5 ms·

The most disturbing part of this, for me, is this line in the very first tweet: "... caused almost the entire fleet to reboot loop ..." I am not interested in

by rsync 8y ago

The most disturbing part of this, for me, is this line in the very first tweet: "... caused almost the entire fleet to reboot loop ..." I am not interested in being part of someone's fleet. The fact that they use this language at all to describe an end-user who has purchased an automobile suggests that their expectations and my own - of what it means to purchase and operate a car - are in deeply (possibly dangerously) mis-aligned.

illumin8 8y ago
Your post conveniently ignores the fact that over the last 20 years cars and trucks have become physical delivery vehicles for software. In fact, the complexity of the software running in any manufacturer's modern car dwarfs the complexity of the hardware in the car itself. So, if you have a car manufactured any time in the last 25 years, you're running software that hasn't likely been patched in years, has a ton of unknown defects and bugs, and might kill you if you hit an edge case that wasn't tested before it was shipped to you. I much prefer Tesla's ability to fix software defects remotely than driving a defective piece of software. For example, I had a 2009 Hyundai Genesis that worked great until I had about 75,000 miles on it, then it mysteriously started losing engine power and I had the entire computer reboot a couple times while I was driving. Imagine your entire instrument cluster going dark and losing engine, braking, and steering power while you're traveling 75 mph on the freeway. The Hyundai dealership said the only way I could get a software/firmware upgrade was by purchasing a $500 maps DVD and having them update my system manually, which takes several hours, for which I'd have to pay one of their trained technicians to do it. Fuck them. I vowed after that to never buy a car again that can't receive OTA updates. Would you buy a smart phone that can never get security fixes or updates? Given the tech in our cars now, why would you buy a car that wouldn't either?
- marssaxman 8y ago
  This is why I do not have a car that was manufactured any time in the last 25 years. You can't trust software, and you definitely can't trust software developers.
  - coatmatter 8y ago
    This is probably going to sound outlandish to the majority, but I take it a step further and don't trust any car (+driver), period. Including drivers with massive amounts of experience or skill (even the best have failed spectacularly). So what do I do instead? I mostly cycle and ride where motorists don't drive and set the largest possible safety margins. I recognise this is not immediately practical for everyone but I'm fortunately set up in the right place with the right knowledge to achieve this. So far this year, I've been in a car four times, a train twice and a plane twice. Musk is pushing for a world where everyone is dependent upon a form of low-occupancy heavy motorised transportation (including wanting to reinvent the train). Naturally, I recoil at this and so should more. More cars will never save the world.
    - heurist 8y ago
      We already live in that world (or country, at least). Your situation is an outlier, unfortunately. I'd personally rather have those cars be electric than burning fossil fuels, and if anyone can reinvent mass transit and make it available to people outside of major cities I'd happily take a train.
  - kalleboo 8y ago
    So you're trading off the theoretical unsafeness of software (how many car accidents have been caused by faulty software?) against the huge improvements in crash safety (engineered crumple zones, AEB, etc) in the past 25 years
  - badpun 8y ago
    If you can't trust software, then how do you handle money? Cash only? No online purchases?
    - marssaxman 8y ago
      I pick my battles. That area doesn't worry me much.
mfarris 8y ago
"Fleet" is longstanding car industry lingo. Not something Tesla dreamed up to keep you under their boot. Source: Father worked in car industry. All of my neighbors, too. Pretty much everyone I knew and then, eventually, me... albeit tangentially.
- rsync 8y ago
  ""Fleet" is longstanding car industry lingo. Not something Tesla dreamed up to keep you under their boot." I am aware of that and I hear that terminology used by rental car companies and equipment dealers, etc. My objection is to what I hear as a subtle difference - the post-sale automobile to a private, end-user is still referred to as belonging to their fleet - as if one's ownership and use of the car were a minor detail. I dislike this subtle shift in language and attitude.
  - monocasa 8y ago
    It's not a shift. It's the language used by the rest of the industry including manufacturers, not just private owners.
    - coatmatter 8y ago
      What's being scrutinised here is the difference of being forced to be a part of a fleet as opposed to separately owning and controlling your own fleet. If you buy a Tesla, you will not be able to control access to it without limiting its normal set of features. If you buy a normal bicycle, you always have full direct control of it. No software updates, no data uploading, no tracking. Normally fleet is reserved to meaning ownership in the management sense, not the micromanagement sense. Even a Navy fleet has autonomy within. Not so with Tesla software by default. This could be rms territory. Free vs non-free, or even Airbus vs Boeing, etc.
      - monocasa 8y ago
        I mean sure, but this isn't some encroachment by Tesla is the point I'm trying to make. At any car company for decades the set of cars for which you're currently responsible for sustaining engineering is known as a fleet. And I think it's fair for the engineers that have responsibility to have an internal sense of partial ownership.
ttsda 8y ago
I believe the author meant a server fleet.

by rsync 8y ago

illumin8 8y ago

Your post conveniently ignores the fact that over the last 20 years cars and trucks have become physical delivery vehicles for software. In fact, the complexity of the software running in any manufacturer's modern car dwarfs the complexity of the hardware in the car itself. So, if you have a car manufactured any time in the last 25 years, you're running software that hasn't likely been patched in years, has a ton of unknown defects and bugs, and might kill you if you hit an edge case that wasn't tested before it was shipped to you. I much prefer Tesla's ability to fix software defects remotely than driving a defective piece of software. For example, I had a 2009 Hyundai Genesis that worked great until I had about 75,000 miles on it, then it mysteriously started losing engine power and I had the entire computer reboot a couple times while I was driving. Imagine your entire instrument cluster going dark and losing engine, braking, and steering power while you're traveling 75 mph on the freeway. The Hyundai dealership said the only way I could get a software/firmware upgrade was by purchasing a $500 maps DVD and having them update my system manually, which takes several hours, for which I'd have to pay one of their trained technicians to do it. Fuck them. I vowed after that to never buy a car again that can't receive OTA updates. Would you buy a smart phone that can never get security fixes or updates? Given the tech in our cars now, why would you buy a car that wouldn't either?

marssaxman 8y ago
This is why I do not have a car that was manufactured any time in the last 25 years. You can't trust software, and you definitely can't trust software developers.
- coatmatter 8y ago
  This is probably going to sound outlandish to the majority, but I take it a step further and don't trust any car (+driver), period. Including drivers with massive amounts of experience or skill (even the best have failed spectacularly). So what do I do instead? I mostly cycle and ride where motorists don't drive and set the largest possible safety margins. I recognise this is not immediately practical for everyone but I'm fortunately set up in the right place with the right knowledge to achieve this. So far this year, I've been in a car four times, a train twice and a plane twice. Musk is pushing for a world where everyone is dependent upon a form of low-occupancy heavy motorised transportation (including wanting to reinvent the train). Naturally, I recoil at this and so should more. More cars will never save the world.
  - heurist 8y ago
    We already live in that world (or country, at least). Your situation is an outlier, unfortunately. I'd personally rather have those cars be electric than burning fossil fuels, and if anyone can reinvent mass transit and make it available to people outside of major cities I'd happily take a train.
- kalleboo 8y ago
  So you're trading off the theoretical unsafeness of software (how many car accidents have been caused by faulty software?) against the huge improvements in crash safety (engineered crumple zones, AEB, etc) in the past 25 years
- badpun 8y ago
  If you can't trust software, then how do you handle money? Cash only? No online purchases?
  - marssaxman 8y ago
    I pick my battles. That area doesn't worry me much.

mfarris 8y ago

"Fleet" is longstanding car industry lingo. Not something Tesla dreamed up to keep you under their boot. Source: Father worked in car industry. All of my neighbors, too. Pretty much everyone I knew and then, eventually, me... albeit tangentially.

rsync 8y ago
""Fleet" is longstanding car industry lingo. Not something Tesla dreamed up to keep you under their boot." I am aware of that and I hear that terminology used by rental car companies and equipment dealers, etc. My objection is to what I hear as a subtle difference - the post-sale automobile to a private, end-user is still referred to as belonging to their fleet - as if one's ownership and use of the car were a minor detail. I dislike this subtle shift in language and attitude.
- monocasa 8y ago
  It's not a shift. It's the language used by the rest of the industry including manufacturers, not just private owners.
  - coatmatter 8y ago
    What's being scrutinised here is the difference of being forced to be a part of a fleet as opposed to separately owning and controlling your own fleet. If you buy a Tesla, you will not be able to control access to it without limiting its normal set of features. If you buy a normal bicycle, you always have full direct control of it. No software updates, no data uploading, no tracking. Normally fleet is reserved to meaning ownership in the management sense, not the micromanagement sense. Even a Navy fleet has autonomy within. Not so with Tesla software by default. This could be rms territory. Free vs non-free, or even Airbus vs Boeing, etc.
    - monocasa 8y ago
      I mean sure, but this isn't some encroachment by Tesla is the point I'm trying to make. At any car company for decades the set of cars for which you're currently responsible for sustaining engineering is known as a fleet. And I think it's fair for the engineers that have responsibility to have an internal sense of partial ownership.

ttsda 8y ago

I believe the author meant a server fleet.