Tesla remotely converts battery pack, cutting 1/3 of range
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Sounds like all around bad decisions. The previous owner shouldn't have sold it as a 90 or at least disclosed that, "It's a 60 but Tesla swapped out the batter with a 90 and left it configured as a 90". Tesla, being notified, should have just enabled the 90 and made the customer happy. How exactly are people supposed to abuse this? Tesla put the 90 in there and they're the only ones who are going to be doing that. Presumably this cost them a fortune to do it in the first place. Why not get some good will out of it? "Hey sorry about your battery. We only had a 90 so we threw that in there. Enjoy. Tell everyone you know about how awesome Tesla was about fixing the problem and remember that next time you go to buy your next car"
It says right there that it was done under warranty.
If my RTX3080 breaks, and Nvidia sends me a 3080Ti as a replacement(because maybe they don't have any 3080 in stock) then no, they can't lock it down to 3080 level 3 years later with a software update. And yes, I'm allowed to sell it on as a 3080Ti, because....that's what it is.
>>The previous owner shouldn't have sold it as a 90 or at least disclosed that, "It's a 60 but Tesla swapped out the batter with a 90 and left it configured as a 90".
Maybe, but again, I don't see why that should be necessary. Tesla should not have been able to do this, period.
Good brands to avoid for this reason, even if they do make enviable hardware sometimes.
What if it's a 3080Ti PCB but inside a RTX3080 card? Is it ethical to sell it as a 3080Ti?
What about an RTX3080 Card that Nvidia drivers mistakenly identify as a 3080Ti and enable additional 3080Ti cores (ignore how technically innaccurate that may be)?
Reminds me of this video from LTT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbZ32mqmsrg
Would AMD have been in the right to force a bios downgrade in the next driver release?
Also that LTT and a related Gamers Nexus video convinced me to buy an obviously counterfeit "Nvidia GTX 970" from ebay, report the seller for the sale, I got to keep it, I got refunded, and then with the money I bought a bios writer and flashed the card back to a "Nvidia GTX 550 Ti".
So you defrauded someone and are proud of it? That they were themselves a fraudster does not make your actions right and you SHOULD return the card.
So rather your analogy about Alienware is: You own a dell gaming pc. Under warranty repair, Dell replaces some of the parts with parts from an Alienware build.
Are you allowed to put on Alienware decals on your Dell desktop and re-sell it as an Alienware?
I suspect it may be an Alienware PC. If so, why wouldn't we call it that?
You could call it an Alienware PC.
My question: Would it be ethical for you to represent it as an Alienware PC, and sell it as an Alienware PC by purposefully attempt pass it off by changing the appearance to make it look like an Alienware PC?
To add to the gray area:
Say DELL XPS 1000 and Alienware 90210 are essentially the same machine, save for custom tuning, drivers, and cosmetics. Alienware gets a 25% markup.
You have the XPS 1000, apply the custom tuning and drivers to get the performance of the XPS to that of it's Alienware's counterpart.
Could you sell it for more than the market rate for a use XPS1000? Yes. I'd argue you have added value by custom tuning the PC. But I believe responsible to disclose that it was an XPS that had been modified.
Taking this back to cars. If an when I sell my Golf R, I will disclose it has received a Stage 1 Turbo upgrade (and hopefully use that to increase the resale value--though it typically does not except to other enthusiasts).
But you're only doing this because it benefits you. If the upgrade reduced your resale value, would you still disclose it? Did you disclose it to insurance companies when you had it done, since it could impact your rates?
When I traded in my GTI for my Tesla I didn't mention the aftermarket headlights I had installed nor the Stage 1. I don't lose sleep over my decision, not that it would have changed the number either way.
Yes and No.
Yes--simply because I'd rather cover my ass from a lawsuit down the line if the new owner discovered the aftermarket tune.
No, as to my knowledge the insurance company doesn't care about street legal aftermarket upgrades.
You may not be legally required to, but the insurance company will pretend the upgrade doesn't exist at best, and actively claim it caused the damage, depending on the upgrade.
https://www.valuepenguin.com/special-auto-insurance-coverage...
https://www.askadamskutner.com/auto-accident/insurance-for-a...
Do you think that Dell should remotely access you computer and artificially nobble it?
No. Just like I disagreed when Sony disabled Linux support in the PS3 via Firmware update (they were hit with a Class-Action for that).
To my knowledge, on of the features of Tesla is that it supports upgrades via OTA software updates. As another commenter pointed it, by treating a Tesla vehicle as a software platform, it allows Tesla to engage in behavior which is quasi normal for say a smartphone, but causes cognitive dissonance when you think of it as a car.
E.g. Apple mistakenly allowing an unsupported feature on an iphone SE, then removing that ability in a future IOS update vs Toyota disabling AWD support on what should have been a FWD vehicle SKU.
Tesla replaced a 60 with a 90, the owner now has a 90.
They list it as a 90 when selling it.
The new owner gets hit with the update to turn it back into a 60.
New owner is pissed at old owner, when they should be pissed at tesla.
Like another comment suggested, this is a small error in the customer's favor, and companies who care about customer satisfaction should really just eat the minimal cost when stuff like this happens instead of getting bogged down in technicalities.
Like, no, if you can't use simple words to explain things and you have to rely on extended metaphors to explain things, you probably don't have the holistic understanding you believe you have.
> New owner is pissed at old owner, when they should be pissed at tesla.
The analogies are trying to explain why or why not the owner should be pissed at Tesla, which if I understand your argument is because it was Tesla who made the change.
The OP is right in that Tesla should codify in the goodwill of free upgrades when logistics doesn't allow it, but they didn't, so the car being rebadged by the owner as a 90 is an issue.
This is the same argument as the Tesla heated seats microtransaction: Tesla actually loses money on cars without rear heated seats if they have to separate "heated rear seats" and "non-heated rear seats" into a new configuration, as it increases manufacturing complexity and logistics (ie. the ability to reassign same-spec cars to new owners if the existing owner backs out of their reservation at the last minute). It makes everything simpler to not make a M3 SR+ customer pay for the heated rear sets and allow them to opt for it later.
Tough shit? Why are we responsible for the success of Tesla's business model?
The bottom line here is that Tesla screwed up. If you accidentally give a customer a feature, you don't take it back years later (especially if, as in this case, the product has changed hands to a new customer). You eat your mistake, and consider it a goodwill expense.
I guarantee you this Twitter thread has cost Tesla more than the $4500 they charge for someone to click a couple times in a UI to turn a 60 into a 90.
If you don't want Tesla to succeed, you shouldn't be purchasing the product. In the same vein, you shouldn't be purchasing Apple products if you think their business model of taking 30% of app-based iOS transactions is too much profit for your liking.
so how about you just explain your position so that other people who don't know the difference between an RTX3080 and a 3080ti can also participate
GP used RTX3080 and 8080Ti, my reply furthers that discussion.
It seems like you're agreeing with me and creating a less appropriate analogy at the same time.
Upon closer analysis, all analogies will break down.
Let's say a technician loaded a more recent map of Europe than the one you bought by mistake. Now you your navigation computer breaks, and you have it replaced by another technician at another authorized service center.
They load the map they had on record for you into the new car nav computer, which to you is the "older" version, but the "newer" one was never one you had a license for.
I'm pretty sure things like this have been happening for at least a couple of decades with some manufacturers, it's just that the "features" have become more major as more things are software-driven, in this case the battery capacity.
As a consumer, it's extremely expensive to remain well informed. I want to purchase from brands where I feel that the company wants me to be happy, ESPECIALLY with such a premium brand as Tesla. I certainly don't want to need a lawyer on hand to figure out if I'm going to buy a lemon or not.
If Tesla makes an error, it should be resolved in the Customer's favor, period. Why would anyone buy a Premium (read: highly expensive) product if they know the company is going to try to hit them with monkeys-paw customer service terms?
Note how the dealer shows the customer the new part before it is installed. Note how the customer doesn't hand over the keys until fully knowing what is going to be done. Note that this old customer then decided to double down by buying a new car from the company fixing his tractor. Tesla has no respect for such concepts.
> Tesla has no respect for such concepts.
Agreed. But it doesn't help that consumers have accepted faux-trust (i.e., marketing) for real Trust.
The key to real Trust is simple: It's earn. It can't be ordered. Demanded. Come from nothing. Be bought. Etc.
The irony here is, trust for Tesla is based on trust for other like (read: premium) auto brands. But in the end, it hasn't been earned. And it shows.
Shit doesn't line up so they push on it real hard while the glue dries.
> What if it's a 3080Ti PCB but inside a RTX3080 card? Is it ethical to sell it as a 3080Ti?
The PCB (with the components on it) IS the card, what do you mean they would swap? The cooler? The plastic bit in front? Do you mean a 3080 card with a 3080TI Chip?
The only place I know of that may have a relevant law to enforce this is Norway and their Norwegian Marketing Control Act that prohibits withdrawing a key feature after sale. Accidental upgrade after a repair under warranty may or may not be included in this.
If there was a similar level of binning done for Tesla batteries they should be able to limit the battery especially if there are safety concerns; sounds like that's not the case here though.
That also used to happen a lot with Intel CPUs, especially late in a product cycle: after refining fab their yields would be so good there wasn't any "bad" part to bin down, so they'd just soft-disable cores on high-end parts (I think after a while manufacturers started fusing the cores).
Yes you can hack it, and people do, but if you're going to use it for proper validation and certification, you're going to pay for those features anyway.
You underestimate the potential for straight up evil in $BIGCORP, nvidia treating video cards like HP treats consumer inkjet printers in the future is something I would be totally unsurprised by.
I think the problem is that there are 2 different types of "can't": can't as in technologically impossible, and can't as in legally disallowed.
In the past, the former was usually the case. Vendors literally could not technologically take away features because things either were not controlled by software or software could not tell the hardware apart because there were no unique identifiers. Because of this nobody really pushed for the legal protections, and as such they do not exist today (at best you _might_ be able to claim misrepresentation by the previous owner and get a return or refund, like if someone sells a LHR card as if it were non-LHR. But with a large purchase like a car, that would be costly time and money wise).
> Tesla should not have been able to do this, period.
Yeah, morally, but we need to start working to make this guaranteed legally. As it is now, "Nvidia sends me a 3080Ti as a replacement (because maybe they don't have any 3080 in stock) then no, they can't lock it down to 3080 level 3 years later with a software update" is totally allowed.
Heck, they could even cut down all legitimate 3080Tis to what would be 3080 or even 1060 performance via drivers after 3 years and you'd be able to do nothing besides complain on social media -- you still have exactly the amount of hardware sold, and they never promised any performance levels (just check their site, you only get things like compute units, clock speed, ram etc. not performance guarantees like FLOPs or FPS)
Exactly. Bait and switch is legally disallowed, even when technically possible.
This is why things like consumer CPUs and GPUs do not advertise a guaranteed level of performance (they only state things like clock speeds, core counts, memory etc.) -- they are not liable if performance gets better or worse down the line. There is no distinction between, say, "games moved to a new API and now old cards are slow" and "we made our new drivers make old cards slow on purpose because we want to sell more new cards". Companies don't do this because it's bad press if found out (which is why there's this whole Twitter thread), not because they are legally required to (at least in the US).
Neither of these are direct claims by Tesla that an "upgrade" happened.
Some 2060s also have dies marked for 2080s that are then fused (re: badging doesn't imply performance). Similarly, you could potentially overclock a GPU and end up having measured performance that matched a higher model (re: car reported capacity). In order for the upgrade to have legally applied, they'd actually need to have stated that it was indeed intended as an upgrade and came with new guarantees that matched the higher performing model. Based on reading the post, this never happened thus the whole problem.
If this did happen, the new owned could just produce the documentation for the upgrade and it would be open-and-shut resolved.
To use a different example someone brought up - imagine your CPU breaks in your laptop. You send it to the manufacturer, and they replace it with a higher model CPU because <reasons> - cool, right? You sell it advertised with that better CPU, then the next owner has to send it in for another, completely unrelated repair, and the manufacturer then says "oh we noticed the last repair fitted more powerful CPU than intended, so we removed it and fitted the original spec CPU".
That wouldn't be just immoral, that would be actual theft.
The matter of fact is, after the warranty repair the guy was given a car with a bigger battery and the bigger capacity enabled in software. Whether Tesla intended to do this or not, is completely and utterly irrelevant - it was his to keep and sell. Now Tesla taking this away should be(but probably isn't) illegal. You have a product with a feature X, Tesla removed that feature and in fact holds it ransom for payment - the fact that they never intended to install it is irrelevant.
To use a different example again - imagine you buy a new car and the factory made a mistake and fitted an extra option that you didn't order. Is the manufacturer in the right to remove that part during your next service?
This is more akin motherboard manufacturers who would unofficially unlock overclocking on unsupported chipsets in first version firmware. If someone bought such a board, overclocked the CPU, sold it, and then the next owner sent the board back to the manufacturer for unrelated repairs, and as part of fixing the other problem the board manufacturer needed to do a BIOS update, resulting in the overclocking feature being lost.
But the principle that a consumer's product shouldn't be modified without asking for explicit permission from the owner still stands regardless of segmentation methods.
Your bank makes a mistake and adds a million dollars to your account balance when you tried to deposit $100. Is the bank in the right to remove that when they discover the mistake?
In this scenario, the bank also tells you: “we are giving you a million dollars, it’s yours”. Then, 3 years later, someone else at the same bank says: “oopsies, we actually made a mistake, so we withdrew that million from your account”.
It’s even worse, imagine you actually received that million, as a payment for something, from someone else who originally received it from the bank.
This doesn’t seem to be the case with the larger battery though? Nothing in the tweet thread indicates that Tesla explicitly stated the car is now a 90 and the original owner can keep it forever.
Also you haven't answered my question, which I think compares better to this situation than a random million dollars deposited into my account. No one randomly gave this guy an upgrade - it was a warranty replacement with a better item, that happens literally all the time in all kinds of industries. What doesn't happen is the manufacturer turning around few years later and taking the item back.
That’s because they don’t have the technical means to extract that money from your house without entering it. I’m sure they would gladly do it if they could.
> Also you haven't answered my question, which I think compares better to this situation than a random million dollars deposited into my account.
In your “car with unpaid option” example I think the manufacturer is in the right to remove it if they didn’t explicitly say you can keep it.
> No one randomly gave this guy an upgrade - it was a warranty replacement with a better item, that happens literally all the time in all kinds of industries. What doesn't happen is the manufacturer turning around few years later and taking the item back.
It’s not clear from the tweet thread if Tesla actually said “sure, you can keep the larger battery”. It seems it was an assumption made by the original owner based on… passage of time and Tesla’s inaction I guess?
See, this is where we're going to disagree. Manufacturer's control over an item ends when the item is sold. If they have an issue with how the car was released from warranty repair, then they can go after the service centre that did the repair, not the owner. Or even if they want to go after the owner, they should do it through legal means, not just modify your product without asking.
>>It’s not clear from the tweet thread if Tesla actually said “sure, you can keep the larger battery”.
Tesla doesn't need to say that. It literally doesn't work like this anywhere, ever. The car was released after the warranty repair, documents were signed for that I'm sure, and after that point the car is what it is. If they installed a larger battery(and enabled it), whether intentionally or by accident, then it belongs to you at that point. Manufacturer should not be able to modify a product you own without your explicit permission, full stop.
I'll use one other analogy and then will give analogies a rest I think.
Imagine picking up a brand new car from the dealer, the car is advertised as having CarPlay support. You buy it, drive it around, then after a year bring it in for its first service - during which the manufacturer goes "oh, but this car was never actually speced with CarPlay support, it must have been a mistake at the factory, we'll remove it now". They might be technically correct, but it literally should be illegal for them to remove it. It's not different than them saying "oh the car was built with 7 seats but we can see that it was ordered with 5, so we removed the 2 extra seats during service" - again, that would be just theft. The car was released from their ownership as-is, and if they have an issue they can pursue it through courts, not just remove an item they think doesn't belong to you.
Like, what if they got it wrong? What if the battery upgrade was actually paid for and Tesla says it wasn't? Do we want them to have unlimited right to modify a product that YOU OWN, just because their database says something? Or should they go through the legal system if they think something is wrong? Because I'm very sure I know what the answer to this one is.
Misdirected payments can be disputed by the reciever in which case it gets settled with legal action by the sender.
The fact that there isn’t a receipt proving that anybody paid for it is irrelevant. It could have been a gift, a reward, a thank you, a bribe, a reasonable business decision given the parts on hand, or an accident. Regardless, that’s on Tesla.
Am I required to ask the manufacturer if they will take back the Chrome wheels when I buy a used car just to make sure they didn’t put them on accidentally?
In our world? Based on the thread, Tesla did a battery service on a model of car with a 60 battery. Unless it was stated as upgraded, after the service it is still a 60 car to the manufacturer. A 60 car that just happened to be able to run at the performance level of a 90 version. They then state this is a bug and fixed it.
It's immoral on Tesla's side, for sure, but the previous owner selling it as an "upgraded" car without documentation is the real problem. We all know that Tesla does this market segmentation using software, so this should mean that just because the hardware's badge states something does not mean the thing will be guaranteed available.
> Am I required to ask the manufacturer if they will take back the Chrome wheels when I buy a used car just to make sure they didn’t put them on accidentally?
No, but if it turns out you mistook plastic for Chrome, it's on you (or on the seller if they misrepresented it knowingly). Just because you can't see lack of software license, doesn't mean it's there.
If you buy a laptop with a pirated copy of Windows, and later after a couple of updates the OS detects this asks for activation, do you go to Microsoft to ask them to enable your pirated software or do you go to the seller of the laptop?
Except in this scenario, it wasn't pirated by the owner, it was literally installed by Microsoft
> In our world? Based on the thread, Tesla did a battery service on a model of car with a 60 battery. Unless it was stated as upgraded, after the service it is still a 60 car to the manufacturer. A 60 car that just happened to be able to run at the performance level of a 90 version. They then state this is a bug and fixed it.
It is completely irrelevant what type of car it is, they installed a 90 battery and enabled it. This is not a software licence. Are you saying it would also have been OK for Tesla at the next service to take out the battery and reinstall a 60 because they made a mistake 3 years ago? That's exactly what they did here. I also doubt that it is legal, there are implicit contracts in the warranty service and when they put in the 90 battery, you can't just renegade on those things. I have the suspicion that way too many people here have been working for too long in software, which has always been in a grey zone between purchase and licence and thus got away with things that hardware people never did.
Did they though...? If they did you'd think there'd be documentation of that provided as a part of the service.
The problem with this is that there is no direct comparable parallel. Physical removal is not allowed, and that most agree with. But this is not the same, there was no physical change, only a software lock. You and I would maybe like it to be treated the same, but it isn't yet.
Software licenses are revoked quite frequently. Game console vendors can blacklist serials bricking essential features of a game console, Steam blacklists stolen activation keys, storage providers can "expire" free space from promos that never included a time limit. Porting the law naively would mean all of these are not allowed either.
Tesla as the sole provider or parts and labor provided a product as a replacement and through their own incompetence failed to install it correctly.
The response to this would be, fine reduce my range, but also swap out the battery for the proper size.
So, the dead mass is there even in brand new cars. I'm guessing the 60 -> 90 swap is because they're not making 60 anymore and it's just all 90 with a software cap... The OP thread even mentions that essentially Tesla forgot to lock the capacity and just left it with the full 90.
Basically it's the whole issue about takebacks of physical features via digital un-licensing. There is no direct parallel in the past. A dealership removing accidentally installed physical components after an unrelated service is unacceptable. A digital provider revoking accidentally provided licenses seems pretty common (I still remember Dropbox giving free storage in very early on promos and later going "oops, that actually expires!"). So this is kind of in the middle. A digital license that controls access to a physical good.
Not having that extra space will dramatically lower the lifespan and reliability of the drive. Same with these batteries.
They just need to be honest about what they're selling.
I have a Samsung SSD. How do I know how much to overprovision? 100Mb? 200Mb? 1000Mb?? How would I know?
When they sell an SSD as, say, 2Tb but then I'm expected to assign 20Gb of that just for reliability, that's materially worse than a drive that advertises 2Tb but doesn't count the overprovisioning. But they're both advertised as 2Tb.
If they're selling a 2Tb drive, it should work as a (reliable) 2Tb drive.
Just like hard drives that manage bad blocks themselves.
All large silicon chips (dram, CPU, GPU, FPGA, SSD, etc) are built with spare sections to replace non-functional ones. A 6 core CPU could be really only 6 but could also be a disabled 8 core when not enough people buy the more expensive 8 core, and they built too many of them. GPUs can be the same, but there are a dozen different functions that could be broken, so they sell it as the next lower SKU. For example, mining chips don't need HDMI, so if HDMI is broken, normally you would toss a 99% good chip. Contracts for digitally controlled goods need proper consumer protection. Tesla just happens to use the feature a lot. Much cheaper to lose 30kWh worth of raw material that might not have passed qualification, and sell it as a 60, than pay for inventory, scheduling, and swap/configuration stations on your assembly line.
Also, if rumors get out that SKU xyz CAN be overclocked or unlocked 10% of the time when a higher chip is used, people will buy and return 9 cards before getting the bonus, causing lots of grief to the entire supply chain and 9x packaging/refurb costs, and then have to sell as open box at a lower profit. Not gonna happen. These locks are heavily encrypted, or physically unaccessible.
And assuming the software change didn't account for that by giving a bit more capacity.
They can't legally do that now either. Apple was challenged in court for doing something similar and lost. There's already legal precedent. The problem is while that can't do that legally, they can do it technically and the path to recourse for the individual is difficult and often not worth it. Which means they can usually get away with it.
We need a way for the legal system do deal with these kinds of things that don't involve actually going to the over worked and too expensive courts to settle it.
They actually settled in the US to avoid setting precedent...
Arbitration?
Could also gather a class. Unless if we are saying the argument is we shouldn't have to do these things. I agree, this is true. We also don't have to purchase Teslas if they indeed do these types of things on the regular.
I'm not sure I disagree with you, but the invocation of the word "morally" here really reminds me of the software licensing debates from twenty-something years ago. Twenty years later most people seem resigned on the software licensing issue (although I doubt their opinion has changed), and they seemed resigned on limiting their ability to run custom software on hardware they paid for (jailbreaking an Apple phone), but there is still plenty of grumbling for software that limits access to hardware features. Tesla limiting the battery capacity is not really different from Apple limiting which OS's you can install on their hardware. Unless I'm missing something?
Imagine 3 scenarios:
Company A rolls out a new mandatory update to a phone that addresses a CPU vulnerability, and to compensate for the reduced performance, overclocks the CPU so now your battery life is 20% shorter.
Company B rolls out a new mandatory update to a phone that improves the battery management so phones do not shut down unexpectedly. However, due to lack of hardware battery reporting when the device was built, they could only estimate the capacity based on the phone's age and natural battery degradation. This causes older phones to have 20% shorter battery life, even though some batteries that were not used as hard could have supported longer.
Company C rolls out a new mandatory update to a phone that detects the phones age and reserves 20% battery capacity on older phones, forcing them to have 20% shorter battery life so users are incentivized to upgrade.
The end result is the same, a phone with worse battery life, but we don't see all of them to be morally the same. The only real difference is the human intent behind it, which is why we probably eventually need regulations that make sure companies should justify that they have a reasonably good intent if challenged. Getting this right is very hard -- you don't want to overburden companies from frivolous cases, but you also want regulations to be effective so they can't just handwave them away.
Obviously that's easier said than done for a complex product, but don't expect sympathy when you screw up. Moving away from monolithic all-or-nothing OS updates would certainly help.
So yeah you can choose to keep the old version and loose warranty, cheers!
Im not sure what the legal side of warranty conditions is. But outdated software is potentially a very real cost to the manufacturer in therms of extra warranty work.
Tesla installed a 90 battery because it was easier and faster to do that than wait around for a 60 battery to show up in the distribution pipeline. They then let the customer take advantage of the fact that they had given them an "overclocked" battery. Trying to force price discrimination at this point is at the very least a bad look and may actually be a violation of the law regarding principle of second sale.
IIRC there you had 2 models, both with the same heated seat hardware, but if you paid for the feature outright during purchase, it will be enabled perpetually even after any resale. But the subscription model would require the subscription be re-applied by the new buyer. And, possibly, if you resold the remaining subscription time would not transfer (?).
The person you're responding to meant "can't" as is "socially disallowed".
OP probably would like to have the legal guarantee, but it's a fight that's still in-progress.
You are actually implicitly doing it right there! A slight re-wording of your post is "'Socially disallowed' can't be implied through 'can't'" … meaning that it is socially/linguistically unable to be so implied (though I disagree), not legally or technically so.
And of course there are tons of other examples—when I say that "you can't just [do that thing]", I very often mean it is socially unacceptable to do it, not that it is illegal or technically impossible to do it.
"Can't" implies some kind of enforcement/compelling force preventing that, either from nature, or some authority (a nation state, a workplace superior, a parent of a child etc.). As much as we might want it, society doesn't act as an authority for this kind of stuff...
Good luck with that. The main reason it isn't illegal is the people who have been in charge of the Federal government are too old to understand computers. They've never updated most laws for the computer age, which is why it's legal to eavesdrop on someone's e-mail but not their paper mail, why corporations aggregating huge amounts of data together to know more about their customers than the customers know is legal, and why it's legal for Tesla to do what they did here.
Get the money, geriatrics and religion out of the US government and make it functional again, then we can fix things like this. Until then, lotsa luck.
But this is a self-resolving problem. Eventually the older generation will just... you know... die off...
The more problematic thing is the whole lobbying situation where money is doing the talking. Consumers in general don't have nearly enough money to be viable as political pressure.
What really needs to happen is for consumers to be on comparable footing with industry lobbies in terms of political say, and clearly just relying on voting is not cutting it, since you often have cases where all the candidates are different kinds of bad just backed by different lobbies...
Non-Technical people suffer the most from this game... The person who doesn't know how to look up and install drivers (Your Dad or Grandma) usually then needs to go out an buy a brand new computer every 2-3 years, simply because the device stops working.. A relatively easy fix to us generates billions of dollars for companies that know the system is broken, and they conveniently don't want to fix that system because it would cut their revenue.
As software permeates the car making industry, they actually wouldn't mind making all cars leased and/or disposable like computer devices, they run online campaigns on reddit against car ownership, and brigade endlessly about the environmental benefits of EVs, which still to this day use tons of toxic materials in batteries and non-bio-degradable plastics as well.
Even the madness over each new minorly adjusted variation of video card that comes out is driven by this drive to maximize company profit is quite harmful to the environment and our health, without any sense of responsibility held by the companies that drive this consumerism.
We pay a lor for these products, we need to all be better at demanding proper product support and quality, and we need to stop continually and carelessly renewing everything tech that we buy, even if we have the extra money burning a hole in our pocket... Because ultimately it's destroying us all.
On the plus side, if you can figure out how to sideload your car you get a free range extension on your battery.
Relevantly,
> ==Automobiles==
> Tesla limits the range on lower-end versions of the Model S in software, as well as disabling Autopilot functions if those functions weren't purchased.
> Some high-end BMW cars in [list of countries] have the option to pay a subscription fee for features such as heated seats, advanced cruise control, and automatic beam switching. The components and functionality already exist within the vehicle, but BMW has a software block that prevent them from being used without paying.
(#2 was recently on HN)
Maybe you're right. However, much of the modern hardware business operates this way. At least Nvidia and Intel have been known to sell the same chips as different models, but just some part of the chip disabled via firmware.
This means that in the future, everyone will need to retain a lawyer conversant in contract law when making any sort of purchase, as what is being purchased may have little to do with the thing you think you have bought, and everything to do with the abstract contract that the lawyer can understand.
The World Economic Forum thinks this is a great idea. I can't wait til those guys are run out of town.
They would also lose their minds if Apple only sold the highest-end model but firmware-locked CPU cores and SSD space unless you paid extra for it, or, even better, paid a subscription for it.
Refresh rates up to 120 Hz, available for $4.99 per month!
It tends not to go down well.
Now this time the idea is that because their differnt SKU's are basically the same chip under the hood anyway just locked at the Silicon level why not allow them to be unlocked if the extra features are found to be needed after purchase.
This happen in other markets just fine. One market that jumps to mind is oscilloscopes, you will basically have a single piece of hardware spanning multiple skus where features are disabled via software/hardware (sometimes the CPU is just reading resistor values or jumpers to determine which model it is and therefore which features it has enabled), one notable vendor jumps to mind is Hantek. You can take a 70Mhz scope and opening it up to unlock it to 250mhz. (The same can be done in a number of Rigol scopes iirc)
Physical objects sold never had that option before the advent of a persistent internet connection, and you at least fully owned it.
Now, software updates which are mandatory, are making physical objects not be truly owned by the buyers.
There needs to be new laws to allow consumers to retain the rights of ownership that is being erroded at record pace.
The world has changed and keeps changing. When I was a kid, smartphones just weren’t a thing. And yet today I simply cannot imagine life without them.
As the world changes so do the metaphors useful in describing it.
I had the exact same situation with, weirdly enough, InstantPot.
My device had a clear warranty-covered issue during the warranty period.
The model I had had been discontinued (and I suspect because of supply chain issues they didn’t have any in stock stateside anyways).
They sent me the new upgraded model as a replacement which was at least twice as expensive.
I would be mad as hell if a few years in now, if they had the ability, they would decide to degrade it to the older model.
I think this is the key problem here. Tesla is asserting the right to decide for the owner what the car "is". Kinda brings into question who the "owner" "is"...
That would be such a great solution
Either there are a ton of Tesla fanatics out there who will put up with a lot of dubious behavior, or Tesla is severely limiting its upside with all of their anti-customer service antics.
I think it's both. There are a ton of Tesla fanatics who think Tesla can do no wrong. Some of them are commenting on this article here, others in the Twitter thread.
But there are also people like myself, who will probably never buy a Tesla due to current and past behavior like this. And there are probably at least a few people reading this who were on the fence, but for whom this battery kerfuffle pushed them over the edge.
> We, uh, we fixed the glitch. So he won't be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it'll just work itself out naturally. We always like to avoid confrontation, whenever possible. Problem is solved from your end.
It was probably one of the previous owners, and them changing the badge without disclosing that it's actually a 60 seems to put the bad-faith blame on them.
Having said that, if I was going to drop $40k on a used car, I would certainly have inspected everything... the carfax, title, stickers on the car, maintenance history, with Tesla themselves, etc. Surely one of those would've hinted to the current owner that it's actually a 60!?
There is plenty of "way". Maybe they did mean to give it as a free upgrade bug did not properly document that. Maybe the person updating the badge did not realize that it was not supposed to be unlocked. Why are you jumping to conclusions like this just to give some corporation the benefit of the doubt especially when it in no way excuses them remotely downgrading the vehicle WITH NO WARNING.
Tweet author said it's badged 90
I’m not saying Tesla are in the right overall, but the question of the badge appears to be one of misrepresentation by a previous owner.
Basically you're always going to want flexibility in hardware, but infinite limits in usage.
Tesla is in the wrong here. If your hardware allows greater range because it allows flexibility in warranty repairs, they need to eat it.
I'm not as sure about this take. Imagine if this were something not connected to The Cloud; the seller sells the car they have, its not their responsibility, nor should it be, nor has it ever been, to know that this is a component that's Cloud Connected and Tesla can just take it away with no notice. No other car operates like that; even the new BMW shit isn't like that, its pretty clear "this is a subscription which is bound to your account, not the car".
Very few consumer physical goods operate like that. Here's a correlate: Intel bins chips. Imagine you buy a computer, you get an i5, years later its upgraded to an i7, years later Intel rolls around a software update and says "your desktop only shipped with an i5, we're disabling two of the cores". That's theoretically totally possible with Intel & partners control over microcode & chipset updates; but it would be wild to happen.
Now, put yourself in the shoes of someone selling that desktop: you sell the computer you have, it has an i7, "two years ago the chip was upgraded", that's it. Let's say the price difference between these two chips is, like, 20% of the total cost of the machine. Would you, the seller, accept 20% less; in other words, selling the laptop Intel may or may not create for the buyer, in the unknowable future? Would you, the buyer, be willing to pay 20% more, even knowing (or, more likely, not knowing) that Intel could nerf the performance at any time?
I'm not on Tesla's side here: I have an expectation of reasonability that they're not meeting, and I feel that they've forfeited their "rights" to locking this configuration down, a long time ago.
But in parallel, it seems that strictly speaking the new owner may also have some reasonable expectation that the history of the care is relayed to them upon purchase. I say "strictly" because I also understand that's not how it goes in the real world. But since were hypothesizing here...
To stay with the water heater analogy - what if when the water heater needs to be replaced under warranty and the company says oh hey we have 40s in stock again so we're sending you what you should have had?
(And with that comment I get voted down. Odd.)
Here's another example: many car brands sell larger tires as a feature of upper trim models. Hypothetically, I take my car to the dealer to get new 17" wheels, but they're out; so they do the insane thing of saying "but we've got 19" wheels here, we'll throw those on free of charge". Four years later the next owner gets a knock on their door: "we got a crew out in the driveway swapping your wheels, you didn't pay for those".
This sounds insane, but I think it only sounds insane because we're talking about software vs hardware. Since its invention, humanity has had a weird stance with software; we tolerate a lot more shit, and that toleration has allowed companies to basically get away with highway robbery. Whether that's Amazon selling eBooks then revoking them years later, game companies releasing unfinished games then promising patches months later, or Tesla issuing OTA updates, it all factors down to a really similar issue in that: software has enabled companies project greed in previously impossible ways.
Maybe the previous owner misrepresented the car; or maybe they didn't, because what reasonable person would have guessed that Tesla would do this? The statement "you didn't pay for those wheels" isn't even accurate; the new buyer probably did pay for them; maybe not in this case, but hypothetically: if it looks like a P90 and quacks like a P90, its a P90, and that's the resale value. If it looks like its got 19" wheels, and it quacks like its got 19" wheels, its priced like its got 19" wheels. The buyer just didn't pay the right person.
"If" is the operative word there. The first tweet says that this is the "~3rd owner of a 2013 Model S 60. At some point years ago the battery pack was swapped under warranty with a 90 pack." If the change occurred with the first owner, it's possible that the second owner didn't realize the magnitude of what they were told, or weren't even told at all, before they sold it to the next person.
It's also entirely possible that whoever had the battery replaced just had absolutely no idea what had been done to it.
All in all, it probably wouldn't be worth the time and effort to actually do that though. And because the current buyer is two steps removed from the actual person who was around for the swap, they probably wouldn't actually get anything back for that effort since the middle person is also protected as they bought and sold in good faith.
As I understand it, all batteries are the same size. They are just software locked. So no additional costs.
It's the same as how Tesla remote unlocked the battery life of people fleeing natural disasters. Which means not only is it there, it's charged.
It’s more likely they didn’t have a 60kWh battery at the time pack to do the replacement. Which brings up an interesting point, a 90kWh battery software locked to 60kWh is a defective part as the added weight takes more energy to move around, has worse acceleration, more tire and break ware etc.
It’s therefore likely Tesla failed to provide an equivalent replacement part and thus broke their warranty contract.
https://insideevs.com/news/342746/more-on-the-return-of-tesl...
Why not? Tesla not only replaced the battery, but REBADGED the car for him.
Putting this on the customer is asinine.
I tried getting a Tesla logo/badge replaced since mine had broken, and Tesla made it clear that getting one was going to be a much greater pain in the ass than just finding one made by a third party.
They claimed it was a supply chain thing, but it clearly had a lot less to do with that and a lot more to do with their techs not giving a damn.
A full capacity battery on the other hand could reasonably qualify as an as good or better replacement which is fine. Therefore whoever did this change at Tesla is exposing them to liability.
Technically if car identified as having a 90kWh battery then Tesla also befitted from that deception by being able to claim higher resale value. Thus making this arguably fraud on their part, though that’s unlikely to stick.
Not sure if that balances out.
It’s adds another point of failure to something your life can sometimes depend on, imagine if you’re in a cyber truck on a backroad trail and Tesla finds out the last owner didn’t pay for 4WD, you could easily get stranded.
And I feel like with all this connectivity to the manufacturer, we will start to see “acceptable use cases” for your cars. For the vast majority of people they won’t notice but a gearhead will get in and head to the track to find out he can’t drive there because he doesn’t have the “track package subscription” or an off-roader realizing he can’t take his jeep off road because if didn’t come with an “off pavement subscription”. Your truck won’t be able to move when hooked up to a trailer because it doesn’t have a “tow package”. Eventually you’re going to be doing something and want to do something with your car and realize you can’t, not because it’s incapable, but because it was told not to by someone else.
I promise you there will be scams abound with hackers selling base model cars as fully loaded ones then reverting everything after the fact. A few are going to die in off-roading situations where the car just refused to move or had critical features disabled through software, and we’re going to relish the days where the only subscription was to your heated seats. And all these subscriptions are going to make Adobe look like a saint with their subscriptions.
"BMW starts selling heated seat subscriptions for $18 a month" "The auto industry is racing towards a future full of microtransactions"
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23204950/bmw-subscription...
But ultimately, all it reinforces to me is that there is no chance in hell I will ever give money to a company that can remotely perform this type of sanction on a product I own.
I will never buy a Tesla.
Disagree.
>> The previous owner shouldn't have sold it as a 90 or at least disclosed that, "It's a 60 but Tesla swapped out the batter with a 90 and left it configured as a 90".
Yes, they should have said that and did. You agree with this decision when you say 'Why not get some good will out of it? "Hey sorry about your battery. We only had a 90 so we threw that in there. Enjoy.'
Tesla, being notified, should have just enabled the 90 and made the customer happy.
Tbey did. Not a bad decision.
The only "bad" decision was to revert it from a 60 to a 90 and stick to that. Hardly "all around bad decisions" but a very bad one at the end.
I mean I'm not convinced at all what Tesla did is even lawful. To me, it seems like Tesla and the owner came to a mutual agreement repairing warranty service years earlier, and Tesla's only real arguments is that that either the customer agreed to the downgrade happening eventually (probably not true) or that they didn't understand they were giving the customer all this capacity (maybe?), but I don't think that in turn gives them the right to sabotage a car arbitrarily without notice to remediate this. I think they have an obligation to restore the status quo before the sabotage.
To be fair, for people not intimately familiar with the craziness of modern tech business, it's reasonable to assume that whatever capabilities the car has at the moment of purchase, are going to be there indefinitely. On the face of it, cutting car battery remotely via software patch sounds about as reasonable as remotely removing a room from a house you purchased.
This is a couple new owners downstream, though. The most recent owner to sell the car might not have known about this, or may not have remembered it or understood the implications of it.
And, regardless, while I think many of us here are very familiar with the idea of more-capable hardware being software-locked to be less capable, with monetary upgrade options, I think it's reasonable to assume that the average consumer would be very surprised that it would be even possible that they could drive a car into a service station for a completely unrelated issue, and then drive it out with a software-enforced "smaller" battery.
inb4: Yes, I'm an expert at cucking myself to vaguely justifiable corporate laws and behavior.
I mean, it's actually is a 90, and it was configured as a 90 when sold, and we have no idea why that happened, nor what the original owner knew or (crucially) was told by Tesla.
> Why not get some good will out of it? "Hey sorry about your battery. We only had a 90 so we threw that in there. Enjoy. Tell everyone you know about how awesome Tesla was about fixing the problem and remember that next time you go to buy your next car"
We have zero reason to think that's not a literal transcript of what the original owner was told when their car was repaired under warranty.
Even if it wasn't, if you take a product in for a repair under warranty, you expect it to be returned in same or better configuration (that's actually a legal requirement), so if you drop off a broken Widget 500X, and then you pick it up and it's now a newer Widget 600X, the absolutely inevitable conclusion is "oh, I bet they were out of stock of the 500Xs, so they gave me a 600X, score", and then you think nothing of it, and years later you sell the 600X on Ebay when you upgrade to the latest Widget 800Z. That's just how it works, and I suspect most people here will have experienced that exact sequence of events.
(There's also a non-zero chance, given Tesla's general level of customer service, that it was locked to be a 60, a previous owner already paid to unlock it to a 90, and then they lost the records.)
The only way I can see we can blame the original owner is if they were told during the warranty process "hey, we're installing a 90, but we'll be locking it to a 60", then Tesla accidentally failed to do it. Which sure, could happen, but it really seems like the least likely result.
I certainly agree that Tesla today is handling this in the worst way possible.
Where has our goodwill gone? It isn't just Tesla, but they are a quite brutal offender.
The real moral of the story here is that if your business plan and practices is creating occasional weird issues and huge cognitive dissonance in your customers, it's the wrong business plan. Also... the number of people this applies to is likely so low that Tesla really screwed up by not erring on the side of the customer. (They didn't buy from Tesla, but they're still a customer buying servicing from them.) If the bad publicity alone causes even a tiny fraction of the population to choose another manufacturer, the've lost their $4,500 and then some.
Harmony is a really underrated concept. When things are harmonious, you don't have problems like this, and you can still make money.
Anything you are leaning towards buying?
And like many, Musk's behavior has dissuaded me from purchasing one, and instead likely a Ford.
Trying to hold Elon to a standard in his companies gets you fired, not him: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-17/spacex-fi...
If people knew or cared all the dumb shit all other car CEO said in their live, or all the corruption they engage in with the Union bosses and the list of things goes on.
Compare working at Tesla and working at Lockheed Martin for example. How can self respecting engineer work there? You are literally building bombs that illegally blow up US citizens (and weddings) around the world.
So if 'CEO fired a some people who clearly were not on board with CEO management style' is the reason for a moral panic, there are a whole lot of places you can never work at. And that's fine, but lets be clear about that.
Also, firing the CEO when the company is growing at breakneck speed while also having industry leading margin. Just for example, Tesla NetIncome this Q matched Ford and GM combined at 1/10 the revenue and in a Quarter where Tesla main factory was mostly closed.
So I guess the question is how highly do you value image compared to 12 years of amazing growth.
I think you're overstating the "brilliance" of the engineers. I have no doubt the core of them working on the battery tech could be in the brilliant category, but the rest of those thousands of engineers are run-of-the-mill automotive engineers.
Would you describe Ford as being composed of thousands of brilliant engineers?
Absolutely.
I've seen people believe that creating a browser is no big deal, can you imagine developing, manufacturing, compliance certification, marketing and distribution of actual vehicles, planet-scale?
He can overpromise to the point of outright lying about functionality and delivery schedule.
The CEO is not 'just one guy'
If Tesla somehow folded overnight I'm sure all the other car companies making BEVs would be ecstatic to scoop up that newly available talent.
Hell, when was the last time Tesla released a new car? The Big Auto companies are rolling out new models every other week. Fact is, Tesla blew a lead and aren’t impressing.
Of course in the last 6 month they have sold less then 10k EVs, about what Tesla does in a week or so. But I guess they announced many new models.
> Fact is, Tesla blew a lead and aren’t impressing.
A lead in what? They are dominating both in terms of volume and in terms of profitability. A few years ago everybody was hype about how VW would blew Tesla doors within a year or two, well turns out Tesla still matches VW for growth.
> Hell, when was the last time Tesla released a new car?
The question is, what is the goal? To release a car because you have released a car? Is that your goal?
Because what matters in the real world is growth and profit. And if you have a fixed supply because of chips and batteries. Just building more different models while you can still sell your existing model is just financially idiotic.
Other manufactures like VW spend billions to turn the ID.4 into a Skoda that is basically the exact same inside.
I don't do business with people who are assholes to their customers.
Nowadays, I have chatted with numerous folks that have purchased alternative EVs.
The Tesla owners still seem the giddiest (There's a lot of 'em around here), but I have not heard one ounce of buyer's remorse from any of the other brands.
The one that brought the Rivian, is every bit as giddy as any Tesla owner I know.
I think that Tesla has managed to establish itself, and will last, but the free ride is over.
I know a Bolt owner though, and they seem pleased.
I also know someone that has a Fusion plug-in hybrid. He loves it.
I have seen the F-150 Lightnings around, but don't know anyone that got one (yet).
The charging situation for electric cars for road trips is still a thing... It seems to have found a standard in CSS. I expected there to be adapters, but apparently making adapters is slightly non trivial as there is a lot of chatting between the car and charger.
Even with that and the limited range, I bought the right car for our usage pattern and have been overall extremely happy with the car. It's been relatively trouble-free (one visit to the dealer for some combined warranty work on the battery, Takata air bag recall, and some other recall or other, all of which were taken care of for $0 and included a free loaner car while it was being done), otherwise requiring two sets of wiper blades, some washer fluid, and one tire to have a nail hole plugged.
When I say we bought the right car for our usage pattern, we paid around $21K (net of government credits) for a car that will still do 75 miles on a charge. Before COVID, my commute was 16 miles round-trip and had chargers at work. After working remotely, I drive the car much less and our two-driver family has a traditional ICE car for any longer trips. We both prefer the LEAF for around-town errands and it gets more drives than the ICE car does. I think once in 7.5 years we had a conflict where we both had more than 100 miles to drive in a day and I worked it out by charging the LEAF during my day. It's been a non-issue and getting a car that's given us >7.5 years of drama-free service for $21K has been great.
Yeah, that's a bit annoying. In the US, many(most) still do, but there aren't going to be many (if any) new CHAdeMO installations. Even more so now that Nissan itself dropped CHAdeMO in the US. The Ariya will be CCS.
That said, if you are in a city, L2 should continue to expand and hopefully you'll be able to top off during your normal activities.
According to the US DOE, we have 4450 CHAdeMO stations and 4583 CCS stations in the US at the moment. No major charging network has started building CCS-only stations yet, though EA plans to in the future. I don't see why you're feeling that remorse, your charging network is large and continues to grow, despite your car being discontinued in the next 2-3 years.
I've owned two Nissan LEAFs (2012, 2018). The things that would give me buyers' remorse are faults of the car, not anything external. Like, not charging any faster than 40-50 kW, charging at half that speed once the battery gets hot, losing 10% of its range to battery degradation after just 3 years, and offering no upgrade path to keep the connectivity features working after AT&T shut down its 2G then 3G networks.
I drive a VW ID.4 now.
If it weren't for the crappy dealership model I probably would have bought the Hyundai Ioniq instead.
I have also been seeing various flavors of BMW electrics, for some time.
A chap around here, owns one of those BMW electric "supercar" looking things (i8?). I don't know him, personally.
An $18/month subscription for heated seats. This is quite frankly absurd. And I know, Tesla is the one that started it (partially), but for things such as heated seats, this is taking it completely to the next level.
Soon enough we will start seeing microtransactions to even turn the car on? Not a good look for the automotive industry as a whole and shame on BMW for this.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/14/business/bmw-subscription/ind...
Went through the same thing with a recent starter replacement. They no longer offer OEM bosch (this was oreilly not sure about AZ) and they no longer sell Bosch OEM even remanufactures.
Again they explained to me this was due to BMW themselves.
I'm going to ride my 328i into the ground, but once its repairs outweigh the value of the car (doing the repairs myself now, had to become my own mechanic to avoid a $1700 bill and 2 week wait for a starter replacement),I am never touching one of their vehicles again.
When in the dealership in Seattle 2 years ago for an oil change and fluid top off/inspection it was a horror show.
They only added about 3 quarts of oil to my car out of the almost 7 needed after a change (light came on immediately as leaving and oil level was - null-). They never did their whatever-point inspection, never did the fluid top off, and left my oil filter cap loose! My 'account manager' was supposed to go over some stuff with me- never saw him. Was told he'd left notes on my file- did not.
While waiting I saw three different people come in with problems with their EV batteries no longer charging. The 1st two were told they'd be covered under warranty. I heard the reps talking amongst themselves about how bad it was getting and whether there would be a recall. 3d person was a lady who was pissed as she'd just had her battery replaced under warranty, it'd happened again and this time they wanted her to pay for a new one. She threatened to sue and they comped everything they could think of for her.
Now with this heated seats fiasco BMW has officially nuked the fridge.
Edit to add- if anyone is interested check out the starter replacement [1], absolutely fucking ridiculous the way cars are now engineered to stop the layman from affecting their own repairs.
Used to be starter replacement was something anyone could do and was all of two to four bolts and a wire and took ten minutes of time. You could even just replace the solenoid half the time for a few bucks.
I've now replaced brakes, rotors, control arms, shocks, struts, starter, window actuators, headlights, radiator, mass airflow sensor, ECM, spark plugs and ignition coils, cleaned the O2 sensors etc. Some of the steps are insane especially the radiator which was 600 just because California ones have a stupid sensor on them that cant be used on an off-brand radiator.
So much blood and sweat because why leave room to work on anything.
Seriously fuck BMW.
The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.” In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.
I basically gave up on that vehicle not because I can't wait or am not willing to play the price, but the BS process of going through one of these dealerships is too infuriating. Rivian I put my order in and at least I have an order date and understand that I'm in the queue and should be sometime MY24. If Cadillac came out with the exact same process as Rivian and it said I could get my vehicle ordered and enqueued for 12month deliver I would do it.
In Utah, where I am, it’s going to be a bit of a hill. I hear we have some laws to protect the local dealerships. Tesla dealers are just showrooms here and I don’t think they sell anything on-site. Could be wrong about all this.
The Ford CEO has mentioned earlier this year that they're less than pleased at the various markups applied by dealerships, and would want to do set price, online sales (eg. https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/02/ford-wants-to-sell-evs-onl...).
Is that "Model Year 24"? So they gave you an estimate of a year-long window, but also did not guarantee the date? How is that much different than "Youre on the list" with a traditional dealership?
I went looking for a Bolt EUV recently (that price point for Super Cruise is really attractive), but they were marked up everywhere by upwards of $6K and it's impossible to reserve one from the manufacturer and actually get any guarantee that it will be purchasable at the listed price.
I remember when everyone was excited to pre-order Teslas when their actual production was several years out...
It seems like there is no EV that is free of something stupid that the car manufacturer is making you put up with.
Maybe Tesla it's these general annoyances. Or collision repair or out of warranty service annoyances.
I test drove a VW ID.4. It sounds like if I bought one I might deal with annoyances (markups, delays) trying to buy the car because dealers are annoying. The flip side is if I bought one and it needs service I can walk home from the local VW dealer to my house pretty quickly. Hyper Local service is rather nice.
Fwiw my car was delivered in the middle half of the original ETA, but I know that others have had lots of issues with their ETAs.
For Hyundai specifically I was looking for the Limited trim, and I've been told they're only allocating custom orders to dealerships with level 3 chargers. And even then the order bank for MY 2022 had already been closed when I started shopping around. I would have had to wait for the MY 2023 bank to open.
The only solid reason I've heard to buy Tesla over others is for the Supercharger network if you travel a lot or can't charge at home. Everything else comes down to preference.
But now, your choices are among legacy car makers and their dealer networks, which were never a joy to interact with most of whom, Hyundai and maybe Nissan excepted, are just bringing out their first serious EVs.
Yeah, Tesla is overhyped. But their competition mostly, still, sucks. Nobody has, and nobody will for at least another year or two, make even a slight dent is demand for Tesla cars. Yes, Cybertruck is dumb. Yes, there is no roadster. But VW has apparently completely screwed their software stack. That is a much bigger failure.
The same can be said about SpaceX. SpaceX's value is highly dependent on a kind of telecom network that was a failure several times before when tried by Motorola, Microsoft, etc. Starship could fly soon, or next year, or in 5 years and it would still revolutionize access to space. Cost overruns? <cough>Boeing</cough>
It's all relative. Hype and image polishing is everywhere.
Are you assuming that this is news to the naysayers? Or maybe the naysayers are fully-informed, and they still say, "I'd rather deal with a traditional dealer than buy a Tesla"? Because that's what this naysayer is saying: better to deal with the devil I know...
So i’d posit, you actually don’t know that particular devil.
The software support in terms of updates is very good, and you still get updates to years old software.
Where they struggle is not enough service capacity and parts shortages. What you would expect from a car maker growing 50% and the service capacity has not grown as fast.
My wife loves the Model Y she replaced it with. They’re vastly different vehicles, but I can say with confidence I will never again buy a GM vehicle.
One of them has had what I would describe as a luxury car experience - fit and finish is perfect, and every detail of the car has been clearly thought about carefully and engineered to work precisely, and it was the cheaper of the two cars.
The other person got the Tesla. It's an acceptable car, but is wasn't cheap, nor is it luxurious. The quality just isn't there.
This strikes me as a result of Tesla's whole "ignore everything known by car companies and act like software companies" approach. So far the software industry is young enough that most companies can expect that anyone approaching them for support is the same person who bought the software... but that's not at all the case for cars, what with resales, inheritances, etc being standard practice.
I think a lot of software companies are going to be in for a rude awakening over the next 25 years or so, as hand-me-down devices and accounts become increasingly common. I wonder how many lawsuits it's going to take before companies purporting to "sell" software actually take wills into account.
Consider Steam, right now. What happens when some judge eventually rules that it's entirely reasonable to put your Steam library in your will and divide it up between different people?
Yup, the Silicon Valley strategy "letting the fires burn". As long as you can acquire new customers with less effort than servicing existing ones, why bother? It worked at Paypal and it has worked so far at Tesla. We see year after year of 50%+ sales growth but nowhere near 50% increases in service capacity. It's the reason we see people waiting months for replacement parts (those parts can go into a new car, for a new customer!) and its the reason they pressure you into accepting bad workmanship so that the problems with the car become yours and not theirs and its now on you to convince them that it is not, in fact, "in spec".
This is a 4 year old thread but Tesla still makes the same service mistakes (like the OP) today: https://twitter.com/grainsurgeon/status/1054732768465305600
At the end of the day, given that Hyundai/Kia, VW, Ford, et. al, are all sold out of EVs for the year, we decided we'd just rather do without a new car than buy a Tesla. Hang in there, l'il 2011 Leaf; you've served us well so far.
I'm on my second Leaf. Was eyeing an EV 6 but that's an unnecessary expense.
If you sell it to Tesla, they often remove FSD and resell without it; but that's no different than anyone else modifying a vehicle they own and then selling it in its new state.
That's definitely not a standard practice, but I can see how that would happen by mistake (e.g. forget to remove FSD from the spec sheet) and then be difficult to get fixed. It's near-impossible to reach the right human at Tesla, so when things fall through the cracks, it's a nightmare. I suspect that's the issue OP is quoting, too -- there's likely a reasonable person at Tesla who can and would help if they knew about this story.
https://electrek.co/2020/02/07/tesla-takes-away-autopilot-us...
It does transfer to a new owner in private sales.
I think you are referring to the point that you can buy it for one Tesla, and it doesn’t transfer if you upgrade to a new Tesla.
I have a model y, and I will say that all of the “little duck bites” are vastly overrated for my use case. I can imagine someone for whom these duck bites may be an issue, but I am not one of them, and none of my friends who own teslas are either.
I imagine that you will enjoy your new Tesla immensely, and you will wonder what all of the negativity was/is about. Imho, it’s just contrarian yipping against something trendy.
And it better be a new Tesla, otherwise who knows what will happen with the features that were sold as is second hand. Tesla might just turn them off.
Like, a friend recently received delivery of a Tesla. They went to the dealer 4 times before they got the car. Each time it was "Your car is available, come pick it up" and then when they got there the car wasn't actually there. By the last time they demanded that the person at the dealership actually walked out to the car and physically touched it, verified it was actually the correct vehicle, before they would go out again
It's not hard to find those kinds of stories. It is not a luxury experience.
Every car I've had was used, I DO like that the ecological "cost" of the car is paid by the previous owner.
However if you buy a new car and drive it for its entire life (15 years) that seems similar to buying a used car. Especially if by doing so you put your old ICE car off the road.
Better of course if you can live with less cars and use public transport instead.
Reputation and the customer relationship are worth more than the company's sense of "fairness", especially when (as in this case) you're not even deterring future customers from doing anything, because the customer who's affected is not responsible for the error.
Bingo.
One of the issues with conventional large corporations (mostly outside of tech) is that middle management incentives often align poorly with this type of philosophy.
A few companies have gotten this right, at least at times.
Costco comes to mind in the present. They go out of their way to save their customers money, and to fix issues customers have as easily as they can. Their returns policy is pretty legendary.
Amazon, somewhat ironically given recent issues, had a philosophy early on that, if a customer was talking to them, they probably didn't want to be! ...And it's probably because something in Amazon's process went wrong. So while I think their reputation has fallen greatly, they did spend a lot of engineering effort into "harmonizing" their purchasing and returns process. Mostly because Bezos saw the value in that. And despite all the bad press, I think they still have that not 'right' but 'decent'. Becuase, while I've had a few issues with amazon, they resolved them really quickly and easily for me as a customer. (I think you get screwed as a vendor though...)
Another example I can think of is Vortex optics. Most optics companies had a pretty good guarantee, often lifetime. Vortex just heavily marketed it and took away the edge cases. So while leupold wouldn't replace your scope if you sent it in along with a video of you driving over it with a truck, vortex would. That allowed them to really rapidly acquire a ton of market share.
At the end of the day, customers are human and despite tech's best efforts, they still try to interact with companies as humans would each other. Fucking over your neighbor while being technically correct still leaves you with a pissed off neighbor who will not respond well to anything you bring to them in the future.
Its incredibly profitable for the ruling class. Too bad you aren't in it.
Yeah, that's me. With all of the nonsense with Tesla, why would anyone do that to themselves? Just buy another car. It's not like there aren't plenty of other EV options in the world.
I think you forgot to spare anything.
Meh. This is a software configuration issue like we've seen before. Like lots of devices in the modern world, the cars can be configured with common hardware but disjoint behavior. You might have the hardware for FSD, but you didn't buy it so you can't use it. You might have the same motor as the performance car, but the current limit is set to long range. You might have the mobile radio, but if you don't pay for the service you won't get satellite pictures.
Or you might have a large battery, but be configured to use only a fraction. And in this case they messed up and accidentally granted a customer access to a feature they hadn't paid for. And the mistake wasn't discovered until the car got reconfigured when it was sold.
I just don't see the "ransom" here. It's a messup. No one ever paid for that extra battery capacity they enabled. Should they honor the mistake? Maybe. But we really need to turn down the rhetoric in this community.
The fact that you can do so was actually my whole point: You can totally justify this! ...and yet... someone still feels like they got fucked. ...and people on the internet agree. That is the antithesis of harmony. Some amount of dissonance is unavoidable, but there are many brands and businesses out there that make sure if a mistake was made, customers leave feeling good. The point is that there are better ways to do business and maintain more harmony between you and your customers, and I've seen many companies be deeply rewarded for that as a whole. It does however often come at the expense of degraded metrics middle managers are commonly evaluated by. Penny-wise pound-foolish is very old wisdom. I think the real key is to evaluate from a systems perspective how that kind of dissonance can be avoided.
This week, I begin shopping for an EV family car. On my list of options are the Ioniq 5, EV6, and odel X.
What a great time to see how Tesla treats customers.
OK, I think I agree. How do we build things that are harmonious?
Back to square 1 looking at the competition.
At this point I feel like terrible communication and service is an intentional business strategy for some companies who found that by making support so baroque as to be inaccessible or just eliminating it entirely that they can slash costs accordingly. I do consider it to be nefarious in such cases.
But they're selling these vehicles. As in, transfer of title to the person they're selling to. Taxes are paid. Transfer is registered with the state(s). Insurance is purchased on vehicles in your possession. And full coverage is required for vehicle loans (another set of showing proper legal transfer).
And, just because some click-wrap software has "We are allowed to murder your family and eat your children" does not make illegal clauses legal. And given in this instance, it was tesla->first owner->second owner->third owner , any click-wrap garbage would have been done by the first owner.
Basically, this is the end-run around physical ownership for all the IoT companies and companies that pay for/demand 100% connectivity. All of these companies that have these always-on remote tie ins are the Darth Vader here - "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further."
All the EV companies are doing this. I so want to buy an EV. I'm not willing to subvert my ownership rights for that.
E.g. they don't want to sell you a general-purpose GPU, but a GPU that's good for one purpose only, and you have to pay extra to use it for anything else [1]. Tesla is leading the way [2], but I'm sure other automakers are also trying to come up with ways to restrict "personal" vehicles from being used for "commercial" activities.
[1] Nvidia’s updates EULA to ban the use of gamer-oriented GPUs in data centers - https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/nvidia-bans-consumer...
[2] Don’t plan on using your autonomous Tesla to earn money with Uber or Lyft - https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/10/dont-plan-on-using-an-a...
Not to mention they benefit from building up a proprietary ecosystem (CUDA, etc.) from collecting data from users (geforce now, etc.).
It's something of a conspiracy theory.
I'm fucking over it. If I "own" the device - legally I should own a key to EVERY fucking lock inside it. Digital or physical.
This attitude that it's acceptable to put a little green man inside of something you sell, and then retain control over that sold item using your little green man is insidious and immoral. I want it fucking banned yesterday, and it's rapidly becoming one of my strongest political opinions.
Any remote access after sale has occurred shall be considered a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and shall hold Chief * Officers, upper tier executive positions, and boards of directors fully liable, up to and including reimbursements of 3x per device to the citizens affected, and prison times no less than 1 week to a maximum of 10 years.
Enforcement of this law shall be done by the Federal Trade Commission."
I would LOVE to see something like this.
It's a nice idea though!
End user control over safety critical software is not only dangerous, but a potential source of significant legal liability.
I don't want an EV that's capable of accelerating at the maximum rate supported by the motors.
My comment is reasoning for why Tesla has a stake in protecting their reputation; if you don't like it, please don't support their practices by buying their cars.
Sure is - and that's absolutely no reason to lock a person out of a car that they own. They OWN it - they are responsible for modifications (and the liability that comes with them). Exactly the same as every car built without a computer - which was roughly ALL of them until the late 70s/early 80s.
The car is a 90 (effectively) because Tesla set it up that way.
However, the software that artificially controls how much range the battery pack will produce (outside of the charging & self-protection algos) - that's borderline unethical to DRM.
Now I kind of want to see what Shelby would do.
It's like preventing customers from changing their own tires because "they might do it wrong and cause an accident". Yeah, they might. But it's not the car manufacturer's responsibility to prevent that, and it certainly isn't justification for locking down the car to only be drivable with manufacturer-installed tires, or remotely disabling cars that use tires from unapproved brands.
Imagine someone installs a cheap third-party ADAS in a Tesla that causes a multi-car pile-up. Should we expect highway patrol officers be able to determine if some third-party software interfered with the normal operation of the car? And, even if Tesla Inc is legally in the clear because the customer did it, they are the #1 target for bad news headlines because they're 'the Apple of Cars' (at least in terms of how much hype they attract), so by the time they set the record straight they've already lost some good-will.
Li-ion batteries have a huge environmental cost. To hide ⅓ of that material behind software is immoral (imho).
It sounds like they were swapping in a better part because they may have not had the original. In the past that was a “win” for the customer. It seems like Tesla has turned this into a loss for the customer (more weight on the vehicle) and a loss for humanity (70 tons of earth mined for unused lithium).
* Illegal to replace your own brake rotors or pads, as faulty ones can cause safety issues.
* Illegal to replace your own headlights, as bad ones could be too dim or too bright and cause safety issues.
* Illegal to change your own oil, as bad ones could seize up your engine in the middle of the road and cause safety issues.
* Illegal to install a turbocharger, as that makes your car accelerate faster than the manufacturer likes and could cause safety issues.
The end result of this line of thinking leads to a million dollar tractor that a farmer can't fix when they need it most. I much prefer the idea that people are individually responsible for any modifications they choose to make to their cars.
At some point, I assume modifying drive-by-wire systems will become legally restricted.
https://www.autocare.org/government-relations/current-issues...
You can modify your car to your heart's desire and put it in a garage or drive it on a race track. You just cannot go into a public road with them. Totally sensible.
You can install your own brake pads sure, but as a layman if you installed brake pads of your own design and construction, it might be a bit of an issue.
If I sold you my car, and I wanted my stereo but forgot it, the first sale doctrine covers the whole thing as delivered. If I was to go to the car, while in your ownership and possession, and attempt to remove the stereo, you'd call the cops for vehicular theft.
That's because it's covered under first sale doctrine. And being a vehicle (unlike most other goods) has an attached ownership registered with the state in the forms of a registration.
Previously, that was simple. I sell you X; you pay agreed price; we trade green paper for thing. Now, with remotely tied crap, people have no say on their properly owned things. That 3rd party who controls the software can do whateverthefuck they want - and that's because copyright and software erodes actual ownership.
In reality, this "correction" on Tesla's part is no different if I decided to keep a hole in my previous company's servers, and then "reach in" for extra-legal 'modifications'. This should be a federal crime, including interstate commerce clause, wire fraud, and hacking. People should go to prison for this kind of thing. - and I'm talking about C levels, not ground-level techs.
You could just have included the stereo explicitly in the contract. This happens all the time in large purchases like real estate. You would of course need to enforce the contract in a different way than breaking into their car, but it would be enforceable as long as the contract as worded doesn’t run afoul of state and local laws. Not doing that, and forgetting to remove it, well… it seems like consumers are giving up a very large concept of ownership for marginal seller use cases, charitably. Uncharitably it seeks to be a lower grab and cut contract law out of the equation.
Edit: slight rephrasing because I misread your argument, I think we are in agreement
Similarly, once a real estate purchase is completed, all items within the bounds of the property purchased--whether it be roof shingles, trees, or former owner family heirlooms they forgot to take with them--legally become possessions of the new owner unless itemized in a sales contract along with agreed-to stipulations that permit retrieval of the items by the former owner after completion of the sale.
Goodwill (and being a reasonable buyer/seller) goes a long way in situations such as these, and in most situations a buyer and seller will work out property sorting issues amongst themselves. However, there would be nothing legally preventing a buyer that stumbles upon a stash of gold bars left in the basement of their new-to-them house--that they did not know about, and that the previous owner did not disclose--and immediately selling them. [1]
BMW's recent second attempt at "enabling equipment features as a service" is a canary in the coal mine, or trial balloon, so to speak. BMW's argument for heated-seats-as-a-service is, flippantly, "What if the second buyer of the vehicle doesn't want heated seats? They don't have to pay for the service. Problem solved." This distorted-reality C-suite speak so drenched in logic fallacy is worthy of a conversation by itself, but I bring it up to say this: instead of buying a car in the traditional sense, OEMs are attempting to change the model to buying "the physical components comprising a car, and the option to enable features of those physical components".
I want no part of it. I like to use hyperbolic (at least for today) examples adapting commonplace business models for smart home devices, software licenses, hardware compatibility lists, EVs, cloud services, etc. to traditional / legacy / analog items:
- What if you went to use your hammer you've owned for years, only to find out that it can't be used to drive in a nail because the company that made the hammer is no longer in business?
- What if your basement flooded because, while the trench drain around your foundation is physically capable of directing enough water away from your foundation into your sump pump, you didn't opt to pay for the "catastrophic flooding capability" license? Better yet, let's say you paid for the license, but haven't checked your email in a few days (maybe because of the storms, since your power has been out and you don't have ready Internet access) to learn that the credit card the trench-drain-as-a-service company has on file has expired and the license renewal charge was declined, so the license you leased was deactivated via OTA update without notice sent via the post?
- What if you find out while driving that your car brakes won't work because a repair shop you've gone to for years installed a set of third-party brake pads that used to be but are no longer compatible with your car (or part of an OEM-certified or OEM-supported configuration) as the result of a recent firmware update to your car's PCM/ECU?
All of those sound terrifying to me.
[1] Source: myself, but not about gold bars, unfortunately. More than one year post-purchase of a house I purchased, the seller decided they wanted a lamp back that they thought they left at the house prior to its sale. I did not remember if they left it or not, but they did leave several items behind. I sent items to their forwarding address that I deemed to be personal items (e.g. monogrammed clothes), but assumed that all other items were left because they didn't want to take them. I donated all of the items I didn't want, possibly including the lamp they desperately wanted returned, to charities. After spending a good bit of energy harassing me over the lamp, the seller consulted with counsel and learned that they had no options for recourse. The harassment stopped, and I have not heard from them since.
its all gross and unnecessary
You gonna let the original owner take his chimney over some deal that happened a decade ago that you had no idea about?
And by doing a bit of research, we arrive at the throat of the issue. Tesla is a competing Used Tesla Dealer, this is listed in their 10K as a part of their automotive segment: - https://www.tesla.com/support/ordering-used-tesla
This page provides no clear guidance on how licenses transfer for "upgrades." Presumably that's in the licensing details for each "upgrade." In other instances, such as Full-Self Driving it's called a "subscription" which has a clearer implication. I seek the EULA for the vehicle itself, which should detail that part of the ownership lifecycle, but it doesn't seem to be public.
The consumer may be able to work a state-permitted return: https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachments/o...
Under the "New Vehicle Limited Warranty" https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/downloads/Model_3_...
Tesla has performed an unneeded repair and broken their own obligation... "but when replacing a Battery, Tesla will ensure that the energy capacity of the replacement Battery is at least equal to that of the original Battery before the failure occurred"
> And by doing a bit of research, we arrive at the throat of the issue. Tesla is a competing Used Tesla Dealer, this is listed in their 10K as a part of their automotive segment: - https://www.tesla.com/support/ordering-used-tesla
Well, that seems to be the original reason why the older vehicle companies weren't allowed to directly sell, and had to go through dealerships.
But because it is a software company, they break the older rules and the reasons why we had those older rules. And naturally, society memory is measured in days.
This article covers the whole situation... and why we probably should stick with dealerships? https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15352113/why-do-we-keep-b...
It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for 'em.
When they bought the car from the 3rd party, did they buy it as a P60 or a P90? Did someone mis-represent the car when sold? Was it Tesla or the previous owner?
Was the badge on the back changed to P90? That doesn't sound like a 'mistake' Tesla would make when making a warranty repair.
Curial information here is missing. If the car was clearly a P60 that was accidentally unlocked P90 then I would consider that when buying the car that Tesla would lock it again when they noticed. If the previous owner misrepresented the car as a P90 and modified the badge then it's on them.
OTOH, a car dealer along the way might do that if they noticed the discrepancy between the badge and what the software reported. It'd be hard to blame them too, since people do sometimes downgrade the badging on cars (eg, this "218i", lol: https://carsandbids.com/auctions/Kmm4AgbK/2016-bmw-m2 ).
It still leaves Tesla as the bad guy. The current owner bears no relation to the ones who did it, and there's really no reasonable process that could have allowed him to know that this might happen.
I mostly agree. I think good customer service norms do dictate a reasonable statute of limitation here.
I think where it becomes interesting is if someone acted negligently in the chain when they bought a P60 and sold it off as a P90. If someone wasn't paying too much attention, they might not have noticed at all. I for instance had no idea which engine variant my car had (1.5L vs 2.0L) until I realized my mpg was poor. So maybe it's a legit mistake. The changing of the physical badge is very suspicious however. But if Tesla changed the software badge then yes, I think they deserve the blame.
The bad thing is that Tesla sometimes takes a really long time with these "audits". Its hard when the customer only finds out what the dealer did after months of ownership.
I'm not entirely sure if I agree with this - they didn't just modify the badge, they also provided the additional rage from a P90.
As a thought experiment: if I sell you a BMW 328i as a 340i but I also swap the engine and sell it with the additional power that comes with that change, have I misled you? Perhaps - I'm honestly not sure - but I don't think selling a car with a P90 badge that also includes the modifications needed to have that car act as a P90 is automatically wrong.
> I don't think selling a car with a P90 badge that also includes the modifications needed to have that car act as a P90 is automatically wrong.
Neither do I. I'm okay with 'Here's my P60, that Tesla accidentally unlocked.' but not 'Here's my P90'.
it is absolutely not reasonable that someone will mess with your car, whether they do it by software or by breaking into yuour garage. Both should be treated as crimes.
If they want to touch the car, they need concent of it's legal owner or they can go to court, and make their case to the judge. I wonder if they can convince a Judge that Joe Bloggs should let them mess with his car, because they made a mistake while servicing Jamed Smith 10 years ago. Most likely the judge would tell them to get lost, it's their mistake after all.
The default assumption is going to be "they were out of 60kWH batteries so they gave me a 90kwh battery" end of story. And gifts cannot in general be taken back. Certainly not from later owners.
It is not like Tesla will give you lots of information. I know that my own replacement battery in my own Model S was a refurbished one, not a new one, because of the letters "RFRB" or something on my receipt. At no points in their process do they provide more details than the very minimum or let you talk to humans that can meaningfully answer questions (in my own experience).
If this info (that it was not supposed to be a gift) it was given to the customer probably in the form of "99kwhlckdwn60" on the receipt and no further info or something equivalently obscure.
If it looks like a gift, why not assume it was a gift? It is entirely reasonably they would gift 30kwh more if 60kwh was out of stock?
I agree that Tesla taking it away after a long period of time is unreasonable.
Even the existence of software controlled lock features is not something that most people will even know about.
I would say this stuff is "arcane knowledge for geeks", not "prudent assumption".
Not all Tesla customers work as programmers or have read up in Tesla forums on the internet.
Amongst car people, I think you have. Motor swaps come with all sorts of other risks. Hell, it’s good manners to disclose if you swapped a motor for equivalent power, for helping the next owner diagnose any problems or be aware of mileage discrepancies.
It’d be good manners at the very least to disclose something was purchased as one model, but made to be equal to a different model by whatever means. It could have future implications to the buyer, just like the ones in this story.
It's conceivable. As far as I can tell, Tesla seems to offer battery replacement as a paid, after-the-fact upgrade. Presumably/hopefully that comes with a new badge since it affects the resale value.
The mechanics could have, through lack of communication or coordination, performed that same procedure for this warranty repair.
(But that's speculation, and really we just need more info.)
I feel like there's an information asymmetry between the used car buyer (who has likely never owned a Tesla before, and certainly doesn't know the history of the vehicle he's considering purchasing), the seller (who may specifically be aware that the car appears to have functionality that could be revoked at a later date), and Tesla (who have records of what has been paid for).
What are the right questions for a buyer to ask in order to ensure they're not left in this unfortunate position?
Just a few spit balls for you:
Do you have another used car for sale that is not a Tesla?
Does this Tesla have any features currently enabled that might be disabled when someone realizes I'm no longer the original owner or the current owner realizes their credit card is still paying for services they no longer use, etc?
In what ways will Tesla fuck me after purchasing this car?
You're "remedies are always legal" is a bit flat. Tell to the parent that is in a rush to take their 2.34 kids to school before heading to work that they need to contact a lawyer before starting their day. And when is the last time a call to a lawyer fixed anything within any kind of quick turn time? So now you're without a car until lawyers "fix" things.
This May when my landlord was taking a piss with his obligations.
A single letter set him staight real fast.
That is purely hypothetical, however -- as far as I know, this kind of stunt has only become a thing since Tesla started doing it. Chevy wants to reduce the capacity of my wife's Bolt by 20%, but they are asking for her permission to do that, not just sending an OTA update to do it against her wishes.
When I look at what car to buy, I am not going to care so much about regulations or legal ramifications, I'm going to look primarily at how likely it is that I will have to resort to those remedies in the future because the manufacturer likes to modify already-sold vehicles after the fact without even asking.
Stunts like this are why we are looking at a Mach-E to replace my wife's Bolt, not a Model Y.
If an owner wants a buyback, the automaker buys it back. If the owner wants to keep the vehicle with whatever changes need to be made to make the vehicle safe, they keep the car and a check is cut to make them whole for the diminished value of the vehicle.
I always thought Apple should have offered free battery replacements, ideally ones that had been re-engineered to better maintain voltage, so I think Chevy's approach is good here given the predicament.
Having to accept a very small risk of fire or lose range temporarily is really unfortunate, but all 2017-2019 owners are getting a 6kWh (20ish mile) upgrade in addition to everyone getting a brand new battery with a fresh battery warranty. Options for buy back or partial refund would be good to present as options but idk how many people would take it in this car market and/or with the option to get a brand new battery.
But that's not a complete list. FSD, etc. won't transfer either. You're right. This would be a useful page on some Tesla owners' wiki.
Seems like the most obvious first question.
Driver: Okay Car are you ready to go?
Car: Sure thing driver, let's just hook up to the T-Network. Okay, we're in! Where's our destination?
D: Well, first thing is that I'm going to want a Mocha Frappe from the local Starbucks.
C: Sounds great! Off we go.
D: Wait, Car what are we doing at McDonalds?
C: McDonald's offers a wide variety of cafe style drinks at competitive prices. This includes your Mocha Frappe. 9 out of 10 baristas actually prefer the smooth taste of McDonald's Mocha Frappe to that of Starbucks. Have you had your break today?
D: No, I wanted Starbucks. Oh well, I guess we're already in line.
Menu: Welcome to McDonalds! What can we make for you today?
D: I would like a Mocha Frappe.
M: Oh, I'm sorry, but I'm afraid out frappe machine is broken. What else can we make for you?
D: Really? I just wanted the Mocha. Okay Car, can you take me to Starbucks now?
C: Sounds great! Off we go.
D: No, Car, you just left the McDonald's parking lot and then came right back. They don't have any Mocha Frappe's here. They said their machine is broken.
C: McDonald's offers a wide variety of cafe style drinks at competitive prices. This includes your Mocha Frappe. 9 out of 10 baristas actually prefer the smooth taste of McDonald's Mocha Frappe to that of Starbucks. Have you had your break today?
D: I guess their frappe machine isn't the only broken machine here.
0: McD, 1: Kytch, 2: Taylor
And by being sorted out I mean you complain on Twitter and one of the Silicon Valley founders notices it by chance and mentions it in his feed, from where it reaches the support of your car company because their support VP reads it, and it is flagged as something to be handled by an actual human.
Ubik (1969)
Now, if someone bought the vehicle, and never signed up for a Tesla account, they might have a good criminal case for "exceeds authorized access" under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Because the original owner's obligations to the seller don't bind the new owner. (This is called "privity" in law. If A has an obligation to B, and B has an obligation to C, A does not have an obligation to C.)
This usually comes up in the other direction, where someone bought a used Tesla, the relevant DMV recognizes the transaction, but Tesla does not.[1] But it sometimes comes up when someone moves a Tesla to another country, which apparently causes Tesla to treat the vehicle as "unsupported".
Expect this to become more of an issue as more used Teslas are around, and there are more third party repair operations.
[1] https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/can-i-supercharge-wi...
You feeling nostalgia for the good old days with MapQuest?
Put me in the 1%. I won't buy another Tesla ever, until there is an ironclad guarantee that what's mine is mine. I did not license the car from them, I bought it outright.
> You feeling nostalgia for the good old days with MapQuest?
Everybody but Tesla has CarPlay. Most have 360* cameras, too, and physical switches and knobs for certain commonly used things, etc.
The real joke is this idea that Tesla is leading technologically. No, they aren't. They're behind everyone else at this point. A touchscreen-for-everything only seems futuristic to a certain niche demographic.
I disagree. You should connect your car to the internet for the features (benefits) it brings. There should be laws protecting users with the connectivity though.
Much like how Lay's will not lose any customers if it's revealed they actually are slightly fattier and unhealthier than everyone already knows they are -- anyone who really would care already stopped eating them, the customers left don't care.
But if Tesla wants to sell a car to the other more frugal 90% of the population, they're going to have to cut this shit out.
Car breaks down, who cares, call the seller, they swap you out, repair it and keep it ready for the next person. It’s the only business model that aligns the incentives right. Car manufacturers and I benefit from better reliability and lower maintenance costs.
This shitty world we live in is the worst of both worlds.
Tesla really fires me up sometimes.
I have a customer who's the ~3rd owner of a 2013 Model S 60.
At some point years ago the battery pack was swapped under warranty with a 90 pack. It wasn't software limited. It was effectively made into a 90 by Tesla.
Years went by.
Car is sold twice since, and now has a new owner (my customer). It says 90, badged 90, has 90-type range.
He has the car for a few months, goes in and does a paid MCU2 upgrade at Tesla after the 3G shutdown.
All goes well. The upgrade is done, car is working fine.
Later on, while the car is parked in his driveway, Tesla calls him to tell him that they found and fixed a configuration mistake with his car.
They remotely software locked the car to be a 60 again, despite having been a 90 for years.
He now has ~80 miles less range.
Furious, he demands they restore it back to the way it was, and they refuse. "We can unlock it for $4,500."
This guy bought a car, & years later Tesla reaches in remotely with no warning and literally cuts his usable range by a third!
(I confirmed story w/logs)
Imagine walking out to your car to find it's now 1/3rd as good as it was 15 minutes ago, and Tesla making it out like this is a good thing! They fixed the problem!
What do you do?
He tried for a while with them with no progress.
I try to help, but without completely disconnecting the car from Tesla, when I change it back to a 90 their "teleforce" bot reaches in remotely and flips it back to a 60 within moments. There's hacky ways around this, but none are ideal.
Tesla won't help him at all.
Honestly, this is pretty f*cked up.
Guy had no way to know that this was going to be done by Tesla. They basically robbed him & are demanding a ransom to get back what he had before.
That's just wrong.
@Tesla @elonmusk - Do better on this and make it right. DM for VIN.
The person should hire a lawyer and sue Tesla.
I'd love to buy an EV that was basically like the original Tesla Roadster: four wheels, a bunch of batteries, and that's it. The only way I know to get this is to do your own EV conversion. Not 100% sure, though. ???
> four wheels, a bunch of batteries, and that's it.
Go watch tear-down the car, there is a lot more.
However I don't think cheap EV like the Bold are nearly as managed and basically work like an old school car.
Longer term, we need firewalls and deep packet inspection devices we can install inline with the LTE modem, so people can still get maps and traffic info, but reject all software "upgrades." We need ublock origin for cars.
"While I don't think it's ideal to need a huge social media push to get things accomplished, thanks to the momentum this thread has generated it seems like we've got a path forward with Tesla towards getting this taken care of the right way."
Tesla is a big company by now. Probably a lot more people working there in Service Centers than in the core manufacturing & engineering. Hard to get everything right. Lots of room for improvement for sure. Rooting for Tesla to work these things out over time! (Disclaimer: Owner + shareholder, both out of conviction.)
> Tesla is a big company by now. Probably a lot more people working there in Service Centers than in the core manufacturing & engineering. Hard to get everything right
Sorry but if you don't have the capacity to attend to every single customer request, maybe don't fuck with their cars remotely, and especially not a couple years after the original mistake?
1 - https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/14/business/bmw-subscription...
You have to be an astute Tesla purchaser to avoid all the “easy” pitfalls. Which simply summarizes to: Don't buy anything that has a weird option. Don't expect to be retro-fitted for anything, and get whatever it is in writing.
With my Model 3, I bought one used from Tesla and it originally came with premium connectivity forever. However, when I purchased mine, it was supposed to only be active for a year (this was the standard deal for used car purchases from Tesla at the time). I still have it 2 years later. They probably have a filter/cutoff by vin # that says who gets premium forever and doesn't filter for sold/resold by Tesla..until they fix that glitch. It’ll happen one day, I’m sure.
The latest pitfall is service. If you have a problem, the only way to talk to someone is to go to the service center. If you have a problem afterwards, you’ll end up as a ticket in the system and no one will get back to you in a timely manner.
Service story time; I had my car serviced for a bad LTE board. It took them several days to diagnose this. When I picked up the car, they had taken apart the panels in the trunk. My mobile connector was in the trunk, and they forgot to put it back in when re-assembling the car. I didn't realize this till the day after I picked up the car. I called as soon as I found this out and could not get a live person at the service center. The call center could only put a ticket in and they'd get back to me in 72 hours. In cases like this, time is of the essence, the more time that's passed, the more likely that my mobile connector would go missing. Anyway, after a lot of calling, no one could get me in touch with someone at the service center. no one. I couldn't drive back down there myself for 5 days. When I finally got there, the service advisor didn't even go ask the tech who worked on my car where the connector was. He just gave me a new one. Very frustrating.
This thread is full of the most tortured, confusing and poorly used analogies I think I've ever seen.
From the failure to deliver FSD, to the inability to quickly fix their out-of-factory fitment problems, to anti-customer policies like these they're quickly souring in my mind.
At least the car is a blast to drive.
edit: FWIW looks like Tesla decided to do the right thing,
> While I don't think it's ideal to need a huge social media push to get things accomplished, thanks to the momentum this thread has generated it seems like we've got a path forward with Tesla towards getting this taken care of the right way.
I'm going to stick to cars from manufactures that don't seem inclined to do this to me. So definitely not Tesla. And maybe not BMW, they're giving off strong vibes of wanting to play this same game with their cars.
It helps that Tesla has fallen way behind in actual features, so I don't really want what they're offering. I can get lane following and adaptive cruise from anyone else, CarPlay is more valuable to me than Tesla's tiny little garden, and all the other standard car features Tesla doesn't want to offer. Wipers that work, door handles that don't suck, 360* camera for parking in tight places, stuff like that. Tesla doesn't have a monopoly on fast EVs any more, and before much longer they won't have the best charging network either. That was what drew me to the P3D.
What else can they do? Shut the engine off? Lock the steering? What intelligence agencies have access? What if a side-channel can be created and (other) malicious actors obtain access?
This kind of remote access to a car is genuinely terrifying.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLlzAv2GTdc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfDoc6wegss
But other manufacturers have to be looking at what Tesla and BMW are pulling and thinking about ways they could follow suit. A pox on all their houses; if I never buy another new car I'll be more than happy.
They should have used it for a little warm fuzzy "Hey we see this was in the system wrong, your car is in fact a 60, but you may now consider it officially a 90. If you haven't already, we'd be happy to send you a complimentary 90 badge to put on the back." Cost practically nothing, instant goodwill.
I enjoyed my Tesla, won't be buying another however.
I respect the OP for saying this. But I have a hard time respecting people buying Teslas, or anything from Musk. Is it not obvious that the guy is a charlatan? (and that the fish rots from the head?) How likely is it that you won't be robbed blind if you try to do business with him or any of his ventures?
“I met him and guy is a genius. But he’s also a carnival barker.”
I didn’t see if he replied.
I don't think it was this CNN article I'm remembering, but this has the survey data in it.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/03/cars/tesla-buyer-politics/ind...
> Surveys by research firm Morning Consult show that in January about 22% of Democrats were considering buying a Tesla, while 17% of Republicans were looking to purchase one. And that gap has been closing — Republican consideration of buying a Tesla has risen about 3 percentage points just since December's survey. And Republicans are slightly more likely to trust the Tesla brand, 27% compared to 25% among Democrats.
And another thing, most people in the world don't give a shit either, and Tesla sells most of their car not in the US.
Tesla base of costumers if far more then the online techno crowd. The are a global car maker that is most strongly associated with electric vehicles. And most people probably don't even know that fact.
> you'll be filing for bankruptcy protection before you know it
MMhh given the companies growth and demand shortfall, pissing of existing costumer base because of some tweets is miles away from causing bankruptcy.
After rebooting, I tried it again, and it did it again.
I've since learned to avoid software updates as long as possible unless the description of changes explicitly describes fixing a bug. Even then, I weigh the benefits of fixing the bug, or leaving it as is, knowing an update could make other things worse.
The Wikipedia article says it was more of an efficiency improvement with the new Mendocino core with on board L2-cache. They really did mean for it to be a 300Mhz processor but it would easily run at 450.
Ah the days when if you got a fun product upgrade it couldn't be retracted years later...
Further, amazing that whomever made the decision to lock it down didn't consider the blow back versus the good will that was already established. ROI & Risk vs Reward... never forget them.
1. Tesla offers a warranty.
2. Tesla is unable to properly make good on the warranty because they don't continue to stock the correct parts.
3. Tesla uses a better part, but then tells the software to pretend the part is much less capable than it really is.
No, no, no. Stop right there. This should be illegal. We should not get to any successive steps where Tesla can gouge you $4,500 for someone to spend two seconds clicking in some admin UI somewhere. That is just bullshit. If you replace a part with something that is more capable (because you no longer have the less capable version), then the customer should get the benefit of the new capabilities. Full stop.
https://twitter.com/wk057/status/1551986133780889602
"While I don't think it's ideal to need a huge social media push to get things accomplished, thanks to the momentum this thread has generated it seems like we've got a path forward with Tesla towards getting this taken care of the right way.
Thanks to those who've reached out!"
There is apparently absolutely no additional labor, no additional material, nothing to distinguish a P90 from a P60 except for a software lock.
That's labor that was not necessary. All the work needed to software lock the charge capacity of the battery could have been avoided. The only way it makes sense is if you get to charge more for the exact same thing. Which is what Tesla is apparently doing.
Essentially, every P90 should be $4500 cheaper and every P60 should have the range of a P90.
I have mixed feelings about schemes like this, but I don't think they're inherently bad.
You start off making 60kWh and 90kWh cars. Customers are happy buying both.
You notice you can save costs overall by just selling the 90kWh cars at the 60kWh price-- but revenue will fall if you don't lock the pack down to 60kWh.
Would it be better to force Tesla to maintain two different physical pack SKUs and incur more costs if they want different pricing for the different capacities?
And you do save some money, even, with the locking-- after all, the 90kWh pack used as a 60kWh one is far less likely to need warranty service-- it has spent less time at the extremes of charge and it can fall all the way from 90 to 54kWh instead of 90 to 81kWh.
This is just like binning with CPUs-- at first, the yields control whether something is an 8 core or 6 core part. Later, you lock some 8 core parts down to be 6 cores so you can sell them at a lower price.
(And now, Intel is about to let Xeon customers pay to unlock additional cores...)
Here they gave the owner a 90, then came back and limited it to 60, after the fact, years later.
Yah. And the buyer was a buyer in good faith of a 90 product that no one expected to be snapped down to a 60 artificially afterwards. I agree this is very problematic.
Yes revenue will fall, but your costs fell as well. Your margin should be roughly the same. Anyway, I thought that's what progress was supposed to be. We get better at making things, those things become cheaper.
If the only difference between two physical items is that I'm not allowed to use all of one, what is the actual difference?
Why are we justifying these corporations taking us for a ride?
But you still get some 6 core parts-- just not enough to meet demand.
In general, suppliers prefer modulating the mix of supply of their products entering the retail chain over endlessly modulating pricing to try and match demand.
> Why are we justifying these corporations taking us for a ride?
Well, one fundamental underlying reason is that deadweight losses fall when you are able to segment markets and adjust pricing for each (price discrimination).
I don't really understand your comment in the context of our discussion-- we're talking about price discrimination. The whole point is that you have different prices for different segments to match demand. So, yes, of course.
Initially, you set the 6 core price and 8 core prices to match actual production yields.
Later, as your yields improve, you use the different SKUs for price discrimination, which captures some of consumer surplus (ewww) and eliminates deadweight losses (yay).
You know, like how we don't make 486DX2 chips anymore.
Not everyone is willing to pay the same price. If there's a market for 100k processors at $200 each, there could easily be a market for 50k slower processors at $150 each and 80k processors at $250 each. If yields are 95% at 8 core and 100% at 6 core:
* The firm gets to make $7.5M more revenue
* The firm avoids waste of about 5000 processors in the single-price, 8-core-only scenario.
* The world gets 30,000 more processors vs. what the firm would make if they only could choose one price to optimize income
* The firm has flexibility on meeting demand: they can alter the mix of 8 and 6 core processors they sell instead of frequently modifying price.
This is a simple scenario, but it shows the reason for price discrimination: it generates more revenue and it also encourages a monopoly or a participant in monopolistic competition to make more product.
30,000 people who wouldn't have gotten a processor in the prior case now get one, and 20,000 people who would have otherwise gotten a high cost processor now spend less money.
A 60kWh battery is not a defective 90kWh pack at all, it's an entirely different component weighing hundreds of pounds less. the 90kWh pack cars eat tires faster, have worse MPGe, and overall are Ewaste.
Yah, a little less, this is true. It also is less damaged by charging to 100%, has better regen, charges faster, and can be expected to have a much better lifespan. You could make a lot of arguments both ways for which one is better.
> A 60kWh battery is not a defective 90kWh pack at all,
The point I'm making is that most 6 core parts are 8 core parts with no defect, so the distinction becomes an artificial one for the purpose of price discrimination rather quickly.
> locking down the hardware via software with no yield reason
In addition to the market segmentation reason, there's also the much-better-warranty-yields reason, and the less-need-to-predict-what-buyers-will-want reason.
As I quoted literally yesterday regarding the BMW heated seat subscription [1]:
> And God help you if an A-list blogger finds out that your premium printer is identical to the cheap printer, with the speed inhibitor turned off. [2]
You wrote:
> Essentially, every P90 should be $4500 cheaper and every P60 should have the range of a P90.
This is not realistic, or is at least overly simplified. There are customers who would not buy the product at the P90 price, but still will give Tesla money - just a little less. Tesla wants that money. There are also customers who are willing to spend a lot more than the list price of a P60, and Tesla wants that money too. Tesla also doesn't want to build and stock two different sized battery packs.
How would you propose that this should work? Regulate price segmentation? Better information for consumers? Moral pleading for megacorporations to act against their financial interests?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32225588
[2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
Indeed, price discrimination eliminates deadweight losses and improves economic efficiency.
> Essentially, every P90 should be $4500 cheaper and every P60 should have the range of a P90.
Oh come on, don't take this to a ridiculous extreme.
I'm pretty sure this logic would say that if a store has a loss-leader then they should sell everything at a negative 20 percent profit margin.
Hell, even without software locks, if they want to sell half the stock at one price and half the stock at a different price that's fine.
It's not like two physically different products. My issue is that there is no differentiator besides "didn't give enough money".
We can take issue with the software lock without saying something silly like "the lowest price must be the correct price". Sometimes the lowest price actually loses money. That's why I brought up loss leaders.
Anyway, now that they already let it out without capping, it's pretty shitty to suddenly cap it. Specially if the car now has a different owner.
https://www.caranddriver.com/audi/e-tron-gt
The E-Tron GT RS or whatever gobbledygook name its got is simply not of this world. We're not going to be talking about Tesla too much longer I think.
If I had to guess, Musk is too distracted. Take your pick of distractions, but the guy has been riding a rocket ship for so long he hasn't yet noticed that it's run out of fuel.
Have you considered selection bias, because seem like that's what's going on here.
> That company has serious problems.
You concluded this from anecdotal evidence?
> the guy has been riding a rocket ship for so long he hasn't yet noticed that it's run out of fuel.
Based on what exactly? Look at every single number both looking forward and looking backward and those numbers would disagree with you.
And Tesla had customer frustration stories literally since the Model S.
1. I would never want any kind of software in my car, because this is precisely the kind of bullshit I would expect to happen, given being a person who knows the state of the software industry. That and death due to uConnect etc.
2. I even less would want any kind of remote access
3. I also don't want UN*X crap in my car like sh scripts or C code, you have billions of dollars, make a real language or use assembly since the software should be small anyway
4. The fact that someone will bring up GNU+Car just proves even more how dipshit you consumers are; you can't even understand how simple things are to fix (just stop putting software in things) and just reason about the major players of the tech industry in an abstract, dilettante way.
> I don't post this stuff because I hate Tesla or anything. In fact, it's just the opposite. I hate seeing Tesla derail themselves with this kind of nonsense.
Uhh no, I hate Tesla after seeing this post and hope they actually get cancer and die (admittedly, the same probably applies to every tech company).
What if you put a "90 pack" in yourself, do they also downgrade it for you?
And please spare me with the "FTC exists" remarks. It's been neutered for decades.
Or maybe you won't be happy but your only option would be to complain about it on social media and hope there's enough people that matter in your follows to raise a stink and get your particular case looked on.
Enjoy it while it lasts....
It should be considered a gift from Tesla, since Tesla made the mistake.
If Tesla withdraws the gift then they should also pay for the mistake, somehow.
Of course, this is different as a subscription service. But what if I'd sold it to someone before it got cancelled, and told them that it had free satellite radio? I don't think Sirius/XM should then have to just give the service for free. Yet somehow I don't think Tesla should have limited the battery either. I'm not really sure what the difference is.
And then I think, I hope none of this BS ever befalls me.
I dont like the world being dominated by Software which could be remotely updated. Whether that is a Car or IoT.
Sounds like Tesla have the same support issues as Google...
Reason 243 I wouldn't go near buying a Tesla.
1. Does your car support over the air updates?
2. If (1) is yes, do you really want to give them up because of this edge case?
1. BMW accidentally enabled the heated seats in your car, then later deactivates it? So you enjoyed a bonus for a while, seems like they're entitled to remove it.
2. Bank accidentally gives you $1,000,000. A while later they realize their mistake and ask for the money back / transfer it out of your account. My understanding is that this is exactly what would happen.
What are the differences from this situation? Is it really a problem?
This is a really funny thing to say because they can and did. Should be clear that Tesla will do whatever they want.
EDIT: Meant to paste unrolled link: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1551713024171548672.html
In the EU they can now remotely speed limit your car.
If you think the push for EVs is for the environment think again, they are a dubious tradeoff with a bigger environmental impact.
The EV push is meant to take away your control over the assets that you "own".
If you don't fight back now, you won't be able to own anything in 5 years.
Also, if you think EVs are worse for the environment, then you are exposing your ideologically-driven ignorance.
"Green" and "Environmental" hardware companies like Tesla, Apple, etc are a joke.
What a shitty company.
Please be kind to those that suffer from Attention Surplus Disorder. (ASD)
Death as in the death of sympathy, attention, notice, psychological affirmation, pride, sharing, hype, superficial outrage and the death of this comment thread of hundreds of comments after only a handful of hours.
There's a reason why people use Twitter, because it really would be their (superficial) death not to.
‘To hold ransom’ (or hold for ransom) is the intended usage here.
It is not their car. They should have no say over the operating parameters.
Well, as expected and unsurprising. [0] It isn't your car. You don't own it and it has a backdoor straight to Tesla inc.
Especially this magnificent and well (badly) aged comment in [0]
"TESla OwNErs likE THiS BAcKdoOR abIlITY."
No thanks and no deal.
Its a really scary kind of resonance at their scale. Most companies who sell goods like these recognize that the aftermarket value of their product is a feature of new products; its a factor in the buying matrix. Apple is a great example; tons of people know and factor into the decision to buy their products that they hold value better than the competition; so a higher upfront cost can be worth it. But if Tesla is scraping by and looking to move more and more of their functionality into cloud-connected-feature-flags & subscriptions, they're going to get eaten alive by competition who can just say "our car is the same price but that's built in".
Because of this 1/1000 snafu? Is that really it?
> "our car is the same price but that's built in".
Maybe you should do some research. If anything other car companies have far, far, far more options and things in them that you might not be able to use. Or they just don't put it it in.
So the reality is, if you do fair price comparison with the competition and you add the features, the competition is actually not doing so well.
I hope you are not actually putting really money on your insights.
So sorry, there is no ransoming. Just a bit of old fashioned fraud, and not on the part of Tesla.
How so? The car clearly had increased range at the time of sale. Tesla clearly approved of it at the time or they wouldn't have let it happen, and companies sure as hell don't get to take back stuff after years of condoning it because it was "by mistake".
Actually, it's just a bit of old fashioned stupidity on the part of Tesla (or, at least, on the part of one of Tesla's employees).
They made the mistake when the car was owned by someone else (in fact, two someone elses ago). It would cost them basically nothing to just leave it alone, and instead they've gained a huge pile of ill will -- not only for the current owner of the car, but an internet's worth of customers and potential customers. And saying they will "fix" what they "fixed" for $4500 just makes them look even more like jerks.
Really bad move on Tesla's part.
Tesla made a mistake, which benefited 1,2 or even all 3 owners. They then fixed the mistake.
I wonder if there are some regulations that prohibit the type of upgrade Tesla did on accident, and the $4,500 fee goes to cover the regulatory requirements necessary to upgrade a vehicle.
Otherwise, yes it's kind of bad move from a customer service point of view.
As another commenter wrote, the first blame lies with who ever rebadged the S60 as an S90 and then sold it as an S90. At somepoint one owner realized they had benefited from something without paying for it, and it's unclear if they ever tried to rectify it with Tesla.
Edit to Add Ethical Questions:
If you're at a restaurant and you get the final bill and you notice an item wasn't paid for. Do you speak up, or do you leave knowing you ate food you didn't pay for?
What if you order DoorDash, and you get extra food you didn't pay for? Do you message Doordash to charge you?
What if it's the opposite, you don't get food you did pay for? Ask DoorDash for a refund?
Finally, what if you accidentally receive a high ticket item in from an online order. 3 months later, the online retailer figures out what happened, and asks you for the item back. If you refuse to send it back, should they charge you for it?
There aren't.
> If you're at a restaurant and you get the final bill and you notice an item wasn't paid for. Do you speak up, or do you leave knowing you ate food you didn't pay for?
If a server at a restaurant says "hey, we're out of the strip cut, would you like a filet mignon instead at the same price?" I have no reason to think it's a mistake to be charged the price of a strip steak. That restaurant doesn't get to put another charge on my credit card literally years later because a manager decided that in retrospect I should be charged the difference.
In this case, the restaurant offered, which is not a mistake, and IANAL, but arguably "hey, we're out of the strip cut, would you like a filet mignon instead at the same price?" sounds close to a verbal contract.
I speak up, and 99 times out of 100 they say "ha, whoops, no big deal, it's on us."
> What if you order DoorDash, and you get extra food you didn't pay for?
The feds already have rules on this sort of thing. When someone sends you unsolicited goods you didn't order, they are yours to keep.
> Finally, what if you accidentally receive a high ticket item in from an online order. 3 months later, the online retailer figures out what happened, and asks you for the item back. If you refuse to send it back, should they charge you for it?
That's actually the same example. You're asking moral questions, but they have established legal answers.
Likewise, if Amazon sends the wrong item to a customer, they have to send the right item, or refund the purchase.
I wonder if this also applies to packages being delivered to the wrong address.