Who owns Tesla’s data?

It would only be cheaper to manufacture at scale; and that assumes that market wants a "1980s small Toyota truck with a Tesla motor". I imagine a car like that wouldn't sell very well; so it would either be incredibly expensive to either build in small batches or to make up for the unsold inventory

But there's stuff like : https://www.volkswagen.co.uk/en/new/e-up.html which basically has a phone holder where the dash would usually be. Maybe other budget manufacturers will bring out something like this.

I think there's your answer. That's hard to do, and software mistakes cost a lot of $$$ and time to fix. You have to go into a dealership/service area to get any updates.

Also, the vast majority of Tesla's customers are attracted to the idea that their car will continuously update itself and get better over time.

E.g. every new car now will have to have reversing camera, event data recorder, drowsiness and distraction detection, lane-keeping assist and advanced emergency braking.

I'm not sure if it's practical to do that with "no onboard computers other than simple microcontrollers" - of course there are some microcontrollers that rival the computers I grew up with, but the complexity of the involved software is inherent in the required functionality.

And since you have to pack the car with all these sensors, cameras and compute power anyway for safety reasons, all the privacy-invasive features don't require much if any extra hardware cost.

Also, rose colored glasses are a thing. When was the last time you (the average dolt reading this, not you personally) rode in a vehicle from the 80s let alone slogged out a commute in one? The venn diagram of "people for whom it is fashionable to want an 80s Toyota pickup" and "people who would commute in any 80s vehicle" is two circles. Sure you can "fix" the driving experience by upgrading stuff but unless you produce them at scale the cost of doing each of these upgrades will be much greater per unit and the total price will quickly eclipse that of just buying new vehicles.

This is false only because costs tend to go down with scale - if you have an entire line making ten $10k BOM (bill of materials) cars in one shift it's going to be a loss-leader compared to a line making 300 cars a shift with a $12k BOM even if both cars sell at the same MSRP.

"Software eats the world".

Consider something like fueling (I know this isn't in your Tesla drive train, but it's apples to apples). Your 1980s Toyota truck had a carburettor, a physical linkage direct to the gas pedal, and pretty simple exhaust. Very simple air intake.

The carbs were fiddly and expensive to build, but didn't really wear out or need much service (unless you let gas rot in them). They were also very inefficient across most of their range, as there is only so much you can do with a throttle body and venturi.

Compare "same" light duty truck now. Fuel injection with a control system: "smart" ECU, a far more complex exhaust - and sensors all along the way. The burn is far more efficient and controlled, partially because the exhaust has to be so much cleaner.

There is a lot of software in there. For the most part the only way anyone (e.g. NASA) knows how to make software anywhere close to as bulletproof ans that mechanical carb and linkage is to absolutely pour effort into it from design through to final test. Assume a 5x-10x cost on the software development, and pass that on the consumers.

If you assume the same lack of safety functionality as the 1980s truck, you can cut a chunk of that out, but I don't see that happening.

I envision it to be like PC parts. It would be awesome for standards to develop for EV's like there are for ICE. I'm sure its much more complicated and deals with high voltage so likely to need some education to not fry yourself.

We have added way more airbags and much stronger roof pillars and side reinforcement which dramatically improves safety in a crash but also steals interior space, making vehicles inch larger to keep the same interior room.

Also if you want a battery electric vehicle with good range, you need a big battery. That's easier to fit into a larger vehicle (ie Tesla Model X) than a small vehicle, and the extra energy usage of the larger vehicle doesn't scale as fast as the larger battery capacity that can fit within.

I think the US could use something like Japan's Kei-car classification. Vehicles that are meant to use around town <= 45mph without going on the highway or needing to handle a 75mph rollover crash. This could be incentivized by cities with parking costs for larger vehicles. But it's difficult to sell when you might still get T-boned at 45mph by a 6,000lb Chevy Tahoe.

Edit: Another big reason for the tech and data connection on EVs is navigation. If you want to travel outside of your home charging radius, you're going to want to know what charging stations are along your route, what speeds they deliver, and what their current availability is.

A lot of Tesla's secret sauce is the "Just type your destination into the nav screen" where the car figures out your energy usage and charging stops to get wherever you want to go.

The dirty secret is that infotainment additions have an outsized impact on consumer demand (better, fancier infotainment is a huge plus) for the cost paid. Due to all the new things needed to comply with current regulations, you'll have little uptake on the super low end model with no infotainment or fancy features if the price difference to the fancy screen version is commiserate with the price paid by the manufacturer. Also, as already mentioned in other posts, it may be at cost-parity due to the higher demand of the fancier trim model.

When a person driving a automobile runs through a crosswalk and hits and kills an innocent child crossing the street with their bike, an accident that could and should have been avoided by automatic emergency braking, a great cost has been inflicting on society as a whole so a person could save $500 on their car.

The price of each individual car needs to be calibrated with the price to society of all the bad things cars do. And this isn't a hypothetical situation where cars might kills tens of thousands of drivers and thousands of pedestrians every year --- they already do. Mandating safer cars, even if this will increase manufacturing costs and bring up all these new data privacy issues, has a huge positive impact on the rest of the people that happen to share the world with those cars.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/meyers-manx-returns-with-an-al...

I update the GPS data in my decade old VW once a year using an SD-card. Not having always-on internet is certainly no reason you can't get updates.

Most companies do actually collect data for a very simple reason: they want to genuinely improve their products and services. (Although some companies, like Google, Samsung and Facebook collect it also to help other companies sell more crap to you.)

Please provide details if you have any evidence that Tesla (or any other automotive company) is selling users' data.

The question is whether or not the history is stored, and how. And if your read farther down, it's clear there is what certainly looks like a good faith attempt to anonymize this data before storage. It seems that green then went into some detail about how a malicious insider might be able reverse engineer that scheme given enough access, but all that survived into the article is some impact quotes, so it's hard to tell what the vulnerability is.

But no, Tesla isn't storing our driving history. At least not deliberately, and certainly with no intent to use it or provide it.

(It's worth pointing out the level of double standard here: Tesla's location history storage is actually much more limited in practice than what you get on iOS or Android, yet... no front page articles on HN about those?)

That may be illegal just like it's illegal to tamper with consumer electronics/HDMI devices

I think it should be something like "Who owns the data Tesla collected from your car?".

But the next time you try to go to a protest that is not sanctioned by the Democrats, expect your Tesla to refuse to take you there.