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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

Surely the people salvaging these cars would be happy to enter into a contract with Tesla to accept all liability (including superchargers/stations) for damages caused by the car they fixed up, then, right?

Edit to add from a below comment I made: I mean more in the scenario of a cell going bad, causing a fire, then maybe blowing up the car and causing collateral damage. As I understand it, this would be covered by the car's insurance, right? If so, Tesla shouldn't be locking the chargers (Maybe Tesla would need to verify insurance before allowing supercharging then). But if it doesn't, or if the car is uninsured, then I can accept Tesla not wanting to be held liable for the damage to their station or other owners' cars for batteries that might have undetectable damage.

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If use of an object requires an ongoing contractual relationship with a specific entity, you don't own it.

I know that people here won't be super surprised by this concept, but I still think it's worth getting the wording right.

Just as with music and videos and games, I think one should be disallowed from calling something "selling", "buying" or "owning" if what's really being done is "licensing". Yeah, I'm from the "words matter" police. :)

I once read that the test of whether or not you own something is, "Can you sell it?" In this vein, movies and TV shows you "buy" from Apple, Amazon, etc. are not yours.

I don't think that's the right test. The question is do you control it? Can it be modified? Can it be defended? Transferred or loaned to someone else? Copied?

The movies and TV on streaming services are not yours because you don't control them and they can be removed at any time. Market salability is another question entirely. There are items you can own you might be prohibited from selling on an open market, such as a landmark property or a particularly destructive weapon.

Of course “when applicable”. You can’t copy a physical object physically, and technically can’t even copy a physical object by recreating it without violating some trademark or the maker’s copyright.

Then some things are owned by nobody. See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fideicommissum

What about buying a house that is part of a HOA?

I think HOAs are a scam. We recently bought a house, and simply didn’t consider anything with an HOA fee (we made exceptions and considered arrangements where the HOA was limited to private road maintenance).

I doubt we’re the only ones; the HOA depresses the price of the house.

In my mind, a house + HOA = condo, regardless of whether it shares a wall with someone else, and we’d pay accordingly (50-66% as much, tops).

I don't own a home but if I did I sure as hell am not paying any fees to some scammers and sure as hell am not listening to some idiots who think they have any say about how I landscape my yard.

HOAs are evil and I wish they could be outlawed.

What kind of change in law would you like to see that would outlaw them?

As far as I can tell, aren't HOAs just 'built' out of standard contract law?

Yes, but so are non-compete agreements and discrimination, and laws can make those contracts invalid.

I would like to see laws make HOAs invalid and null and void. If you own something you should have full control of it, to the extent that it doesn't adversely influence the safety of the community. So yeah I'm okay with laws saying you aren't allowed to store a pile of hazardous chemicals that could be a safety hazard to neighbors but I'm most certainly NOT okay with laws telling you how you're allowed to landscape your garden or what color you can paint your house or what your fence or driveway looks like or whether you park your car in your driveway or garage. To me, owning means I make the rules, to hell with contracts, it's not a rental.

Unless it's in some historical district where we're trying to preserve the historic look, that I'd be willing to make an exception for. But definitely not in random suburbs.

> If you own something you should have full control of it, to the extent that it doesn't adversely influence the safety of the community.

Well, but that's just an issue of definition. By your peculiar definition, it just means that you don't own the home that comes with HOA encumbrance.

I don't think your peculiar definition is the same as the law normally uses. By itself, it's as fine a definition as long as everyone is careful in their use of words, and doesn't try to draw build moral arguments from issues of definition.

I'm not a lawyer. But I suspect that your first paragraph mentioning issues of discrimination might be able to have some legal firepower. I doubt you'd get much mileage out of anti-trust concerns, unless a particular HOA was dominating a housing market?

As for your second paragraph: those sounds like excellent reasons for an individual such as you or me NOT to buy a home that's part of a HOA. But they furnish no reason to outlaw HOAs, ie to forbid other people from forming them or joining them.

In a free country, why would you take away my right to join an HOA to protect the home I own? The 1sr Amendment guarantees freedom of association.

Sounds an awful lot like mob “protection”

An HOA isn't theoretically better or worse than a state government.

As others have explained, once car and charger have done their handshake, charging is about as complicated as a toaster oven and there isn't really anything the car could do to damage the charger.

And as you have correctly discovered, cars catching on fire is a very regular event that is covered by insurance. Does your supermarket make you sign a liability waiver every time you drive onto their parking lot? No, we have mandatory insurance and other higher-level concepts to do away with all of this overhead that we would otherwise incur doing the most trivial of "transactions".

Can't this be said of literally any car? A badly repaired car could cause a 12 car pile up and kill 17 people because the breaks or power steering failed at the wrong time. This actually seems tremendously more likely than the scenario you name. It seems like Tesla's actions are a pretty transparent effort to control the market to maximize profit.

>Can't this be said of literally any car? A badly repaired car could cause a 12 car pile up and kill 17 people because the breaks or power steering failed at the wrong time.

Yeah you can say it if your goal is to create some political fear-mongering radio advert for some inspection program ballot initiative, doesn't make it true though.

There have been many studies about the efficacy of vehicle inspection programs. The TL;DR of them is that while throwing up a bunch of red tape can keep junk off the road and this can affect the accident rate but the effect is negligible or near the noise threshold. People in well maintained cars making bad decisions is the source of the overwhelming majority of accidents. The brakes going out on some shitbox are basically a rounding error. Salvage cars breaking for reasons having to do with whatever accident they were in is even rarer than that.

Salvage vehicles are a rounding error compared to old junk shitboxes. So take everything that studies have shown about inspection programs and move the decimal a couple places.

This is nonsense. Chargers should be designed to protect themselves. It a defective car can damage it it's only the charger's manufacturer fault.

> would be happy to enter into a contract with Tesla

It is not Tesla's car. They don't own it anymore.

The liability would be the same for any other car.

> this would be covered by the car's insurance, right

Yes. Which has nothing to do with Tesla.

> then I can accept Tesla not wanting to be held liable

Tesla does not own that car. The car would be the same as any other car that Tesla does not own.

A defect that is the fault of the manufacturer is certainly a way to sue Tesla for 'cars they don't own'. Happens all the time. Daily.

And after you jailbreak your Tesla and cause an injury accident, who's to know? Just say you didn't, and it was Tesla's defect. Of course Tesla is concerned.

Let's apply this scenario to a non-Tesla car. And instead of a jailbreak, you decide to do your own brake job on your car.

"And after you do your own brake job on your Honda and cause an injury accident, who's to know? Just say you didn't, and it was Honda's defect."

This applies to any kind of thing you do to your own car. There's always some chance that something can go wrong and cause a huge wreck. There's always a part that can go bad, and there's always going to be someone who lies to cover up or blames the manufacturer.

You could drive your wheel into a curb, damage your suspension, and then have it fall off a week later and crash into oncoming traffic. And still blame the manufacturer for it.

The point is, you don't need to modify a car, or jailbreak it, or anything for these lawsuits to happen.

> And after you jailbreak your Tesla

The Tesla belongs to the user. It no longer belongs to Tesla. That is all that matters.

> Of course Tesla is concerned.

Their concern is of no importance to me regarding things that they no longer own. I simply do not care what their concern is on anything that is no longer owned by them.

Good for you. But society has rules and laws, and Tesla is indeed responsible for failures in design or manufacturing. As evidenced by hundreds of lawsuits of other manufacturers, for a century.

> But society has rules and laws

Yes, and those rules and laws say that the car belongs to the consumer, and the consumer can basically do whatever they want to that car, regardless if Tesla doesn't want that.

Tesla has no legal right to prevent someone from salvaging a car that belongs to the person.

A consumer has the legal right to salvage that car, no matter what Tesla thinks on the matter.

Right to repair laws are on the consumers side, not Tesla's.

This is well established law, that has been in existence for literally decades, and Tesla does not get to ignore these well established laws.

The fact that "Of course Tesla is concerned." is not my problem. It is not the problem of consumers, who have legals rights. And I don't care what Tesla is "concerned" about, because consumers have the legal right to salvages cars, and Tesla does not get to ignore these laws.

> Tesla is indeed responsible

Sucks to be Tesla then! They can shut down their business and stop making cars, if they don't like the laws that allow consumers to salvage cars.

That doesn't mean that a handful of people with jail-broken cars are going to be able to get together and prove a manufacturing defect.

If there were 2000 cars that were jailbroken, and they all crashed in the same way due to the jailbreak.. don't you think they'd figure out that the jailbreak was the problem? It's not that hard to tell if the software has been changed from stock.

If they all failed differently, and had different accidents in different scenarios, you're going to have a hard time proving a manufacturer defect.

Does Tesla sell cars? Or do they sell car-shaped things that run on licensed software?

But Tesla is bound by the Magnuson Moss Act. They can't reduce the functionality of a product after the fact.

The charger should be designed to withstand abuse and vandalism. It certainly should be handle a short in a charging system.

Somehow, things work in a sane way with ICE cars and gas stations.

These are wrecked cars, however. Who is to say that the batteries don't have hidden damage that could cause them to blow on a fast charge and cause a fire? We already know Teslas have fire issues.

That's what insurance is for.

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