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> no, they can't lock it down to 3080 level 3 years later with a software update I think the problem is that there are 2 different types of "can't": can't as i

> no, they can't lock it down to 3080 level 3 years later with a software update I think the problem is that there are 2 different types of "can't": can't as in technologically impossible, and can't as in legally disallowed. In the past, the former was usually the case. Vendors literally could not technologically take away features because things either were not controlled by software or software could not tell the hardware apart because there were no unique identifiers. Because of this nobody really pushed for the legal protections, and as such they do not exist today (at best you _might_ be able to claim misrepresentation by the previous owner and get a return or refund, like if someone sells a LHR card as if it were non-LHR. But with a large purchase like a car, that would be costly time and money wise). > Tesla should not have been able to do this, period. Yeah, morally, but we need to start working to make this guaranteed legally. As it is now, "Nvidia sends me a 3080Ti as a replacement (because maybe they don't have any 3080 in stock) then no, they can't lock it down to 3080 level 3 years later with a software update" is totally allowed. Heck, they could even cut down all legitimate 3080Tis to what would be 3080 or even 1060 performance via drivers after 3 years and you'd be able to do nothing besides complain on social media -- you still have exactly the amount of hardware sold, and they never promised any performance levels (just check their site, you only get things like compute units, clock speed, ram etc. not performance guarantees like FLOPs or FPS)

zozbot234 4y ago
> I think the problem is that there are 2 different types of "can't": can't as in technologically impossible, and can't as in legally disallowed. Exactly. Bait and switch is legally disallowed, even when technically possible.
- jabbany 4y ago
  Actually, it isn't bait and switch at all. Unless Tesla advertised the upgraded capacity explicitly after the service, you are not entitled to anything. This is why things like consumer CPUs and GPUs do not advertise a guaranteed level of performance (they only state things like clock speeds, core counts, memory etc.) -- they are not liable if performance gets better or worse down the line. There is no distinction between, say, "games moved to a new API and now old cards are slow" and "we made our new drivers make old cards slow on purpose because we want to sell more new cards". Companies don't do this because it's bad press if found out (which is why there's this whole Twitter thread), not because they are legally required to (at least in the US).
  - jtbayly 4y ago
    Did you read the post? It said it was a 90.
    - jabbany 4y ago
      Actually it didn't. The post said the battery had a 90 badge and the car reported capacity as if it were 90. Neither of these are direct claims by Tesla that an "upgrade" happened. Some 2060s also have dies marked for 2080s that are then fused (re: badging doesn't imply performance). Similarly, you could potentially overclock a GPU and end up having measured performance that matched a higher model (re: car reported capacity). In order for the upgrade to have legally applied, they'd actually need to have stated that it was indeed intended as an upgrade and came with new guarantees that matched the higher performing model. Based on reading the post, this never happened thus the whole problem. If this did happen, the new owned could just produce the documentation for the upgrade and it would be open-and-shut resolved.
      - gambiting 4y ago
        No I don't think I agree. To use a different example someone brought up - imagine your CPU breaks in your laptop. You send it to the manufacturer, and they replace it with a higher model CPU because <reasons> - cool, right? You sell it advertised with that better CPU, then the next owner has to send it in for another, completely unrelated repair, and the manufacturer then says "oh we noticed the last repair fitted more powerful CPU than intended, so we removed it and fitted the original spec CPU". That wouldn't be just immoral, that would be actual theft. The matter of fact is, after the warranty repair the guy was given a car with a bigger battery and the bigger capacity enabled in software. Whether Tesla intended to do this or not, is completely and utterly irrelevant - it was his to keep and sell. Now Tesla taking this away should be(but probably isn't) illegal. You have a product with a feature X, Tesla removed that feature and in fact holds it ransom for payment - the fact that they never intended to install it is irrelevant. To use a different example again - imagine you buy a new car and the factory made a mistake and fitted an extra option that you didn't order. Is the manufacturer in the right to remove that part during your next service?
thereddaikon 4y ago
>Heck, they could even cut down all legitimate 3080Tis to what would be 3080 or even 1060 performance via drivers after 3 years and you'd be able to do nothing besides complain on social media -- you still have exactly the amount of hardware sold, and they never promised any performance levels (just check their site, you only get things like compute units, clock speed, ram etc. not performance guarantees like FLOPs or FPS) They can't legally do that now either. Apple was challenged in court for doing something similar and lost. There's already legal precedent. The problem is while that can't do that legally, they can do it technically and the path to recourse for the individual is difficult and often not worth it. Which means they can usually get away with it. We need a way for the legal system do deal with these kinds of things that don't involve actually going to the over worked and too expensive courts to settle it.
- jabbany 4y ago
  Assuming this refers to Batterygate, the loss was only in the EU where they do have better consumer protections. They actually settled in the US to avoid setting precedent...
- dimitrios1 4y ago
  > We need a way for the legal system do deal with these kinds of things that don't involve actually going to the over worked and too expensive courts to settle it. Arbitration? Could also gather a class. Unless if we are saying the argument is we shouldn't have to do these things. I agree, this is true. We also don't have to purchase Teslas if they indeed do these types of things on the regular.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- thrown_22 4y ago
  It's called small claims court.
  - account42 4y ago
    That might be worth for the $4500 Tesla downgrade but for the 3080 Ti vs. 3080 example you are probably going to spend more in court fees and wasted time than you are going to get unless small claims in your jurisdiction somehow lets you claim compensation for those too.
MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago
> Yeah, morally, but we need to start working to make this guaranteed legally. I'm not sure I disagree with you, but the invocation of the word "morally" here really reminds me of the software licensing debates from twenty-something years ago. Twenty years later most people seem resigned on the software licensing issue (although I doubt their opinion has changed), and they seemed resigned on limiting their ability to run custom software on hardware they paid for (jailbreaking an Apple phone), but there is still plenty of grumbling for software that limits access to hardware features. Tesla limiting the battery capacity is not really different from Apple limiting which OS's you can install on their hardware. Unless I'm missing something?
- jabbany 4y ago
  Yeah, there's no logical distinction, only a moral one. Imagine 3 scenarios: Company A rolls out a new mandatory update to a phone that addresses a CPU vulnerability, and to compensate for the reduced performance, overclocks the CPU so now your battery life is 20% shorter. Company B rolls out a new mandatory update to a phone that improves the battery management so phones do not shut down unexpectedly. However, due to lack of hardware battery reporting when the device was built, they could only estimate the capacity based on the phone's age and natural battery degradation. This causes older phones to have 20% shorter battery life, even though some batteries that were not used as hard could have supported longer. Company C rolls out a new mandatory update to a phone that detects the phones age and reserves 20% battery capacity on older phones, forcing them to have 20% shorter battery life so users are incentivized to upgrade. The end result is the same, a phone with worse battery life, but we don't see all of them to be morally the same. The only real difference is the human intent behind it, which is why we probably eventually need regulations that make sure companies should justify that they have a reasonably good intent if challenged. Getting this right is very hard -- you don't want to overburden companies from frivolous cases, but you also want regulations to be effective so they can't just handwave them away.
  - datavirtue 4y ago
    Too much pedantry. If it doesn't benefit the consumer unequivocally, don't fucking do it.
shadowgovt 4y ago
Indeed. This is recapitulation of the old fight Intel got themselves into trying to implement market discrimination via selling chips that could be overclocked but setting them to underclock because it was cheaper to sell all the same chip and then underclock the ones that didn't pass their performance tests in the warehouse (or even that did, but they didn't have enough low-end chips in the pipeline) then it was to physically make multiple different dies of high and low clock chips. Tesla installed a 90 battery because it was easier and faster to do that than wait around for a 60 battery to show up in the distribution pipeline. They then let the customer take advantage of the fact that they had given them an "overclocked" battery. Trying to force price discrimination at this point is at the very least a bad look and may actually be a violation of the law regarding principle of second sale.
- jabbany 4y ago
  Yeah. It does remind me of things like heated seat subscriptions for some other brands. IIRC there you had 2 models, both with the same heated seat hardware, but if you paid for the feature outright during purchase, it will be enabled perpetually even after any resale. But the subscription model would require the subscription be re-applied by the new buyer. And, possibly, if you resold the remaining subscription time would not transfer (?).
runnerup 4y ago
Three types: The person you're responding to meant "can't" as is "socially disallowed".
- jabbany 4y ago
  "Socially disallowed" is not a thing that can be implied through "can't" though, as that's just a convention and courtesy. OP probably would like to have the legal guarantee, but it's a fight that's still in-progress.
  - JadeNB 4y ago
    > "Socially disallowed" is not a thing that can be implied through "can't" though …. You are actually implicitly doing it right there! A slight re-wording of your post is "'Socially disallowed' can't be implied through 'can't'" … meaning that it is socially/linguistically unable to be so implied (though I disagree), not legally or technically so. And of course there are tons of other examples—when I say that "you can't just [do that thing]", I very often mean it is socially unacceptable to do it, not that it is illegal or technically impossible to do it.
    - jabbany 4y ago
      I mean if the goal is "Socially disallowed" it should be "shouldn't". "Can't" implies some kind of enforcement/compelling force preventing that, either from nature, or some authority (a nation state, a workplace superior, a parent of a child etc.). As much as we might want it, society doesn't act as an authority for this kind of stuff...
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        Social sanction is an enforcement mechanism.
Accujack 4y ago
>Yeah, morally, but we need to start working to make this guaranteed legally. Good luck with that. The main reason it isn't illegal is the people who have been in charge of the Federal government are too old to understand computers. They've never updated most laws for the computer age, which is why it's legal to eavesdrop on someone's e-mail but not their paper mail, why corporations aggregating huge amounts of data together to know more about their customers than the customers know is legal, and why it's legal for Tesla to do what they did here. Get the money, geriatrics and religion out of the US government and make it functional again, then we can fix things like this. Until then, lotsa luck.
- jabbany 4y ago
  > The main reason it isn't illegal is the people who have been in charge of the Federal government are too old to understand computers. But this is a self-resolving problem. Eventually the older generation will just... you know... die off... The more problematic thing is the whole lobbying situation where money is doing the talking. Consumers in general don't have nearly enough money to be viable as political pressure. What really needs to happen is for consumers to be on comparable footing with industry lobbies in terms of political say, and clearly just relying on voting is not cutting it, since you often have cases where all the candidates are different kinds of bad just backed by different lobbies...
- winternett 4y ago
  Even still, who in their right mind is going to pay a lawyer $10k+ to present a case over a $2k GFX card? Or even do a class action suit just to be mailed a $3 check after the legal fees are worked out... It's all impossibly far from functional.

zozbot234 4y ago

> I think the problem is that there are 2 different types of "can't": can't as in technologically impossible, and can't as in legally disallowed. Exactly. Bait and switch is legally disallowed, even when technically possible.

jabbany 4y ago
Actually, it isn't bait and switch at all. Unless Tesla advertised the upgraded capacity explicitly after the service, you are not entitled to anything. This is why things like consumer CPUs and GPUs do not advertise a guaranteed level of performance (they only state things like clock speeds, core counts, memory etc.) -- they are not liable if performance gets better or worse down the line. There is no distinction between, say, "games moved to a new API and now old cards are slow" and "we made our new drivers make old cards slow on purpose because we want to sell more new cards". Companies don't do this because it's bad press if found out (which is why there's this whole Twitter thread), not because they are legally required to (at least in the US).
- jtbayly 4y ago
  Did you read the post? It said it was a 90.
  - jabbany 4y ago
    Actually it didn't. The post said the battery had a 90 badge and the car reported capacity as if it were 90. Neither of these are direct claims by Tesla that an "upgrade" happened. Some 2060s also have dies marked for 2080s that are then fused (re: badging doesn't imply performance). Similarly, you could potentially overclock a GPU and end up having measured performance that matched a higher model (re: car reported capacity). In order for the upgrade to have legally applied, they'd actually need to have stated that it was indeed intended as an upgrade and came with new guarantees that matched the higher performing model. Based on reading the post, this never happened thus the whole problem. If this did happen, the new owned could just produce the documentation for the upgrade and it would be open-and-shut resolved.
    - gambiting 4y ago
      No I don't think I agree. To use a different example someone brought up - imagine your CPU breaks in your laptop. You send it to the manufacturer, and they replace it with a higher model CPU because <reasons> - cool, right? You sell it advertised with that better CPU, then the next owner has to send it in for another, completely unrelated repair, and the manufacturer then says "oh we noticed the last repair fitted more powerful CPU than intended, so we removed it and fitted the original spec CPU". That wouldn't be just immoral, that would be actual theft. The matter of fact is, after the warranty repair the guy was given a car with a bigger battery and the bigger capacity enabled in software. Whether Tesla intended to do this or not, is completely and utterly irrelevant - it was his to keep and sell. Now Tesla taking this away should be(but probably isn't) illegal. You have a product with a feature X, Tesla removed that feature and in fact holds it ransom for payment - the fact that they never intended to install it is irrelevant. To use a different example again - imagine you buy a new car and the factory made a mistake and fitted an extra option that you didn't order. Is the manufacturer in the right to remove that part during your next service?

thereddaikon 4y ago

>Heck, they could even cut down all legitimate 3080Tis to what would be 3080 or even 1060 performance via drivers after 3 years and you'd be able to do nothing besides complain on social media -- you still have exactly the amount of hardware sold, and they never promised any performance levels (just check their site, you only get things like compute units, clock speed, ram etc. not performance guarantees like FLOPs or FPS) They can't legally do that now either. Apple was challenged in court for doing something similar and lost. There's already legal precedent. The problem is while that can't do that legally, they can do it technically and the path to recourse for the individual is difficult and often not worth it. Which means they can usually get away with it. We need a way for the legal system do deal with these kinds of things that don't involve actually going to the over worked and too expensive courts to settle it.

jabbany 4y ago
Assuming this refers to Batterygate, the loss was only in the EU where they do have better consumer protections. They actually settled in the US to avoid setting precedent...
dimitrios1 4y ago
> We need a way for the legal system do deal with these kinds of things that don't involve actually going to the over worked and too expensive courts to settle it. Arbitration? Could also gather a class. Unless if we are saying the argument is we shouldn't have to do these things. I agree, this is true. We also don't have to purchase Teslas if they indeed do these types of things on the regular.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
thrown_22 4y ago
It's called small claims court.
- account42 4y ago
  That might be worth for the $4500 Tesla downgrade but for the 3080 Ti vs. 3080 example you are probably going to spend more in court fees and wasted time than you are going to get unless small claims in your jurisdiction somehow lets you claim compensation for those too.

MetaWhirledPeas 4y ago

> Yeah, morally, but we need to start working to make this guaranteed legally. I'm not sure I disagree with you, but the invocation of the word "morally" here really reminds me of the software licensing debates from twenty-something years ago. Twenty years later most people seem resigned on the software licensing issue (although I doubt their opinion has changed), and they seemed resigned on limiting their ability to run custom software on hardware they paid for (jailbreaking an Apple phone), but there is still plenty of grumbling for software that limits access to hardware features. Tesla limiting the battery capacity is not really different from Apple limiting which OS's you can install on their hardware. Unless I'm missing something?

jabbany 4y ago
Yeah, there's no logical distinction, only a moral one. Imagine 3 scenarios: Company A rolls out a new mandatory update to a phone that addresses a CPU vulnerability, and to compensate for the reduced performance, overclocks the CPU so now your battery life is 20% shorter. Company B rolls out a new mandatory update to a phone that improves the battery management so phones do not shut down unexpectedly. However, due to lack of hardware battery reporting when the device was built, they could only estimate the capacity based on the phone's age and natural battery degradation. This causes older phones to have 20% shorter battery life, even though some batteries that were not used as hard could have supported longer. Company C rolls out a new mandatory update to a phone that detects the phones age and reserves 20% battery capacity on older phones, forcing them to have 20% shorter battery life so users are incentivized to upgrade. The end result is the same, a phone with worse battery life, but we don't see all of them to be morally the same. The only real difference is the human intent behind it, which is why we probably eventually need regulations that make sure companies should justify that they have a reasonably good intent if challenged. Getting this right is very hard -- you don't want to overburden companies from frivolous cases, but you also want regulations to be effective so they can't just handwave them away.
- datavirtue 4y ago
  Too much pedantry. If it doesn't benefit the consumer unequivocally, don't fucking do it.

shadowgovt 4y ago

Indeed. This is recapitulation of the old fight Intel got themselves into trying to implement market discrimination via selling chips that could be overclocked but setting them to underclock because it was cheaper to sell all the same chip and then underclock the ones that didn't pass their performance tests in the warehouse (or even that did, but they didn't have enough low-end chips in the pipeline) then it was to physically make multiple different dies of high and low clock chips. Tesla installed a 90 battery because it was easier and faster to do that than wait around for a 60 battery to show up in the distribution pipeline. They then let the customer take advantage of the fact that they had given them an "overclocked" battery. Trying to force price discrimination at this point is at the very least a bad look and may actually be a violation of the law regarding principle of second sale.

jabbany 4y ago
Yeah. It does remind me of things like heated seat subscriptions for some other brands. IIRC there you had 2 models, both with the same heated seat hardware, but if you paid for the feature outright during purchase, it will be enabled perpetually even after any resale. But the subscription model would require the subscription be re-applied by the new buyer. And, possibly, if you resold the remaining subscription time would not transfer (?).

runnerup 4y ago

Three types: The person you're responding to meant "can't" as is "socially disallowed".

jabbany 4y ago
"Socially disallowed" is not a thing that can be implied through "can't" though, as that's just a convention and courtesy. OP probably would like to have the legal guarantee, but it's a fight that's still in-progress.
- JadeNB 4y ago
  > "Socially disallowed" is not a thing that can be implied through "can't" though …. You are actually implicitly doing it right there! A slight re-wording of your post is "'Socially disallowed' can't be implied through 'can't'" … meaning that it is socially/linguistically unable to be so implied (though I disagree), not legally or technically so. And of course there are tons of other examples—when I say that "you can't just [do that thing]", I very often mean it is socially unacceptable to do it, not that it is illegal or technically impossible to do it.
  - jabbany 4y ago
    I mean if the goal is "Socially disallowed" it should be "shouldn't". "Can't" implies some kind of enforcement/compelling force preventing that, either from nature, or some authority (a nation state, a workplace superior, a parent of a child etc.). As much as we might want it, society doesn't act as an authority for this kind of stuff...
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      Social sanction is an enforcement mechanism.

Accujack 4y ago

>Yeah, morally, but we need to start working to make this guaranteed legally. Good luck with that. The main reason it isn't illegal is the people who have been in charge of the Federal government are too old to understand computers. They've never updated most laws for the computer age, which is why it's legal to eavesdrop on someone's e-mail but not their paper mail, why corporations aggregating huge amounts of data together to know more about their customers than the customers know is legal, and why it's legal for Tesla to do what they did here. Get the money, geriatrics and religion out of the US government and make it functional again, then we can fix things like this. Until then, lotsa luck.

jabbany 4y ago
> The main reason it isn't illegal is the people who have been in charge of the Federal government are too old to understand computers. But this is a self-resolving problem. Eventually the older generation will just... you know... die off... The more problematic thing is the whole lobbying situation where money is doing the talking. Consumers in general don't have nearly enough money to be viable as political pressure. What really needs to happen is for consumers to be on comparable footing with industry lobbies in terms of political say, and clearly just relying on voting is not cutting it, since you often have cases where all the candidates are different kinds of bad just backed by different lobbies...
winternett 4y ago
Even still, who in their right mind is going to pay a lawyer $10k+ to present a case over a $2k GFX card? Or even do a class action suit just to be mailed a $3 check after the legal fees are worked out... It's all impossibly far from functional.