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Tesla remotely converts battery pack, cutting 1/3 of range

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Re: Tesla remotely converts battery pack, cutting 1/3 of range

#551

"You'll own nothing and you'll like it."

The irony is that I would love to not actually own a car, please let me pay a flat monthly/yearly fee for “having a car of a specific model or better in good working order” available to me at all times and let the manufacturer figure out how best to do that.

Car breaks down, who cares, call the seller, they swap you out, repair it and keep it ready for the next person. It’s the only business model that aligns the incentives right. Car manufacturers and I benefit from better reliability and lower maintenance costs.

This shitty world we live in is the worst of both worlds.

Re: Tesla remotely converts battery pack, cutting 1/3 of range

#552
post #80

> To be extra clear, I don't post this stuff because I hate Tesla or anything. In fact, it's just the opposite. I hate seeing Tesla derail themselves with this kind of nonsense. I respect the OP for saying this. But I have a hard time respecting people buying Teslas, or anything from Musk. Is it not obvious that the guy is a charlatan? (and that the fish rots from the head?) How likely is it that you won't be robbed…

Someone called him out on twitter for his flirtation with toxic conservatism. They asked if he remembers what demographic buys 99% of his vehicles. I didn’t see if he replied.

Aside from anecdotes and fear mongering from EV owners, most people aren't actually making car buying decisions based on politics. Of the friends & family I have who own EVs, more than half are die hard conservatives. They recognize value when they see it.

Re: Tesla remotely converts battery pack, cutting 1/3 of range

#553

I'll spare the moral judgements against Tesla for this: The real moral of the story here is that if your business plan and practices is creating occasional weird issues and huge cognitive dissonance in your customers, it's the wrong business plan. Also... the number of people this applies to is likely so low that Tesla really screwed up by not erring on the side of the customer. (They didn't buy from Tesla, but they'…

> They didn't buy from Tesla, but they're still a customer buying servicing from them. This strikes me as a result of Tesla's whole "ignore everything known by car companies and act like software companies" approach. So far the software industry is young enough that most companies can expect that anyone approaching them for support is the same person who bought the software... but that's not at all the case for cars,…

> This strikes me as a result of Tesla's whole "ignore everything known by car companies and act like software companies" approach

Yup, the Silicon Valley strategy "letting the fires burn". As long as you can acquire new customers with less effort than servicing existing ones, why bother? It worked at Paypal and it has worked so far at Tesla. We see year after year of 50%+ sales growth but nowhere near 50% increases in service capacity. It's the reason we see people waiting months for replacement parts (those parts can go into a new car, for a new customer!) and its the reason they pressure you into accepting bad workmanship so that the problems with the car become yours and not theirs and its now on you to convince them that it is not, in fact, "in spec".

This is a 4 year old thread but Tesla still makes the same service mistakes (like the OP) today: https://twitter.com/grainsurgeon/status/1054732768465305600

Re: Tesla remotely converts battery pack, cutting 1/3 of range

#554
post #48

So the way I'm reading the post is Tesla swapped out a battery pack for a 60 with a 90 and enabled the 90. Tesla, years later, discovers that even though the hardware for a 90 was installed it should have been software limited to be a 60. (I'm assuming that Tesla only made the owner pay the cost of the 60 battery swap even though they replaced it with a 90). They go and "fix the glitch" and set it back to the 60. Sin…

This one of those really easy, Bank error in your favour, sorts of problems where all Telsa had to do is just leave the 90 alone and essentially tighten up it's internal processes. I have a hard time with tech that has software kill switches. Like all those farm tractors out there, it just invites a culture of hacking and stealing and probably doing unsafe and risking things. This is a space where we totally need to see proper regulation.

Re: Tesla remotely converts battery pack, cutting 1/3 of range

#556

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla is also thousands of brilliant engineers that transformed the industry, and not just one guy who tweets a lot.

Exactly, so they should do the only logical thing and vote out Elon as Tesla's CEO so he stops destroying whatever public image they have left. Elon doesn't "do" anything besides be a double edged hype machine.

It would be amazing if Tesla were a worker cooperative where that were possible.

Trying to hold Elon to a standard in his companies gets you fired, not him: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-17/spacex-fi...

Re: Tesla remotely converts battery pack, cutting 1/3 of range

#557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are documented cases of Tesla selling a pre-owned vehicle that was purchased with an optional feature, listing that optional feature in the sale ad, and then disabling the feature after the person they sold the car to has taken possession.

That sucks. Got a link by chance? That's definitely not a standard practice, but I can see how that would happen by mistake (e.g. forget to remove FSD from the spec sheet) and then be difficult to get fixed. It's near-impossible to reach the right human at Tesla, so when things fall through the cracks, it's a nightmare. I suspect that's the issue OP is quoting, too -- there's likely a reasonable person at Tesla who c…

Link to one story is here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32244975

Re: Tesla remotely converts battery pack, cutting 1/3 of range

#558
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is a controversial opinion here, but I think software locks aren't inherently bad in a car that can be driven by software. I don't really trust Tesla's self-driving software as is, I certainly don't trust some random person's hack of already questionable Tesla code. This isn't an iPhone. Someone mucking about in the software can kill people.

This sort of justification would never fly if we were talking about modding ICE vehicles: * Illegal to replace your own brake rotors or pads, as faulty ones can cause safety issues. * Illegal to replace your own headlights, as bad ones could be too dim or too bright and cause safety issues. * Illegal to change your own oil, as bad ones could seize up your engine in the middle of the road and cause safety issues. * Il…

These seem largely to be straw-men; brake rotors, pads, headlights.... all have associated safety standards.

You can install your own brake pads sure, but as a layman if you installed brake pads of your own design and construction, it might be a bit of an issue.

Re: Tesla remotely converts battery pack, cutting 1/3 of range

#559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no, they can't lock it down to 3080 level 3 years later with a software update I think the problem is that there are 2 different types of "can't": can't as in technologically impossible, and can't as in legally disallowed. In the past, the former was usually the case. Vendors literally could not technologically take away features because things either were not controlled by software or software could not tell the h…

>Heck, they could even cut down all legitimate 3080Tis to what would be 3080 or even 1060 performance via drivers after 3 years and you'd be able to do nothing besides complain on social media -- you still have exactly the amount of hardware sold, and they never promised any performance levels (just check their site, you only get things like compute units, clock speed, ram etc. not performance guarantees like FLOPs o…

It's called small claims court.

Re: Tesla remotely converts battery pack, cutting 1/3 of range

#560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could just as easily get screwed by GM, Ford, or any other legacy automaker That is purely hypothetical, however -- as far as I know, this kind of stunt has only become a thing since Tesla started doing it. Chevy wants to reduce the capacity of my wife's Bolt by 20%, but they are asking for her permission to do that, not just sending an OTA update to do it against her wishes. When I look at what car to buy, I a…

Curiosity is too strong. For what reason does Chevy want you to volunteer to lower your capacity?

its part of a massive recall on the bolt. They completely halted production for months and months and are now going to recall and replace the battery of every bolt on the road. Before the replacements go in they want owners to agree to have their capacity cut as an extra precaution.
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