Wow first time heard someone capable of repair a Tesla. I always was assuming Tesla cars are designed to be hostile to repair outside their own factory (partially due to inherent complexity, and market strategy as well).
Also huge respect to his belief that things people bought should always be repairable by the owner (with some reasonable learned skills).
Doesn't a Tesla have fewer parts than a conventional vehicle? If so, I'd imagine that they're simpler to fix as long as the person knows what they're doing / is willing to learn.
What parts would require more fancy equipment? Induction motors are pretty dead simple and probably built to lower tolerances than the average ICE. An EV has more reliance on fancy electronics, which would be hard to replicate, but that applies to any modern day car too. Think of the engine ECU that controls fuel flow, spark timing, etc. You aren't going to pick one of those up at sparkfun.
Think of a Tesla as a laptop computer with a very large battery bank, some powerful inverters and electric motors.
It has all the complexities of a cluster on wheels, tons of software systems and as a result is hard to diagnose properly.
So the first 'fancy equipment' you will need is a set of proper diagnostics equipment, which is - given the complexity involved - most likely supplied by the manufacturer or not at all.
What Tesla could do - but which they would hate because it is part of their competitive edge - is to release full schematics and software listings, but no other ordinary car manufacturer does this, nor are they required to by law.
Good thing too because if the Toyota ECU was anything to go by the industry would look pretty dumb.
You’re not going to be replacing piston seals or doing a transmission rebuild on one, but they’re complex and highly computerized. High voltage power electronics are probably quite exciting to work with, too.
Then the proper thing to do is provide relevant safety procedures in the service manual. Combustion cars certainly have plenty of hazards (toxic and flammable liquids, poison gas, rotating machinery, and, yes, high voltages, too).
Treating electric cars as "these are mystery devices that must be repaired only by us, because reasons" does the world an enormous disservice.
I see this belief (that things people bought should always be repairable by the owner) by many but I always feel it’s extremely self-centered. IMO it’s reckless to think this way about repairing complex systems that can affect others.
Repairing something that you own that only affects you is different from repairing something like a car that could affect others. As a completely fictional example: incorrectly repairing a complex brake system could pose a danger to other drivers and lead to an -otherwise avoidable- accident.
EDIT: some responses are focusing too closely on the example of brakes- perhaps it’s not the best way to illustrate my point. Say, instead, your engine broke or your self driving car’s software was malfunctioning. Should you still have the right to repair?
Several years ago I incorrectly replaced brakes on my car. Only one caliper failed and there was plenty of stopping power and warning that something was wrong. It was loud as hell!
The mechanic at the garage told me that torquing nuts is tricky because if you under torque the nuts come loose. But sometimes they rust and you need to torque them more than the manufacturer spec. In that case he said that could also lead to failure. He said "we've all been there" to my glum attitude about screwing up the repair.
Repairs are not always simple. Hopefully there are other protections in place if one component fails.
The problem is that taking your line of thought to its logical conclusion, we end up with a dystopian society where the bulk of the knowledge, power, and control is concentrated in a tiny minority and also enforced by such.
Everything you do affects everyone else, that's no excuse to take away freedom.
I don’t believe that’s the only logical conclusion. Perhaps there should be some base requirement for people who want to repair something- be it a certification or insurance requirement.
There could definitely be degrees of freedom for repair on specific items, much like there’s a degree of freedom of usage for particular items.
The right to own should not necessarily imply a right to repair for all types of items.
> The right to own should not necessarily imply a right to repair for all types of items.
the right to repair doesn't necessarily mean you have to do it yourself.
To me, the right to repair means the right for a 3rd party to completely understand the innards of a piece of equipment. This way, the manufacturer cannot lock you in, nor can they charge exorbinant prices for repairs. It's really and extension of a free-market. Compete on quality and price, rather than by monopoly or coercion.
That's the best approach, certify him to recycle Tesla's. Make him document what he's done and that his repaired cars pass the same sorts of tests that new Tesla's do. Then require him to have insurance so if something goes wrong because of his efforts then he pays the first two million of any settlement. But let him buy new parts though.
Yep, that would be the ideal way. OTOH, will never happen because there is no such certification system in place even for new cars (and not only Tesla's). New cars pass the homologation process where a few specimen are subjected to various tests (e.g. crash testing and emission tests) and a lot of paperwork is done by the manufacturer certifying compliance with various regulations.
That's not realistic for a repaired car. You can't crash-test a one-off vehicle which is the only way to determine structural soundness of some of the repairs he is doing.
That's also why such car "recycling" is generally not done. If anything major in the chassis/body is damaged, the car is usually a total loss - it is not economical or even possible to safely repair it and nobody could guarantee the safety of it.
The best he can do is to become an authorized mechanic for Tesla (not sure whether Tesla has such program, never owned one). But then he would likely be legally unable to use salvaged parts in his repairs, only new ones.
Yes, it should imply a right to repair for all types of items.
Mind you, right to repair is a separate question from right to use on public streets. The former is between the manufacturer and the owner, the latter is between the owner and the public/the state. There may be additional requirements to be allowed to use a repaired vehicle on public streets, but the important point is that that is none of the manufacturer's business, the requirements are set by the state, not by the manufacturer.
There may be additional requirements to be allowed to use a repaired vehicle on public streets, but the important point is that that is none of the manufacturer's business, the requirements are set by the state, not by the manufacturer.
Indeed. This is usually called "roadworthiness" and varies between states. In fact, this is why the whole custom/car modding/hot rod culture can exist --- and from what I've seen, it's not been detrimental to overall safety. The vast majority of deaths come from idiotic/drunk/distracted drivers, not problems with modded/repaired cars.
One reasonable solution is to pass laws that any given car can only be repaired [1] by someone certified by the manufacturer AND the manufacturer must provide reasonable-costing open-to-anyone training and certification repair courses.
I figure that "repairable by owner" is just a proxy for "repairable by someone who the owner designates which is not necessarily the same company that manufactured the car."
In any case, where would you stop? If we decide that only manufacturers are qualified to service things which could potentially affect other people, then the list grows very large in a hurry.
We've had mechanics, including owner-mechanics, working on far more complicated machinery than an electric car for a hundred years. It's not nearly as hard as inexperienced people believe.
So you only take your car to the dealer for repair? You wouldn’t take it to a competent independant mechanic? What if a certified Tesla mechanic got fed up with Elon Musk’s bullshit and opened his own shop? Would that be reckless? BTW brakes are dead simple. Fixing them is a task any self respecting person should be able to do.
Imagine the completely hypothetical situation where your self driving car was malfunctioning due to an OTA update. As the owner of the car, would you say you have a right to go into the software and now modify it?
All I’m saying is that there should absolutely be some limit to what you have a right to repair, independent of your ownership.
> Imagine the completely hypothetical situation where your self driving car was malfunctioning due to an OTA update. As the owner of the car, would you say you have a right to go into the software and now modify it?
Yes, if it's my car I would absolutely say I have that right. The way I operate my car is my responsibility too.
Would you say that operating a car safely carries less responsibility than repairing one safely?
Yes, I do need a license to operate a vehicle on the road. But, I actually don't need to buy my own insurance, because I live in New Zealand. Here, we have socialised insurance which covers accidents in general. Vehicle operating fees (handwave) do vary a bit, basically depending on the cost of that type of vehicle to society. We also have 6-monthly or annual safety checks on vehicles (depending on age of vehicle AFAIK; I still haven't owned one newer than mid-90s), if they are to be used on the road. And, we have a thriving car culture, despite my best efforts to get everyone moving on bus/foot/bike, but that's a distraction to the current discussion...
When you earn that license to operate your car, part of the deal is that you shouldn't operate your car if you think it might not be safe. That requirement does not go away depending on who fixed it last, or for that matter, the car's entire history.
I think there are some serious issues with regulating people's repairs (or just tinkering with) of their own stuff. For a start; I can't imagine a practical implementation of this "car repair license" which would solve any realistic problem, so to me it sounds like a proposal for mostly-useless bureaucracy.
Beyond that, I (and my employer) put a lot of value on the knowledge I've gained to be able to competently, to your example, fix my own brakes (two weekends ago, I replaced a wheel bearing - seems to be working fine). I think that adding barriers to technical work effectively dumbs down society in general. It also encourages waste - if the cost of a repair increases (as it probably would, if the licensing requirements increased), then the broken thing is more likely to be discarded wholesale, rather than repaired.
Maybe we should move on from this car discussion, and consider other regulated machines in common use. Radios, in particular, seem like an interesting parallel - they operate in a public space and carry safety risks. When radio regulation started, radios were similar complexity to concurrent cars, but now are largely software controlled. Do you think you should be legally prevented from changing the driver/firmware in your WiFi radio or cell phone?
In this hypothetical who carries the liability and insurance for if the self driving stuff crashes? If thats Tesla I dont have a problem with them not letting me modify anything. But if I'm still ultimately responsible for whatever the car does when in autonomous mode then I should be able to do whatever I want to the whole car.
Essentially I dont expect Tesla to allow me to make changes to their system that's indemnifying me from risk.
BTW brakes are dead simple. Fixing them is a task any self respecting person should be able to do.
Au contraire.
An EV uses a combination of traditional friction braking and regenerative braking, with a sophisticated algorithm to appropriately shift between methods.
If the batteries are fully charged, that means less regenerative braking.
If a vehicle is driven aggressively the batteries are probably already hot, so less energy should be dumped back into them when braking. But at the same time, the friction brakes are probably being overused. How to keep them from being destroyed?
What if a car is yawing or drifting? When stability control kicks in, some combination of friction braking and regenerative braking may be warranted. How much at the front axle, how much at the rear axle, how much at each wheel?
If this were "dead simple", why did Formula 1 teams need a few years to work out their braking issues at the start of the current turbo hybrid era?
We're no longer in the days of a master cylinder responding to pressure from a driver's foot by simply sending hydraulic fluid to drum brakes.
Sure, simple maintenance such as replacing brake pads in most cars can still be DIY. But "repair" in general is no longer simple.
That's a good point. Remember when Tesla reduced braking distance with an over the air software upgrade?
Unlike locomotives and street cars, few electric cars have a resistor bank for dumping braking energy when the batteries are fully charged. So a fully charged battery does reduce braking performance.
"We're no longer in the days of a master cylinder responding to pressure from a driver's foot by simply sending hydraulic fluid to drum brakes."
I think there are many cars on the road that literally fit that description, and certainly it's still legal to drive such. More cars that you'd think have rear drum brakes.
The complexity of electronic aids is not really germane to the complexity of maintaining brake systems when you normally don't get failures and if you do there's going to be a code that tells you.
Sure, legacy. But this entire discussion started with Tesla. Which has a much more sophisticated system. Even the entry level current generation Honda Civic LX has 4 wheel disc brakes (which, granted, aren't much different than drums).
not really germane to the complexity of maintaining brake systems
The poster I responded to said "fixing them". I consider that to be much different than your word "maintaining". Maintaining is much easier than fixing. Tesla probably keeps their codes secret and won't sell you any replacement electronic parts anyway. The practical result of this is IMO quite the opposite of "dead simple".
""We're no longer in the days of a master cylinder responding to pressure from a driver's foot by simply sending hydraulic fluid to drum brakes.""
At some point of actuation the Tesla car should have a mechanical backup when depressing the brake pedal, right? I really don't think it's pure brake by wire.
There are a number of areas on vehicles where failure can lead to injury or death. The reality, though, is that these systems are designed to fail gracefully, and most people that work on cars know how to respect them. Take brakes for example. If you fuck it up on one wheel, the remaining wheels have more than enough stopping power to get you home. If you have a leak, there's two separate circuits, so you should have at least two wheels that will stop you. In addition, the brake pedal being squishy should alert you to a problem. And the parking brake is normally a steel cable that should always work. And most repair manuals, tutorials, and YouTube videos will tell you about common pitfalls and what to watch out for.
And if you think a certified mechanic never makes a mistake, you are sorely mistaken.
Absolutely. On the other hand, when you have a guy that welds two halves out of two wrecks together and builds a "new" car out of them or does who knows what with the battery (which is essentially a giant firebomb under the car waiting to go off), I am not surprised Tesla doesn't want to have anything with him.
It is mainly a legal liability issue. Those are safety critical parts and the manufacturer doesn't want to be the one getting sued if someone dies in such a vehicle. If the chassis of the car breaks or deforms in an accident because it has been "repaired" after a previous crash and someone gets hurt because of it, that's not the same thing as someone screwing up the brakes. Most people will sue the manufacturer claiming a manufacturing fault, not the mechanic as most mechanics don't repair things like that (car is considered totaled in such case).
E.g. in most of Europe a "franken-car" like that wouldn't be even able to pass the mandatory inspection and get registered in the first place. Once the car is considered totaled and bought out by the insurance, they must destroy it so that potentially compromised parts can't find out their way back on the street again (they still do but that's another issue).
The consequence is that these "chop shops" resort to buying the registration from an owner of one wreck on a black market (e.g. because they caused the accident and didn't want to get their premiums increased, so they didn't claim it from their insurance - in that case they are left with an useless registration and no car) and "build" a new car to match the registration, which is then sold.
It is of course illegal and selling a car like that is fraud (the client would never buy it if they knew the history or not for the asking price). That is also often where most of the stolen cars end up - a stolen car cut up into parts is worth more than selling it whole (and way less risky too).
So while I admire the guy's technical skills, here I perfectly understand why Tesla is steering waaay clear of him. This is definitely not the same thing as Apple's laptops - a laptop is not 1-2 tons of metal barreling down a motorway at 100 km/h with a firebomb under the seat.
Yeah, what this guy is doing is a bit on the reckless side. But even if you do make a Frankenstein vehicle (which I have done, although it was my own), the liability is not going to be on the vehicle manufacturer. If you sue the manufacturer claiming a manufacturing fault, they're going to look at it and see that it's been (poorly) repaired. It's easy (if you're trained) to identify body damage repair work. The welds will be mig welded instead of spot welds, there will be little dings from the body hammer or marks from a grinding wheel, cuts from a plasma cutter or angle grinder look completely different from die cut, the paint and overspray is going to be slightly different. It's possible to make body work look like it just rolled off the assembly line, but it's only economical on million dollar classics.
I genuinely don't want to live in a world where I can't get replacement parts to fix my vehicles, and this is one more example of why I don't like Tesla.
So far this is largely a non-issue, because people who like to repair things themselves tend to be biased towards simpler things that they have the capability of repairing, and people who don't care about repairing things tend to be biased towards whatever's shiny and new really complex, and rely on dealer warranties and the like.
One notable exception here being farm equipment, where modern farmers want highly-automated equipment to reduce labor costs, but they also want to be able to maintain their equipment themselves.
I'm an experienced shadetree mechanic. Rebuilt a couple engines, hotrodded a motor or two. There are all kinds of things that I could have done that would make a vehicle unsafe for public roads. I didn't do those things though, because I wanted a machine that worked, not a machine that was broken.
My hunch is that in the real world, people that fix cars themselves are no more dangerous than professional mechanics.
That certainly helps, but I wouldn't jump straight to "less dangerous", based on my experience with repairing my own hobby old-timer with very little experience. It's easy to overlook a small thing that might affect safety without you knowing it. Also, mechanics get sued for malpractice right?
> That certainly helps, but I wouldn't jump straight to "less dangerous", based on my experience with repairing my own hobby old-timer with very little experience.
Well, if you do anything with very little experience it will be a more dangerous affair. That's why most people would ask more experienced people to help or would be an apprentice to more experienced people until they are ready to do their own work solo.
You don't watch a youtube video and then jump straight to replacing or upgrading your brakes, steering or suspension.
Your brakes example is typical of someone who was never taught to work on their own vehicle.
Others have pointed out that it is not dangerous, so I’ll point out that it is emensely rewarding to do this kind of work yourself. Enlist a competent buddy and give it a try.
Really? Years back I had the brakes completely fail on a classic Mini I'd worked on because one of the pipes wasn't fully tightened and all of the brake fluid pissed out the first time I applied the brakes. Thankfully I managed to grab the handbrake use that to stop (the Mini handbrake is cable powered and independent of the hydraulic system).
My understanding is that not all classic Minis had dual circuit hydraulic brakes. So if you have one of the originals with a single brake circuits, any leak means you will fail to stop (if fitted with drum brakes, stopping was doubtful anyway)
Pre-modern cars have something to mitigate this, testing your brakes more than a single pedal push before you go out on the road. Kind of sounds like you didn't even bother to bleed the lines which is also asking for a heap of trouble even if you managed to properly repair the entire braking system.
I've worked on the brakes on multiple cars and never once took one out for a test drive without triple-checking that I didn't make some stupid mistake that would put other people in danger.
Don't get me wrong, I had a couple cars with dodgy brakes over the years but always made sure they were good enough at the time I was driving them -- had this '53 Dodge that I had to bleed the brakes every time I wanted to take it out for a spin because the wheel cylinders were pitted and slowly leaked but always made sure to do a proper job because other people's lives were at risk too.
A car is (or should be) designed to last many decades of service. It may have complex systems, but it's 2018, they should have diagnostic interfaces and service manuals at least as good as pinball machines from the 80s. Full time functionality monitoring and reporting, self tests, etc should be table stakes.
Everything should have a diagnostic procedure and a replacement procedure. All of the other car companies manage to do at least that, and they also somehow manage to make replacement parts available too. As a bonus of the internet age, you can publish updated service manuals when unexpected failures are found and a diagnostic procedure and recommended remediation are built.
Bad software updates should be fixable by flashing a known good version. I don't expect to have support for 3rd parties to modify firmware to make fixes (but one could hope).
If the engine in my out of warranty vehicle breaks, I can (attempt) to fix it myself, bring it to an independent mechanic to fix it or replace it (again, myself or others). If I value the coolness of my car over time and money, I can even replace a functional engine with something better, for some value of better, and subject to environmental regulations.
It's extremely reckless to leave out what the general practice to make things likely to break because of some super cheapo part and not be easily repairable does to us and our environment in the long run. You're not even trying to weigh one against the other, you completely ignore a major part of the equation, and the incentive you create to make things needlessly complex or expensive to repair (special or very soft screws in other with mundane widgets being the lightest form of that I guess), if need be by obfuscation. How much damage would be cased by "reckless repairs", and how much damage is currently being caused by fleeced customers?
The Amiga came with schematics... that seems like a parallel universe now... and then I realize that was what some kind of golden age of openness to me, probably seems very closed and uptight to what computer scientists in the 60s or so did and experienced. And hey, isn't Linux incredibly complex? What if someone tinkers with the sourcecode, breaks it completely, and ends up exposing very private email someone else send to them to them? What if someone uses a Raspberry Pi to automate their garage door, instead of buying a "professional product", and another person gets harmed or even killed? Those things can happen, and then that person is liable for what they did.. isn't that enough? Or at least enough in most cases?
If people repairing cars leads to a lot of accidents, then it's the job of lawmakers to study, recognize and deal with that. It's a farce for all sorts of products being hard to repair because people repairing their stuff is less profitable than them buying more, and then to justify that with safety. If it's about safety, then you have to hand over responsibility. If you find out a new food you invented can carry a new disease if not stored properly, inform the authorities so they can make rules for everyone, instead of doing your own little thing and not telling anyone. Some companies probably don't want that because proper laws would deal with it in respects to how dangerous something is, how much expertise is needed, and so on... not just solely "how much additional money can we squeeze out of it".
So it's not about safety (that's not in reference to your comment which I believe is sincere, but in reference to what many companies are doing), that simply doesn't mesh, it's about the desire to control and exploit, to channel people into what companies need/want instead of channeling companies into what people need/want. Being exploited and manipulated in this fashion is a net decrease of safety. That just about everybody who exploits is in turn the exploited pet of others in other areas, that everybody who presumes to be a magician to the plebs is in turn a pleb in the sight of another magician, that doesn't make it better or more fair, it makes it a maelstrom. Our tools get faster and bigger, but we become consumers instead of makers, parrots instead of sources. We hop from raft to raft on a windy river, rather than building and expanding and improving our world. That is just so boring and also dangerous, besides sorely lacking dignity. Anyone who works to change that, no matter in what capacity, I support without ifs and buts.
Generally speaking and kind of a tangent, but how much damage is done to the mind by making the world and the objects we use to function and socialize more opaque, so that we become to resigned to either consume or watch? That's hardly on our radar, but I would count on it.
I think that analogy somewhat breaks down because, aside from action taken by specific companies, the non-repairability of modern laptops in general is heavily driven by the endless desire of consumers for lighter and thinner devices with more battery capacity.
By contrast, for modern electric cars weight and size has so much margin that it's basically a non-issue aside from the complications of fitting the battery into the chassis.
It means that car companies have far, far less of a genuine engineering-driven reason to make devices that are impossible to repair at home or in small shops.
I've watched his videos, and they are awesome.. but I am also somewhat surprised he hasn't electrocuted himself yet. All that said, his point is 100% on base. right now Tesla has gotten around without addressing right-to-repair issues. The model 3 is supposed to be a mainstream car. One of the reasons I have not pulled the trigger yet on my deposit, is because I am not convinced that anyone other then Tesla can repair it.
I watch this guy on YouTube, Louis Rossman, who fixes MacBooks. This reminds me exactly of his experiences. Macs are increasingly more difficult to repair and Apple generally wants to own the repair experience so they can funnel you towards a new purchase.
Cars these days can run half a million miles in their lifetime if you treat them right and replace the pieces that break. Could you imagine a future where cars followed the Apple model?
I actually think Apple’s repair system is one of the reasons they have success. Most customers can’t repair their stuff so having a trustworthy place to go to is a really nice safety blanket. Compare that to most other phone or computer manufacturers where you have to ship your stuff or do it yourself and risk voiding warranties. I imagine eventually Tesla will offer an Apple-esque “Certified Repair” service option to increase their ability to help customers with non-Tesla employees.
I think the biggest issue with Apple's "repair" model is the amount of repairing that actually goes on. As a result of the increasing board integration of Apple computers and Apple's repair policy, a single resistor kicking the bucket means a full board replacement that will set you back a good fraction of what you paid for the computer in the first place, at an Apple certified repair center. Even worse is the outright hostility to 3rd party repair shops who instead opt for (more difficult), but ultimately less expensive (for the custom and the environment) component-level repair. You won't be getting any documentation or spare parts from Apple.
I picked a component off the top of my head. Water damage is almost always the culprit in these repairs, which doesn't affect most servers (except for these [0] maybe?) Louis Rossman's channel on Youtube [1] can give you better information than I can.
Haha, of course you did -
It's always a capacitor![1]
These mature cheap reliable mass-produced electrolytic capacitors of which we rarely see fault today, sure had quite the rebellious stage[2] [3].
Interesting, from the announcement on badcaps.net[3]:
"Back in April 2002, I had an idea to start a business (actually spinoff of another business) servicing motherboards at component level amid the mass capacitor failures plaguing the PC industry."..."The store boomed from its launch all the way up until about a year ago. Over the last 6 months or so, I have sold very few capacitors. Once my stock depletes, I will be shutting down the Badcaps.net store."
Did you reposition them? Capacitors are today often part of planne obsolence- you can time there demise pretta acuratly by placing them near a heat source.
Two soldered wires later, placed at a cool spot, your capacitor might last long enough to see the board go up in flames for other reasons.
While I agree the lack of repair documentation and available spare parts is a concern, Isn't the whole point of integration (at least on a chip/board level) to increase reliability?
I'm a mechanical engineer masquerading as a software developer so I could be talking out my ass, but I'm fairly sure that board failure rate is proportional to the amount of discrete components on said board.
Not always, the soc integration is going for reduced production effort on a total scale. You just produce the chip and thats it- reliability is not always better.
From an engineering standpoint, Apples devices became hard to repair because they optimized for weight and size over maintainability. Would Tesla do the same? Size isn't going to be something they care about because cars are all the same size and thats what people want.
From a business standpoint it doesn't make much sense either. Tesla offers very long warranties (I believe is 4/8 years for vehicle/drivetrain), so making things hard to repair would likely be costing them money. For the next 10-20 years, assuming they survive, there will be more new Teslas under warranty than older models as the production rate keeps increasing.
Electric cars are so much easier to repair in my opinion because of their simplicity, with the exception of the high voltage stuff, which I won't touch. Replacing the drive unit in most electric cars is like 2 sets of wires and 4-8 bolts. Ever tried replacing the camshaft in an internal combustion vehicle? I'd say the difference is, the aftermarket car parts business is very good at making camshafts, bearings and pistons, but not so good at making high power inverters and charging systems. But that'll change as electric vehicles become more common.
>From an engineering standpoint, Apples devices became hard to repair because they optimized for weight and size
This is FALSE, small size do not explain Apple not publishing schematics, not selling parts, attempting to stop third parties to repair Apple products by sending them to justice etc.
I think you need to research more this subject and if you are honest with yourself you will stop excusing Apple for this.
This is FALSE as well, Apple doesn't publish them for the same reason many other companies doesn't publish them: IP/Lawyer departments. This is also why the other stuff happens.
Basically, whenever a company says: we don't want third party X to do Y because of user experience, it mostly boils down to 10% user experience, 10% PR & Marketing, and 80% legal crap.
This is FALSE again, they go against people or sites that publish schematics or instructions on how to fix things, they go against people that want to buy replacement parts, they say is for keeping the brand standards but is for the money.
Imagine your side mirror of your car is broken(say a Ford).
Now imagine Ford is not allowing you to buy any other brand of mirror to replace it, you can't even buy the Ford mirror to replace it yourself either, you must go to a Ford shop pay 10x more for the mirror replacement but in some cases the guys there say that is to expensive to try replace only the mirror and they will change the entire car body but all is fine if you bought the extra insurgence package, if not you will pay 25%-50% the original full car price to have it fixed.
Again, inform yourself, this thread has many references and be honest with yourself, you can like Apple for the things that they do right and don't try to excuse them for the things they do wrong.
How is that false? They (as in, Apple's legal department) enforce their rules (such as, the schematics are copyrighted and publishing them is just as not-allowed as uploading a movie or ebook), that is hardly different from another company enforcing their rules. Comparing it with Ford doesn't help either, and neither does telling me to 'inform myself', I have been in this business since 1998 and haven't heard anything from Apple, ever. I'm not an APSP or AASP, but board-level repairs aren't new, and doing it without schematic's isn't new either.
If you read what I wrote, you should be able to understand that:
> they say is for keeping the brand standards but is for the money.
is exactly this:
> whenever a company says: we don't want third party X to do Y because of user experience, it mostly boils down to 10% user experience, 10% PR & Marketing, and 80% legal crap.
But without assuming malice or planned obsolescence. It doesn't make sense for a company to create a workflow, train people and build up logistics for an integrated product if there is no money to be made off of it. You can argue that you don't like that, but assuming that they (Apple as a company) makes tons of extra money because of that is a bit unfounded. It's not likely that a company would retain a client base if they actively practice such rules against incentives. If you turn it around, would you be able to say: "the company (Apple) would make more money if they sold spare parts and repair guides to anyone"? I think not. I don't agree with it, but it doesn't mean it's going to make a difference. A law would make a difference, and since this isn't an Apple discussion but a repair discussion based on Tesla, I'd think you would be more interested in a structural solution than trying to assign malice and speak emotions all day long.
The discussion should be about whether we agree with the rules, and if the rules are lawful (and if we can change the law to enforce a better set of rules). Not the personification of a company and assigning malice, that doesn't get anyone anywhere.
I think one of the biggest problems with business today is that fact that we in society have removed "personification" from the company, companies are made of people, and allowing companies whole to act as if they are amoral automatons with their only goal profit seeking removes the ethical obligations of the people that make up said corporations. Allows management to hide behind phrases like "it is not personal it is just business".
So no a company may not be a person, but people are in charge of it, people make the choices and policies of the companies, and as such those people though be personified and held to an ethical standard and foundation on behalf of the company.
Explaining away all of Apples anti-consumer policies simply because "Well the damn lawyers" as you have done here is a massive evasion and redirection of responsibility that the management, engineers and really every employee of apple as to their customers
I think you have to know the inside to know where you can change them from the outside. As an engineer or logistics expert, you have no leverage inside a company to modify those policies. When you say a company is made up of people, and try to personify it, you, and many others also try to vilify the same people. Imagine working somewhere and championing an internal policy reform (which takes ages), and reading some unknown person writing angry crap about you, that's not a very nice thing. Responsibility is an equally useless word here, as you can't expect all 'responsible' parties in one company to have the same opinions. Say you have 100.000 employees working at Apple, do you really think they all share your views? Even if they all have a responsibility to make your life easier for you, you can't expect them all to believe in the exact same way or route to accomplish that. Put 10 people in a room and you'll have enough opinions and methods to give you a headache, let alone over a ton of them. This is why they have some sort of chain of command that removes some responsibility and capabilities down the chain. That also means that you can be mad at the engineers all you want, but it doesn't mean it's their fault or that they are 'out to get you'.
Business scholars devise calculations where you can put in the laws and requirements of your business and out comes the way forward, often not in favor of the consumers. If you want that to change, well, then capitalism gets in the way and that's when you need laws or shareholder/board-level influence if consumers want that to change.
Your opinion is based on the idea that you can make overall structural changes based on the same principles as making changes to government; but the difference is that there is no way to reach the business part of a company short of changing a law or simply not buying the product.
The scale of operations often doesn't allow for certain changes due to the cost involved, especially when it comes to catering to an insignificant amount of people (such as independent repair shops or consumers that want low level access to everything).
When I write about where the policies come from and why things are in a certain way, that is not opinion but a reflection of current operations. My opinion and the reality don't match, but that doesn't mean I'm going to declare my opinion as fact or yell on a social media platform that "personified company X is malicious". It doesn't help, it doesn't change and it is far from constructive.
On top of that, most policies in larger corporations are in place because they were implemented buy lawyers by directive of business management driven by the wishes of boards and shareholders. Unless you can communicate to, and convince the shareholders, boards and other actual decision makers, all the screaming and opinions are worthless. Especially when it's 1000 people yelling and 100 million people not yelling but being consumers all the same (and paying for products).
In my opinion, all devices should be completely open and manageable by whoever owns them, but that has yet to become reality. Even basic stuff such as parameters for the ECU in almost all cars isn't freely available. Plenty of good & bad reasons for that, but still a bummer when you simply wanted to change a bit in a register to enable or disable a function that suits you.
You can't blame the IP laws for the fact that Apple is bullying people that fix and refurbish Apple products,
hopefully there will be laws around the world to require electronics manufacturers to supply parts similar and repair schematics similar as for cars.
I do not see other manufacturers doing same as Apple, so it is FALSE that laws are the ones causing Apple to behaive like this, that would mean that all the rest are operating illegally and let the users open and repair the products, some of them even
DARE to sell the parts.
I do see other manufacturers do it, and I do see even non-hardware manufacturers do it, hell, even Sony did it with a bunch of hackers that reverse engineered the PS3 and PS4 to run their own software -- and they weren't running a business off of it.
Also, I'm not blaming IP laws, luckily, we don't have the USA IP laws in the rest of the world.
I think most of the pitchforking at Apple is just happening because it's an easy target, not because it's a good example or the first step to fix a structural problem. That USA bill for the right to repair (or was it a state? or county? who knows...), that's the right kind of thing.
Also, have you ever tried to get spare parts from Microsoft for your Xbox, or schematics? Or perhaps for your PlayStation? It's not new or different what Apple does, and it's not going to fix anything by picking the easy target.
My point was not that the Apple is the only or the biggest offender, my initial comment was about excusing Apple and blaming the laws or the layers, Apple has no excuse,also MS,Sony or Tesla are on the offenders list.
Again my point is that there is no excuse for Apple, some parts can be replaced, Apple should sell me parts(like car manufacturers have to provide parts) and I should have the right to replace or fix the parts or give it to a third party to repair.
I agree the world needs laws similar that there are for cars in some countries to prevent abuse.
It's amazing that people keep supporting Apple despite it being so obvious that they are not doing it in the best interest of the customers. Think why wouldn't Apple keep a pro lineup that offers upgradable parts for the cost of little more weight and size(that theory itself is bs but anyway)? My MacBook Pro would work perfectly fine for another 5 years if I can upgrade the ram and replace my battery(which I can but have to give to service centre or risk myself with a complex diy procedure). The retina MBP have reached a pinnacle of laptop if you ask me with very minimal upgrades happening over the years. The CPU performance have improved but for most of the tasks I do it's going good and probably will hold itself for another 4-5 years provided I can upgrade the ram so that it can accommodate apps built by developers with modern computers with lavish ram.
> Apples devices became hard to repair because they optimized for weight and size over maintainability.
This is incorrect, there are way smaller, lighter and thinner devices than Apple's laptops and phones that are far more service friendly. Case in point - Checkout Huawei's premium laptop lines.
Apple's devices became harder to repair because of Secure Elements, Asymmetric encryption and DFM. Not because of malice as so many people keep thinking. Not releasing parts and schematics is probably something the lawyer department wanted and since there is very little business incentive to do it anyway, they simply don't do it.
None of the reasons you list require that the RAM and SSD be soldered to the mainboard! They solder them to the mainboard so that you can't buy the low spec'd config from them and then add 3rd party components at reasonable/competitive-market based prices. They force you to pay 2X+ the market rate for for RAM and storage when up-specing a system.
They have the highest margins, by far, in the whole industry, and well they are raking in money so it's working for them, as far as revenue/income is concerned.
> so making things hard to repair would likely be costing them money.
It's easier for them to repair because they have access to the manuals and diagnostic software necessary to quickly identify the issue.
> Electric cars are so much easier to repair in my opinion because of their simplicity
Parts of them, but the highest cost repairs on Tesla's are by far the body work; which is somehow an order of magnitude more expensive than other cars.
> Replacing the drive unit in most electric cars is like 2 sets of wires and 4-8 bolts.
That's a gross oversimplification and completely ignores the necessary reprogramming to make the replacement actually function in the new vehicle, which is precisely the problem with their repair model; you _can't_ actually do this yourself due to software barriers.
> But that'll change as electric vehicles become more common.
And as soon as the manufacturers release the necessary information to make them functional on their platform.
> From an engineering standpoint, Apples devices became hard to repair because they optimized for weight and size over maintainability. Would Tesla do the same?
> Tesla offers very long warranties (I believe is 4/8 years for vehicle/drivetrain), so making things hard to repair would likely be costing them money.
The Apple analogy is a good one. Tesla makes similar tradeoffs, but instead of optimizing for size and weight, they are optimizing for safety, performance, and ease-of-manufacturing.
Sometimes, there is no conflict. For instance, Tesla's battery is designed to be super low to the ground to lower the center of gravity, reduce rollovers, and improve turning. They managed to achieve this via a bolt-on assembly that is easy to install and and just as easy to replace. Hurrah!
But in other places, the tension is very much felt. Replacing the front radar (even on pre-facelift cars, before it was hidden) requires removing the entire front bumper cover. Replacing a broken paddle gear in a rear door handle often requires removing the door's window.
If modularity were a first-order goal, these procedures would be a lot simpler, and major hardware upgrades (like Autopilot hardware or the 2nd gen MCU) would be reasonably feasible. But to the extent that modularity comes at even the slightest structural cost, or unnecessary weight, or any difficulty in robotic assembly, Tesla has erred away from it.
I assume their calculus is:
* Safety and performance are what they compete on
* Ease of manufacturing is their competitive advantage
* Modularity and cheap repair costs are "nice to have", but less important than the previous two.
The original iPad was rendered unsupported after 2 years on the market. At that point, the lack of software updates combined with inevitable unknown security vulnerabilities mean that Apple's model actually generates a safety hazard.
It's common for Android hardware to become unsupported after 2 years, but the degree of success of cyanogenmod and postmarketos (and now project treble) demonstrate that there is a better way.
As time passes, an iPad's unknown vulnerabilities become known. Similarly, the scenarios and environs in which a Tesla is driven also change unpredictably.
Apple and Tesla can't support their designs indefinitely and remain profitable. The ethical solution is either don't sell the product (rent it out instead) or simply allow owners to accept the maintenance burden.
> Apple and Tesla can't support their designs indefinitely and remain profitable.
I don't see any indication of this. The support windows for all Apple and Tesla products are in line with consumer expectations. The two-year shelf life for iOS devices is driven more by market demand and the way that phone contracts (used to) work than anything else. You don't see that problem with Macbook Pros or iMacs, where consumers expect a longer lifespan.
The expectations for a car are even longer, which is why Tesla still supports its earliest vehicles, and says it will continue to do so moving forward. I don't see any reason to disbelieve this, nor evidence that the company can't sustain it.
"...hard to repair because they optimized for weight and size over maintainability."
How did Apple achieve those goals? Through greater integration and reduced modularity.
I often face two challenges when repairing my own stuff (cars, phones, appliances) these days:
tightly coupled designs
finding replacement parts
The book "Design Rules: The Power of Modularity" deeply influenced how I look at architecture and design.
Since I'm an Apple fanboy, I'm clearly okay with their choices, priorities. But I'm also fully aware of what I'm forfeiting.
I watched the Sandy Munro videos about their Tesla teardowns. The same forces are at work. Fascinating. (Since I'll never be able to afford a Tesla, I won't have to determine if their reduced repairability is an issue for me.)
That hardly seems like a valid business plan for such a large company. If they were to do it purely to create such a construction, they'd be losing clients and money faster than you can hear a YouTuber rant about it.
It seems that everyone is assuming malice in every case while that is not often the cause. Internal Lawyer/security/IP departments, DFM and business rules are like 99.999999% of the reasons why things are the way they are at any large company that tries to serve markets above the bottom/budget line.
This seems to me like more of an industry-wide thing than just a Tesla thing. I'm not happy about it, either, but I wouldn't recommend most car owners take their Leaf, Volt or even Prius to anyone but the manufacturer for major service at this point.
There are probably quite a few more cars I would add to that list without hesitation, and it's only going to grow.
I've watched a bunch of his videos a while back and he said he had a day job in the tech industry. But basically he's said he wanted a tesla without paying $$$ so he bought some salvage vehicles and did it as a hobby.
But with his channel starting to take off he might have transitioned to a youtube career. At this point he's probably funding a lot of it via youtube income.
Reminds me of Chris, who has the B is for Build channel on YT. He started rebuilding a few salvage cars (BRZ, Lotus Evora) on the side while being a software engineer. Ended up losing that job and now does YT full time basically rebuilding salvage or almost salvage cars.
One reads that Elon Musk has an interest in colonizing Mars. If Mars ever has a government, they'd better have some Right to Repair laws! Those would me more like, you'd-better-not-be-jerking-your-customers-around-and-let-them-repair-vital-equipment-or-people-might-freakin-die laws!
Is this Rich Rebuilds? I discovered his videos recently. I found them really interesting and hilarious. I get the impression he does take appropriate safety precautions.
That was fun to watch, I really admire the guy for his dedication to learning all the various bits of the car. He should publish a manual and sell it to support his web channel, I'd buy a copy!
> Tesla's stance on rebuilding vehicles is that only they should be able to do it
I had no idea they had this kind of stance -- is there any more nuance to it?
If there isn't I cannot conscience supporting Tesla in any way again -- there's no way I'm going to help a company that disregards/works against right-to-repair get a monopoly. Just the same reason I avoid buying iDevices.
Tesla doesn't do body work, it's all done by 3rd parties.
But if you don't buy iDevices for that reason, you probably don't want a Tesla. Me, the one time I broke a screen, I used a 3rd party repair service, no problems.
There's a quote from Tesla spokesperson at the end of the video:
> Tesla continued that its customers are free to do what they want with their cars, including doing their own work to repair salvaged vehicles. They added that there are significant safety concerns when salvaged Teslas are repaired by unqualified mechanics, as these vehicles could pose a danger to both the mechanic and other drivers on the road.
Basically, already every single time a Tesla gets a car accident, the news loves to jump all over it. Now if you had people doing a half-ass job and making a defective repair, then the bad press would fall on Tesla.
I have been watching his channel when it was called Car Gurus and he had to change it. What is so awesome is how he is pushing the needle for the right to repair argument. As a TSLA stock holder I want him to continue to push that POV. It will only be a matter of time.
I wonder if things would be different if there wasn't such a big media spotlight on Tesla. Having more repair shops would be a help to them, they are barely coping.
I've watched Rich Rebuilds for a while, and it's one of about 5 YouTube channels I've bothered to subscribe to. I like Rich and the content in the videos (for the most part, aside from the rants which aren't my favourites).
I watched this yesterday and was pleasantly surprised at the angle of the video - I expected it to be a little more snarky about what he's done, but it presented a much better angle in terms of the right to repair that Tesla clearly fights against.
I'm often told that I'm an Elon Musk fanboy by friends and family - I love what SpaceX is doing, and I want Tesla to succeed (because I'm convinced that the sooner we get ICE-powered vehicles off the roads, the better), but I have spent much of the last 30 years fixing my own vehicles; I built my first motorbike from a written-off bike, and I've owned hundreds of cars. I built my own rally cars and competed in one of them at WRC level. I love fixing things, and as soon as I found out (via Rich Rebuilds, or CarGuru as it was then) about Tesla's policy, my opinion on them changed completely; I still want them to succeed, but I can't imagine ever owning one because of their stance (even though it probably wouldn't affect me, even if I ever did own one, which is unlikely to say the least).
There are a number of people on here taking what appears to me to be a straw man on the 'right to repair' angle - talking about 'repairing the software yourself'. I don't think this is what most people are talking about (and it's certainly not what Rich is talking about). It's about Tesla's restrictive policy over spare parts and repairing vehicles - not down to software level, but to the level that Rich is working at - like-for-like replacement of entire components. If a vehicle is on Tesla's list, then they will not sell you parts. And you can't get pattern parts in the way you can for most ICE vehicles - I'd imagine this is because the supply chain/pool is much smaller (Tesla is a small, niche manufacturer in reality) and they have clauses in place to stop the sale of these parts via other channels. And this is just wrong. There is no more danger in the straight like-for-like replacement of a motor unit or inverter than there is in any other competent repair.
My experience of dealer repair work has been limited, but when it has taken place, it has been poor. The mechanics in question have been of the 'follow a fixed set of instructions in the order given' type, not seeming to know their trade well and get straight to the point. I was quoted over £2000 in labour costs possible to diagnose a problem with a Ford Focus I owned (car was about 5 years old at the time) - 'because we have to do the diagnosis step by step, even if it's obvious it's not that'. Had I taken it there, it would have been the full price as it was one of the last things on the list (small end failure, which was common on that particular engine). Service in the UK is incredibly bad for the most part, and I've seen friends have terrible (and expensive) experiences at franchised, approved garages, with multi-thousand costs being generated to replace parts without any improvement (A friend's BMW X5 is springing to mind).
There is no significant risk to anyone if this kind of repair is carried out by competent personnel. And there are plenty of competent personnel about who would be able to do everything normally needed to repair a Tesla. The service documentation alone would allow that to happen (factory service manuals are generally a goldmine of information, but also written in such simple terms that nearly anyone could follow them), and the supply of the right parts to anyone who wants them - at a price without a prohibitive mark-up - should be a right. I'm saddened that Tesla is instead following a path trying to lock people in to their ecosystem of service - and even more so when they refuse to carry out mandated...
It just occurred to me that there may be another thing I don't see yet mentioned in this thread that gets in the way of repairing Teslas - from what I've read, they make constant changes in their cars during model years, so how do you know which exact parts you have in your car? I bet it's underdocumented.
I have been trying to fix various things in an old car from the 80s, and one of the more annoying aspects is trying to get a replacement part and finding there is a rare variant that I need but has the same part number as the common one. There are also a lot of parts that don't have diagrams or part numbers at all, because they weren't anticipated to be serviced normally.
That's not that impressive, in fact it tends to be a signal of poor design. The more changes to a model in a short time the worse it will be later to find parts and to keep the car running. It will also end up being more expensive. That's why it is generally good practice to avoid the first year of a new model (unless you are into collecting low serial number cars...).
And if a manufacturer that is facing a financial issue would start to reduce the number of welds on the cars (which you would assume engineering put there for a reason) I would be very suspicious, especially if they did not retest and recertify.
Welds are actually weak points as far as I'm aware. Perhaps reducing them and using another method (usually adhesive) is actually stronger overall. It can also reduce weight. It's why a lot of high end cars these days use bonded aluminium panels instead of spot welds.
Nowhere that I've seen did they say they were replacing welds with adhesives or other construction methods, it was just said that a number of welds were dropped for efficiency reasons.
Usually the engineers that determine how many welds you will need to hold something together know what they are doing and you can't just replace welds with bonding without further cascading impact to the rest of the work.
Rereading my original comment, what I meant was "it's impressive that they can get away with not retesting and recertifying when making material changes to safety-related elements of the vehicles."
^This. 3 years ago I had to scrap a low milage 2009 VV GTI because the ABS computer was shot. Of course that module also communicates with all the other electronics on the car and is not readily accessible.
Go online to the forums and read about the nightmare of trying to do this yourself without VW diagnostics to get the new module to work with all the existing components. Even my local shop, who uses a VV tech on the side would not warranty a $3,000 fix. The dealership wanted over $4,500 to fix it. In the end I traded it in where I bought it (I worked there many moons ago and the owner leaned on a wholesaler to buy the car at a very reasonable price).
Just to clarify my point; this was a GTI- a loved car with all kinds of known fixes, fixers and available parts.
finding there is a rare variant that I need but has the same part number as the common one.
That's usually because the replacement is a drop-in compatible replacement; otherwise the part number would also have changed. Note that sometimes this also means a few other parts need to be replaced with new versions too, and if so that would be something mentioned in a service change bulletin (unfortunately rarely available, in contrast to service manuals.)
"That's usually because the replacement is a drop-in compatible replacement"
I wish. When I had it installed, I was told there was an issue, but I was sure it was the right part so I told them to go ahead and just do it. Afterwards, there was a heavy bag of leftover parts, and I said "what's this?" It was the stuff that had to be taken off to fit the wrong part. That stuff, coincidentally, doesn't have part numbers or documentation itself.
Also not helping - salvage places that don't send you the exact part that's pictured on their website.
Tesla seems to be <!--towing--> toeing a line between:
A) manufacturing vehicles for sale as an exclusively-electric auto maker...
and
B) manufacturing the necessary hardware, but then just collecting an equiptment-fee. This equipment is required, but enables use of their smart-car-as-a-service driving subscription (Terms and Conditions subjuct to change without notice).
I wonder if some Tesla cars will end up like old set-top boxes for some paid Satellite TV service (DirecTV): utterly useless, illegal to circumvent due to Tesla IP violations required, but still yours to keep!
Thanks, I didn't write the previous comment but had no idea that it was "toe the line" instead of "tow the line." Idioms.....why do they always seem to beat around the bush... ;-)
Even then, I think it's the wrong idiom. To me, toeing the line means following the rules or maybe supporting the story . . . toeing the company line, for example. I would suggest, rather, that Tesla is walking a fine line between . . .
You can usually work out which homophones make up an idiom just by thinking visually about what those homophones would mean in the idiom. "Towing a line" gives you a visual of hauling a cable out to something or someone, perhaps the meaning of that idiom, if it were a thing, would be to save someone.
Toeing a line invokes using your foot for, well, something related to a line. Is it an actual line or a metaphorical line? What's the line going to be used for after you toe it?
The idiom is usually used in the sense of getting really close to some imaginary, arbitrary boundary. Even if you don't know the history behind the saying, that it's something that boys used to do to mess with each other, you can usually rule one of them out and get pretty close to the actual history / meaning of the idiom.
When I first came across it, I 'knew' it was 'toe' and I would have been pretty surprised if it had actually been 'tow'. What I didn't know was the precise thing that the end of the foot was actually supposed to be doing to the supposed line.
Thanks, I did know the idiom refers to foot placement, but still typed 'towing' for whatever reason. If 'B' becomes the primary business model, towing won't be necessary. A quick T&C change for automaticSelfRecycle() to default accept.
Last time Automakers tried crap like Telsa is trying we got the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act
I would have hope we would get a revision that protects consumers but we are more likely to see a repeal of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act from both Democrats and Republicans than any support for lowering of Intellectual privilege protections. (Democrats are in the pocket of Hollywood who lives and dies on copyright laws)
Uncle Rich! I found Rich's YouTube channel[1] about a year ago when I got my Model X and it's been funny and educational. It definitely sheds a lot of light on how new Tesla is at making cars, but also how much further ahead some of their manufacturing choices are then other auto brands. It's definitely got strong language and he takes lots of shots at Tesla and Tesla Fanboys, but if you've got time to watch the story of someone taking apart a car, then it's amazing.
I've been watching him for quite a while. One the most interesting videos is where he gets his rebuilt Tesla (Delores) to supercharge. On the face of it, that does not sound like a big deal. However, it is much more interesting than that. It basically exposes the fact that supercharging is managed by client-side security.
Tesla has all kinds of restrictions on what vehicles are allowed to supercharge, and whether or not you'll be charged a fee. For example, my friend's S is a 2015 with supercharging that transfers with the vehicle, so that if he sells it to you, you can still supercharge. My 2017 X has free supercharging that is restricted to the first owner, so if I sell you my car, you'll end up paying for supercharging. And if either one of our cars is wrecked, and Tesla finds out about it, they will not allow the cars to supercharge at all until they are "recertified" by Tesla, at a cost of thousands of dollars.
If you buy a salvage Tesla, I'd suggest that (unless you've rooted it, and know how to re-enable supercharging) that you just pull the sim card, and don't let it connect to your wifi. That will (hopefully) preserve your ability to supercharge at the price of making the giant touchscreen basically useless.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 144 ms ] threadAlso huge respect to his belief that things people bought should always be repairable by the owner (with some reasonable learned skills).
Really cool video, btw. The message is spot on!
It has all the complexities of a cluster on wheels, tons of software systems and as a result is hard to diagnose properly.
So the first 'fancy equipment' you will need is a set of proper diagnostics equipment, which is - given the complexity involved - most likely supplied by the manufacturer or not at all.
What Tesla could do - but which they would hate because it is part of their competitive edge - is to release full schematics and software listings, but no other ordinary car manufacturer does this, nor are they required to by law.
Good thing too because if the Toyota ECU was anything to go by the industry would look pretty dumb.
Treating electric cars as "these are mystery devices that must be repaired only by us, because reasons" does the world an enormous disservice.
Extremely unappealing to me.
Repairing something that you own that only affects you is different from repairing something like a car that could affect others. As a completely fictional example: incorrectly repairing a complex brake system could pose a danger to other drivers and lead to an -otherwise avoidable- accident.
EDIT: some responses are focusing too closely on the example of brakes- perhaps it’s not the best way to illustrate my point. Say, instead, your engine broke or your self driving car’s software was malfunctioning. Should you still have the right to repair?
The mechanic at the garage told me that torquing nuts is tricky because if you under torque the nuts come loose. But sometimes they rust and you need to torque them more than the manufacturer spec. In that case he said that could also lead to failure. He said "we've all been there" to my glum attitude about screwing up the repair.
Repairs are not always simple. Hopefully there are other protections in place if one component fails.
Everything you do affects everyone else, that's no excuse to take away freedom.
"No risk no life."
There could definitely be degrees of freedom for repair on specific items, much like there’s a degree of freedom of usage for particular items.
The right to own should not necessarily imply a right to repair for all types of items.
the right to repair doesn't necessarily mean you have to do it yourself.
To me, the right to repair means the right for a 3rd party to completely understand the innards of a piece of equipment. This way, the manufacturer cannot lock you in, nor can they charge exorbinant prices for repairs. It's really and extension of a free-market. Compete on quality and price, rather than by monopoly or coercion.
That's not realistic for a repaired car. You can't crash-test a one-off vehicle which is the only way to determine structural soundness of some of the repairs he is doing.
That's also why such car "recycling" is generally not done. If anything major in the chassis/body is damaged, the car is usually a total loss - it is not economical or even possible to safely repair it and nobody could guarantee the safety of it.
The best he can do is to become an authorized mechanic for Tesla (not sure whether Tesla has such program, never owned one). But then he would likely be legally unable to use salvaged parts in his repairs, only new ones.
Mind you, right to repair is a separate question from right to use on public streets. The former is between the manufacturer and the owner, the latter is between the owner and the public/the state. There may be additional requirements to be allowed to use a repaired vehicle on public streets, but the important point is that that is none of the manufacturer's business, the requirements are set by the state, not by the manufacturer.
Indeed. This is usually called "roadworthiness" and varies between states. In fact, this is why the whole custom/car modding/hot rod culture can exist --- and from what I've seen, it's not been detrimental to overall safety. The vast majority of deaths come from idiotic/drunk/distracted drivers, not problems with modded/repaired cars.
Do you see a dystopia emerging from such laws?
[1] cosmetics aside obviously
If you are barred from repairing an item by law or policy then you do not own that item
In any case, where would you stop? If we decide that only manufacturers are qualified to service things which could potentially affect other people, then the list grows very large in a hurry.
We've had mechanics, including owner-mechanics, working on far more complicated machinery than an electric car for a hundred years. It's not nearly as hard as inexperienced people believe.
Imagine the completely hypothetical situation where your self driving car was malfunctioning due to an OTA update. As the owner of the car, would you say you have a right to go into the software and now modify it?
All I’m saying is that there should absolutely be some limit to what you have a right to repair, independent of your ownership.
Yes, if it's my car I would absolutely say I have that right. The way I operate my car is my responsibility too.
Would you say that operating a car safely carries less responsibility than repairing one safely?
When you earn that license to operate your car, part of the deal is that you shouldn't operate your car if you think it might not be safe. That requirement does not go away depending on who fixed it last, or for that matter, the car's entire history.
I think there are some serious issues with regulating people's repairs (or just tinkering with) of their own stuff. For a start; I can't imagine a practical implementation of this "car repair license" which would solve any realistic problem, so to me it sounds like a proposal for mostly-useless bureaucracy.
Beyond that, I (and my employer) put a lot of value on the knowledge I've gained to be able to competently, to your example, fix my own brakes (two weekends ago, I replaced a wheel bearing - seems to be working fine). I think that adding barriers to technical work effectively dumbs down society in general. It also encourages waste - if the cost of a repair increases (as it probably would, if the licensing requirements increased), then the broken thing is more likely to be discarded wholesale, rather than repaired.
Maybe we should move on from this car discussion, and consider other regulated machines in common use. Radios, in particular, seem like an interesting parallel - they operate in a public space and carry safety risks. When radio regulation started, radios were similar complexity to concurrent cars, but now are largely software controlled. Do you think you should be legally prevented from changing the driver/firmware in your WiFi radio or cell phone?
Essentially I dont expect Tesla to allow me to make changes to their system that's indemnifying me from risk.
Au contraire.
An EV uses a combination of traditional friction braking and regenerative braking, with a sophisticated algorithm to appropriately shift between methods.
If the batteries are fully charged, that means less regenerative braking.
If a vehicle is driven aggressively the batteries are probably already hot, so less energy should be dumped back into them when braking. But at the same time, the friction brakes are probably being overused. How to keep them from being destroyed?
What if a car is yawing or drifting? When stability control kicks in, some combination of friction braking and regenerative braking may be warranted. How much at the front axle, how much at the rear axle, how much at each wheel?
If this were "dead simple", why did Formula 1 teams need a few years to work out their braking issues at the start of the current turbo hybrid era?
We're no longer in the days of a master cylinder responding to pressure from a driver's foot by simply sending hydraulic fluid to drum brakes.
Sure, simple maintenance such as replacing brake pads in most cars can still be DIY. But "repair" in general is no longer simple.
Unlike locomotives and street cars, few electric cars have a resistor bank for dumping braking energy when the batteries are fully charged. So a fully charged battery does reduce braking performance.
I think there are many cars on the road that literally fit that description, and certainly it's still legal to drive such. More cars that you'd think have rear drum brakes.
The complexity of electronic aids is not really germane to the complexity of maintaining brake systems when you normally don't get failures and if you do there's going to be a code that tells you.
Sure, legacy. But this entire discussion started with Tesla. Which has a much more sophisticated system. Even the entry level current generation Honda Civic LX has 4 wheel disc brakes (which, granted, aren't much different than drums).
not really germane to the complexity of maintaining brake systems
The poster I responded to said "fixing them". I consider that to be much different than your word "maintaining". Maintaining is much easier than fixing. Tesla probably keeps their codes secret and won't sell you any replacement electronic parts anyway. The practical result of this is IMO quite the opposite of "dead simple".
At some point of actuation the Tesla car should have a mechanical backup when depressing the brake pedal, right? I really don't think it's pure brake by wire.
And if you think a certified mechanic never makes a mistake, you are sorely mistaken.
It is mainly a legal liability issue. Those are safety critical parts and the manufacturer doesn't want to be the one getting sued if someone dies in such a vehicle. If the chassis of the car breaks or deforms in an accident because it has been "repaired" after a previous crash and someone gets hurt because of it, that's not the same thing as someone screwing up the brakes. Most people will sue the manufacturer claiming a manufacturing fault, not the mechanic as most mechanics don't repair things like that (car is considered totaled in such case).
E.g. in most of Europe a "franken-car" like that wouldn't be even able to pass the mandatory inspection and get registered in the first place. Once the car is considered totaled and bought out by the insurance, they must destroy it so that potentially compromised parts can't find out their way back on the street again (they still do but that's another issue).
The consequence is that these "chop shops" resort to buying the registration from an owner of one wreck on a black market (e.g. because they caused the accident and didn't want to get their premiums increased, so they didn't claim it from their insurance - in that case they are left with an useless registration and no car) and "build" a new car to match the registration, which is then sold.
It is of course illegal and selling a car like that is fraud (the client would never buy it if they knew the history or not for the asking price). That is also often where most of the stolen cars end up - a stolen car cut up into parts is worth more than selling it whole (and way less risky too).
So while I admire the guy's technical skills, here I perfectly understand why Tesla is steering waaay clear of him. This is definitely not the same thing as Apple's laptops - a laptop is not 1-2 tons of metal barreling down a motorway at 100 km/h with a firebomb under the seat.
I genuinely don't want to live in a world where I can't get replacement parts to fix my vehicles, and this is one more example of why I don't like Tesla.
One notable exception here being farm equipment, where modern farmers want highly-automated equipment to reduce labor costs, but they also want to be able to maintain their equipment themselves.
I'm an experienced shadetree mechanic. Rebuilt a couple engines, hotrodded a motor or two. There are all kinds of things that I could have done that would make a vehicle unsafe for public roads. I didn't do those things though, because I wanted a machine that worked, not a machine that was broken.
My hunch is that in the real world, people that fix cars themselves are no more dangerous than professional mechanics.
Well, if you do anything with very little experience it will be a more dangerous affair. That's why most people would ask more experienced people to help or would be an apprentice to more experienced people until they are ready to do their own work solo.
You don't watch a youtube video and then jump straight to replacing or upgrading your brakes, steering or suspension.
> Also, mechanics get sued for malpractice right?
Only in sue happy countries.
Others have pointed out that it is not dangerous, so I’ll point out that it is emensely rewarding to do this kind of work yourself. Enlist a competent buddy and give it a try.
Do modern cars have anything to mitigate this?
I've worked on the brakes on multiple cars and never once took one out for a test drive without triple-checking that I didn't make some stupid mistake that would put other people in danger.
Don't get me wrong, I had a couple cars with dodgy brakes over the years but always made sure they were good enough at the time I was driving them -- had this '53 Dodge that I had to bleed the brakes every time I wanted to take it out for a spin because the wheel cylinders were pitted and slowly leaked but always made sure to do a proper job because other people's lives were at risk too.
Everything should have a diagnostic procedure and a replacement procedure. All of the other car companies manage to do at least that, and they also somehow manage to make replacement parts available too. As a bonus of the internet age, you can publish updated service manuals when unexpected failures are found and a diagnostic procedure and recommended remediation are built.
Bad software updates should be fixable by flashing a known good version. I don't expect to have support for 3rd parties to modify firmware to make fixes (but one could hope).
If the engine in my out of warranty vehicle breaks, I can (attempt) to fix it myself, bring it to an independent mechanic to fix it or replace it (again, myself or others). If I value the coolness of my car over time and money, I can even replace a functional engine with something better, for some value of better, and subject to environmental regulations.
The Amiga came with schematics... that seems like a parallel universe now... and then I realize that was what some kind of golden age of openness to me, probably seems very closed and uptight to what computer scientists in the 60s or so did and experienced. And hey, isn't Linux incredibly complex? What if someone tinkers with the sourcecode, breaks it completely, and ends up exposing very private email someone else send to them to them? What if someone uses a Raspberry Pi to automate their garage door, instead of buying a "professional product", and another person gets harmed or even killed? Those things can happen, and then that person is liable for what they did.. isn't that enough? Or at least enough in most cases?
If people repairing cars leads to a lot of accidents, then it's the job of lawmakers to study, recognize and deal with that. It's a farce for all sorts of products being hard to repair because people repairing their stuff is less profitable than them buying more, and then to justify that with safety. If it's about safety, then you have to hand over responsibility. If you find out a new food you invented can carry a new disease if not stored properly, inform the authorities so they can make rules for everyone, instead of doing your own little thing and not telling anyone. Some companies probably don't want that because proper laws would deal with it in respects to how dangerous something is, how much expertise is needed, and so on... not just solely "how much additional money can we squeeze out of it".
So it's not about safety (that's not in reference to your comment which I believe is sincere, but in reference to what many companies are doing), that simply doesn't mesh, it's about the desire to control and exploit, to channel people into what companies need/want instead of channeling companies into what people need/want. Being exploited and manipulated in this fashion is a net decrease of safety. That just about everybody who exploits is in turn the exploited pet of others in other areas, that everybody who presumes to be a magician to the plebs is in turn a pleb in the sight of another magician, that doesn't make it better or more fair, it makes it a maelstrom. Our tools get faster and bigger, but we become consumers instead of makers, parrots instead of sources. We hop from raft to raft on a windy river, rather than building and expanding and improving our world. That is just so boring and also dangerous, besides sorely lacking dignity. Anyone who works to change that, no matter in what capacity, I support without ifs and buts.
Generally speaking and kind of a tangent, but how much damage is done to the mind by making the world and the objects we use to function and socialize more opaque, so that we become to resigned to either consume or watch? That's hardly on our radar, but I would count on it.
They are. That (fortunately) doesn't stop people from still trying, and succeeding. Look up Louis Rossmann and Apple products for a analogous example.
By contrast, for modern electric cars weight and size has so much margin that it's basically a non-issue aside from the complications of fitting the battery into the chassis.
It means that car companies have far, far less of a genuine engineering-driven reason to make devices that are impossible to repair at home or in small shops.
Cars these days can run half a million miles in their lifetime if you treat them right and replace the pieces that break. Could you imagine a future where cars followed the Apple model?
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17444076 [1]: https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup
These mature cheap reliable mass-produced electrolytic capacitors of which we rarely see fault today, sure had quite the rebellious stage[2] [3].
Interesting, from the announcement on badcaps.net[3]:
"Back in April 2002, I had an idea to start a business (actually spinoff of another business) servicing motherboards at component level amid the mass capacitor failures plaguing the PC industry."..."The store boomed from its launch all the way up until about a year ago. Over the last 6 months or so, I have sold very few capacitors. Once my stock depletes, I will be shutting down the Badcaps.net store."
Two soldered wires later, placed at a cool spot, your capacitor might last long enough to see the board go up in flames for other reasons.
For laptops this kind of environment is common; in fact most of Louis Rossmann’s repairs are about liquid damage.
I'm a mechanical engineer masquerading as a software developer so I could be talking out my ass, but I'm fairly sure that board failure rate is proportional to the amount of discrete components on said board.
Cooling, em-effects and (if you go small enough) electro-drift are allmost always worser on a Soc. http://summit.sfu.ca/system/files/iritems1/10320/etd2087.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1712/1712.05562.pdf
This might have improved in recent years ( im not really up to date with manufacturing) but seeing the whole direction the industry moved- i doubt it.
Electric cars are so much easier to repair in my opinion because of their simplicity, with the exception of the high voltage stuff, which I won't touch. Replacing the drive unit in most electric cars is like 2 sets of wires and 4-8 bolts. Ever tried replacing the camshaft in an internal combustion vehicle? I'd say the difference is, the aftermarket car parts business is very good at making camshafts, bearings and pistons, but not so good at making high power inverters and charging systems. But that'll change as electric vehicles become more common.
This is FALSE, small size do not explain Apple not publishing schematics, not selling parts, attempting to stop third parties to repair Apple products by sending them to justice etc.
I think you need to research more this subject and if you are honest with yourself you will stop excusing Apple for this.
Basically, whenever a company says: we don't want third party X to do Y because of user experience, it mostly boils down to 10% user experience, 10% PR & Marketing, and 80% legal crap.
Imagine your side mirror of your car is broken(say a Ford). Now imagine Ford is not allowing you to buy any other brand of mirror to replace it, you can't even buy the Ford mirror to replace it yourself either, you must go to a Ford shop pay 10x more for the mirror replacement but in some cases the guys there say that is to expensive to try replace only the mirror and they will change the entire car body but all is fine if you bought the extra insurgence package, if not you will pay 25%-50% the original full car price to have it fixed.
Again, inform yourself, this thread has many references and be honest with yourself, you can like Apple for the things that they do right and don't try to excuse them for the things they do wrong.
If you read what I wrote, you should be able to understand that:
> they say is for keeping the brand standards but is for the money.
is exactly this:
> whenever a company says: we don't want third party X to do Y because of user experience, it mostly boils down to 10% user experience, 10% PR & Marketing, and 80% legal crap.
But without assuming malice or planned obsolescence. It doesn't make sense for a company to create a workflow, train people and build up logistics for an integrated product if there is no money to be made off of it. You can argue that you don't like that, but assuming that they (Apple as a company) makes tons of extra money because of that is a bit unfounded. It's not likely that a company would retain a client base if they actively practice such rules against incentives. If you turn it around, would you be able to say: "the company (Apple) would make more money if they sold spare parts and repair guides to anyone"? I think not. I don't agree with it, but it doesn't mean it's going to make a difference. A law would make a difference, and since this isn't an Apple discussion but a repair discussion based on Tesla, I'd think you would be more interested in a structural solution than trying to assign malice and speak emotions all day long.
The discussion should be about whether we agree with the rules, and if the rules are lawful (and if we can change the law to enforce a better set of rules). Not the personification of a company and assigning malice, that doesn't get anyone anywhere.
I think one of the biggest problems with business today is that fact that we in society have removed "personification" from the company, companies are made of people, and allowing companies whole to act as if they are amoral automatons with their only goal profit seeking removes the ethical obligations of the people that make up said corporations. Allows management to hide behind phrases like "it is not personal it is just business".
So no a company may not be a person, but people are in charge of it, people make the choices and policies of the companies, and as such those people though be personified and held to an ethical standard and foundation on behalf of the company.
Explaining away all of Apples anti-consumer policies simply because "Well the damn lawyers" as you have done here is a massive evasion and redirection of responsibility that the management, engineers and really every employee of apple as to their customers
Business scholars devise calculations where you can put in the laws and requirements of your business and out comes the way forward, often not in favor of the consumers. If you want that to change, well, then capitalism gets in the way and that's when you need laws or shareholder/board-level influence if consumers want that to change.
Your opinion is based on the idea that you can make overall structural changes based on the same principles as making changes to government; but the difference is that there is no way to reach the business part of a company short of changing a law or simply not buying the product.
The scale of operations often doesn't allow for certain changes due to the cost involved, especially when it comes to catering to an insignificant amount of people (such as independent repair shops or consumers that want low level access to everything).
When I write about where the policies come from and why things are in a certain way, that is not opinion but a reflection of current operations. My opinion and the reality don't match, but that doesn't mean I'm going to declare my opinion as fact or yell on a social media platform that "personified company X is malicious". It doesn't help, it doesn't change and it is far from constructive.
On top of that, most policies in larger corporations are in place because they were implemented buy lawyers by directive of business management driven by the wishes of boards and shareholders. Unless you can communicate to, and convince the shareholders, boards and other actual decision makers, all the screaming and opinions are worthless. Especially when it's 1000 people yelling and 100 million people not yelling but being consumers all the same (and paying for products).
In my opinion, all devices should be completely open and manageable by whoever owns them, but that has yet to become reality. Even basic stuff such as parameters for the ECU in almost all cars isn't freely available. Plenty of good & bad reasons for that, but still a bummer when you simply wanted to change a bit in a register to enable or disable a function that suits you.
I do not agree with you on many points but that these kinds of policies are hard to change is obviously true.
I do not see other manufacturers doing same as Apple, so it is FALSE that laws are the ones causing Apple to behaive like this, that would mean that all the rest are operating illegally and let the users open and repair the products, some of them even DARE to sell the parts.
Also, I'm not blaming IP laws, luckily, we don't have the USA IP laws in the rest of the world.
I think most of the pitchforking at Apple is just happening because it's an easy target, not because it's a good example or the first step to fix a structural problem. That USA bill for the right to repair (or was it a state? or county? who knows...), that's the right kind of thing.
Also, have you ever tried to get spare parts from Microsoft for your Xbox, or schematics? Or perhaps for your PlayStation? It's not new or different what Apple does, and it's not going to fix anything by picking the easy target.
Again my point is that there is no excuse for Apple, some parts can be replaced, Apple should sell me parts(like car manufacturers have to provide parts) and I should have the right to replace or fix the parts or give it to a third party to repair.
I agree the world needs laws similar that there are for cars in some countries to prevent abuse.
This is incorrect, there are way smaller, lighter and thinner devices than Apple's laptops and phones that are far more service friendly. Case in point - Checkout Huawei's premium laptop lines.
They have the highest margins, by far, in the whole industry, and well they are raking in money so it's working for them, as far as revenue/income is concerned.
It's easier for them to repair because they have access to the manuals and diagnostic software necessary to quickly identify the issue.
> Electric cars are so much easier to repair in my opinion because of their simplicity
Parts of them, but the highest cost repairs on Tesla's are by far the body work; which is somehow an order of magnitude more expensive than other cars.
> Replacing the drive unit in most electric cars is like 2 sets of wires and 4-8 bolts.
That's a gross oversimplification and completely ignores the necessary reprogramming to make the replacement actually function in the new vehicle, which is precisely the problem with their repair model; you _can't_ actually do this yourself due to software barriers.
> But that'll change as electric vehicles become more common.
And as soon as the manufacturers release the necessary information to make them functional on their platform.
> Tesla offers very long warranties (I believe is 4/8 years for vehicle/drivetrain), so making things hard to repair would likely be costing them money.
The Apple analogy is a good one. Tesla makes similar tradeoffs, but instead of optimizing for size and weight, they are optimizing for safety, performance, and ease-of-manufacturing.
Sometimes, there is no conflict. For instance, Tesla's battery is designed to be super low to the ground to lower the center of gravity, reduce rollovers, and improve turning. They managed to achieve this via a bolt-on assembly that is easy to install and and just as easy to replace. Hurrah!
But in other places, the tension is very much felt. Replacing the front radar (even on pre-facelift cars, before it was hidden) requires removing the entire front bumper cover. Replacing a broken paddle gear in a rear door handle often requires removing the door's window.
If modularity were a first-order goal, these procedures would be a lot simpler, and major hardware upgrades (like Autopilot hardware or the 2nd gen MCU) would be reasonably feasible. But to the extent that modularity comes at even the slightest structural cost, or unnecessary weight, or any difficulty in robotic assembly, Tesla has erred away from it.
I assume their calculus is:
* Safety and performance are what they compete on
* Ease of manufacturing is their competitive advantage
* Modularity and cheap repair costs are "nice to have", but less important than the previous two.
The original iPad was rendered unsupported after 2 years on the market. At that point, the lack of software updates combined with inevitable unknown security vulnerabilities mean that Apple's model actually generates a safety hazard.
It's common for Android hardware to become unsupported after 2 years, but the degree of success of cyanogenmod and postmarketos (and now project treble) demonstrate that there is a better way.
As time passes, an iPad's unknown vulnerabilities become known. Similarly, the scenarios and environs in which a Tesla is driven also change unpredictably.
Apple and Tesla can't support their designs indefinitely and remain profitable. The ethical solution is either don't sell the product (rent it out instead) or simply allow owners to accept the maintenance burden.
I don't see any indication of this. The support windows for all Apple and Tesla products are in line with consumer expectations. The two-year shelf life for iOS devices is driven more by market demand and the way that phone contracts (used to) work than anything else. You don't see that problem with Macbook Pros or iMacs, where consumers expect a longer lifespan.
The expectations for a car are even longer, which is why Tesla still supports its earliest vehicles, and says it will continue to do so moving forward. I don't see any reason to disbelieve this, nor evidence that the company can't sustain it.
"...hard to repair because they optimized for weight and size over maintainability."
How did Apple achieve those goals? Through greater integration and reduced modularity.
I often face two challenges when repairing my own stuff (cars, phones, appliances) these days:
tightly coupled designs
finding replacement parts
The book "Design Rules: The Power of Modularity" deeply influenced how I look at architecture and design.
Since I'm an Apple fanboy, I'm clearly okay with their choices, priorities. But I'm also fully aware of what I'm forfeiting.
I watched the Sandy Munro videos about their Tesla teardowns. The same forces are at work. Fascinating. (Since I'll never be able to afford a Tesla, I won't have to determine if their reduced repairability is an issue for me.)
That hardly seems like a valid business plan for such a large company. If they were to do it purely to create such a construction, they'd be losing clients and money faster than you can hear a YouTuber rant about it.
It seems that everyone is assuming malice in every case while that is not often the cause. Internal Lawyer/security/IP departments, DFM and business rules are like 99.999999% of the reasons why things are the way they are at any large company that tries to serve markets above the bottom/budget line.
There are probably quite a few more cars I would add to that list without hesitation, and it's only going to grow.
But with his channel starting to take off he might have transitioned to a youtube career. At this point he's probably funding a lot of it via youtube income.
I had no idea they had this kind of stance -- is there any more nuance to it?
If there isn't I cannot conscience supporting Tesla in any way again -- there's no way I'm going to help a company that disregards/works against right-to-repair get a monopoly. Just the same reason I avoid buying iDevices.
See my comment from March 2017:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13929078
But if you don't buy iDevices for that reason, you probably don't want a Tesla. Me, the one time I broke a screen, I used a 3rd party repair service, no problems.
> Tesla continued that its customers are free to do what they want with their cars, including doing their own work to repair salvaged vehicles. They added that there are significant safety concerns when salvaged Teslas are repaired by unqualified mechanics, as these vehicles could pose a danger to both the mechanic and other drivers on the road.
Basically, already every single time a Tesla gets a car accident, the news loves to jump all over it. Now if you had people doing a half-ass job and making a defective repair, then the bad press would fall on Tesla.
I watched this yesterday and was pleasantly surprised at the angle of the video - I expected it to be a little more snarky about what he's done, but it presented a much better angle in terms of the right to repair that Tesla clearly fights against.
I'm often told that I'm an Elon Musk fanboy by friends and family - I love what SpaceX is doing, and I want Tesla to succeed (because I'm convinced that the sooner we get ICE-powered vehicles off the roads, the better), but I have spent much of the last 30 years fixing my own vehicles; I built my first motorbike from a written-off bike, and I've owned hundreds of cars. I built my own rally cars and competed in one of them at WRC level. I love fixing things, and as soon as I found out (via Rich Rebuilds, or CarGuru as it was then) about Tesla's policy, my opinion on them changed completely; I still want them to succeed, but I can't imagine ever owning one because of their stance (even though it probably wouldn't affect me, even if I ever did own one, which is unlikely to say the least).
There are a number of people on here taking what appears to me to be a straw man on the 'right to repair' angle - talking about 'repairing the software yourself'. I don't think this is what most people are talking about (and it's certainly not what Rich is talking about). It's about Tesla's restrictive policy over spare parts and repairing vehicles - not down to software level, but to the level that Rich is working at - like-for-like replacement of entire components. If a vehicle is on Tesla's list, then they will not sell you parts. And you can't get pattern parts in the way you can for most ICE vehicles - I'd imagine this is because the supply chain/pool is much smaller (Tesla is a small, niche manufacturer in reality) and they have clauses in place to stop the sale of these parts via other channels. And this is just wrong. There is no more danger in the straight like-for-like replacement of a motor unit or inverter than there is in any other competent repair.
My experience of dealer repair work has been limited, but when it has taken place, it has been poor. The mechanics in question have been of the 'follow a fixed set of instructions in the order given' type, not seeming to know their trade well and get straight to the point. I was quoted over £2000 in labour costs possible to diagnose a problem with a Ford Focus I owned (car was about 5 years old at the time) - 'because we have to do the diagnosis step by step, even if it's obvious it's not that'. Had I taken it there, it would have been the full price as it was one of the last things on the list (small end failure, which was common on that particular engine). Service in the UK is incredibly bad for the most part, and I've seen friends have terrible (and expensive) experiences at franchised, approved garages, with multi-thousand costs being generated to replace parts without any improvement (A friend's BMW X5 is springing to mind).
There is no significant risk to anyone if this kind of repair is carried out by competent personnel. And there are plenty of competent personnel about who would be able to do everything normally needed to repair a Tesla. The service documentation alone would allow that to happen (factory service manuals are generally a goldmine of information, but also written in such simple terms that nearly anyone could follow them), and the supply of the right parts to anyone who wants them - at a price without a prohibitive mark-up - should be a right. I'm saddened that Tesla is instead following a path trying to lock people in to their ecosystem of service - and even more so when they refuse to carry out mandated...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13183972
I have been trying to fix various things in an old car from the 80s, and one of the more annoying aspects is trying to get a replacement part and finding there is a rare variant that I need but has the same part number as the common one. There are also a lot of parts that don't have diagrams or part numbers at all, because they weren't anticipated to be serviced normally.
And if a manufacturer that is facing a financial issue would start to reduce the number of welds on the cars (which you would assume engineering put there for a reason) I would be very suspicious, especially if they did not retest and recertify.
Usually the engineers that determine how many welds you will need to hold something together know what they are doing and you can't just replace welds with bonding without further cascading impact to the rest of the work.
Go online to the forums and read about the nightmare of trying to do this yourself without VW diagnostics to get the new module to work with all the existing components. Even my local shop, who uses a VV tech on the side would not warranty a $3,000 fix. The dealership wanted over $4,500 to fix it. In the end I traded it in where I bought it (I worked there many moons ago and the owner leaned on a wholesaler to buy the car at a very reasonable price).
Just to clarify my point; this was a GTI- a loved car with all kinds of known fixes, fixers and available parts.
That's usually because the replacement is a drop-in compatible replacement; otherwise the part number would also have changed. Note that sometimes this also means a few other parts need to be replaced with new versions too, and if so that would be something mentioned in a service change bulletin (unfortunately rarely available, in contrast to service manuals.)
I wish. When I had it installed, I was told there was an issue, but I was sure it was the right part so I told them to go ahead and just do it. Afterwards, there was a heavy bag of leftover parts, and I said "what's this?" It was the stuff that had to be taken off to fit the wrong part. That stuff, coincidentally, doesn't have part numbers or documentation itself.
Also not helping - salvage places that don't send you the exact part that's pictured on their website.
I wonder if some Tesla cars will end up like old set-top boxes for some paid Satellite TV service (DirecTV): utterly useless, illegal to circumvent due to Tesla IP violations required, but still yours to keep!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toe_the_line
Toeing a line invokes using your foot for, well, something related to a line. Is it an actual line or a metaphorical line? What's the line going to be used for after you toe it?
The idiom is usually used in the sense of getting really close to some imaginary, arbitrary boundary. Even if you don't know the history behind the saying, that it's something that boys used to do to mess with each other, you can usually rule one of them out and get pretty close to the actual history / meaning of the idiom.
When I first came across it, I 'knew' it was 'toe' and I would have been pretty surprised if it had actually been 'tow'. What I didn't know was the precise thing that the end of the foot was actually supposed to be doing to the supposed line.
Last time Automakers tried crap like Telsa is trying we got the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act
I would have hope we would get a revision that protects consumers but we are more likely to see a repeal of the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act from both Democrats and Republicans than any support for lowering of Intellectual privilege protections. (Democrats are in the pocket of Hollywood who lives and dies on copyright laws)
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfV0_wbjG8KJADuZT2ct4SA
Tesla has all kinds of restrictions on what vehicles are allowed to supercharge, and whether or not you'll be charged a fee. For example, my friend's S is a 2015 with supercharging that transfers with the vehicle, so that if he sells it to you, you can still supercharge. My 2017 X has free supercharging that is restricted to the first owner, so if I sell you my car, you'll end up paying for supercharging. And if either one of our cars is wrecked, and Tesla finds out about it, they will not allow the cars to supercharge at all until they are "recertified" by Tesla, at a cost of thousands of dollars.
If you buy a salvage Tesla, I'd suggest that (unless you've rooted it, and know how to re-enable supercharging) that you just pull the sim card, and don't let it connect to your wifi. That will (hopefully) preserve your ability to supercharge at the price of making the giant touchscreen basically useless.
https://www.patreon.com/RichRebuilds/overview