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Comment by TrainedMonkey | Hacker News Reader

Hats off to Tesla, right now they are doing for cars what Apple did for smartphones in 2007. Under closer examination concept is simple - work closer with customers. In Tesla's case this means monitor working parameters of all the cars they sold. This allows them to identify, diagnose, and solve quite a few problems extremely quickly.

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Very cool, but at the same time I can't help but think, "Gee, now that is one less personal device in my life that is under my control".

Would be nice if these updates were open-source and cars ran open source software on open source designs. Unfortunately it's going to be a while before we see this.

So, cars are starting to be licensed, not sold?

(Okay, the hardware is still sold, but it's relatively useless without software.)

That actually sounds a lot more like Microsoft - Windows and other products are sounding massive amount of telemetry data back to Redmond

Windows does not send anything back to Microsoft unless the user explicitly enables the "Customer Experience Improvement Program." If you want to check if this is enabled, just press start and type "ceip".

Microsoft is huge software corporation that dominates operating system/productivity space. Tesla is a fairly small automotive company that is really innovative. I think that comparison is actually extremely flattering to Tesla.

Anyways your point is correct, however it is one thing to get telemetry from your own operating system that connected to the internet, and entirely different beast to bring that kind of technology to consumer automobiles.

Because who doesn't love having their personal possessions tracked by third parties, right?

One person's feature is another person's backdoor.

And that's unlike the iPhone in some way?

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