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Comment by flatline | Hacker News Reader

It’s pretty typical of corporations, the cult surrounding its leader notwithstanding. Not even just US corporations - the VW emissions scandal was huge, and today they are doing as well as ever. That was a big shakeup; the kind of stuff we are seeing from Tesla feels like business as usual.

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VW emission scandal ended with actual judgement and two prison sentences.

Miles and miles different - they were not completely untouchable the way tesla and similar hot companies are.

Nope - the VW episode was terrible, but they faced large fines and corrected course and it's history. I'm still slightly squeamish about accepting them but they've turned it around and I think I read have just overtaken Tesla in EV sales in Europe (a self-inflicted Musk wound, of course).

I see no course correction from Tesla. Just continuing and utter tripe from it's CEO, team, and Musk-d-riders.

This is an on-going issue for them and, at this point, with no further change? I hope it drives them into the ground (Autopilot, natch).

You can actively criticize VW on the internet without an army of sycophants coming for you. The standard behavior of Tesla stans is that any problem with the vehicle is in fact your fault and only your fault because it would not be possible for Tesla to do something wrong. It is cult-like.

No, it's not typical, because you don't see huge numbers of people defending VW's emissions fraud.

I don't defend it but the specifics never bothered me. They cheated because their cars didn't meet new emissions standards. They were fine by the standards of the year before. So a bureaucracy just declared that a legal level of emissions was now illegal.

In my mind it's like suddenly declaring that blue cars are illegal, and they made a color-shifting car that is blue except when the authorities are looking at it.

It is wrong in the sense that it is normalizion of deviance, however. We live in a society and if we don't like a law or regulation the correct response is to get it legally changed, not to ignore it and cheat.

I didn't say you are defending it. I'm saying that "companies do bad things sometimes" is not a full description of the Tesla phenomenon that people take issue with.

> They cheated because their cars didn't meet new emissions standards. They were fine by the standards of the year before.

> So a bureaucracy just declared that a legal level of emissions was now illegal.

That is not at all what happened and not how emissions standards are deployed. The EPA's Tier 2 standards were finalized in 2000 to phase in during the 2004-2008 model years [1].

[1] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2000/02/10/00-19/c...

> They cheated because their cars didn't meet new emissions standards

Anything beyond the first two words in that sentence is irrelevant.

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