Tesla’s toxic superfans are giving community a bad name as stories go mainstream
electrek.co
electrek.co
It's been interesting watching the excuses and defenses of Tesla pivot in the wind like a weathervane in a tornado. Whatever Tesla does is good, right, perfect, and everyone else sucks, no matter how nonsensical this ends up sounding to literally everyone else.
The excuses for why, see, really it's GOOD that you can't fix your own car, can't access the diagnostic screens the car has built in, etc, are particularly tortured. Someone might fix it wrong, see, and then that would look bad for Tesla if it blew up. Yes, there's a particularly strong media focus on Tesla, but if you go talking to the world endlessly about how amazing your self driving system is, and how capable it is, it's reasonable to expect people to take notice when it drives at highway speeds into stationary solid objects.
The latest tortured explanations are more about Bitcoin, though - the scourge of the planet, wasting energy, horrible carbon footprint per transaction, that... oh, uh... isn't /that/ bad... and, uh... see, Mars needs a currency, and... (etc).
It would probably be less annoying if the community of Tesla supporters occasionally remembered that a $100k car isn't pocket change for everyone. I've talked, far too often, to people who defend Tesla's practices by stating, "Well, I don't want to work on my car, and I don't think the Service Centers are overpriced, so I don't see why anyone else cares. Besides, they're no more expensive than a BMW, Mercedes, or Porsche dealership, so what's the problem?"
I'll stick to stuff I can work on. Even if I choose not to work on it, at least if I can access it fully, it means some other independent shop can do the same thing.
None give source code for the ECU...
Tesla's seem to have a rooting and hacking community, which at least gives you more power than a closed source blob that nobody has gotten root on like every other manufacturer.
I can do none of that on a Tesla. I can't even access the diagnostic screens built into the car without a rolling code generator - even if I own the car free and clear.
And that's a problem.
But when it broke, at least we could open the hood and make it run again. Now instead we got cars that will refuse to move if it happen to update firmware in underground garage, and you cant get it out without teslatruck. (I think this was fixed, but the point still stands)
> Its not a phone
Why is it okay for phones? How come we somehow collectively aggreed that its OK for manufacturers to lock our own phones away from us?
I really hate this attitude of "I dont trust myself to tinker with it so I think noone else should be allowed to". Thats the attitude which, if it gets enough traction, takes our freedoms away.
Because phones are not enormous metal machines that could easily get into an accident and kill its passengers.
Now the cars are enormous metal machines that could easily get into an accident and kill its passengers, yet, until recently, were "open" to any and all modifications by anyone. And it didnt affect their safety.
The point is, locking cars isnt happening for our safety, its happening to increase profits. But people dont like to hear it, so the pitch is safety.
By this tempo soon the bananas will be legal to be peeled only by certified servicemans, because wrong disposal of the peel may cause injury to a person.
Changing brake pads is a easy job that I did in the backyard a number of times.
Then I moved to the city and got an office job.
A 40 year old engineer that works on safety critical software gave me a snide remark about how stopping a car is too important and he'd be afraid to take that into his own hands.
I quickly learned not to talk about DIY on anything that wasn't toys unless I wanted to listen to people generalize from their own lack of experience and consider me reckless.
It's just the usual tribalism.
That said, is Tesla responsible for some fans being jerks?