Which is super scary. A couple years ago one of their firmware engineers had his NDA expire, and he posted some stories about his time there in some forum.
One of the stories that stuck with me is they were really sloppy with their updates. One time the pushed one that wasn't fully cooked (it might have bricked some, I can't remember), so one of the engineers literally wrote a script to SSH into each of the cars to roll back part of the update.
Update: here's the original source: https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376
https://www.wired.com/2016/08/jeep-hackers-return-high-speed...
Since the author remains anon, I always thought it was just a troll.
Full quote:
> model s and x use openvpn to talk to their backend. inside that backend there are metadata services that feed info to the system, one of those things being a ~20MB+ (generated by the worst erp system) json payload that describes supercharger shit for the map in the touchscreen. somebody was smart enough to do automated linting but forgot to validate against the custom parser the car runs which caused a segfault in the qt app that runs the ui, which in turn for a variety of reasons forces a reboot of that component. I think we clocked about 15 seconds before it read the file and faulted after boot. it was doing that for an hour before everyone panicked and got me and qa on the phone to fix it. i wrote a quick python/fabric script that ssh’d to as many cars as possible at a time to rm the file
- "On that note, China has a law in place that mandates all electric cars send real time telemetry to their government servers - Model S/X/3, NIO cars and any other electric car if they're driving already complies with that law to be road certified"
- "Don't be surprised if that becomes a mandate in other countries"
They regularly lambast HN via this thread. It would be great if more people read their criticisms of the community here.
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=39...
However, I believe consumers also have a way to laugh Tesla out of the room, eventually: public policy ideas like the first sale doctrine, or just straight up passing new laws saying that when you buy a car, the manufacturer must provide basic certain basic services (such as allowing the vehicle to run, and warranty for basic components) even if the purchaser elects to deactivate some of the data collection.
In the past few decades, we have really allowed power to accrue to large corporations, but I think that things like the right-to-repair movement show that the pendulum may swing the other direction, at least in some contexts. Regardless of overall political or economic ideology, as soon as a large portion of the population realizes that these OEMs are basically saying "yes, pay me a good chunk of your annual salary, and I'll let you use this vehicle as long as you don't piss me off," I think things will swing very quickly in favor of consumers. The reason it hasn't yet is because most people don't have to deal with vehicles with these restrictions.
I'm sure its not going to be long before you don't _own_ your car, you just purchased a license to use it for a period of time.
Have they updated the software such that this isn't possible?