"Now they are claiming that the eMMC chip, ball-grid soldered to the motherboard, inaccessible without disassembling the dash, and not specifically mentioned in the owner’s manual, should be considered a “wear item”, and thus should not be subject to such scrutiny."
I didn't expect other from a company that is immediately blaming the victim when their self-driving car once again drives somebody into a stationary object or lane divider instead of showing compassion first and launching an investigation later.
As a parent/child the first thing that comes from Tesla is a blog post and public statement on how your loved one allegedly was too stupid to use the car while Tesla goes into technical telemetry to grant themselves absolution.
...Also, while we are not-forgetting... TSLA CEO defended trump calling the country to reopen in the middle of the pandemic, just like other CEOs that sell pillows or something. Funny how we only keep one of them accountable.
I mean, we should have opened up back then. All the curves in all the regions around the globe have basically the exact same shape regardless of restrictions in place. They all peaked right around the same time, and are all falling dramatically at the same time. Sure the numbers might be slightly different, but they are all in the same ballpark per capita. Those with heavy handed restrictions didn’t score 10x or 100x better.. they only did marginally better or often even worse!
It’s almost as if you cannot stop a respiratory virus using extremely barbaric non pharmaceutical interventions.
very few countries had effective social isolation, most like the US were having both the economic and health negative side effects of closing and not closing because leadership was disagreeing on everything. For example, some cities had curfews and closed restaurants, but open airports and counted every business that was not a restaurant as "essential".
But the few countries that did things correctly, like NZ, did have a much better outcome with close to ZERO deaths.
Tesla at no point anywhere advertises they have a full self driving car ready to go. FSD optioned onto the car when you purchase is for "future delivery."
You can buy a car with a full self driving package but they don’t imply they sell full self driving. That’s some mental gymnastics, even if they say it’s for future delivery. After all cars have a limited life span, what good is the package if it isn’t delivered within the life of the car?
Yup. Per Tesla it's unfair to consider eMMC something that should last the lifetime of the car, and entirely fair to sell you FSD that may never work in the lifetime in the car, may never be regulatorily approved, or both.
> The currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous.
It's in the fine print but it's brought up every time you talk about Autopilot and enabling it in the car (it's disabled by default) requires you accept a disclaimer saying that you need to be paying attention at all times.
I understand that they provide a disclaimer, I’m saying they shouldn’t sell it as FSD until they can guarantee FSD will exist within the life of the vehicle.
It seems highly unlikely that Tesla is close to fully autonomous driving. The “Paint it Black” demo was over 4 years ago and we haven’t seen anything better since then. We were supposed to get an autonomous road trip from LA to NY by 2017. The videos that have come out of the FSD beta release make it clear that you couldn’t leave the car without intervention for 30 minutes without a major crash occurring.
Tesla doesn’t even have any autonomous miles to log in California, unlike dozens of other companies including GM and Waymo.
They have gotten better about it, but for a long time they absolutely advertised FSD as mostly complete, and capable of actual unsupervised self-driving. Even after people started pointing out how much of an overt lie the marketing material was, it took a year or so for them to walk it back to something that at least seems to match what you are actually going to get.
Tesla lost the right to call their drive assistance "Autopilot" in Germany because Tesla couldn't stop implying that their cars were already very close to FSD and more capable than they actually are.
Tesla's response is of course self serving. It should be expected from their legal department as a cost control measure. You cannot expect corporations to act benevolently or morally, hence the need for legislation (right to repair, warranty periods set by statute as is done in the EU) and regulation (NHTSA forced Tesla's hand to issue a recall, which they were strongly attempting to avoid).
This disagreement happens often, and I think that's partly because there are two meanings of 'expect': to regard something as likely, or to regard it as the rightful or obligatory standard of behaviour.
If you expect (in the first sense) benevolent corporate behaviour, in the absence of incentives that align benevolence with self-interest, you're generally being naive. But if you expect (in the second sense) benevolent corporate behaviour, and act accordingly, you may be helping to create that alignment -- because corporations and the people who control them usually care about their public image (certainly when it directly affects consumer behaviour), and legislators are usually at least somewhat responsive to public pressure.
So having the first kind of expectation leads to unhelpful complacency; but lacking the second kind of expectation leads to unhelpful cynicism, cashing out as acquiescence to the status quo.
You can't change the people owning or running a corporation, but you can change the rules they operate under.
In this case, though, I don't think the rules should be changed. I'm fairly certain that Tesla is not the first automaker to have come up with this kind of money-saving idea. This has to be well-trodden ground in consumer rights.
In this case, people should vote with their wallets, and the occasional class-action lawsuit, or, if things get too far out of line, expect the same kind of regulator intervention that would happen against any other car company. If regulators would not intervene against any other automaker trying this sort of thing, then I don't think they should intervene against Tesla.
I expect both. We have regulations because oftentimes corporations need a little inspiration to stay honest. And I expect a good corporation to stand behind their product, and not overtly attack their customers at every opportunity. Tesla's culture strongly reflects Elon's personal ethics, and it shows.
why shouldn't they cover their butts when people will look to extort? I'd much prefer a situation where companies take responsibility and customers show grace and courtesy, but that's not the world I live in...
Tesla will actively throw you under the bus to defend themselves.
"His vehicle had warned him about having hands on the steering wheel" (... fourteen minutes prior to the accident).
Leave aside the fact that if you have an accident in your Tesla you will need to go to court to subpoena telemetry data. But they'll happily publish your telemetry data without your (explicit, I know, I know, TOS) agreement if they think they're being painted in a bad light.
And if you disclose information about the vehicle, they'll happily force push neutered/old firmware to your vehicle to hide or prevent such activities, lock you from future upgrades, and disable ethernet and OBD ports in your vehicle.
Or a Douglas Adamsesque approach to right-to-repair, where there's a website with parts you can "order" (except everything down to the most commodity bolt says "Call Tesla" and they will tell you its unavailable to order via the website), that's if you know what parts you need, a process which required making an appointment with Tesla to look at the service manual, several months out, which required a fee, had a time limit, and put you in a room where you were not allowed a computer, phone or camera, just a notepad and pencil), all the while touting their "corporate commitment to transparency" as they pulled out of NHTSB testing.
I wasn't speaking specifically to this situation. The previous comment was about knee jerk legal reactions, which is what I was referring. On that note, flash memory isn't a durable good though.
Can you provide a citation to another automobile with an infotainment system that is only spec'd to last 6 years (due to flash wear)? The one in our 14 year old Toyota SUV is still working without issue.
nope. But I can cite expectations for vehicles' parts that should last longer, but don't. It only takes a viewing of Consumer Reports to see that.
Note that many electronics are designed to last 10 years (i.e. electromigration). Obviously, use cases matter (24 hour use, high temp or lots of heat cycles).
As an owner there are times when you just shake your head at some of their decisions. I like my TM3, I won the quality raffle and have no issues, but I do worry when Tesla takes a stance about a part like they did here.
Plus combined with the fact Musk was forced to acknowledge that Tesla did not offer anything for FSD on trade ins and "will look into it" makes me wonder just how much they expect customers to put up with.
Still it beats out my previous Ford and even my Infiniti in both reliability and oddly interior quality. Paint wise the Infiniti was far better and paint on my Ford was far worse. Both my Ford and Infiniti also had more than one real recall and a few visits to fix stupid things.
"Now they are claiming that the eMMC chip, ball-grid soldered to the motherboard, inaccessible without disassembling the dash, and not specifically mentioned in the owner’s manual, should be considered a “wear item”, and thus should not be subject to such scrutiny."