Tesla’s Dieselgate | Hacker News Reader

Tesla’s Dieselgate

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71 pointsrbanffy35 comments

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It is long rant that lists all griefs that author has with musk and Tesla.

I stopped reading at about 1/3 of this article because whatever this article’s title promised still doesn’t started.

Every single one of his complaints is sourced. Maybe, just maybe, Musk and tesla suck?

My criticism can be summarized in one principle: "Bottom line up front".

It says about Dieselgate. Knowing what dieselgate is I'd expect to see the following:

    Tesla put special check into firmware that detected when car is used for power consumption/distance check in standartized environment and used some trickery to get better numbers (distance) than they are getting in normal usage. Here is the proof by

Instead of that I scrolled already like 2 screens and there are rants about musk being or not being tesla founder, starlink, tesla subsidies, musk reality distortion field. Then it somehow leaps towards criticism of DRMs and I stop reading those ramblings. I don't own tesla, not have tesla stock, not musk fanboy, and the article did a poor job in convincing that anything is bad. It feels that it is is already written for haters who nod reading every point.

This article is written like modern recipes online, which are almost universally hated on HN. One ones that start with grandmother and childhood memories, then go to beautiful children and that Saturday morning when house is full of smells and author picks her/his favorite knife and Le Creuset dutch oven...

I don't think the parent is disputing whether tesla sucks or not, he's saying that the article is poorly written. It's titled "Tesla's Dieselgate", but it doesn't address that specific point until 2/3rds into the article. If the article was titled something like "Why Tesla Sucks", this would be forgivable, but there's no need to preface every anti-tesla article with a lengthy preamble about all the existing reasons why tesla sucks.

It does a pretty good job of laying the foundation of just how much of a liar Musk and Tesla the company are, before pointing out they are once again being liars.

Context is important.

It spends too much time obscuring it's message

Inverted pyramid principle: https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/WC191

Bottom line up front: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)#:~:text=B....

Not that important.

Sourced with things that show the opposite. Like stating that Teslas are one of the deadliest cars and linked to an article showing 17 deaths out of 44,000 yearly deaths were when Autopilot was on.

If you scroll past the 6 feet of regurgitated Musk condemnation, he has a good point: DRM and anti-right-to-repair laws make it easy for manufacturers to scam consumers and allow scummy rent-seeking behavior.

I wish Doctorow eased off on the rhetoric and hyperbole ("mobile gas-chambers", really?) because underneath all that he is still right.

Exactly. We already have RMS, the job of Cassandra is already taken.

Tesla's range is a complete fiction. To support this fiction it displays an imaginary range substantially higher than actual on the HUD. To avoid blowing the charade or leaving drivers high and dry when it dies with 100 miles on the clock it switches from fiction to reality about halfway through. The difference is so egregious that a huge portion of users think their car is broken. So many that Tesla created a team to mass close those tickets first by running remote diagnostics and blowing smoke up their ass to convince drivers there is nothing wrong. EG you're holding it wrong.

To keep up with volume they stopped bothering actually doing any diagnostics and flagging customers effectively preventing them from creating new tickets which might result in expensive service calls.

So you buy based on inflated numbers realize its not working as expected, call to complain thinking your car is broken, your account gets flagged and now if something really does go wrong you could be stranded in limbo for days unable to use the normal process.

Additional fun if you miss a payment or they misapply a payment or a check gets lost or any of the fun things that happen in the magical world of payment processing they have the ability remotely stop your car and summon a repo man.

Seems like this will eventually be misused to stop protests or be mass misused by hackers eventually.

You should read the rest of the article its worth reading.

Tesla's range is quite accurate, in my experience. The top number gives you a relatively accurate range in good conditions -- aka city driving in the summer. And then if you punch in your destination it'll tell you within a single percent of what your battery will be at your destination.

Interesting some of the negatives comments here. I rather liked the article. Length and hyperbole and all.

Of course, it could have been a simple quick to read tweet (or do I call them x's now?): "DRM is techno cancer".

But sometimes, you need to marinate in an idea for a bit to get it to really sink in, for slow associations to rise in your head to sort through it.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36906331

duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36906331

e.g. 'Tesla's Volkswagen's Watergate Scandal'

I suppose soon we'll have FutureCorp's Tesla's Volkswagen's Watergate Scandal Can't we just bring back the word 'scandal' unadorned?

Anyway, this article is trash. Why does it lead with rambling complaints about starlink instead of cutting to the chase, which is that DRM in Tesla cars prevents people from knowing what their cars actually do? (Not news btw, I and others have been complaining about this for years.) Also "The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers" I stopped reading here. VW's crimes were severe but comparing them to the Holocaust is completely uncalled for. Is this supposed to be a funny joke because VW is German? It isn't funny.

Salt, lots of salt

The sheer amount of energy expended by Elon Musk haters is matched only by the energy output of his biggest supporters.

The man and his companies aren’t Satan, they’re not the force of evil incarnate, they’re just an organization. It costs zero energy to ignore the things you don’t like.

Why should anyone ignore Tesla criminally defrauding their customers by programming their vehicles to lie about their range?

If Musk/Tesla were just distasteful, your comment would make sense. But we know now that they've willfully harmed customers in many ways and likely committed crimes in the process.

I really don't understand this comment.

It has no substance other than "stop complaining, you're wasting energy".

I don't even know what's a good response to this. Why even do anything?

The article makes a large number of serious accusations but provides no citations for some of the worst of them. I have no doubt that the accusations are mostly true, but without backup, they are just ranting and raving and raising the noise floor. It's a low-quality piece of writing.

Because it's become tedious and borderline pathological.

I am sorry but I disagree: this information is helpful in as much as it effectively prevented my from buying a Tesla, and also I understand better now the difference between my Mazda MX-30's truthfull range reporting, and Tesla's untruthful range claims.

If someone's bad behavior has become tedious, that's a complaint against that person, not against the people who are trying to hold them accountable.

The Venn diagram of Musk apologists and Trump apologists has a lot of overlap.

> It costs zero energy to ignore the things you don’t like.

So, you are saying there should not be any protests, criticisms, and disagreements?

No, he's saying stop letting people live rent-free in your head.

Is the evidence that Musk is living rent free in peoples head the fact that articles are being written about his company's problems? Are we stating that there is nothing of value in this issue being made public?

He's technically saying "I am going to berate you if you criticize X"

I wouldn't say that. It's got more of a "STFU, you whiners.. start focusing on more important things inside the locus of your own control, rather than complaining about what other people are doing" vibe.

Check. Do not buy a Tesla. Ever. Done what I can do. Glad I've followed this stuff in case any didn't-buyers-remorse ever sinks in. Moving on.

What would martin eberhard who left years before model S know about musk and his contributions to engineering decisions at tesla?

Are these claims verified? It should be trivial ie for 2nd hand owners to chip in whether with sales extra equipment is disabled and new owner needs to purchase it again. I think I would remember any outrage around this, and this for sure should produce some.

There were one or two cases where FSD got accidentally disabled when reselling a used Tesla. I remember the outrage about it.

That's the least of the unverified, unsupported claims in this article. Flagged (and no, I don't own a Tesla or any other products from any Musk companies, or have an interest in any related securities.)

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