[Jeroen]

I see a lot of emotional sentiments about owning the hardware and having paid for it and therefor it is yours to use. Unfortunately, that is not how things work. Read your purchasing agreement and you will see.

You can certainly do with the car what you like. But hacking into it to enable functions that you have not paid for is simply illegal, it is theft. Legally, there is no other term. You do this, you are a thief! Nobody forced you to buy the car without certain features enabled. The Hardware might be installed and paid for it, that doesn’t mean you are entitled to use it.

Apart from your warranty becoming invalid, Tesla is very likely to not do any repair or maintenance on your car. You will have to pay them a very substantial sum to have them re-configure the software/parameters to its original settings.

So it’s going to cost you big time. It is nothing new really, all the dealers have the very same policy in place if you chiptune their cars. Volvo started it some 15-20 years ago. Those D5 diesels were very easy to chip tune. In fact it was an official Volvo option at a considerable premium to have it chip tuned to a higher output. People did not want to pay Volvo. They did it themselves, or got somebody to do it. Very easy, added almost 45HP and bags of torque.

The next time you brought your Volvo in for a service, they would refuse to work on it. You would have to pay Volvo big time to get it back to its original settings and you would be charged another premium because Volvo needed to also run extensive diagnostics to ensure nothing else was messed up. They would not let you take the car out of their shop. You had to sign an agreement, that you were told and understood your car was running on illegal software, it could not be considered safe, possibly not roadworthy, your warranty was void etc. Etc.

There is also the matter of liability. If you drive a hacked Tesla, don’t think you can ever have a case against them, irrespective of what goes wrong.

Personally I think the biggest problem is your electronics being messed up. And the car could actually be unsafe to drive. Car electronics and all of its computer all sit on a relatively simple bus network. There is no physical separation between the critical driving functions and other less, or none critical functions. (E.g. radio)

Once you manage to get into the system, you might cause harm that doesn’t show up easily or immediately.

Jeroen

[McLaren Rulez]

Déjà vu, anyone?

It wasn't exactly difficult to see this coming. It wasn't that long ago when there was a thread on BMW charging for seat heaters using a subscription model. It was obvious that they could only lock people out for so long before the car gets jailbroken.

Originally Posted by McLaren Rulez

With hardware elements like seat heaters already built into the car, we'll see how long BMW lasts at preventing its customers from turning them on

Tesla will stop honouring the warranty obviously. They might even try and go legal but that's a PR disaster in the making. Either way, it's closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.

[Sen]

Originally Posted by neith

Not too shabby, unless we're comparing it to Ferrari suing their own customers

A gore-y case in point, but man was it satisfying to see just for the youtuber to stick it to a company like Ferrari:

https://youtu.be/7d2moH6jWh8

It's like the popular phone 'durability tester' jerryrigeverything on a bigger stage. Lol

[johy]

The implementation of "pay by use" feature in this case is plain laughable.

It is like selling a phone with some of the high-end features already existing in the phone like

Wireless charging
NFC
Biometrics

BUT, selling them in a disabled state - so that you pay to "unlock" these features.

When selling features, one can implement payment for premium features in software services and the like (For comparison, the one that comes to mind is Tidal HiFi, compared to regular Tidal for CD quality music streaming and Spotify HiFi when that is finally rolled out).

The car companies in this case should just not have any feature - that they are not going to sell to the consumer; they should be (legally) forced to have sub-variants - so that the consumer can choose what he wants and does not want to pay for.

[electric_eel]

Originally Posted by Jeroen

I see a lot of emotional sentiments about owning the hardware and having paid for it and therefor it is yours to use. Unfortunately, that is not how things work. Read your purchasing agreement and you will see.

If I own the hardware I can do whatever I want with it. I can also hire the services of a third party to make the necessary modification. Otherwise Tesla should be "lease" the hardware with the appropriate agreement not selling.

You can certainly do with the car what you like. But hacking into it to enable functions that you have not paid for is simply illegal, it is theft. Legally, there is no other term. You do this, you are a thief! Nobody forced you to buy the car without certain features enabled. The Hardware might be installed and paid for it, that doesn’t mean you are entitled to use it.

Apart from your warranty becoming invalid, Tesla is very likely to not do any repair or maintenance on your car.

Yes Tesla can invalidate the warranty, they would have a clause saying something to that effect but other than that they can hardly do anything legally. As a consumer you may not want to do these stunts for practical reasons (no OEM support etc) but there is absolutely nothing illegal here and no thieving involved.

That takes care of the legal aspect. As far as ethics is concerned, I would say that the unethical behaviour is on the OEM (tesla in this case) side. Enforcing monopoly through
vendor lockin is not some thing that should be condoned if we want better deal for the consumer. Tesla in particular has a dominant position in the EV market and they are dictating terms to the powerless customer.

Not exactly the same but a related point about software modification.

http://cr.yp.to/softwarelaw.html

It is relevant here because you are enabling things in software.

[nidhikapoor]

Originally Posted by Jeroen

I see a lot of emotional sentiments about owning the hardware and having paid for it and therefor it is yours to use. Unfortunately, that is not how things work. Read your purchasing agreement and you will see.

You can certainly do with the car what you like. But hacking into it to enable functions that you have not paid for is simply illegal, it is theft. Legally, there is no other term. You do this, you are a thief! Nobody forced you to buy the car without certain features enabled. The Hardware might be installed and paid for it, that doesn’t mean you are entitled to use it.

Apart from your warranty becoming invalid, Tesla is very likely to not do any repair or maintenance on your car. You will have to pay them a very substantial sum to have them re-configure the software/parameters to its original settings.

So it’s going to cost you big time. It is nothing new really, all the dealers have the very same policy in place if you chiptune their cars. Volvo started it some 15-20 years ago. Those D5 diesels were very easy to chip tune. In fact it was an official Volvo option at a considerable premium to have it chip tuned to a higher output. People did not want to pay Volvo. They did it themselves, or got somebody to do it. Very easy, added almost 45HP and bags of torque.

The next time you brought your Volvo in for a service, they would refuse to work on it. You would have to pay Volvo big time to get it back to its original settings and you would be charged another premium because Volvo needed to also run extensive diagnostics to ensure nothing else was messed up. They would not let you take the car out of their shop. You had to sign an agreement, that you were told and understood your car was running on illegal software, it could not be considered safe, possibly not roadworthy, your warranty was void etc. Etc.

There is also the matter of liability. If you drive a hacked Tesla, don’t think you can ever have a case against them, irrespective of what goes wrong.

Personally I think the biggest problem is your electronics being messed up. And the car could actually be unsafe to drive. Car electronics and all of its computer all sit on a relatively simple bus network. There is no physical separation between the critical driving functions and other less, or none critical functions. (E.g. radio)

Once you manage to get into the system, you might cause harm that doesn’t show up easily or immediately.

Jeroen

Multiple extremely valid points. Even after this post, people are posting that they have the right to unlock features. Have they not read this post?

[Jeroen]

Originally Posted by electric_eel

If I own the hardware I can do whatever I want with it. I can also hire the services of a third party to make the necessary modification. Otherwise, Tesla should be "lease" the hardware with the appropriate agreement not selling.

You own the hardware, but not the software. So you are welcome to enable these features/functions by using your own software. But in this case, the software is hacked. So you are using a piece of software that you have not paid for and that is illegal and theft. You simply do not own the RTU to use it. Feel free to get somebody to write you a new piece of code, but as soon as you use the code inside that car, and you haven't got the RTU it is theft.

I have seen many more references about the legalities, similar to yours, but the reality when it comes to software, RTUs and so is far more complex. 99,9% of the public gets it wrong and uses all kinds of irrelevant arguments (often found on the Internet) to prove they have the "right" as they paid for the hardware.

Do and think whatever you want to do, but if you hack into a car's computer, to enable functions, you did not pay for, I will call you a thief. And I have all the legal credentials to back up that statement. But I have given up explaining it on the Internet.

Jeroen

[electric_eel]

Originally Posted by Jeroen

You own the hardware, but not the software. So you are welcome to enable these features/functions by using your own software. But in this case, the software is hacked. So you are using a piece of software that you have not paid for and that is illegal and theft. You simply do not own the RTU to use it. Feel free to get somebody to write you a new piece of code, but as soon as you use the code inside that car, and you haven't got the RTU it is theft.

There is only two ways tesla can make it illegal. They do not sell the software or hardware, they merely lease it with an appropriate clause. I am not sure what is the end agreement, are tesla owners merely leasing it from Tesla or are they buying it ? Buying means change of ownership, and once you own it you can do whatever you want. Might not be the brightest thing to do, but there is nothing in the legal system of any country that I know of against being a fool.

I have seen many more references about the legalities, similar to yours, but the reality when it comes to software, RTUs and so is far more complex. 99,9% of the public gets it wrong and uses all kinds of irrelevant arguments (often found on the Internet) to prove they have the "right" as they paid for the hardware.

This is not an arbitrary internet page please check who Daniel Bernstein is.

https://www.britannica.com/event/Ber...tment-of-State

[svsantosh]

Originally Posted by Jeroen

You can certainly do with the car what you like. But hacking into it to enable functions that you have not paid for is simply illegal, it is theft. Legally, there is no other term. You do this, you are a thief!

Thanks for thinking on the same page.

VAG/Chip/AFM mods & tune days are very different from what is being discussed here. Not only Tesla will void warranty on a expensive car but has the right to drag you to court.

There is a very clear demarcation between what a Toyota/VW/Maruti/Hyundai owner can do to his car Viz-a-Viz what a Tesla owner "Is signing" up for.

These Pay-For-Subscription add ons are totally a rip off, Agreed, but no one is holding a gun to your head to sign up for it. The very fact they are asking $10 per month for a basic feature is a way of saying "This is a barbed fence - do not cross over it".

Like i said...

Originally Posted by svsantosh

then we can take out our popcorns and watch the events unfolding