Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Shivetya | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I have zero issue with features being lost in a salvaged car. those are entirely at your risk purchases and worse some salvage cars are just unsafe for both driver and others sharing the same road.

that they can be sold and be allowed back on the road opens the manufacturer to a whole host of liabilities. The insurance company declared it not worthy of repair so if state laws permit them to be titled why should the manufacturer provide any support or be compelled to do so?

anecdotal, we have a neighbor in our subdivision with two salvaged cars. both have been given plates by the county to allow them to be driven. both have body damage including a Nissan Rogue which has no back window and one rear passenger window is gone. So who is liable for mechanical failure or even software failure when this car is in accident? I am not even sure it has functioning air bags.

* for clarity - I am against a car being sold and losing features as shown in the article, that car was not a salvage title

Except vehicles are salvaged when the cost of repairing whatever damage was done exceeds most of the FMV according to the insurance company's appraisal process.

It's often entirely disconnected from the vehicle's safe operation. Some vehicles/damages are just expensive to repair and/or don't hold their value well.

I'm currently sitting on a vehicle which was in a minor fender bender but since they creased the quarter panel the insurance company totaled it. There's absolutely nothing wrong with the car besides a cosmetic dent, I drive it daily, its operation is unchanged.

If it were a Tesla, apparently I'd be losing access to all sorts of stuff I purchased like unlimited supercharging just because someone dented my car and the insurance determined it was too expensive to fix.

That's unacceptable in my view, but I already would never buy a car riddled with surveillance systems and unattended OTA software "updates", I'm definitely not in the target market for Tesla.

> why should the manufacturer provide any support or be compelled to do so

I don't think anyone is asking for that.

The ask is 'don't disable existing paid-for features on the car, thanks'.

The legal reductionist version of this situation is buying a house and finding that 2 rooms got demolished because the builder had a lease agreement on those with the previous owner.

Once that car is yours, the software on the car is yours, too.

It boggles my mind how the manufacturer modifying a car they don't own isn't computer trespass and/or straight theft as they deprive you of the rights of ownership.

They'll make some assertion along the lines of granting a license to specific configurations of the control software of the car.

This is part and parcel of why I think IP on software is increasingly rearing it's head as an anti-pattern. Right of First Sale goes right out the window with the "marriage" model of smart appliance ownership we seem to be converging on via contract law.

It's also bizarre that people, especially on here, in this thread, think it's ok for a business to retroactively take away a feature that was already paid for. That price you paid on the used car has those features priced in. This is some weird crabs-in-a-bucket behavior but driven towards protecting a corporation.

> opens the manufacturer to a whole host of liabilities

I don't think so. How would the manufacturer be liable for a failure due to a repair made by someone else? Has there ever been an incident of such a case?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com