Hacker News Reader

Comment by jart | Hacker News Reader

It's not just Tesla. All the online services you depend on are run this way, and none of it's regulated. Governments don't know how to regulate software companies like Tesla. They know how to regulate people constructing homes, cooking food, and building bridges but most attempts at regulating software development have petered out. This is a good thing. Thanks to Tesla's modern approach to car manufacturing it is now possible for anyone in the middle class to purchase a self-driving bulletproof truck that's faster than a Lamborghini. You can't make this stuff up. I swear.

View on HN

Most of the online services I use can't kill me if they have a bug.

Why do Tesla people see servitization and paying for something in perpetuity forever as being such an enabling thing for people? We need to own the things we pay for, not rent them. In a decentralized way. A car is a machine that needs to be capable of functioning completely independent of everything else. There is no reason it should be a PaaS other than to extract as much value out of the market as possible.

Companies need to leave some value for regular people to live.

If Tesla is a software company rather than a car company, then did you also consider Wework one rather than office rentals? Honestly interested why their, as of now, main product shouldn’t define the type of company they are.

People who have 100k to burn on a car are middle-class? What's the median yearly income in the US? 90k?

Even less, the median household income is 80k: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p60-28...

Was it MKBHD who made some weird claim that he spoke to a bunch of people, "most of whom thought the cyber truck was closer to $1M and were amazed to hear it was more like $100K"?

I have NEVER heard that. It makes zero sense and sounds more like the fever dream of a Teslarati: "Wow, I know the median home price in my area is $500K, and the median household income $80K, but all of a sudden there is this explosion of million dollar Teslas on the road!"

You can apparently lease a Cybertruck starting at $1000/month. That is definitely within range for someone on a 90k income, even if it is isn't the most financially smart thing you can do.

What? More like 190k income needed to even get a quote

The middle class is the bourgeoisie, not the 50th percentile.

I need to ask - is this a joke? No, Tesla is not particularly bulletproof compared to other cars. Its doors may stop a 9mm sure enough, but the windows won't manage even that, and anything above 9mm will go through the doors as well. And 9mm is not even that common among criminal shooters, they usually go for bigger calibers / higher penetration naturally already.

And which Lamborghini specifically?

> And which Lamborghini specifically?

It's faster than a Lamboghini Spire.

But not as robust off-road.

It's a pretty simple fix.

In the old days, governments had departments which would inspect cars, verify they complied with legislation, and even examine build quality.

Quite easy, when everything was basically physical.

Now the ECU and modules are a black box, unknowable to such entities. Things can be caught (see VW scamming fuel/emissions tests), but it's by luck.

So solution? We pass laws that all code, every bit of it, all chip schematics too, all firmwares are open source.

Note I said open source, which in the old days just meant "readable". We're not talking GPL, all copyright would remain.

On top of that, all build scripts and methods to flash modules / etc would be provided to governement test environments.

Now we can test. Now, we can look for crappy code, hacky junk, fake emission cheats, bugs and more.

Don't like it? You don't sell cars. Tough.

The entire supply chain would be required to fall inline.

It's really not that hard.

In terms of security, that's what signing updates is for.

And (for example) you can already take hobby tools, such as forscan (for fords) amd flash updates to modules.

As long as it is signed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com