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Comment by gleenn | Hacker News Reader

One more disgusting show of corporations doing the wrong thing in the name of profits.

I know this is going to be an unpopular take, but why should a person be allowed to maintain use of an item they don’t own and are delinquent on? The unpopular part is that this just removes some friction from an already existing process.

This is assuming there are the appropriate regulations in place to notify and give a reasonable option to rectify the payment issue, but isn’t this exactly how we deal with stuff from homes to furniture? You agree to pay a certain amount and if you are sufficiently delinquent, you lose access to that item because you don’t actually own it yet.

We already have that though, it's called repossession. This feature just removes the human barrier and makes it vulnerable to hacking.

It removes the risk of a human getting hurt or injured. I can't be the only one that's seen repos gone bad. I'm not talking about that dumb, scripted _reality_ show either

The human getting hurt or injured is a necessary evil against abuse and puts a limit on how unreasonable or petty the lender can be (as the risk of repos is ultimately baked into the commission charged by the goons, thus not making it profitable to repo for minor things).

Same reason why people are generally much more civil in real life than online - the risk of being punched in the face keeps everyone in check and assigns a real cost to assholic behavior.

Ehhhh...really? Physical injury is a necessary risk for enforcement of a legal contract? Where else does this extend?

Does a marriage contract bear the risk of injury? How about a business merger?

This is weird logic that belies a desire for vengeance, not justice.

A fundamental physical limit on corporate greed sounds like a very good thing to me.

Keep in mind that the potential for violence doesn't mean violence has to occur - every party in the contract is still free to not force the other side to resort to violence (which usually happens out of desperation).

I would rather rely on well-structured legal limits rather than brutish physical ones. People who advocate for physical violence as an arbiter of disagreements tend to either be the types who prefer to get their way by strong arming others or have not experienced the devolving of the rule of law for extended periods of time.

Keep in mind that I have never advocated for violence being the primary arbiter of disagreements. In fact, resorting to violence pretty much always turns out poorly for the attacker and is thus not a winning strategy - it is usually done out of desperation more than anything else.

The possibility of someone reacting unreasonably however keeps everyone more honest and assigns an actual cost to pushing people to a situation where they will resort to violence out of desperation.

That possibility exists regardless; someone can always create a "Falling Down" scenario when they're fed up. But I don't see any real advantage to a civilized society in increasing the possibility of the equivalent of vigilante justice.

I'm not talking about some kind of organized, premeditated, high-cost vigilante operation like making people fall out of windows (I'm assuming that's what you meant by "falling down" scenario?).

I'm talking about the repo goon having to risk that the car leasee he's repossessing from being at their breaking point (because that car is the only way they can keep their job and avoid losing everything) and/or mentally unstable and pulling out a gun or a crowbar and thus pricing this risk into their services (or outright declining the job if it feels too sketchy) which ultimately trickles back up to the lender and encourage them to let go or be more lenient with this particular case (something they'd have no reason to do if they could turn the car off remotely).

“Falling Down” was a reference to the movie by the same name.

I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect a threat of violence from the enforcement of a contract. There’s a reason why we tend to give the monopoly of (non-self-defense) violence to the government.

> I know this is going to be an unpopular take, but why should a person be allowed to maintain use of an item they don’t own and are delinquent on?

> an item they don’t own

That's the problem, you don't own anything. We're already quickly moving into a future where cars you "buy" have random features locked behind yearly subscriptions that can be remotely disabled if you don't pay, the only reason you can even still "buy" cars instead of renting them is because full self driving isn't capable of safely driving the car back to the manufacturer on its own yet.

I actually agree with this and I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. The car companies tried to pass a law a few years back where "owners" can't actually own a vehicle, and are essentially turned into long-term leasers. IIRC, the guise was the "right to maintain" is no longer applicable since vehicles are too complicated now.

There's an inherent fundamental creepy grossness to punishing someone for misbehavior by pushing a button from afar.

If we had an all pervasive surveillance system that instantly reported any crime it would be bad for the same reason. A world where power is wielded opaquely by distant controllers in a unilateral and instantaneous manner is not a world we want to live in, and it cultivates an even worse world the longer it exists.

Rules and laws that might be fair and just when they were first written can become very unjust and dystopian when the ability to enforce them dramatically increases.

Your argument is the same one made for justifying credit systems, especially ones like the social credit system enforced by the CCP. "If you wanted to have access to the tram you should have just been a better person and earned it."

I largely agree with the point about opaque use of power.

However, the current situation isn't much different. It's not the bank manager coming down to evict you or repossess your car. They distance themselves by outsourcing the enforcement through third parties like repo companies and sheriffs. This doesn't create the type of accountability you seem to want and makes it easier for banks to wield their power.

>It's not the bank manager coming down to evict you or repossess your car. They distance themselves by outsourcing the enforcement through third parties like repo companies and sheriffs.

I don't think the current status quo is good either. The distance between the one with power and the one who is effected has been very far for a very long time, but pushing it even more distant and cemented is worse.

The consequence of using power unjustly is decreasing. If a dictator wanted to prevent a protest by arresting all attendees before they arrived, it would require enormous resources and be extremely visible and unpopular, and inspire future resistance. If he can instead push a button and drive all the attendees cars to an out of the way lot (or simply immobilize them), the overhead is much lower.

This reminds me of the idea that the nuclear codes can only be accessed by the president if they personally kill someone to get them. The idea is that it takes the idea of abstract power and translates it to a much more emotional decision.

I think there are certain aspects that appeal to that as a natural bulwark against power. But I’m not so sure we should want such decisions to be emotional. Just like we want justice to be blind, I think it may be a good idea for it to be dispassionate as well. This is why we generally frown on countries that let the victims determine the sentencing of their perpetrators.

> isn’t this exactly how we deal with stuff from homes to furniture?

Repossession is how we deal with these situations. We don't have recliners that lose the ability to recline if a bank payment doesn't go through on time. Or smart homes that lock you out if your mortgage payment is late.

Is there a functional difference? Or put differently, why would someone prefer to have a repo person come and take away the asset, putting themselves and other people at risk of a physical encounter?

The remote locking requires remote connectivity, which means risk of errors or hacking. Also, once the ability to remote lock is built-in, it makes it easy to say "oh sure you paid for XYZ features, but once you sell the vehicle it is reset to factory defaults" — meaning the new owner has to pay for whatever you paid for already.

I'm not making the case that it's zero risk. But I think the risk is preferable to the alternative of a physical encounter. Maybe I'm old, but paying for software features seems a bit more of an edge case (I know HN skews towards SV, with a higher prevalence of Teslas. I don't know how prevalent paying for additional software-enabled features is with other car companies). I think the feature piece can easily be handled through other mechanisms, like regulations.

We already have car immobilizers on leased cars. This would just make it innate to the car's computer instead of an external tool, making it more reliable and harder to remove.

I love to scold corporations more than most, but this use case seems OK to me. They're talking about doing this with leased cars -- cars that you don't own -- not with cars that you do own.

If I'm leasing a car, that car is the property of the leasing agent, not me. I think it's totally fair that they can do anything they like with it within the terms of our contract, as long as they're disclosing it to me.

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