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Comment by dangero | Hacker News Reader

Tesla cars are in this category too

I was extremely skeptical of this, so I googled it. Seems like Tesla owners have had no problem starting their cars without an internet connection, though obviously the internet dependant features don't work.[0] This doesn't seem comparable to a CD player that won't play CDs without an internet connection, it's more like a CD player that gracefully degrades to not showing the extra info it would get from the internet while still playing the local media.

[0]: https://forums.tesla.com/en_AU/forum/forums/can-you-disconne...

So that’s a lie. I drove through Arizona and Colorado on a hiking trip last year, and frequently camped in places with no service. Worked just fine.

Did you try using keyless start from your phone? I’ve relied on this before when I forgot my key but I’d worry about lack of service making it ompossible to start my car.

I did not. I have a Model S. The unlock-when-you-get-close thing worked, since it’s Bluetooth.

It is not a lie. The idea is that Tesla would go out of business and a vulnerability in the car would be found and exploited to kill you in the absence of security updates. Similar to how the article says:

> We're guessing a Charter alarm would still be able to make loud noises when someone breaks into a house, but that doesn't mean it'll work with an alarm-monitoring service.

That’s a lot of assumptions. The point stands that Tesla’s perform just fine in the absence of a network.

What lots of assumptions? that's a single inevitability that a self-driving car manufacturer, Tesla or otherwise, will go out of business, rendering the car offline only (the point made in the article) or worse, like the case with Android phones, you'll have plenty of vulnerable cars on the street and some community updates (like the work of LineageOS for instance).

It's the same point made in this computerphile video[1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLiE0Nr8VOE

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