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Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

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Re: Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

#551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it sells the world's best selling car at a high margin? And is double the price of the Toyota Corolla it dethroned. https://electrek.co/2023/05/25/tesla-model-y-is-now-the-worl... If one gets news about Tesla only from HN then it does seem Tesla is ridiculous, because only negative stories tend to get upvoted and positive ones buried.

It still makes less money than any other of these automakers. Also margins have fallen like rocks, there's been 3 price cuts in one year. I can buy a tesla for less than a golf in Italy. Cars aren't great stocks. Low margins too much competition. jm2c

> It still makes less money than any other of these automakers.

Source?

Re: Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

#552

Is it just me, or are these numbers almost low enough to be labelled positive PR? > The Tesla files contain more than 2,400 self-acceleration complaints and more than 1,500 braking function problems, including 139 cases of unintentional emergency braking and 383 reported phantom stops resulting from false collision warnings. The number of crashes is more than 1000. A table of incidents involving driver assistance sys…

Do you know how many sudden unintended acceleration were needed for Toyota to take a beating? How many fires were needed for Ford to recall Pinto? How many ignition failed for GM to take a beating? All of those were low numbers.

No I do not. What were those nummbers?

Re: Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

#553
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll do one further: most of us shouldn’t have to drive cars at all every day, we’re just enabling dependency on the robber-barrons that create them - our entire country has been built to be reliant on the auto industry, it’s practically a hostage situation and most of us have stockholm syndrome

In cities for sure but even if you make cities be pedestrian friendly anyone outside of them still needs them

what if I told you that even the smallest town could be pedestrian friendly, and before the advent of cars they were this way for thousands of years

Re: Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

#554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 'keep your lane' tends to be the rule if the right hand lane is also moving at the speed limit (so you can't legally pass). Why are you in the lefter lane if you can't pass? I've been in rush hour (where keep-to-the-right-unless-passing is very strictly enforced) in bumper-to-bumper traffic and the left two (out of 6) are completely empty and everyone is doing 'around' the speed limit. Some are in the right lane do…

> I've been in rush hour (where keep-to-the-right-unless-passing is very strictly enforced) in bumper-to-bumper traffic and the left two (out of 6) are completely empty and everyone is doing 'around' the speed limit. I've been on interstates in every continental US state and I've never seen this, but I think something has been lost in translation because "bumper-to-bumper" and "everybody doing the speed limit" are mu…

We're talking 1-2 meters between your car and the car behind/front of you. It's extremely stressful to drive in at 70 km/h.

Re: Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

#555

Is it just me, or are these numbers almost low enough to be labelled positive PR? > The Tesla files contain more than 2,400 self-acceleration complaints and more than 1,500 braking function problems, including 139 cases of unintentional emergency braking and 383 reported phantom stops resulting from false collision warnings. The number of crashes is more than 1000. A table of incidents involving driver assistance sys…

People are just not reporting them. My model 3 does something scary at least a few times a month but I've never reported any.

I was going to say "Because you believe in the Tesla mission. That's why someone buys the car." but I realize that that's actually no longer the case. That they've become a car manufacturer where customers can simply weigh the pros/cons as they decide what car to buy.

Re: Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

#556
> How did the company deal with complaints? The Tesla files also provide information about this. The files show that employees have precise guidelines for communicating with customers. The top priority is obviously: offer as little attack surface as possible.

For each incident there are bullet points for the “technical review”. The employees who enter this review into the system regularly make it clear that the report is “for internal use only”. Each entry also contains a note in bold type that information, if at all, may only be passed on “VERBALLY to the customer”.

“Do not copy and paste the report below into an email, text message, or leave it in a voicemail to the customer,” it said. Vehicle data should also not be released without permission. If, despite the advice, “an involvement of a lawyer cannot be prevented”, this must be recorded.

Customers that Handelsblatt spoke to have the impression that Tesla employees avoid written communication. “They never sent emails, everything was always verbal,” says the doctor from California, whose Tesla said it accelerated on its own in the fall of 2021 and crashed into two concrete pillars.

Re: Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

#557

Is it just me, or are these numbers almost low enough to be labelled positive PR? > The Tesla files contain more than 2,400 self-acceleration complaints and more than 1,500 braking function problems, including 139 cases of unintentional emergency braking and 383 reported phantom stops resulting from false collision warnings. The number of crashes is more than 1000. A table of incidents involving driver assistance sys…

People are just not reporting them. My model 3 does something scary at least a few times a month but I've never reported any.

my six year old model 3 with 60,000 miles on it doesn’t do anything I don’t tell it to- this sounds like user error. I wouldn’t report user error either.

Re: Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

#558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been in rush hour (where keep-to-the-right-unless-passing is very strictly enforced) in bumper-to-bumper traffic and the left two (out of 6) are completely empty and everyone is doing 'around' the speed limit. I've been on interstates in every continental US state and I've never seen this, but I think something has been lost in translation because "bumper-to-bumper" and "everybody doing the speed limit" are mu…

We're talking 1-2 meters between your car and the car behind/front of you. It's extremely stressful to drive in at 70 km/h.

!!!! 2 meters separation at 70 km/h gives you a tenth of a second to react to anything the car in front of you does, that's flatly insane. Where in the world do people drive like that?

Seriously, that's objectively insane. Try the ruler drop test for reaction times if you don't believe me, a 10th of a second to even initiate your response isn't realistic and obviously gives no time for the response itself to have effect. What I'm saying is that at a tenth of a second, you can't even start to press the brake pedal in time, let alone have enough time to actually slow down.

In America, with only 2 meters between vehicles the traffic would be inching forward at a snails pace, under 20 km/h at least. "Stop and go", as in people would stop their car and then drive forward slowly when a larger gap ahead of them appears.

Re: Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

#559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear people talk about people brake checking all the time (whether they're the brake checkers or the person tailing). A buddy of mine was tailing a (non-Tesla) car a little too closely on his motorcycle and the driver deliberately brake-checked him and he wrecked. And that's just people deliberately driving erratically, never mind the people who are responding to debris, animals, people, etc darting into the road.

Fault of your friend for not keeping a safe distance. If both drivers only had basic insurance covering damages that aren't your fault, he got nothing and the other driver got paid for having his car damaged by a reckless driver that smashed into his car. How does your friend even know it was without reason? Maybe a kitten or a squirrel crossed the road.

We’re not debating fault, we’re debating whether other drivers drive predictably. Whether the driver brake checked him or whether there was a squirrel or kitten in the road doesn’t really matter: the point is the human driver braked unpredictably. You don’t have to drive with special caution around a Tesla, you should drive with the same amount of caution that you would drive around any car. I have a Tesla and I use autopilot pretty liberally (but not carelessly—I’m always ready to take over) and phantom braking was really frustrating last year, but it was never unsafe unless perhaps someone was literally a foot or two behind you at high speed. They seem to have fixed that sometime in 2022, and since then I’ve had fewer than 5 phantom braking episodes and they have been almost imperceptible (certainly not dangerous). The Tesla critics in this thread are reacting to some pretty extreme assumptions about autopilot (that phantom braking happens all the time, that it’s less safe than the unpredictable behavior of human drivers, etc). We certainly need more evidence, but I’m going to be biased toward the people who actually have experience driving Teslas rather than the people whose information comes from the rumor mill.

Re: Whistleblower drops 100 GB of Tesla secrets to German news site

#560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking 1-2 meters between your car and the car behind/front of you. It's extremely stressful to drive in at 70 km/h.

!!!! 2 meters separation at 70 km/h gives you a tenth of a second to react to anything the car in front of you does, that's flatly insane. Where in the world do people drive like that? Seriously, that's objectively insane. Try the ruler drop test for reaction times if you don't believe me, a 10th of a second to even initiate your response isn't realistic and obviously gives no time for the response itself to have eff…

If the car in front of you instantaneously goes to 0, yes.

Reminds me of driving in western Virginia, people drive insane there. This is going into Amsterdam in the morning. Highly recommend “Not Just Bikes” on YouTube if you want an interesting comparison between roads here vs. Canada/US.

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