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Re:All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving ... by AnimalMuppet on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @09:18PM (#12749209)
Until it's tested in court, the legality of that restriction is highly questionable. (Which is not to say that you can ignore it with impunity. If you don't have the money for a multi-year lawsuit against a billionaire, you might not want to violate it.)

Presuming that such "EULAs for cars" are not legally binding, the next step will be cars that simply will not do the "forbidden" action, because their software detects and prevents it. Thence comes the next round of lawsuits...

Re:All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving ... by timdorr on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @09:28PM (#12749252)
It's different because the self-driving doesn't entirely happen within the vehicle. Tesla maintains a road database to base driving decisions off of and it's assumed you obtain that information from the network.

> Initially, the vehicle fleet will take no action except to note the position of road signs, bridges and other stationary objects, mapping the world according to radar. The car computer will then silently compare when it would have braked to the driver action and upload that to the Tesla database. If several cars drive safely past a given radar object, whether Autopilot is turned on or off, then that object is added to the geocoded whitelist.

So, you will likely be accessing a service to use the self-driving features. At that point, I think it's technically within Tesla's rights to dictate how that service is used.

Re:All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving ... by Klathmon on Wednesday October 19, 2016 @09:47PM (#12749307)
It might be within their rights, but still a big issue and something that IMO shouldn't be within their rights.

I can understand (and fully agree with) limiting usage that can hurt them (like you cant use their object db in your own non-tesla car, and you can't use it as free storage for images or something), but limiting how you USE the system in a way that it's meant to be used?

I've only ever seen this kind of stuff in shitty B2B programs, and even there it was a big enough issue to deter us. This is a big deal and could really open the floodgates to some really shitty practices.

Re:All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving ... by usrusr on Thursday October 20, 2016 @05:32AM (#12750850)
> If several cars drive safely past a given radar object, whether Autopilot is turned on or off, then that object is added to the geocoded whitelist.

Slightly exaggerating of course, this means that if there are a few locals that routinely blast through a given stop sign, your future Tesla will happily do the same. So much for better safety through automated driving.

All those years marketing departments have preached about the "personality" of car brands, now we might finally get it (an aggregation of driving patterns of the worst of the brand's customers, if it was strictly a whitelist algorithm which I sure don't hope it is)