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The whole idea of an internet connected car that constantly 'phones home' without any easy way to bypass or disable is kind of mind boggling to me. I don't und
by grawprog 6y ago
The whole idea of an internet connected car that constantly 'phones home' without any easy way to bypass or disable is kind of mind boggling to me.
I don't understand why after this people weren't in an uproar.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/business/tesla-battery-irma-upgrade.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/business/tesla-battery-ir...
When Tesla decided generously to temporarily grant residents fleeing a hurricane an upgrade that allowed full usage of their battery.
People's lives were literally in the hands of an optional, upsold firmware softlock.
The fact that it's come to that is completely appalling. When the manufacturer of your car has the power to save your life because if they didn't they'd suffer bad publicity is disgusting.
And the fact is, the only reason why hackers are able to gain access to vehicles, the only reason for any of it is because companies have decided cars need to be a service provided by them so they can keep making money after the initial purchase.
People buy cars so they can travel freely without relying on others. Making cars reliant on a third party server for something as basic as the ingition goes against the entire premise of owning a car.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago>People's lives were literally in the hands of an optional, upsold firmware softlock People's lives are literally in the hands of optional firmware softlock all the time in medical devices that you can find in hospitals. If the hospital doesn't pay for x feature or for support technicians to service them, then some people could actually die. Saving lives or not, you can't blame a company for not giving you for free features you haven't paid for.
- calvano915 6y agoAlso look to Boeing 737 Max crashes caused by the "base model" lacking relatively cheap safety indicators and redundant sensors.
- letitbeirie 6y agoDidn't the option just cover the AOA disagree indicator? AFAIK even the planes with that option only read from the pilot flying's AOA sensor before their fix was implemented.
- rainbowzootsuit 6y agoNot to mention that that indicator isn't a physical light with hardware and wiring, but merely an on-screen icon on the central display panel.
- jerry1979 6y agoI blame companies for not doing what I want all the time. If you don't complain, you have no right to complain.
- dmitryminkovsky 6y ago> If you don't complain, you have no right to complain. A beautifully stated maxim I’ve never been able to articulate. As an immigrant from the USSR to the US, I believe this mentality is what separates the First World from the Second.
- totalZero 6y ago> If you don't complain, you have no right to complain. Damn this is heavy.
- ChrisRR 6y agoExactly. There's so many expensive treatments, devices, software, etc. that don't get offered to everyone. Unfortunately everything has a price My workplace is currently struggling to sell a more expensive device, where in the majority of the cases it will offer no advantage over the original device, but in some cases it will be life saving. Naturally, many health services are dragging their feet on wanting to buy our device.
- futuretaint 6y agoI for one am glad Tesla did the right thing and were pro life saving. Thats what makes Elon Musk an of the box thinker.
- AndrewUnmuted 6y agoThe Tesla softlock was not a feature, though, it was an artificial limitation being placed upon the operational capacity of your car. It's like Dell selling somebody a laptop with two of its eight processor cores turned off, and then forcing them to pay a fee in order to turn the cores back on. I agree with the OP that it is a disgusting business practice at best, and totally indefensible.
- heliodor 6y agoSo companies are not allowed to differentiate product models through software, only through hardware?
- AndrewUnmuted 6y agoI don't think a two or three line IF statement really qualifies as differentiating a product through software.
- fsociety 6y agoSeems like a waste of resources to build a car capable of 300-400 miles but software lock it to 200 miles. Ideally not okay but obviously we live in a profit seeking world and Elon and co are no different.
- andrewflnr 6y agoI blame companies for creating pricing structures that deny people the full use of hardware they supposedly own. I know it's standard practice. Lots of standard practices are bullshit, and this is one of them.
- vagrantJin 6y agoWait till you see Apple...oh wait.
- qertoip 6y ago100%.
- PartiallyTyped 6y agoI would like to hijack the comment chain to point to the right to repair movement in agriculture [1]. There will be some hearings in Nebraska [2] about the issue where lobbyists will try to shoot it down again. [1] https://www.agriculture.com/machinery/repair-maintenance/right-to-repair https://www.agriculture.com/machinery/repair-maintenance/rig... [2] https://legiscan.com/NE/bill/LB543/2021 https://legiscan.com/NE/bill/LB543/2021
- thatguy0900 6y agoHmm, that makes me wonder. If right to repair exists, could someone "repair" their tesla in such a way to get full access to their battery legally?
- serf 6y ago>Saving lives or not, you can't blame a company for not giving you for free features you haven't paid for. Who's fault is it? The person who dies because they couldn't afford a firmware unlock which in most cases is a sunk-cost that's locked purely to produce profit? Sorry -- that's too much of an ethical/moral opinion -- and honestly edges near victim-blaming; making lots of money in life isn't something that is guaranteed by any shot. I'm of the opinion that anyone with actionable ability to change a situation -- and then chooses not to act on that ability -- is to blame for the situation progressing. I hope and wish for public companies to attempt to act altruistically -- and the ones that don't should be held responsible by their audiences. The BioMed profit schemes out there are devious and for-profit-engineereed, no doubt about that; commonality doesn't make those practices morally appropriate, though.
- estaseuropano 6y agoUnless you are telling me that tesla sells cars for a loss (like an inkjet printer), the Tesla owners already paid for the feature. It just has been limited for some extra margin which clearly is not essential else the car would not have been sold to begin with. Its plain rent seeking and frankly should be illegal.
- vincnetas 6y agoWalk a mile in manufacturer shoes. Let's say you run a company producing a hardware product. And you invest in developing a software feature which improves your product. It costs money. This software feature also needs tiny modification of original hardware product by replacing couple parts with better ones with price difference of 0.001 cent/per piece . So your options are: Start producing two separate models of you product, greatly complicating supply chain and logistics Discontinue old product and produce only improved version Produce only new HW but introduce software switch, to allow users to keep purchasing cheaper product without new feature, while simultaneously allowing users who need new feature to pay premium to cover your development costs
- oji0hub 6y ago> Saving lives or not, you can't blame a company for not giving you for free features you haven't paid for. Yeah, you can.
- kgwxd 6y agoNon-payment should be handled by the legal system, not back doors built into software.
- pie420 6y agoThat's a really silly and wrong way of looking at it. Tesla has down society and you a great service by including additional capacity in your car above what you payed for. If they choose to let you have it for free, pat on the back for them. If not, then it is no different at all from someone dying in a Ford Focus that was only front wheel drive where all-wheel drive would have saved their lives.
- crocodiletears 6y agoIs the AWD drivetrain included in the base model?
- bjelkeman-again 6y agoNo. It is only a single motor in the SR model.
- userbinator 6y agoby including additional capacity in your car above what you payed for. The batteries have been already manufactured and you physically have them in your possession as they are there in your car; they just chose to artificially cripple their capacity in software. If not, then it is no different at all from someone dying in a Ford Focus that was only front wheel drive where all-wheel drive would have saved their lives. If the FWD version also came with all the parts that the AWD one has, but they were simply disabled in software and only acted as dead weight, people would be just as furious (and no doubt someone would find a way to reenable it.)
- Guvante 6y agoWhile agree the focus metaphor isn't a great one but you are also miss-selling the Tesla situation here. Tesla restricts your battery usage for battery life purposes. This allows them to sell you a vehicle that has a charge matching what they claim while also having a battery life matching what they want it to be. SSDs work similarly. You don't sell 1 TB of SSD storage you sell slightly more than 1 TB worth. Then you wear level between cells to ensure the whole thing lasts a lot longer. (Batteries are nice because losing a cell isn't losing data but the fundamental strategy isn't anti-consumer)
- prostoalex 6y ago> allowed full usage of their battery. I thought on the checkout page Tesla was pretty explicit that they were selling a 75 kWh model with discounts thrown in for artificially software-restricted 60 kWh version. If an ICE brand sold two trims of the same vehicle - the cheaper one with the smaller tank or worse fuel economy, is it as appalling and aren't they endangering the drivers of the budget version?
- jimmyswimmy 6y agoI have trouble putting my finger on exactly why this feels wrong, but to me, the idea of buying a car - buying anything that has hardware in it that I have to pay extra to activate, it just seems wrong. I suppose it's the sense of wastefulness, or perhaps the idea that the extra widget could break and take down other things along with it. Consider how you would do this with a battery. The battery has to have extra cells in order to have extra capacity, and the software allows the user to use or not use the extra cells if you pay for the privilege. But if one of those extra cells fails, the entire battery pack does as well. In your example, the hardware IS configured differently, and there's no sense of waste or increased failure therein. You bought a car with a crappier engine or a smaller tank, and that's what is in it. There's no software key to fix it. Something about the idea of software letting you access hardware you already paid for (even if you didn't pay for the software to use it), just feels wrong.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoOn the other hand, the extra cells give you more wear-leveling, right? So, in theory at least, a 75KWh battery limited to 60KWh has a longer lifetime than the unlocked one.
- KMag 6y agoIt's not wear levelling, but yes, my understanding is that Li-ion batteries still last longer if you don't fully top them up and don't fully discharge them. What kind of warranty does Tesla have on the batteries? Is it conceivable that a firmware change that prevents fully topping up or fully discharging the battery statistically saves Tesla money in its warranty costs?
- ttt0 6y agoI'm sorry, but what the fuck? Who asked for this?
- perryizgr8 6y agoI certainly agree with what you're saying. However, isn't this standard in many devices nowadays? Your iPhone can run any set of instructions, but it is artificially restricted to the subset found in Apple app store. It's the same thing in the car.
- rixed 6y agoIn general it can be assumed that any apparition of software in any piece of hardware is just a case of practical implementation of "organised scarcity". I wonder how long before there is a large enough backlash from customers that "works fully offline" becomes a marketing label.
- PartiallyTyped 6y agoAm I the only one that remembers cars getting hijacked *while driving* because core systems were connected with the entertainment system [1]? The whole 'lets smartify everything', 'control everything' or even 'collect usage information' is exhausting. We have collectively given up our freedom in the name of 'comfort' and often for features that nobody really needed but became mainstream. [1] https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/ https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...