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Comment by skore | Hacker News Reader

> An even bigger conflict of interest with auto dealers is that they make most of their profit from service, but electric cars require much less service than gasoline cars. There are no oil, spark plug or fuel filter changes, no tune-ups and no smog checks needed for an electric car. Also, all Tesla Model S vehicles are capable of over-the-air updates to upgrade the software, just like your phone or computer, so no visit to the service center is required for that either.

Gotta hand it to Musk - that's some smooth salestalk in what is supposed to be just voicing a public opinion against shady politics. I was halfway through the third sentence when I caught myself thinking - "indeed, that does sound like such a better dea--- Hey wait a minute!". Musk, you sneaky bastard! Never missing a chance to remind me why I want a dang tesla.

He is right and it's a terrific salespitch. That's the best kind of right.

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An even bigger conflict of interest with auto dealers is that they make most of their profit from service

I am old enough to remember what owning a car was like when things were changing away from mechanical devices one could understand and tinker with and becoming nondescript hunks of plastic you had to buy from a manufacturer. (I'm talking about the ignition system, as one specific example.) There was always a bit of a sinking feeling for me along with a sense that the world was being dumbed down and manipulated for profit. As programmers and technical people, we should be able to see many parallels!

That said, dumbing down the world in some ways is not necessarily a bad thing and can be exceedingly positive. One might miss the twisty, dusty country road in leisure time, but curse it when it's raining and the road has turned into an impassable morass. Reliable, boring, convenient transportation is great sometimes, like when you're driving someone going into labor to the hospital.

Maintenance free electric cars that drive themselves will be one of those positive simplifying things.

Funny enough, quite a few programmers who have become burned out with the mainstream tech industry move into automotive related industries as cars are becoming more and more computer driven.

I think I bought my "frugal-mobile" from one of them.

I hope that emerging manufacturing technologies will allow what has happened to software over the last 25 years to happen to hardware over the next 25 years.

It is possible to run a completely open software stack, and very easy to run an almost-completely open software stack.

My hope is that open-source hardware (both electronic and mechanical) will be abundant enough in the future that I could feasibly fabricate a new ECU from scratch, or 3D print a new evaporator for my AC.

I too hope so, but not for automotive. I want to 3D print the hull for a high speed catamaran. Every year I wait is another year laser sintering gets cheaper, 3D printing gets better, and the cost of technology drops.

I agree with the idea in principle, that electric cars are a net positive for reliability and minimizing service costs.

However, when you talk nostalgically about the good old days of cars being "mechanical devices one could understand and tinker with", and then turn around and talk about the new generation of electric cars being somehow equivalent, it seems a little logically inconsistent to me.

Make no mistake, a Tesla is just as much of a "hunk of plastic" when it comes to fixing or modifying it yourself. Expecting any complex piece of modern electronics to be similarly hackable to a car from the last century is a little unrealistic.

EDIT: sounds like we're basically in agreement on this. I misunderstood the previous comment.

Tesla is just as much of a "hunk of plastic"

That is exactly my point. Did you actually read the whole comment you are responding to?

I did read it - it appears I misunderstood you though, sorry! For some reason, I interpreted the last two paragraphs as saying they were similar.

Yeah, I remember those times, too; perhaps less nostalgically than you do. Take your ignition system example. Sure, one could dig in there and replace and adjust the points. But you did it because you had to, you had to do it regularly, and it would be adjusted correctly exactly once: after you did the job. From there, the points immediately started wearing and it would not be exactly right until you did it again. Solid-state ignition, please.

Synchronizing three Weber carbs? Oh, yeah, good times. Good times that involved poisonous mercury to boot. Port fuel injection, please.

Don't get me wrong, there was a time I liked working on cars, too. So much so, I was a professional ASE-certified mechanic for a while. I also like my Scion xB that in 70K miles we've done nothing to except insert gas, change the oil, and put a set of tires on it. I don't miss having to slap new points and plugs in it before a weekend trip.

And for the Tesla tie-in, our Leaf is about as much of an appliance as you're going to get in a car. There's something to be said about a car whose maintenance schedule doesn't fill a page.

> Reliable, boring, convenient transportation is great sometimes, like when you're driving someone going into labor to the hospital.

Or great even for something as simple as getting to work in the morning. I've owned my share of Triumphs and Fiats. I enjoy my dumbed down existence that doesn't involve a late-night session under the hood because I have to be at work the next day.

I mean, I see your point. But if most folks are like the cranky, older version of me now, if they wanted finicky transportation that needs constant maintenance they'd buy a horse.

I heartily believe there's a market for both. Compare a Macbook Pro with a custom built Linux desktop. The MBP is very user friendly, plug n play, and has very little customization capacity. The custom Linux desktop is an absolute tinkerer's paradise, with everything from hardware to software being open for customization.

The car equivalent of these used to exist for daily drivers, but are now relegated mainly to closed course competition vehicles (much to my delight). The Radical SR is probably my favorite one, consisting of a modular vehicle that can be built from a kit shipped in boxes of parts [1].

There is extreme pleasure to be had from driving both a Tesla, and a Radical SR. But both have very different uses, and very different performance and maintenance criteria.

For those interested:

http://www.radicalsportscars.com/uk/

But even for Linux, Ubuntu is trying really hard for you to not have to go into the command line. They would love for it to be a tinkerer's paradise but also usable. They want it to be a muscle car and a Tesla. Computers have the advantage of being both of those.

Computers have the advantage of being both of those.

They're still muscle cars. Tablets and phones have been making inroads, but the inmates still run the asylum.

> Compare a Macbook Pro with a custom built Linux desktop. The MBP is very user friendly, plug n play, and has very little customization capacity. The custom Linux desktop is an absolute tinkerer's paradise, with everything from hardware to software being open for customization.

It's not fair to say Macs are less customizable or less of a tinkerer's paradise just because they are more user friendly.

I think it's fair to say that. In my opinion, Linux wins on kernel configuration options alone. Would you like a tickless kernel? Soft real-time? Hard real-time? A different scheduler, may be?

It's pretty easy to boot Linux on a Mac.

My guess is he was talking about the retina MBPs that are impossible to change RAM on and damn near impossible to do anything else with.

You can do a lot with them. What you're talking about is doing things to them.

Meh, you knew exactly what I meant, as did most people that read that discussion I'm sure.

Who said that it's because of user friendliness? But they are intentionally made uncustomizable and not for tinkerers hardware-wise, that 1/10 repairability score (http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Retina+Di...) isn't an accident.

An apt analogy. I moved from Linux-based machines to Macbook Pros. I love the ability to tinker in Linux. I hate the requirement to tinker in Linux, just to get normal desktop stuff working.

Hah, I'm glad you mentioned points and carbs. Those are the two examples of systems I just don't want to have to screw with ever again.

Carbs are great until something in the environment changes and they're not perfect anymore. I want MAF's, o2 sensors, etc, thanks.

I think my favorite car was my late 80's toyota truck with a 22RE. For my taste (which would vary wildly for another person) it had the perfect blend of technology while keeping things reliable and easy to work on. But it was still just something I enjoyed working on because I enjoy working on things.

For a day to day car, I'd rather have something I never had to touch. I'm hoping the move to electric vehicles picks up speed.

Toyota trucks of that era were great mechanically, and the 22RE was a great little engine, but they would rust out in no time. OK for the south but not a good choice for anyplace that salt is used.

Hmmm, I drove mine in St. Louis. It was there for at least a decade. I never had any major rust issues with that particular truck, but I was better to my vehicles at the time. There was some bubbling around the quarter panels, but nothing major. It was an 1987, and was pretty beat up, so I wasn't worried about it being perfect.

The thing with the toyota truck I noticed mostly, is that despite cosmetic flaws, it still ran great and was pretty sound functionally at 230k. I had a dodge dakota that fell apart around me and spun a bearing at 160k. The drivers side door hinges actually rusted completely out.

I had a 1987 MR2 in St. Louis for four or five years as well, and my friend had it for three or four before that. It had issues with the rear quarter panel as well, but otherwise was good.

All anecdotal, and the St. Louis winter isn't a Michigan winter or anything like that, but there's my experience fwiw

Somewhere inside you is something that misses the Webbers. Every night under the bonnet, day in the rain covered in oil and every bizarre breakdown (the rotor disintegrated again?!) was worth it for the induction notice, smell of warm oil and exhaust note... I think... Tuning Strombergs is another dark art.

It kind of feels like the opposite is happening today with the "maker" movement. With those "blobs of plastic" falling left and right to arduinos and 3d printers, it seems like the makers are on a tear to bring the "good old days" back again.

As long as the carmaker is open about things, the increasing complexity doesn't have to be bad news for tinkerers. It's not officially released yet, but https://github.com/timdorr/model-s-api shows the promise of Tesla's commitment to openness. It won't allow the "how does my car work?" type of tinkering, but it allows the "how can I use my car in interesting ways?" tinkering.

It's much the same as computers. The original Apples were understandable devices. The lack of miniaturization meant that hackers could figure out how everything was working and play with it. That activity would be ridiculous with modern-day CPUs/components as the complexity has increased by orders of magnitude and the miniaturization has reached levels where specialized equipment is needed to look at what's going on that costs well beyond what can fit in a hobbyist's budget. Yet modern-day computers are still programmable and people are still learning and hacking. The only difference is that this learning is happening a few abstraction levels removed from the actual hardware. The same will be true with cars, provided manufacturers are as cooperative as Tesla seems to be.

> An even bigger conflict of interest with auto dealers is that they make most of their profit from service

Musk is too smart to know hes comparing oranges to apples.

He is only partially right. I say to Mr. Musk - I will agree with your complain when you sell me your car for $18,000 - an average price for an average car in the US. Why it doesnt cost $120,000, like your models, you ask? Well, exactly because of what you mentioned: they use cheaper parts with less engineering that are bound to break faster and then they will make up some profit on the parts. That's why Mr. Musk, they profit from service on car that is TEN times less expensive than your car.

If you asking me I prefer to pay cheaper upfront and be able to treat it like a pair of shoes that I will be able to exchange for a newer model in 2-3 years, when this gets me bored or wears out.

Other than that -- always love to hear brilliant people sticking it out to the lobbyists and corrupted over-bureaucratized politicians! At this stage of things within US, Musk is sticking it to so many groups (building rackets "10-times cheaper than otherwise tax payers would've paid") and pissing off so many powerful people, that I wouldn't be surprised to see him dead sooner or later (although of course I wish him all the best!)

Tesla's site is a bit frustrating. I get most of those same benefits driving a Nissan Leaf. So I'm not really interested in a "true cost" comparison to a gas vehicle I wouldn't be buying anyways.

Turns out the Model S at $1,466 as optioned is more expensive than a Leaf. :) Not that I wouldn't kill for a 300 mile range...

do you realize how much money you could make from networking opportunities that arise from driving around a Tesla? invest in your future

Tesla is the new Country Club membership? (They are also being granted as perks of employment.)

An old-man Jaguar costs a fraction of the price. Does a Model-S come with the country club membership? I'm in!

Does a Model-S come with the country club membership? I'm in!

It's more likely to come with a hackerspace membership.

I'm sure the Leaf is a fine vehicle. But I see them directed at two different audiences. That logic would also question why get a Porsche 911 when you can get a VW Beetle for a fraction of the price? They are both German engineered gas vehicles, after all.

Fun fact: The Beetle was originally designed by Ferdinand Porsche, so you'd even drive a "real" Porsche in both cases.

Not to mention that 911s look like smooshed Beetles anyway. I kid, I kid...

That's not much of a coincidence: The 911 is actually a fairly old design (early 1960s) and the follow up to the Porsche 356 [1] where the similarity is even more striking. They are also from a technical point of view fairly similar: Both have an air-cooled boxer engine in the back which certainly influences the design. There's also the "Berlin-Rom-Wagen" [2], a sports version of the beetle which was built for a planned long distance race from Berlin to Rome. It already looks very much like the Porsche 356. So the history of the two cars is actually quite mixed up.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_356

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_64

It was no coincidence that I picked those two vehicles. :) Although I was more thinking the new model years since both are currently being produced.

It is a terrific salespitch, especially in how it raises the subject of OTA updates while adroitly waltzing you past the obvious worry that a poorly tested OTA update will brick your car.

How does the distribution mechanism in itself affect the quality? It's just a way of getting new software on the car. You can have the exact same standards of quality for an update installed over the air as one installed at a service centre.

The easier it is to update software, the less important that it is bug-free.

Until that bug causes a car to drive unexpectedly into a wall in the interim time until you've sent out a patch. The importance of being bug-free is much more driven by the potential damage caused by a bug than how quickly you can update the software.

Fear monger. What if what if what if... I'm not saying it couldn't happen, I'm just saying that possible new issues are no reason to persist the old issues

This is utter nonsense, "possible new issues" are every reason to carefully evaluate and weight new options.

No. It's a car, and has the power to kill people on software malfunction, making it a critical system. Critical systems are tend to go through a much greater and more robust form of testing.

The destructive potential of a car exceeds that of a lot of handguns one can buy.

There have long been techniques for writing software as formal proofs of correctness. As far as I can tell, they haven't been popular with mainstream programmers because they are simply too different.

That is a really neat bit of fact; but, what does that have to do with what I was talking about? I really would like to know, it sounds like a really important insight, I'm just not sure what train of thought led to that.

No, but "Cars do uncomfortable things at high velocity" is not exactly an edge case.

Right. So, what happens when you are the one in that car, the car that teaches them better?

do you think that the gasoline cars don't have software updates? their engine is nowadays all software controlled and theres a fw update plug, generally under your driving wheel.

and they'll update it when they service the car. how is that software any safer than the OTA?

its not.

I never said that. I was responding to "The easier it is to update software, the less important that it is bug-free."

I would say that the easier it is to update software, the more likely it is to be bug free.

It's easier to test one change in isolation than to try to figure out which of these 20/200/2000 commits broke things.

Except at a service center there's presumably the opportunity to replace the firmware chip or board if they brick it during the update whereas a bad OTA update leaves you little option.

OTOH I'd risk a bad OTA update 1% of the time if it meant avoiding the service center the other 99% of the time. And I'm sure a bad update is just a call and a tow away from a fix at a Tesla service center. Unless you're on a road-trip I guess.

With the march of Moore's Law, it should currently be feasible for automobile controllers to actually run under a kind of hypervisor and keep a copy of the old system so that it can roll back. (Including by request of the owner.)

Yeah - I would not expect Mus to not have the foresight to do this...

I'm supposing that was sarcasm?

You might want to turn off updates during road trips.

How about registering your "garage coordinates" with your car's computer so that it can detect when you're on a road trip and give you the option of installing an update or not? (When you are stopped and have parked the car, of course.)

Exactly. In the same way my computer remembers which monitor I plug into it (work, home office one, home office two, etc) and recalls the configuration of the second screen... the car should know when it is plugged into your home charge port. Various features should only be available when plugged into your home charge port.

You don't really take Teslas for roadtrips(at the moment - when the supercharger network gets finished...maybe)

They could make the previous firmware easily restorable - like the BIOS on post-2008 computers - all of them have a shadow copy that can be restored if the new BIOS does not work. Hold two buttons and start the car or something :-)

I feel like you've uncovered a horror movie plot from the future. Teen girls take off on a road trip in their Tesla Model Z, when an unfortunately timed OTA update leaves them stranded in a land of backwoods hillbillies... with secrets they'd rather stay secret.

Cue dueling banjos?

For one thing, an OTA update mechanism is obviously more subject to third-party spoofing than an update delivered by physical ethernet from the dealership.

(BTW, do Teslas apply OTA updates while the car is underway, or store them up for application when parked? If the former, then applying even a correct update to a car in motion could have all sorts of nasty consequences if it resulted in a sudden change to, say, response characteristics of the suspension or brakes.)

Is that true though? I mean, in my mind OTA makes it a given that the firmware is going to be fully signed and the channel will be fully authenticated. Whereas if a dealer is installing it, they could dismiss concerns with "we trust our service technicians." Seems the latter opens the door to a lot of social engineering possibilities.

But I was responding to a claim of the update being "poorly tested", not insecure. That's orthogonal to it being over the air. A poorly tested update delivered through a service center can also brick your car.

I'm sorry, but no. No, most manufacturers update processes aren't actually secure in any meaningful way. Tesla's OTA process seems to use (I've not checked it myself) web standards, encryption, and signatures to verify that the OTA update is correct. The "Physical ethernet cable" that is used by traditional manufacturers can be done by any hobo on the street, in pretty much the same time. It's really only a matter of time before a script-kiddie-ready device that you plug-in and starts the car shows up; There's no security, no signature verification, etc. on the traditional manufacturers updates.

Source please regarding teslas OTA process.

Here's a pretty good summary from someone who sniffed the WiFi traffic from a Tesla doing an OTA update: http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/22294-Sniffing...

"do Teslas apply OTA updates while the car is underway"

Even your cellphone doesn't update when it's 'under way', what makes you wonder a moving automobile will? If you hazard a guess as to how OTA's are applied to automobiles, I would guess it'll be in Parked, plugged in, and prompted to update by pressing an "Accept & Update" button.

There are realtime kernels that can update the apps, the OS, and install a new kernel without dropping a beat. VisualWorks Smalltalk had a system for loading code into a shadow of the running class hierarchy, then atomically committing the code changes. If you defined some functions for the transformation of existing objects, you could start a transaction in one version, then finish it in another.

We keep forgetting that lots of "advanced" features were actually invented decades ago.

No, of course it does not apply the update while under way. When there's a firmware update available you get a nice big dialog box telling you so and button that says "would you like install tonight at [3 AM]". You can change the time or even cancel the update.

Furthermore, the message tells you it won't install unless the car is plugged in or has a certain level of charge.

> a poorly tested OTA update will brick your car

This is possibly true (though I'd be surprised if they didn't have serious precautions in place to prevent a total firmware brick, even fairly cheap electronics are difficult to really brick these days, with multistage/multipartition bootloaders and such).

However, given the amazingly large amount of costly meatspace work they would cause themselves by sending out an OTA that bricks cars, I'm sure they are well motivated to avoid that possibility.

a poorly tested OTA update will brick your car

It should be possible now to have a rollback function built into engine controllers.

Yeah. I am completely uninterested in owning a vehicle which is 0wned by the manufacturer.

whats the difference? 20% of Americans lease their cars from manufacturers right now, when you lease something by its nature you don't own it. Another 60% make use of financing when they buy, in which case the bank owns your car.

If you are trying to make an argument about control then make it and maybe give us some more information than just the conclusion of your thoughts.

Sorry if my reference was unclear - I meant "0wned" in the hacker sense, in that ultimate control rests not with you, the owner, but with the manufacturer, who in the case of Tesla can apparently just pump new code out which your car will install. That seems seriously creepy and weird to me. When I buy a car, its previous owner should have no further control over it. OTA updates for a car sound really wrong.

Here is the changelog: http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showwiki.php?title=Model%20S%... These changes sound worthwhile to me, even if the mechanism is creepy.

Also just think; how long did it take for the first iphone jailbreaks to come out, cydia for your car. Alternately replaceable ROM's for your car a la android. Where there is a closed eco system there are 100 people just staring at their computers until they figure out how to break it wide open.

If the separation between the UI and the backend electronics (the stuff that would be critical to safety) was strong enough, Tesla could even embrace a hackable UI portion of their system. It would be up to you if the Bluetooth phone worked, or if the climate controls worked, or if any other feature worked on the main display. (I assume the cluster display would be controlled by a different virtualized process.)

Of course Tesla would still supply a standard UI that the vast majority of people would use, but it could be forked on Github if you preferred. (I assume that third-party apps would be separated.)

For all the 'speculation' about Apple merging with Tesla, acquiring a significant portion of Blackberry/QNX would be a better choice. Detroit could end up buying their interactivity from a subsidiary of Tesla.

cydia for your car.

Just what my car is missing, fifty thousand anime ringtones and a SNES emulator with all-you-can-eat ROMs.

Yeah definitely, the whole statement played alot more sarcastic if you were sitting with me in the office.

You always have the choice whether to install updates. If you don't want the update, just decline it.

If you don't trust the manufacturer and their software, why would you think declining an update would prevent them from "0wning" you?

Enjoy your horse, then... but only if you're an atheist. :-P

I have an old car, which has a little bit of non-upgradeable firmware in its ECU, and a motorcycle, which has no electronics more complicated than the turn-signal flasher relay. Even an electric car doesn't have to be built with some crazy upgradeable touch-screen computer; it could just be a car.

GM's latest recall (faulty ignition switch) killed 303 people and covers 1.6 millions vehicles; I think they'd love to have an OTA update method right now, even with the possibility of "bricking" the vehicle.

http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-autos-303-dea...

Don't know if an OTA update would fix what is essentially a mechanical problem.

If it cut the ignition and effectively bricked the car the 303 dead and their family and friends would be pretty stoked right now.

A poorly performed service at a dealers will brick your car too.

We trust the manufacturer to correctly service our cars, manually or OTA.

Don't even have to call it a "salespitch". A good product will sell itself. And it's quite clear a Tesla is a good product.

Point taken, but then again - it really is a salespitch in what is supposed to be a statement on a political issue.

He's done a very good job of spinning around the publicity for an improved public opinion of Tesla. Impressive.

The man is nothing if not a smooth salesperson.

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