It's been interesting watching the excuses and defenses of Tesla pivot in the wind like a weathervane in a tornado. Whatever Tesla does is good, right, perfect, and everyone else sucks, no matter how nonsensical this ends up sounding to literally everyone else.
The excuses for why, see, really it's GOOD that you can't fix your own car, can't access the diagnostic screens the car has built in, etc, are particularly tortured. Someone might fix it wrong, see, and then that would look bad for Tesla if it blew up. Yes, there's a particularly strong media focus on Tesla, but if you go talking to the world endlessly about how amazing your self driving system is, and how capable it is, it's reasonable to expect people to take notice when it drives at highway speeds into stationary solid objects.
The latest tortured explanations are more about Bitcoin, though - the scourge of the planet, wasting energy, horrible carbon footprint per transaction, that... oh, uh... isn't /that/ bad... and, uh... see, Mars needs a currency, and... (etc).
It would probably be less annoying if the community of Tesla supporters occasionally remembered that a $100k car isn't pocket change for everyone. I've talked, far too often, to people who defend Tesla's practices by stating, "Well, I don't want to work on my car, and I don't think the Service Centers are overpriced, so I don't see why anyone else cares. Besides, they're no more expensive than a BMW, Mercedes, or Porsche dealership, so what's the problem?"
I'll stick to stuff I can work on. Even if I choose not to work on it, at least if I can access it fully, it means some other independent shop can do the same thing.
Are Tesla's actually more locked down than any other modern brand of car?
None give source code for the ECU...
Tesla's seem to have a rooting and hacking community, which at least gives you more power than a closed source blob that nobody has gotten root on like every other manufacturer.
Because its my car? I bought it? 30 years ago you could dig into basically any car, (and their safety was worse than of modern cars), yet how often you saw someone modify their car to the point of health incident?
But when it broke, at least we could open the hood and make it run again. Now instead we got cars that will refuse to move if it happen to update firmware in underground garage, and you cant get it out without teslatruck. (I think this was fixed, but the point still stands)
> Its not a phone
Why is it okay for phones? How come we somehow collectively aggreed that its OK for manufacturers to lock our own phones away from us?
I really hate this attitude of "I dont trust myself to tinker with it so I think noone else should be allowed to". Thats the attitude which, if it gets enough traction, takes our freedoms away.
>enormous metal machines that could easily get into an accident
Changing brake pads is a easy job that I did in the backyard a number of times.
Then I moved to the city and got an office job.
A 40 year old engineer that works on safety critical software gave me a snide remark about how stopping a car is too important and he'd be afraid to take that into his own hands.
I quickly learned not to talk about DIY on anything that wasn't toys unless I wanted to listen to people generalize from their own lack of experience and consider me reckless.
> I quickly learned not to talk about DIY on anything that wasn't toys unless I wanted to listen to people generalize from their own lack of experience and consider me reckless.
Yeah... I know exactly what you're talking about. Look for dirt under fingernails on a Monday morning, that's a good clue someone might do their own work. Or weld splatter burns on a beat up jacket. Of course, occasionally you get a dead giveaway like someone driving an 80s sports car to work that is clearly both well maintained and not quite stock...
What I couldn't wrap my head around was the sense of "proud ignorance" a lot of people seemed to have about not knowing how to do anything mechanical. It wasn't just, "I don't know how to do that, is it hard?" - it was "I don't know how to do that, and why would I bother learning when I can pay someone else to do that?"
It never made sense to me. If a vehicle is easier for me to work on, then it's going to be easier for someone else (a local shop) to work on as well. And if I know what a job requires, I can decide if it's worth paying someone else to do it. Paying someone $200 to do wheel bearings in the dead of winter? Worth the money. Paying someone $800 to replace a water pump, serpentine belt, and a few other things when I can do it in a few hours on a nice Saturday? Not so much.
I think you got it backwards:
Why is it okay for manufacturers to lock phones from us? It cant be because they are enormous metal machines that could easily get into an accident and kill its passengers, yet a locked phone is still more or less the only option.
Now the cars are enormous metal machines that could easily get into an accident and kill its passengers, yet, until recently, were "open" to any and all modifications by anyone. And it didnt affect their safety.
The point is, locking cars isnt happening for our safety, its happening to increase profits. But people dont like to hear it, so the pitch is safety.
By this tempo soon the bananas will be legal to be peeled only by certified servicemans, because wrong disposal of the peel may cause injury to a person.
They generally are, yes. On most other cars, you can get the software and interfaces to interact with them as the dealer can, if you're willing to jump through a few hoops. Various service procedures require this sort of interaction (often a coolant replacement requires some bleeding procedures to get the air out, brake fluid flushing requires some toggling of the ABS controller valves, etc). Or, sometimes, there's just an easy diagnostic procedure you can do. "This problem could be caused by valve A being bad - can you test valve A? It's not moving as commanded? Ok, I'll go replace it."
I can do none of that on a Tesla. I can't even access the diagnostic screens built into the car without a rolling code generator - even if I own the car free and clear.
Not necessarily stuff you can work on, but stuff that doesn't come with vendor lock. If the manufacturer is the only one who can fix the product, you've got yourself a subscription.
> If the manufacturer is the only one who can fix the product, you've got yourself a subscription.
reply
Indeed. I would have zero complaints at all about Tesla's maintenance programs and service center only requirements if they didn't sell the cars, but only leased them. Great, your car, your rules.
Selling the car, and telling me I can't work on it, though... not OK with that.
17 comments
[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 46.0 ms ] threadIt's been interesting watching the excuses and defenses of Tesla pivot in the wind like a weathervane in a tornado. Whatever Tesla does is good, right, perfect, and everyone else sucks, no matter how nonsensical this ends up sounding to literally everyone else.
The excuses for why, see, really it's GOOD that you can't fix your own car, can't access the diagnostic screens the car has built in, etc, are particularly tortured. Someone might fix it wrong, see, and then that would look bad for Tesla if it blew up. Yes, there's a particularly strong media focus on Tesla, but if you go talking to the world endlessly about how amazing your self driving system is, and how capable it is, it's reasonable to expect people to take notice when it drives at highway speeds into stationary solid objects.
The latest tortured explanations are more about Bitcoin, though - the scourge of the planet, wasting energy, horrible carbon footprint per transaction, that... oh, uh... isn't /that/ bad... and, uh... see, Mars needs a currency, and... (etc).
It would probably be less annoying if the community of Tesla supporters occasionally remembered that a $100k car isn't pocket change for everyone. I've talked, far too often, to people who defend Tesla's practices by stating, "Well, I don't want to work on my car, and I don't think the Service Centers are overpriced, so I don't see why anyone else cares. Besides, they're no more expensive than a BMW, Mercedes, or Porsche dealership, so what's the problem?"
I'll stick to stuff I can work on. Even if I choose not to work on it, at least if I can access it fully, it means some other independent shop can do the same thing.
None give source code for the ECU...
Tesla's seem to have a rooting and hacking community, which at least gives you more power than a closed source blob that nobody has gotten root on like every other manufacturer.
But when it broke, at least we could open the hood and make it run again. Now instead we got cars that will refuse to move if it happen to update firmware in underground garage, and you cant get it out without teslatruck. (I think this was fixed, but the point still stands)
> Its not a phone
Why is it okay for phones? How come we somehow collectively aggreed that its OK for manufacturers to lock our own phones away from us?
I really hate this attitude of "I dont trust myself to tinker with it so I think noone else should be allowed to". Thats the attitude which, if it gets enough traction, takes our freedoms away.
Because phones are not enormous metal machines that could easily get into an accident and kill its passengers.
Changing brake pads is a easy job that I did in the backyard a number of times.
Then I moved to the city and got an office job.
A 40 year old engineer that works on safety critical software gave me a snide remark about how stopping a car is too important and he'd be afraid to take that into his own hands.
I quickly learned not to talk about DIY on anything that wasn't toys unless I wanted to listen to people generalize from their own lack of experience and consider me reckless.
Yeah... I know exactly what you're talking about. Look for dirt under fingernails on a Monday morning, that's a good clue someone might do their own work. Or weld splatter burns on a beat up jacket. Of course, occasionally you get a dead giveaway like someone driving an 80s sports car to work that is clearly both well maintained and not quite stock...
What I couldn't wrap my head around was the sense of "proud ignorance" a lot of people seemed to have about not knowing how to do anything mechanical. It wasn't just, "I don't know how to do that, is it hard?" - it was "I don't know how to do that, and why would I bother learning when I can pay someone else to do that?"
It never made sense to me. If a vehicle is easier for me to work on, then it's going to be easier for someone else (a local shop) to work on as well. And if I know what a job requires, I can decide if it's worth paying someone else to do it. Paying someone $200 to do wheel bearings in the dead of winter? Worth the money. Paying someone $800 to replace a water pump, serpentine belt, and a few other things when I can do it in a few hours on a nice Saturday? Not so much.
Now the cars are enormous metal machines that could easily get into an accident and kill its passengers, yet, until recently, were "open" to any and all modifications by anyone. And it didnt affect their safety.
The point is, locking cars isnt happening for our safety, its happening to increase profits. But people dont like to hear it, so the pitch is safety.
By this tempo soon the bananas will be legal to be peeled only by certified servicemans, because wrong disposal of the peel may cause injury to a person.
I can do none of that on a Tesla. I can't even access the diagnostic screens built into the car without a rolling code generator - even if I own the car free and clear.
And that's a problem.
Indeed. I would have zero complaints at all about Tesla's maintenance programs and service center only requirements if they didn't sell the cars, but only leased them. Great, your car, your rules.
Selling the car, and telling me I can't work on it, though... not OK with that.
It's just the usual tribalism.
That said, is Tesla responsible for some fans being jerks?