Tesla’s Dieselgate

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/

by rbanffy • 3 years ago

71 35 3 years ago

The sheer amount of energy expended by Elon Musk haters is matched only by the energy output of his biggest supporters.

The man and his companies aren’t Satan, they’re not the force of evil incarnate, they’re just an organization. It costs zero energy to ignore the things you don’t like.

mandeepj• 3 years ago

It costs zero energy to ignore the things you don’t like.

So, you are saying there should not be any protests, criticisms, and disagreements?

asguy2• 3 years ago

No, he's saying stop letting people live rent-free in your head.

smt882• 3 years ago

Why should anyone ignore Tesla criminally defrauding their customers by programming their vehicles to lie about their range?

If Musk/Tesla were just distasteful, your comment would make sense. But we know now that they've willfully harmed customers in many ways and likely committed crimes in the process.

hatsunearu• 3 years ago

I really don't understand this comment.

It has no substance other than "stop complaining, you're wasting energy".

I don't even know what's a good response to this. Why even do anything?

tiahura• 3 years ago

Because it's become tedious and borderline pathological.

CamperBob24• 3 years ago

The article makes a large number of serious accusations but provides no citations for some of the worst of them. I have no doubt that the accusations are mostly true, but without backup, they are just ranting and raving and raising the noise floor. It's a low-quality piece of writing.

m3kw9• 3 years ago

Salt, lots of salt

mcpackieh• 3 years ago

e.g. 'Tesla's Volkswagen's Watergate Scandal'

I suppose soon we'll have FutureCorp's Tesla's Volkswagen's Watergate Scandal Can't we just bring back the word 'scandal' unadorned?

Anyway, this article is trash. Why does it lead with rambling complaints about starlink instead of cutting to the chase, which is that DRM in Tesla cars prevents people from knowing what their cars actually do? (Not news btw, I and others have been complaining about this for years.) Also "The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers" I stopped reading here. VW's crimes were severe but comparing them to the Holocaust is completely uncalled for. Is this supposed to be a funny joke because VW is German? It isn't funny.

saiya-jin• 3 years ago

Are these claims verified? It should be trivial ie for 2nd hand owners to chip in whether with sales extra equipment is disabled and new owner needs to purchase it again. I think I would remember any outrage around this, and this for sure should produce some.

CamperBob24• 3 years ago

That's the least of the unverified, unsupported claims in this article. Flagged (and no, I don't own a Tesla or any other products from any Musk companies, or have an interest in any related securities.)

wmf• 3 years ago

There were one or two cases where FSD got accidentally disabled when reselling a used Tesla. I remember the outrage about it.

ryan93• 3 years ago

What would martin eberhard who left years before model S know about musk and his contributions to engineering decisions at tesla?

galkk3• 3 years ago

It is long rant that lists all griefs that author has with musk and Tesla.

I stopped reading at about 1/3 of this article because whatever this article’s title promised still doesn’t started.

mrguyorama2• 3 years ago

Every single one of his complaints is sourced. Maybe, just maybe, Musk and tesla suck?

gruez• 3 years ago

I don't think the parent is disputing whether tesla sucks or not, he's saying that the article is poorly written. It's titled "Tesla's Dieselgate", but it doesn't address that specific point until 2/3rds into the article. If the article was titled something like "Why Tesla Sucks", this would be forgivable, but there's no need to preface every anti-tesla article with a lengthy preamble about all the existing reasons why tesla sucks.

belltaco• 3 years ago

Sourced with things that show the opposite. Like stating that Teslas are one of the deadliest cars and linked to an article showing 17 deaths out of 44,000 yearly deaths were when Autopilot was on.

galkk3• 3 years ago

My criticism can be summarized in one principle: "Bottom line up front".

It says about Dieselgate. Knowing what dieselgate is I'd expect to see the following:

    Tesla put special check into firmware that detected when car is used for power consumption/distance check in standartized environment and used some trickery to get better numbers (distance) than they are getting in normal usage. Here is the proof by

Instead of that I scrolled already like 2 screens and there are rants about musk being or not being tesla founder, starlink, tesla subsidies, musk reality distortion field. Then it somehow leaps towards criticism of DRMs and I stop reading those ramblings. I don't own tesla, not have tesla stock, not musk fanboy, and the article did a poor job in convincing that anything is bad. It feels that it is is already written for haters who nod reading every point.

This article is written like modern recipes online, which are almost universally hated on HN. One ones that start with grandmother and childhood memories, then go to beautiful children and that Saturday morning when house is full of smells and author picks her/his favorite knife and Le Creuset dutch oven...

michaelmrose• 3 years ago

Tesla's range is a complete fiction. To support this fiction it displays an imaginary range substantially higher than actual on the HUD. To avoid blowing the charade or leaving drivers high and dry when it dies with 100 miles on the clock it switches from fiction to reality about halfway through. The difference is so egregious that a huge portion of users think their car is broken. So many that Tesla created a team to mass close those tickets first by running remote diagnostics and blowing smoke up their ass to convince drivers there is nothing wrong. EG you're holding it wrong.

To keep up with volume they stopped bothering actually doing any diagnostics and flagging customers effectively preventing them from creating new tickets which might result in expensive service calls.

So you buy based on inflated numbers realize its not working as expected, call to complain thinking your car is broken, your account gets flagged and now if something really does go wrong you could be stranded in limbo for days unable to use the normal process.

Additional fun if you miss a payment or they misapply a payment or a check gets lost or any of the fun things that happen in the magical world of payment processing they have the ability remotely stop your car and summon a repo man.

Seems like this will eventually be misused to stop protests or be mass misused by hackers eventually.

You should read the rest of the article its worth reading.

bryanlarsen• 3 years ago

Tesla's range is quite accurate, in my experience. The top number gives you a relatively accurate range in good conditions -- aka city driving in the summer. And then if you punch in your destination it'll tell you within a single percent of what your battery will be at your destination.

gary_0• 3 years ago

If you scroll past the 6 feet of regurgitated Musk condemnation, he has a good point: DRM and anti-right-to-repair laws make it easy for manufacturers to scam consumers and allow scummy rent-seeking behavior.

I wish Doctorow eased off on the rhetoric and hyperbole ("mobile gas-chambers", really?) because underneath all that he is still right.

CamperBob24• 3 years ago

Exactly. We already have RMS, the job of Cassandra is already taken.

slowmovintarget• 3 years ago

duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36906331

SideburnsOfDoom• 3 years ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36906331

travisgriggs2• 3 years ago

Interesting some of the negatives comments here. I rather liked the article. Length and hyperbole and all.

Of course, it could have been a simple quick to read tweet (or do I call them x's now?): "DRM is techno cancer".

But sometimes, you need to marinate in an idea for a bit to get it to really sink in, for slow associations to rise in your head to sort through it.

Tesla’s Dieselgate

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