially are so stressed that they have trouble prioritizing things in what would seem to be a logical choice to someone on the outside. What is often not understood is that honest (and early) conversations with lenders can frequently lead to adjusted terms to help people get through a difficult period. Without that conversation, they lose transportation access which leads to reduction in job opportunities, and then the whole thing starts to spiral. Very difficult.
I mean, I wasn't even searching for this, but this appeared in my twitter feed this morning. For your consumption:
https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1473187956022251523
I just don't trust companies generally in these situations.
If the loan is secured on the car then it's not "your car" until the loan is paid.
But sure you're right, mistakes can be made and being able to switch off your car remotely is somewhat dystopian even if you're 100% in the clear.
Huge amounts of stuff is never returned, either because the repo guys were careless/stole it, because retrieving is hard/inconvenient for someone who no longer has a car, or because the owners just don't care.
ie. you take out a loan to pay for some sort of medical implant, you miss your payments, and they can turn it off.
I can't find the exact video, if anyone has I'd love a link!
Is Tesla trying to become the underwriter of future loans, and this is their way of testing their automated repossession process?
I don't like the power these companies have in relation with their customers. The customer has no power at all, in most cases. In my case I had to ask the bank to revert the charges and close my Netflix subscription, but it was just ~ $30-40 at stake, not a $50,000 car. How many times cars are repossessed without any fault of the customer?
I am not aware that Tesla is directly financing the vehicles, so why would they hire a repo person to go repossess it? In addition, given the OTA update capabilities of Tesla, they could probably just remotely disable the car, and not have to worry about the expense of liability of a repo agent. In addition, the picture is weird, as if you had such full control of the car, why would you need to put a "boot" on the car to immobilize it, since it would make driving it back to Tesla harder.
I am calling satire on the tweet, until further proof.
I was a repo man in the 1980s. When we'd get the repossession paperwork from the bank, we'd also get a copy of the car's title. We'd take that paperwork into a dealership and they would cut us duplicate keys.
Tesla cars are not licensed for operation without a control of a driver. It's unlikely Tesla (the company) would take the financial responsibility to cause any damage or injury during an unlicensed operation without a driver.
Straight from the Model S manual:
"Model S may not detect certain obstacles, including those that are very narrow (e.g., bikes), lower than the fascia, or hanging from the ceiling. As such, Summon requires that you continually monitor your vehicle's movement and surroundings while it is in progress, and that you remain prepared to stop the vehicle at any time using the Tesla mobile app, by pressing any button on the key fob, or by pressing any Model S door handle."
https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/Model_S_release_no...
Why?
When you jailbreak an iPhone you don't loose features.
I also wouldn't be surprised if Tesla locked out your sim if they found you to be abusing it so you'd have to try to get a new one (not sure how that works with eSims).
Does this mean that Tesla is the owner of the loan?
I'm skeptical that Tesla will be helping random banks get their money back like this, but it sounds like this is direct financing through Tesla.
Also, keep in mind that this is just a tweet with a picture of a car on a trailer. This is absolutely not verified as true. Tesla nor the car's owner have verified or commented on this from what we can see in this article. Literally just some guy who says "a friend told me."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hertz-customers-allege-false-ar...
[1]: https://psmag.com/news/stalker-cop-police-protection-danger-...
[2]: https://sites.temple.edu/klugman/2020/07/20/do-40-of-police-...
Cops are sourced from the general population, so incidence rates need to be compared to the general population, and you'll find that police have significantly lower "negative" behaviors compared to the general population in virtually all aspects. That doesn't mean they should be allowed to remotely disable your car though.
They are notably not. Usually, immigrants are drastically under-represented compared to general population (at least in Germany, you have to hold German or European citizenship to join the police force).
> so incidence rates need to be compared to the general population
Oh hell no. Police officers act on behalf of the government and with powers that are both far greater than those of ordinary people and not immediately appealable. As a result of that, police officers in Germany are actually held to extremely high standards by law (§34 BeamtStG - https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/beamtstg/__34.html) and receive at the very least two years of training.
I won't say our police are perfect (because they aren't, they still are a bunch of bullies), but they are orders of magnitude better than the trigger happy, barely educated (seriously, 360 hours of training?! - https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/article_9dd5d48b-2152...) morons that make up the US police force.
Police in the US have far higher post secondary education rates than the general population. Over half have a bachelor's and over 80% have at least an associate's. And that's overall. Many states and larger localities require post secondary education, particularly in urban, higher crime areas.
>but they are orders of magnitude better than the trigger happy...
Can you prove it? Tens of millions of police interactions a year and less than a thousand deaths is pretty damn good and not at all indicative of the narrative you're spewing, especially when you account for how much violence the police experience at the hands of criminals. Sounds to me like you've bought into a narrative completely unsupported by data.
I also have a 2004 f-250 that will likely outlive me, and it is completely tracking free.
After they'll find the car their life will be more complicated , they need to make a key. Coordinate if this is the right car. If car is locked/has custom security, lots of noise in neighborhood due to alarm, so basically everyone around your block is stressed because you didn't pay.
And that's fees people who pay the bills will cover. Do you think this kind of services are cheap? If they can't return the car, that will be also split between future lease agreement. They will be included one way or another in your loan/monthly payments.
Doing so , they basically decreasing the price of such event at least 5x.
That's the happiest I've heard someone be about their friend's job being automated away :D
I would assume if you do something dumb with the electronics or software you wold probably be found liable in terms of insurance.
I'd say autonomous vehicles are pro-social machines. They will, in general, act to follow the rules established, ideally more often than a "dumb" car operated by a human.
Given how many traffic accidents are human caused, that's sort of the point of the entire exercise.
I would argue that once the repossession clause in the contract has been activated (criteria has been met and bank decides to exercise the right) then from that decision forwards the bank is now the owner.
Possession is not 9/10 of the law if a contract says control reverts to bank under a condition that's clearly been violated.
This is not a game where if just hide for X time then contracts expire. It's not a game of tag, where "it doesn't count" until a reposession has been completed "fairly". You don't need to give someone a fair chance to avoid the consequences in a contract.
You are 100% right, but that is the circumstance with loans to purchase cars independent of whether the car is autonomous. Banks do make a ton of money on the interest from car loans and they are, indeed, not liable for service or maintenance of the vehicle.
When repossession occurs, the person in possession of the car is not the owner anymore. That's why the repo man is allowed, legally, to take the car. They are transporting it to the rightful owner's place of choice.
That said, repossession of things are not a thing here either.
I am really struggling to understand the mindset here of what I assume are mostly well paid professional software developers. If I defaulted on a car loan (I don’t know the details exactly off the top of my head, but this entails more than just missing a payment) I’d be quite ashamed of myself and return the car myself with an apology. I cannot understand the mindset of someone who would feel justified keeping the car, much less getting angry at the method used by the bank to reclaim their property.
It’s not like this is a cheap car either where you’re threatening someone’s livelihood who is not going to be able to get to work.
So the obvious conclusion is to... eliminate the "repo" mechanism entirely, on the off chance it might get abused/mistakenly used?
No-one said anything about feeling justified keeping the car. People take issue with the backdoor. I too, would rather clean the car, take my stuff, and return it with an apology (if the bank refuses to negotiate an extension to the loan) than find that a backdoor has been used against me and it's just all gone one day.
This isn't the the path I want us going down. If this applies / impacts a few thousand Tesla 'owners' so enamoured by the that cultish brand that they'll accept this BS, so be it.
But apply variations of this to the world, and the countless mistakes and mishaps that can happen and you're in further down into a nasty world of things happening.
I mean, look at getting something fixed with Google or a Facebook. Those bastions of the tech world.
It has absolutely nothing to do with the money aspect of this.
Case in point: literally this happened yesterday. I set up a D/D with one of our internet providers 3 months ago. They have been chasing me for 3 months for payments. New supplier so their email went to spam. I have evidence I did all the right things to do this. And yet, yesterday, I checked my spam luckily and there was a 7 day suspension notice if the bill wasn't paid. So, basically, our business internet connections relied on me being lucky that I caught a stray e-mail ... apply this to your car ... or your home (where there have been stories of this kind of BS, only for the owner come home and realise their home had been sold on and they can't get it back).
Basically, automation is great, but don't automate interaction with your customers on key situatons.
It is still not your car. It is still Tesla's.
It's like saying "the super stole my TV!!" when actually the super just let the police in with a search warrant, and they took the TV you stole down to the station.
Evidently, the car isn't yours, even though you have paid for it. Tesla still owns it.
Every locksmith in the world has the ability to bypass your lock (exaggeration). That doesn't make them the owner.
You didn't need to and given that was already avoided here; it now has been admitted. Thus, it is by definition a 'backdoor' then especially a directly 'remote' one. It doesn't matter who it is, we just know that Tesla and many others have this ability directly; no locksmith needed or whatever.
So the future is connected cars where not even you can fully control your own car and it is still 'owned' and can be externally controlled in the hands of the manufacturer, just like our phones. Since they are already giving out OTA updates to it.
Dreadful.
In this case though some people are objecting to who the "owner" is. And I think that the people objecting are wrong. And (I assume) so does the law.
Your car is not protected from the bank or the government by its keys, but by the law.
Same as your house. If you lose your house legally, you'll lose your house physically.
The fact that the bank (indirectly) called Tesla instead of a locksmith is to me irrelevant in this case.
Now, in the abstract, is it uncomfortable that the car manufacturer can unlock your car? Sure. But we knew that they could. How else could your phone do it.
I hate to break it to you, but your telco can tap your phoneline. The bus can track your public transport movement. I can follow you on the street. Your power company can effectively track when you're away on vacation.
This case was not abuse. And it doesn't even have to be cloud-connected to enable this kind of owner-depriving abuse. As soon as cars got their first microchip they could have gotten firmware that would brick the car unless it went to an authorized dealer twice a year for "reset".
I'm not saying there aren't dangers, but this case isn't it.
> You didn't need to and given that was already avoided here; it now has been admitted.
It's interesting how you seem to think this was a "gotcha".
It's like the people who say "there is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer". Yeah, just like there is no bakery, it's just someone else's oven.
That may be analogous to "the cloud", but not to the subject here: When you buy a car or a phone, it's supposed to be "yours". (That's what "buying something" means.)
When you go to the bakery every morning to buy your breakfast baguette, you don't think you're buying the bakery -- you're just buying the bread. And that is yours after you've paid for it. Or does your baker have an electronic backdoor to the bread he sells you?
(And you're not just renting the bread, or "buying the service of using it for a while". Or does your baker come around and collect your poop after you've digested the bread?)