‘Massive’ Tesla leak reveals data breaches, thousands of safety complaints | Hacker News Reader

‘Massive’ Tesla leak reveals data breaches, thousands of safety complaints

theguardian.com

232 pointsdoener141 comments

Recent and related:

Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36075886 - May 2023 (591 comments)

Also an article on ArsTechnica https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/05/massive-trove-of-tesla-...

> For each incident there are key points for the "technical review". The employees who enter this review into the system regularly make it clear that the report is intended for "internal use only". Each entry also contains the note in bold type that information, if at all, may only be passed on "VERBALLY to the customer".

> "Do not copy the report below into an email, text message or leave it in a voicemail to the customer," it continues. Vehicle data should also not be released without permission. If, despite the advice, "a legal involvement cannot be prevented", this must be recorded.

> Customers that Handelsblatt spoke to have the impression that Tesla employees avoid written communication. "They never sent emails, everything was always oral," says the doctor from California, whose Tesla said it accelerated on its own in the fall of 2021 and crashed into two concrete pillars.

Those Tesla's can’t keep their mouth shut (“whose Tesla said it accelerated…”)

> They never sent emails, everything was always oral

I work with a guy like that. Send him an email, and if he replies at all it will be with a phone call.

Maybe he is just fond of instant organic feedback

Even in a work setting it prevents accountability. That's why I send a follow up email immediately after the discussion with the points and commitments. "Please let me know if any of these action items are incorrect..."

Worked at a fully-remote company that was like that. Anything barely controversial was moved to Zoom for fear of recording incriminating data (which could used by authorities but also by CEO in regular witch hunt). We weren't discussing anything illegal but it had the side effect of discouraging any disagreements in writing.

Once worked with someone like that too. And he was terrible at keeping to things agreed on such calls, and would in fact later claim that we'd agreed things which we had not.

I started following every call with a short email listing, for the avoidance of doubt, everything agreed in the call, with a note that if I've missed anything he should let me know ASAP, and explicitly mentioning anything that didn't have a satisfactory conclusion during the call. Never felt the need to CC in others, unless they were specifically relevant, though that would have been a further step if needed (if he claimed to have never seen an mail etc.).

This is why we need single party consent recording laws.

My graduate advisor was like that. Refused to ever put anything in writing. Would verbally order you to do something, entire room would jump in and say "that doesn't make sense, literally doesn't add up", when they would bring it up again I would send them an email stating exactly what was wrong with their idea and why I didn't like it, if they insisted I would send them another email stating "although you have not responded to my previous written correspondence, you have verbally commanded me to do this multiple times so I will go ahead with your idea although here is a list of my objections", and then when the crap idea failed exactly the way everyone in the lab said it would professor would rant that it was your idea and they were always against it and you've wasted everyone's time and resources. Not surprisingly, I left with a MS instead of finishing my PhD. What an asshole. Professor recently got tenure, after multiple students and staff (including me) reported them for fraud, embezzlement, and slander.

Although I'm very positive about my graduate advisor, I do see similarities in my PhD field in general. I'm still trying to figure out what is the goal of academia. It's not about finding the truth.

Money, as always. Instead of selling a product to willing customers at a profit, you try to sell your research ideas to funding organizations in the hopes that they will give you a grant.

Yes that makes sense, but what is then the goal of government funding in all of this? Is it just politics? Like we want to find out that Facebook corrupts our youth, so we fund research in that direction? Government seems to not care about whether the actual findings are true because both citations and peer review do not measure truth but popularity.

One could counter this by saying that truth is valued in the sense that publishing false papers costs you your reputation. However, there is a simple solution for this and that is to make your theories more intricate. If your theories are intricate, you can just say that it was all part of the scientific process and walk away without blame.

There's been a few stories over the years that show Tesla is a bit "laissez faire" with their security and data protection. A recap from my own memory:

1. Engineer sharing how they SSH into moving cars in order to apply updates and troubleshoot (several years back)

2. Recent leaks of customer recordings.

The whole autopilot situation is concerning too.

The good old Ford Pinto playbook

I guess Elon will handle this by tweeting something really crazy to shift focus from the real problem, and as usual we will fall for it.

On the other hand, he is running out of crazy things to say. The only remaining thing I can think of is he coming out in support for cannibalism

If things get tight in his Martian kingdom they may well have to invent the Donner Pass kebab.

Ah yes, reminds me of one reason I don't mind waiting so much for a table these days. Just list the family name as "Donner" - hearing the maître d' call out "Donner, party of 4, your table's ready" really makes up for the wait! ;)

Cannibalism is crazy now? Think of all the advantages:

- Cannibalism is a way to maximize the use of available resources

- If regulated in a certain way, cannibalism could serve as a form of population control

- With a balanced diet and careful preparation, human meat could be a source of protein and other nutrients

- Cannibalism could be seen as a means of waste reduction. Instead of bodies taking up space in graveyards or being cremated, they're consumed

- Cannibalism could be used as a symbol of dominance or power. Consuming another person might be a demonstration of absolute control or superiority.

Of course, this is all fictional, and I just thought it would be fun to try to think positively about a somewhat controversial topic. But still...

What "a humility-rich proposal" ;)

Not exactly on brand for him to be modest though, so I don’t imagine it would be suggested except maybe as an April Fool’s Day joke

There is one small hole in the whole thing called “prion diseases”, though…

They did cover that, under the “Population Control” bullet point.

But what about the buzzards? If we all begin to purge each other and eat one another, then the poor buzzards will starve. Lol

I remember meeting a girl studying anthropology. She talked about her taking a course on "man eaters". Primitive tribes who occasionally eat people. (Of course it's entirely unacceptable to say "primitive" or even "tribe" in anthropology!) Instead of condemning the practice as morally abhorrent, as they often do, e.g. for persecution of homosexuality, they just talked about why they (the man eaters) do it, what type of spiritual gains they hope to achieve with it, etc, very non-judgmental. On other matters anthropologists are some of the most judgmental people in academia. The absurdity of the double standard was hard to express. Some kind of inconsistent moral relativism.

Please let's not go into boring celebrity wars. Especially not this boring celebrity war.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[flagged]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870

That ssh into moving cars is really scary. I guess an engineer can do a lot in that session if he wants.

At least they're using ssh and not some home rolled garbage. If ssh uses keys and not small passwords, it's one of the most secure methods around to get access to a machine. Unfortunately far too many companies are just rolling their own extremely flimsy and insecure VPN programs these days.

You are missing the point. Their engineers have the ability to ssh into your car. While you arr going 85mph on the freeway. That's by itself is scary af.

I get anxiety updating my bios at the best of times, I can't even imagine at speed.

I can only speak for German car companies, but their tech is incredibly secure, and multiple teams work on just making sure it is close to impossible to get access to anything digitally controlled in a car.

The thing with cars is that malicious actors usually can get physical access to it, which makes it an order of magnitude more difficult to secure. This is one of the main reasons car computers often seem so clunky.

A lot of this tech seems to consider the legitimate owner of the car doing DIY repairs as "malicious" as well, unfortunately.

I see your point, but modern cars are too complicated to allow tinkering anyway.

Besides, would you dare driving next to the guy that just installed random rom from xda?

I'm talking about simple stuff like authorizing additional keys, enabling remote lock/unlock without a stupid subscription, etc.

The rom on the car is way less of a concern to me than whatever the person had to drink or their road rage fueled tailgating...

I think the protocol used to access the moving vehicle is the least of the concerns here.

It definitely a near top concern. If they're doing a flimsy home spun thing then it's much more likely to be compromised. While the company being able to do this is enough to prevent me from buying a car from them, an insecure system that could be compromised means I believe the company should offer a recall on all cars. Being more secure doesn't mitigate the concerns, but it not being secure hightens them.

To be clear, neither is acceptable but it being secure is still a big issue.

> That ssh into moving cars is really scary. I guess an engineer can do a lot in that session if he wants.

It all depends exactly what the engineer is SSHing into. A bash shell with root access? BAD. A shell with only monitoring and diagnostic tools that are cleared to use while the car is running? Probably not a problem and actually sounds both useful and the right way to do it. I'd love to be able to SSH into my car and get diagnostics.

According to the engineer who leaked that ssh thing (which was years ago) they were live patching and pushing updates to the cars over ssh. It was essentially full root. That said this was also super early in the company history, so this might have been for the roadsters more than the actual commercial cars.

Either way, that makes me think, maybe the code is still there? Oops I'm not rich enough to afford a Tesla anyway.

They're dropping the price hard. Probably one of the only nice things I'll say about Tesla is they're willing to wade in and compete on price. And that's mostly cuz Toyota or Ford are still charging too much.

With interest like this I almost feel vehicles are a burden, albeit a necessary one. Interesting that rate and price both hike.

My favorite was the alleged sighting of "Wet Nellie" (modified Lotus from Bond movie that Musk bought years ago) in video footage sent to Tesla's servers by one of their cars - likely, when it was parked. They have been quite lax in multiple ways at times with various practices.

Definitely speaks to company culture that not only did all sorts of images & video get recorded on private property and sent to Tesla (at highly questionable times given the claimed reasons for the sending of images / video), these materials were then casually handled up and down the chain. Significant disregard to any real access control, training, rules, etc. - employees sharing, commenting, and making memes off of everything.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sens...

(Not the only article or set of sources, of course. I'd certainly still classify this as alleged, but, have encountered enough such reports and heard enough stories from various people to consider this likely largely accurate. My opinion, though.)

Yep, it's indicative of the culture for sure. If this sort of thing is still happening years after the whole "SSH into moving cars" thing, I can't expect it to improve.

Concerning, I'm sure Elon will look into it.

Evaluating Tesla's situation is difficult without context. With 3 million cars on the road, about 0.1% of owners have lodged complaints, which doesn't seem alarming initially. Unintended acceleration issues, typically attributed to user error barring some floormat incidents, are common across the industry. Without comparison to the overall auto industry's complaint rate, Tesla's situation isn't notably concerning.

I find it notably concerning that they seem to want to avoid creating a record of customer complaint interactions.

I don’t. If you’ve ever worked in customer service you realize majority of issues are user error where the user isn’t bright enough to see their obvious error.

Combine that with the hate cult that follows musk around and such a database would just be kindling… like how this report is kindling for the hate.

It’s not surprising musks corporations act like any other corporation to me. But to each his own.

"your call can be recorded for training purposes"

Literally every company in the world wants to avoid creating a record of defects. It opens them up to litigation and bad PR. That would put their shareholders at risk, which would effectively be negligence.

Have you never heard of a data retention policy? Every company has them. They exist to delete records that could be used in a lawsuit or by a whistleblower. They tend to find whatever the regulatory maximum is and put their limit at a little past that.

>> Tend to find whatever the regulatory maximun is

This not a question of finding it so, the same way it is not a way of "finding" the speed limit on a certain stretch of road.

And those retention policies are there to preserve records for the potential of future law suits. The absence of records that actually should be there doesn't do any service turing a trial or other dispute. Quite the opposite, usuall, it is assumed those records were deleted for the very reason ypu stated, meaning the company doing it almost guilty from the get go.

Funny how you have the facts almost right, but everythong else backwards.

> Literally every company in the world wants to avoid creating a record of defects.

No. The most effective companies in the world are the ones with the fastest feedback loops, and in the absence of directly measuring customer use of the product, sharing searchable records of defects is the best way to accomplish this.

This is particularly the case in services companies like software. We will not only collect written defect reports but we circulate them in real time throughout the company so that issues can be fixed as fast as possible. At any good SaaS company, the Zendesk tickets, Salesforce records, and recorded customer calls from tools like Gong are often funneled directly into Slack or email alerts for anyone to see without even having to go search for them.

Tesla insisting on unrecorded verbal communication is a shady practice only mirrored by con artists, HR hacks, and bloodsucking lawyers.

>throughout the company

Sure, but Tesla is concerned with leaks becoming PR disasters for every little issue with their cars. Can't say I blame them, giving the routine unwarranted panic it generates.

I doubt your company is making that data public.

If you have to seriously worry about bugs becoming public you fucked up big time. Having ridden in their cars with the self-driving mode, it's obvious that Tesla simply makes shoddy, unsafe vehicles. Trying to hide the issues rather than prevent or fix them won't save them.

> If you have to seriously worry about bugs becoming public you fucked up big time

So? Yes, you fucked up big time and you don't want the public to know. That's PR 101.

> Trying to hide the issues rather than prevent or fix them won't save them.

Where did you get it that they are not trying to prevent the issues?

Companies don't care about "effectiveness". They care about the share price. If sharing customer defects makes the share price go up, they'll do it. If they find out it risks the share price, they'll clamp down on it.

Tesla insisting on unrecorded verbal communication for specific circumstances is not uncommon at all. Often it's at the direct instruction of their legal counsel. You're just not aware of it, because it's secret (and protected by NDAs and an army of lawyers), so you don't hear about it, and thus assume it's uncommon.

Corporate unethical bullshit is an iceberg. You will never see the vast majority of it.

Not all companies have public share prices, first off, since only about 1% of all incorporated entities are publicly traded.

Secondarily, well-run public companies do not focus their teams on the share price in the short term. They focus on long term growth that compounds from strategic thinking and focused execution, not chasing stock price that can go up or down randomly based on conditions out of their control.

I work for an automotive company and I think the argument "who's procecting our shareholders?" with no mention of "who's protecting the lives of our customers?" is bullshit.

Telling your employees not to communicate with customers in any other way but live voice is not normal.

In the US, companies have essentially two lawsuit survival strategies: don't communicate anything to customers until it has been reviewed by an array of lawyers, or communicate without review and without creating a record.

Maybe it's the how and not what that is more of concern.

Unintended acceleration reports were something like 10x typical cars when I last looked at the data. At that time, there weren't many other electric cars and so I thought it was only fair to attribute those reports to the difference in immediate acceleration for electric cars. Since then, there's more electric cars to compare to and I've soured on one pedal driving (I suspect it leads to more user errors with brake vs accelerator) so it would be interesting to see if it's a Tesla thing or am electric car thing.

One thing I noticed and it scares me, when you are on auto pilot and you accelerate past the limit and then let go of the pedal the car will regenerative brake below the intended auto pilot speed, auto pilot will kick in and accelerate. I don’t know if the car will stop every time it’s happened I took over control.

I’d have to setup something soft to hit to test it but it’s unsettling to the point where I don’t really use autopilot unless I’m going straight for a long time.

Time and time again, Tesla is proving to just be a meme company. I wouldn’t touch their products even if they gave it to me for free.

I’ll stick with my “dumb” car (manual transmission) for as long as possible, reduce my dependency on cars in general (reducing carbon footprint of car usage and gas consumption).

Maybe the true players in the EV industry will rise. Too many fly by night companies right now with minimal reputation; and first generation models from more known companies.

Plus I’m still holding out for 500+ mi ranges on a single charge with a fully loaded vehicle. Hopefully some innovations in battery tech will make that a possibility.

How often do you drive 500 miles in day?

I’m so tired of this argument. Any amount more than 0 precipitates a need for a vehicle with that range.

You mean even if I drive, say, 10 miles per day, I need a car that does 500+ miles on a single tank?

In clear conditions on well traveled roads, nah.

But I also just watched a video where a bridge closure turned a 7 minute drive into a 4.5 hour drive one way.

And I’ve been stuck behind a winter road closure that lasted several hours (after being several hours into our trip).

Got it. So much more extreme situations than "anything above 0".

My point is that going above 0 exposes you to extremes, especially the further north you go.

Risk management is important.

You mean "above 0" degrees? Or is 0 latitude? I really don't understand what "above 0" means here. I thought it was kilometers/miles.

It was in response to “how often do you do X”, so I took it to mean # of times you need to do X that is more than 0

everything makes sense now, thanks

I live in Montana. This means that a 500 mile EPA range (which i read as 500 miles on a mild day with no accessories activated) is going to mean a real range of around 400, cut down to 200 when the weather inevitability drops and stays below -10f (Tesla owners in MT were reporting exactly that - half the range in the cold weather).

200m, if you allow for an emergency buffer, can be a trip from home to the city around here. Or going from one city to another.

Texas offers similar length trips, just with AC instead of heating.

> Plus I’m still holding out for 500+ mi ranges on a single charge with a fully loaded vehicle.

I would take that if it were kilometers, but with lights and heating at -5 Celsius, please

Is it that annoying to fill the tank if the car does <500mi? My car has 52L capacity (13.7 gallon) and usually does 10km/l (22g/mile) and it used to last me more than a week when I commuted.

How much are you driving per week?

This is the 10th time this has been posted - almost all posts have had double-digit comments, four of which reached the front page (from memory). It's getting very annoying.

At the risk of spitting into the wind - yes, Tesla is treated differently. That is by both actual Tesla owners, who love their cars and autopilot (Tesla has the highest brand and highest satisfaction score from owners) and are mad at the media drivel that has poured out since day 1 (see #TSLAQ and Niedermeyer). They get irrationally defensive due to the flame wars, but also because they also believe that this is just the latest version of the attacks on Tesla and SpaceX that were just as vitriolic but more out of the public limelight before those companies "steamrolled" their competition.

But then there are also the critics, who think little of what SpaceX and Tesla have done, make up shit (again, see #TSLAQ and Niedermeyer, as well as Biden's "GM is leading the EV revolution" comments), but also have legitimate concerns about Elon.

> > But then there are also the critics, who think little of what SpaceX and Tesla have done

What have they done? Asking because after all the fanfare I set foot in one and it's the same experience you had getting in a 2003 Mercedes E-Klasse. If anything the 2003 E-Klasse makes you feel like you are surrounded by opulence during your ride, while Teslas are empty inside and the materials are so crooked and cheap.

Can't comment on the space thing because it's so far removed from the daily use of everyday people that it's basically entertainment for nerds, like Chess or Bridge.

The deregulation that enables this kind of public beta testing only works if we also don’t accept commanders with the individual power to make trade off decisions like this for thousands of workers to follow.

Time and again workers show more humane decision making given the agency in events like these or the train operators who raised warnings ahead of recent disasters etc. And we see the state siding their support with those owners over the powerless operators, which I point out to show there is value in deregulation regardless. Workers often show pride in what they do, can enjoy the productivity and value what they achieve as a group, but their limited agency at the altar of command prevents common humane reasonableness day to day and in bigger ways.

And the Morton-Thiokol Challenger shuttle case.

The time has come for a self-referential leak: a file which says that a confidential file F belonging to such and such a company, detailing a secret data leak, has been leaked on date D. What is the secret data leak being detailed? The leak of file F on date D.

Most car manufacturers have hundreds to thousands of safety complaints. They settle and include non-disclosures so you can't hear about them. If the cost of settling a class-action is more than the cost of a recall, they'll do a recall.

Usually it is regulatory bodies calling for recalls, if OEMs are not doing it themselves first. OEMs do not have a lot of say in these matters. That is why all recalls are public record as well.

It's pretty expensive to properly invest in data access controls. You need to basically prevent anyone from unilaterally touching customer data without an assigned ticket (from an customer, alert system, or another employee) or another employee agreeing the access is justified. For very important customers you might want multiple or manager/director level agreement. This can add a lot of friction to normal business-as-usual tasks - if you just grant giant groups of people this access (which is pretty much SOP since so many roles occasionally do need it) then you invariably get this kind of misuse (and leaks).

Employee training and a company culture of treating customer data respectfully are not that expensive.

Wonder if there are any groups out there that steal data from these kinds of companies, and then short the stock and leak it

Sizeable trades face scrutiny especially in light of leaks. Would be pretty obvious if someone bought a lot of puts right before a leak. And that is just a singular event. If they had a habit of doing that...

Sure, you just leak it to some "public web site" for a few days then do your big splash trades in and around the time you leak it to aggregators. It feels easily muddled with insider trading vs opportunistic trading on breaking news.

I was thinking more North Korea style rather than a single person, as in multiple shorts bought over a long period. Can’t say I really know how practical this is versus SEC

If everything was above board this wouldn’t work would it?

I don't think it is really possible for everything to be 'above board'. I'm sure Ford receives plenty of complaints that they don't want published even if they are all baseless. When you have millions of cars on the road that is the reality.

In GTA 5, if you buy the right stocks before doing the heist missions, you can make a profit off the fallout. If you do it in all the right spots and invest all the winnings each time you can easily make $INT32_MAX.

Most sold car model and highest stock value. Capitalism approves of this approach and has rewarded the decision makers.

Teslas are great cars that just make driving a pleasure. I’m sure for every large sample of any item, there will be some problem ones. It is specifically in these cases, a non trivial number of them are not being handled with more care, more like google customer service. I’m sure a significant part of this is growing pains, scheduling delays in service.

I would love for a singular place on the internet where people can start reporting public data about their experiences, in hopes to get more attention to these problems, at least the more common ones.

I can't be the only one who is tired of seeing news media digging at Tesla constantly. No other car manufacture is treated the same way.

Maybe because no other car manufacturer is managed the same way.

VW’s management isn’t exactly stellar either, and they’re the ones who got caught.

Same with Elon. News sites know articles about him bring views so there is a new article edit him every other day. At this point I just don’t care what stupid thing he’s done this week.

A lot of hype, and a very public CEO intentionally driving said hype, can have that side effect.

In a sense so, I know at least one former POTUS who was also treated worst of all other throughoit history. Both claims have equal merit to them.

No other manufacturer went out of their way to put cameras everywhere and to record from them to employee chats where they make memes and share videos of peoples “intimate moments.” If GM got caught doing that I’d be ragging on them too. Tesla is an inanimate object, not some person with feelings that need to be protected.

There are articles about Toyota, Ford, and GM having data breaches if you search for them. The difference with this one is the kind of data exposed. It's not just user location data, it appears to be some malfeasance by the company itself, an attempt to cover up issues.

There is likely something real here.

Tesla could rebrand as a boring car manufacturer and do away with their insanely high market cap (relative to other auto makers) and stop claiming to be a tech company with disruptive technology.

They could do that and they’d be treated like any other car company. But Tesla won’t because “disruption” and “innovation” is why people like Tesla.

I think it’s stilly to consider Tesla a victim of news media. Tesla welcomes this. Free advertising. Free PR.

I am tired of Tesla lying about its vehicles being capable of "driving themselves" and selling a "Full Self-Driving" product that is anything but - preying on the public's ignorance and substantially harming public safety.

I am dog tired of that.

No, other automakers are definitely not saints... but Tesla has embraced uniquely extreme wrongdoings throughout its history and this Handelsblatt story (which is still coming out in stages) fits Tesla like a glove.

Yes they are, when they screw up.

Chevy Corvair "unsafe at any speed"

Ford Pinto gas tank ruptures

Toyota uncontrolled acceleration

Volkswagen diesel scandal

I'm sure there are many others.

Elon is particularly stupid though. The other ones dont take features out that are good like parking sensors. The other ones don't say that sensor fusion doesn't work. Tesla deserves even more shit than it gets from the media.

I assume all Tesla drivers who are frequent road trippers have a gas car too?

There are 1800 Tesla chargers in the US vs. 145,000 gas stations. Also it takes less than three minutes to fill a gas car and gas cars are less expensive.

I don't get the appeal for all their disadvantages unless your Tesla is your 2nd or 3rd car?

Also Elon Musk's behavior....

It is usually not true. Tesla drivers often live in cities with limited parking. They can afford more than one car sure, but perhaps their $1 million town home only has one parking spot. So they can only park one car.

And why have sucky acceleration ICE when you can have an EV instead? You have to choose, why not go with the better daily drive rather than the occasional long range driver? You can always rent if the trip doesn’t make sense in an EV.

Why does anyone need the kind of acceleration that Tesla offers. You can really only fully exploit it on the track. Driving around town it's totally unnecessary. Even on a highway, as long as you can keep up with traffic that's all you need.

You can exploit the acceleration in city driving. It’s like every stop light is a chance to cut loose from 0 to 35. Have you test driven one yet? It’s just a fun drive.

And what about the pedestrian trying to judge whether he can cross the road, who may not be expecting a car to be leaping from stoplight to stoplight, but accelerating at the normal pace that most other cars do?

That’s why you go when the light is green and not red. And as long as you aren’t breaking the speed limit, you aren’t going to be getting to that pedestrian anytime soon, especially if it’s a stroad.

Anyways, it’s the ICE drivers I see running stop signs all the time (come on, I thought Tesla FSD was supposed to do that???). They probably don’t have as much fun as stopping and going as EV drivers do. The regenerative breaking also makes stopping fairly simple, so there is that also.

> > It’s just a fun drive. 0-35

To me sounds like coitus interruptus. And I am not even a fan of 0-60 , 0-100 etc.

Real fun is in corners and ICEs will always be superior compared to EVs in corners because the latter are freacking boats.

you get a lot of your energy back via regenerative breaking, so it isn’t that wasteful.

Not many corners in the city.

There are lighter EVs that corner well. The real issue with an EV is that you never feel like you are going to tip over while cornering because your center of gravity is so low. Where is the fun in that?

That’s for top speed. Acceleration is maneuverability. In Los Angeles, I find the latter to be a lot more important than being able to go 150mph.

Elon Musk’s behavior made us cancel our second Tesla after selling our first.

It makes me disappointed because the car was our favorite car of all time. But I believe you have to stand up for what you believe in and vote with your money.

> I assume all Tesla drivers who are frequent road trippers have a gas car too?

IME, a Tesla is great for a road trip.

- Everyone knows when the next stop is. - Gives a good break for the driver (or to swap off at fairly consistent intervals) - Allows a nice quick break for the driver during charge.

It probably comes from a misunderstanding of the charging needed. You usually only charge between a low % and what you need for the next stop. 0% to 80% at a v3 SC ends up being ~30 minutes and you usually don't even need that.

By the time everyone goes to the bathroom and stretches their legs we've been ready to head out.

Plus AP for lanekeep (basic, not FSDj) makes it super enjoyable.

Teslas are now cheaper than the average care in the US after rebates. Average car price is around $48k. The Model 3 starts around $37k and the Model Y starts around $43 with current federal rebates (state and local rebates may reduce price further).

Most people charge there car at home and rarely ever visit chargers.

Not a Tesla owner, but an EV owner. (Kia EV6)

I drove from Houston to San Diego and back. You do have to plan, but it's not an impossible trip. Besides, using the restroom or grabbing food always takes longer than the time a gas car would fill up. Usually when I discuss EVs, I inevitably run into someone who talks about road tripping and not needing to use the restroom like it's some kind of an Olympic sport.

Both my wife and I have EVs. Zero emissions are important to us. We charge at home, so never have any issues.

That said, if I ever need a gas car, I'll just rent one. Doesn't make sense to keep one and pay the cost in emissions and fuel and maintenance for situations I need every few years.

People claim that -in time- the monetary saving on fuel, plus the time (and hassle) saving of having to go to the pump , plus not having to go for an oil change every x miles would make them end up ahead.

What keeps me bullish about Tesla is that when I put "self driving" into YouTube, I see an endless stream of videos made by normal people, filming their own Teslas actually doing self driving.

No other manufacturer has gotten there yet. The cars are either geofenced or there are only marketing videos available.

So I take it, that Tesla does have a technical advantage of some sorts.

Considering how big the market for self driving is, I think the advantage in this field is worth the $500B market cap they have.

their technical advantage is measured in comparison to tests, not production consumer rollout which is confounded by risk appetite

The only company that has a level 3 self driving car is Mercedes-Benz.

Besides, if you measure success by the number of YouTube videos then feel free to search for "Tesla self driving accident" and "Tesla quality issue" on YT

I don't see any Mercedes self driving videos on youtube by regular people. If that tech existed and was in customers hands, Im sure there were many such videos?

>I don't see any mercedes self driving videos on youtube by regular people

What a weird metric to have, "videos on youtube of X". Has it occurred to you that more people post videos on youtube because they're influencers or just regular attention seekers cashing in for views because Tesla is overhyped and is the kind of thing that generates traction on social media?

Maybe Mercedes owners, or those of any other brand, buy their car to drive it first, not show it off on youtube.

For my next job, I'll work only at the company with the most videos on TikTok.

There are more "driving my mercedes" videos on Youtube than "driving my tesla".

Just nothing for self driving.

It’s not available to consumers and only works on a few pre-mapped highways a low speeds (i.e. traffic jams). This is a nothingburger.

It is absolutly not a weird metric. I (and a whole lotta other people) go to youtube to find real people testing and using real life things like keyboards, bikes, even other car brands, and so much more. I dont see how a person wanting to see how a cars self driving works on youtube is any different.

Because you can (and should) test drive a car for yourself before dropping hella' stacks on one. Random people on youtube can be, and often are, biased with their opinion.

You probably can't test drive the self driving feature though because it only works on about 50ft of road in Nevada. Hence why you would look it up on youtube, only to discover that no else was able to use it either for the same reason.

Yes it's a ridiculous metric. People will post anything for views. A kid crashed an airplane to get YouTube views. Lots of stuff posted to YouTube can't really be taken for face value, a lot of people are are just gaming for views.

Anything except a Mercedes driving itself, apparently.

I was curious so I went looking. I did not, in fact, find any customer videos of the Mercedes.

The MB system will only in traffic jams on a handful of pre-mapped highways in Nevada. Not available to consumers yet. This is a purely regulatory achievement.

Actually Honda was the first auto manufacturer to reach level 3.

Oh come on.

This supposed 'advantage' (ongoing myth like the one about their battery tech - hint: for years Tesls bought from Pana and for a while now also massively from CATL) is adversely played out on the shoulders of unsuspecting traffic participants that didn't sign up for this shitshow (firetruck operators, police officers, motorcycle riders, home owners, etc. etc.)

Also Tesla openly stated to the CA DMV they operate FSD only on L2 (1), whileas recently MB was certified for L3 (2).

I wouldn't even call Tesla's clusterfuck L2-capable. Just research number of disengaments per mile - and not as Tesla reports it, nothing published by Tesla is trustable. Also i could just refer to videos published by Musk cronies Gfilche and WholeMarsBlog that show massive decision errors by FSD over multiple, even recent revisions. Btw just (3)...

Everything Tesla publishes or their cult members believe can be debunked. But why should i put up that effort here for others if those do just easily digest stories from the cult?

EDIT: If you dont trust stuff published by Musk+Tesla opponents, then at least check out (4) he also now and then analyzes FSD crashes using Tesla recorded data.

And you can all downvote me as you please, don't care. I am observing and studying this irresponsible heap of a tech company already 5 years next month.

(1) https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35785277/tesla-fsd-califo... (2) https://group.mercedes-benz.com/innovation/product-innovatio... (3) https://www.autoevolution.com/news/the-new-wave-of-tesla-fsd... (4) https://twitter.com/greentheonly

The Mercedes L3 certification only applies to highways and for speeds less than 40mph. That has been a solved problem for years, so the L3 certification is not an indication of superior tech, but a trick to allow Mercedes salesmen to say "ours is L3 and Tesla is only L2."

I would not form opinion based on YouTube's algorithm. Mine was less positive.

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