The main issue here I guess, is Tesla assisting the bailiffs. Bailiffs (here in the UK) have certain legal rights to enter and repossess your house and/or remove property you haven't fully paid for. They are granted this right via a case-by-case court order.
If Telsa are also granted the rights within the court order to assist the bailiffs, then presumably it would be a fully legal action.
At the end of the day, you sign a contract wherein you agree to keep up payments on an item, and if you don't the item will be repossessed. If you don't like those terms, don't get stuff on payment plans.
Most US car dealerships will make a new key for someone repossessing a car. As Tesla is the dealership this seems like the exact same situation, the only difference is someone with the key can now remote summon the car.
> someone with the key can now remote summon the car
Cars with remote summons features today basically just crawl forward a few metres to help you get out of a parking spot. They aren't self-driving across town to a repossession lot, if that's what you're thinking.
I don’t usually vote up comments that are mostly humorous on HN, but there’s always an exception.
To me the problem isn’t that they might, but that they can. I guess the fault is technically on the person who rented something under terrible terms, but the problem to me is that over time terrible terms seem to win out over reasonable ones.
Not to mention, if Tesla is capable of doing this for rentals, I have to assume they are capable of doing it for any Tesla. Which is not great.
> over time terrible terms seem to win out over reasonable ones
Tyranny of the marketplace, I guess. If most people are not bothered by the terrible terms, then the selection of items with non-terrible terms will be correspondingly small.
Case in point: I'd like to buy a TV (even at a higher price) that does not have ads all over the interface. From what I can tell, as of right now there are approximately a handful of such TVs, not counting older models that probably aren't produced any more. And of course out of that handful, most are not very good in other respects..
I don't know how to solve that apart from regulation, which is often a very poor solution.
My solution is to never setup wifi or provide ethernet to my TVs. They can't vomit ads all over the screen or track what you're watching if they can't get online.
Right. Compromise the right credentials, and you can order a high percentage of parked Teslas to start backing up.
That probably won't make them cause damage immediately -- I assume there's a set of sensors that will apply brakes rather than hit a wall or a detected car -- but there's a lot of chaos to apply that way.
I wonder if Tesla's EULA immunizes them against such breaches.
Ha. Though my guess is, once self-driving is reliable enough to do that, the economics of car ownership are going to flip completely. It won't make sense anymore to have a car that spends most of its time sitting unused in your garage.
Imagine, now, that self-driving combined with Uber pool, so that people who need to get from and to the same destinations at the same time (as is typical for commutes) would be able to share the ride.
Imagine then making those vehicles larger to enable not only a decrease in traffic, but an increase in housing density, local infrastructure in walking distance, and economic growth.
Imagine if we then realized we could charge that elongated car as it's driving if we put electric lines above streets.
Oh, and why not increase rolling efficiency while we're at that, and make the task of self-driving simpler by embedding signaling infrastructure into the road itself.
You just imagined buses, trolley buses, and streetcars respectively.
Which is what makes the most sense, and will continue making the most sense for vehicles that don't sit in your garage most of the time.
There's more to car ownership than being able to get from A to B in principle.
Once you add immediate availability, individual vehicle preferences, having your stuff in the car already, the ability to keep your stuff there once you arrive at your destination, never having to think about small, but normal usage damage (especially if you have kids), or, conversely, having the vehicle just as clean as you want it...
...you will see that garages aren't going anywhere any time soon, self-driving cars or not.
And that we'd be wise to develop actual public transport infrastructure for the people who really do only care about getting from A to B, with some acceptable wait time. It's a win-win for everyone.
My pessimistic prognosis is that the development of the self-driving car will make the taxis slightly cheaper, but instead of paying your Uber driver, you're going to be paying engineers, maintenance, and cleaning staff.
Imagine how different the US would be if it was Big Public Transportation that lobbied to have towns and cities designed around them, rather than the car industry. Walking, cycling, buses, trams, trains, etc. etc. You'd still have cars but they wouldn't be a basic need for survival like they're often treated as, because you can't get anywhere without one.
Because it was basically 100 years ago when the car industry sought to dismantle that infrastructure, and succeeded.
To be fair it wasn't some conspiracy. The reason why people began using the car 100 years ago was that the car was becoming widely available and it was super convenient even in the days when roads were caked in horse manure. Even in the peak of the streetcar era, the private car was the best way around town, and as more people bought more cars, it continued to dominate as the streetcar would be bogged down in traffic just like a bus today. Intercity passenger rail also didn't stand much of a chance against the convenience and speed of the jet age.
Regardless of whether or not there was a conspiracy, I think the last 100 years of private vehicle ownership in the US have shown that solely due to the convenience, it would have happened anyway.
I don't think that follows, because you have to prove that car ownership would have increased the same way without any intervention by car manufacturers. You're treating it as a foregone conclusion.
If you follow the same 100 year trajectory in other countries, then you will see an uptick in car ownership for sure, and infrastructure adapts to support this (highways/freeways/motorways), but it's not nearly as drastic as it is stateside.
Of course, the US is a large place and even its states are larger than other countries. And it hasn't existed in its modern form for more than a couple of centuries whereas the civil infra on the other continents has been around for at least a full millennium and most likely longer than that (e.g. Roman roads in the UK that would date back well over 1000 years). So the US got the luxury of a blank slate and, well... see what you got from that.
At the same time...car manufacturers had the perfect opportunity to seize so they could sell more cars and thus have civil infrastructure designed around the fact that everyone has a car. If someone at that point in time had more money than Henry Ford they could have dumped it into trams and trains and the landscape would have been significantly changed.
>If you follow the same 100 year trajectory in other countries, then you will see an uptick in car ownership for sure, and infrastructure adapts to support this (highways/freeways/motorways), but it's not nearly as drastic as it is stateside.
As the Wikipedia article you cited elsewhere discusses, streetcar systems outside the US went out of business at the same time as those in the US for the same reasons.
An Uber (or personal car) also has the advantage of being able to take an alternate route. I used to work on the west side of Capitol Hill in Seattle and lived on the east side of the hill. Any time something like Hempfest or Pride was going on, it literally became faster to walk home than take the bus. If I was driving I could have taken an alternate route and gotten home in a fairly reasonable amount of time.
There's no public transport in the US, aside from a few exceptional places like NYC, Seattle, Boston (maybe), and, like, DC.
Uber is so popular because it actually allows you to get from A to B, for some money.
But I love the circular logic of "nobody wants the buses, why fund them" — "you can't get anywhere on a bus, why fund them" — "look how few people ride the bus" etc.
People keep saying this, but I don't get it. The majority of your possessions spend most of their time sitting idle. Even if I just look at the higher value ones: my riding lawnmower gets used for a couple of hours every few weeks, my garden tractor/snowblower even less frequently, then I've got a trailer, a truck, miscellaneous tools, etc.
I could rent every single one of these, but don't because the economics don't make sense, and the use model would otherwise lead to a lot of inconvenience.
The lynchpin in these arguments is that you'll somehow be able to summon a vehicle on a moments notice and all your usage will still be less expensive than personal ownership. The cost will be low because no humans are involved...
Except it didn't work for ZipCar or the rental agencies that have added hourly options -- sure it's not bad, but is it really pushing people out of car ownership? No...
Ride sharing similarly hasn't worked to push people out of car ownership either -- it's just killed traditional taxi services by compensating drivers less and eliminating the flag down monopoly some cities have maintained (a taxi medallion in Boston/NYC used to be worth hundreds of thousands... no one wants them now)
All these share options work for low use scenarios like the city dweller who wants a weekly trip to a shopping center, but for the daily commuter/driver it won't ever make sense... and it'll never make sense for those that need to keep things in their car like child seats, diapers, a walker, tools, etc...
Bike/Scooter shares haven't eliminated personal ownership either because of the scarcity issue at peak times.
My observation in that all of these things (plus delivery services, Amazon, etc.) can make a difference at the margins. If someone doesn't have a daily commute (or has a reasonable transit or bicycle/walk option) and otherwise isn't transporting themselves, other family members, home improvement stuff, etc. on a daily or near-daily basis, collectively they may let a household do without a car (or at least a second car).
A couple I know in SF don't have a car but they seem to make a lot of use of cars in some form or other pretty regularly.
I've pretty much abandoned Zipcar for this reason.
In the early days, it was great. But once membership increased, there was an increasing chance that I would get a car that was not particularly usable.
Filthy on the outside (dirt, mud, etc) and/or inside (dog hair, bodily fluids, etc).
Or a car that had one or more warning lights illuminated (check engine, brake, no wiper fluid, low gas, etc).
And each time I had to phone into Zipcar support to report it (and/or swap cars), otherwise the next user could report it -- leading to me being charged some cleaning fee or such.
The best experience I had was in Seattle when I entered a dirty Zipcar and called support who said I had to take the vehicle to a car wash otherwise they would charge me a cleaning fee.
While I understand I could have probably escalated to someone who understood the situation ("oh? you just got into the car 5 minutes ago?"), I decided it was a better use of my time to avoid short-term car rental programs altogether.
It'd be a pain in the ass for zipcar, but every parking space should have an attendant to do a quick once over every time someone parks a car.
Less hassle with verifying who actually trashed it, but also if you have to stare someone in the face after your ride, you'll probably be more respectful of the car.
But really, there's just not a satisfactory solution I can think of to make me want to use the service.
It depends how easily they can be cleaned of others’ odors and messes, and how often they need to get cleaned.
Presumably if the rate of mess is low enough and there are extra cars, you would just request a new one. Then they punish the person who left the mess or odor, disincentivizing them from doing it again. Probably need cameras monitoring the inside of the car.
It's not so much messes. Rentals, including short-term ones, are a thing today. But rather there's a lot of value to many people to have the car that they want when they want it, leaving certain belongings in the car, having the car equipped for their purposes whether child seats or roof racks, etc.
While I honestly don't expect door to door self driving in most places for decades, a lot of people who don't use cars much probably underestimate the degree to which many people customize their vehicles. And even if they sit a lot of the time, most of the cost is often in miles, not time.
In a world where car ownership is limited, I can imagine that the car interiors would be changed drastically. Something like a subway car with hard plastic seats and easily sanitized surfaces.
That is only going to happen for most people if the economics of car rentals are VEEEEEERRY reasonable. I am not willing to wait 10 minutes for an available vehicle every time I need to go somewhere. People who are dreaming of a day of full automation need to take this into account, because while I don't know how long the average trip by car is, I suspect that it's somewhere in the 15-20 minute range, which is impossible to match even with a fully autonomous driving scheme that can ignore things like stop lights and stop signs.
To further this, what are the parameters before requesting the RTB option? If the car is currently driving (assuming the "owner" is currently using the car), will it reroute with them in as an involuntary passenger? Before attempting to RTB, will it determine the route and distance necessary and determine the amount of charge required and then verify there's enough? Will the car need to be in park for a minimum amount of time first? What if it's parked and I'm loading my small child into a car seat when the RTB order is issued? Will it start driving away with my kid? What if the car is currently plugged in when the RTB is ordered? Will it rip out the charging cable and cause further damage to the car or my house? Who will be responsible for that damage?
It's reasonable to assume an open door will prevent movement...
...being plugged in to a charger (that doesn't have some sort of automated disconnect) would also be disable.
The question is valid though after you've put the kid in and you're on 30 second excursion to push the shopping carriage back... what if the car is recalled? Seems like a potential disaster and tragedy.
To this point, after crossing the state line from Nevada into California, there are highway signs that state the fines for littering and abadoning an animal on the side of the highway. The fine for littering is significantly higher than animal abandonment.
This depends entirely on how quickly they get to the vehicle, but given the money involved, I'm sure they will just lobby to have the death of the dog pinned on the owner.
I'm hopeful that by the time cars can be automatically repossessed without a human operator they'll have set up a network of on-demand rentals and I won't have to worry about car ownership and all the nonsense it entails.
Do you actually prefer the subscription hell we are in now with companies like Adobe deciding we can no longer actually own any software and have to continuously rent it?
Google actually seems like they will be first to full self driving. My biggest fear is that they continue to have zero interest in being an actual car company and keep all their Waymo tech locked behind their taxis and Lyfts are replaced by Waymos with no reduction in price, just a loss job for the person who would normally drive the Lyft. Other companies follow suit and the self driving car dream is ruined to make C suite executives richer.
> Do you actually prefer the subscription hell we are in now with companies like Adobe deciding we can no longer actually own any software and have to continuously rent it?
No, I don't prefer software subscriptions with monthly fees. I don't find the "maintenance" required for software annoying or onerous. However, I really don't like car maintenance. Waiting for an oil change, tire replacement or rotation, or really any repair is the worst part of car ownership and I could die happy never having to do any of that again. I don't place a lot of value on ownership in general because of maintenance or storage burdens.
I do like pay-as-you-go for most of the stuff I use, for whatever it's worth. Food, electricity, gas, that sort of thing. I use cabs when I go on vacation and look for opportunities to travel by bus, train, or plane instead of driving. A self-serve on-demand auto rental service would be ideal, for me.
I'm with you on detesting car maintenance when owning a vehicle.
To be fair, most of those maintenance options do go away with fully-electric vehicles. For example, you could lease a Tesla Model 3/Y. The process is impressively streamlined: pay $100 using Touch ID and Apple Pay, then select a pick-up date on the calendar. Now you have a vehicle with basically no maintenance, apart from topping up wiper fluid. All managed with an intuitive and highly-polished mobile app. In 3 years, repeat process.
My intention isn't to advertise for Tesla. I'm just pointing out that options exist nowadays for people who dislike the entire hassle of vehicle ownership (dealing with dealerships, negotiation, financing, scheduled & unscheduled maintenance, etc.)
Don't the higher end car brands in your area do pickup/return service? BMW picks my car up from the office parking garage, changes oil or tires and returns it before the end of the day. All I have to do is pick a day in their online portal and leave the keys at he reception desk.
I very much prefer owning a car over renting because I can leave things in the car. Like child seats, but also extra clothes, diapers, a phone charger, some snacks etc.
Usually rental anything is a lot more costly in the long run than outright ownership. So someone getting his Tesla repossessed probably wont be any better of trying to rent one. Thought my biggest problem with large scale car rentals are times like rush hour where nearly everyone needs a car at the same time, so there either has to be a giant capacity or you have to rely on most people still having their own car.
> Cars with remote summons features today basically just crawl forward a few metres to help you get out of a parking spot.
Smart summon on a M3 (what the article is talking about) can back out and navigate parking lots... although horribly and slowly. But it's not just a straight line.
One time someone did this in a Costco parking lot from 2 rows away from me and my parked car. It pulled out of its spot 3 spaces away from my car, started doing a u-turn that would've had it hit my car in order to drive through the row of parking spots. I was standing in front of my car wondering where the eff the driver was (obviously it was smart summon but in the heat of the moment...). Lots of families go to Costco, I could've easily had a small child with me next to my car and we would've been about 8 or so feet from being hit by a car that apparently had no idea I was there.
The worst part about this for me is that the Costco parking lot is already a cluster without having to add in the "show off my car to my brother in law" game to the mix.
I avoid Costco like the plague because the experience is always bad for my mental health. I'd rather pay a few extra bucks to avoid oblivious giant cart drivers, having to show multiple forms of ID , having my receipt validated before I can leave, having to figure out how to transport stuff to and from car, etc. Plus, there is no consistency in the non-grocery inventory. You're forced into the "we _have_ to buy these pans today because we never know when they'll be available again!" psychological trap.
It's just a very inconvenient shopping experience in my opinion. But I know I'm the only person in America who feels this way.
I wouldn't disagree with your experience complaint, but Costco exists precisely because it doesn't care about the "shopping experience". If you go to Costco, you forgo the right to complain about the "shopping experience" because you are explicitly choosing something with a bad one in exchange for very cheap goods.
Walmart and Target: slightly better experience, slightly more expensive.
Supermarkets and Malls: better experience, more expensive
So I guess, you aren't the only person in America, but people make the choice to accept the burden for the price savings.
Odd, I've always considered Costco to have one of the best shopping experiences. Stuff on the shelves, I go find what I want and check out.
I generally hate supermarkets and malls. Annoying music, questionable `sales` pushed on aisle end caps and elsewhere, etc. Not the experience I'm after.
My Walmart is awful compared to the Costco. Messy shelves and aisles, carts that clank and clatter. Costco is neater, the employees are friendlier and more helpful... like the two stores have two different cultures. And I appreciate that Costco usually has just one good option—it simplifies things, and it's great when they happen to stock something I've been thinking about buying. I just bought a folding wagon that's bigger and beefier than the Amazon ones for the same price. My experience has been that Costco provides a better shopping experience than Walmart, in the same league as Target, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe's.
Depends on the Costco. The one near me put the main entrance to the parking lot next to the store entrance.
The Walmart near me has the main entrance to the parking lot at the opposite end of the store. There is also a long protected cart path going down the parking lot.
The Costco on the other side of town is almost as good as the Walmart.
My problem is that when a driver hits a small child they go to jail. Are there any consequences for Tesla when they get it wrong? A small dent in share prices that day doesn't cut it for me.
Yes, if they were ruled at fault, just like any other company.
If the operator was ruled at fault, they would receive consequences.
Are you insinuating that Tesla operates on a higher level than the law and is receiving special privileges vs other automakers, or are you saying all automakers should be more accountable? What event are you pointing to they should be more accountable for? Or is this all just a vague hypothetical?
What if instead of hitting a child the car took control killed about 300 people?
And what if it wasn’t in parking lot summons but regular driving assistance?
And maybe it wasn’t a car but an airplane?
Are you sure there would be any material consequences for the board and leadership?
Boing recently face real financial consequences from the 737 Max defect.
Holding companies to the same standards as members of the general public runs into an issue of how large an impact they have. A Surgeon is going to make mistakes that kill people, but just because people are imperfect doesn’t mean effectively banning surgery via sending every surgeon to prison after their first mistake is appropriate. Roll up to a single hospital and mistakes are inevitably common, roll up to a hospital network and serious mistakes happen every day. The only way organizations at that scale can operate is with quite a bit of slack.
The financial consequences are nothing for the company, even less for those responsible. For accountability there need to be personal consequences for cases of extreme and wilful negligence for cases like Boeings.
I’m not advocating for life in prison for the top brass, but some prison time surely.
Unless we just start issuing fines and warnings to the regular people to deal with manslaughter of criminal negligence.
Prison for the top brass 1:1 with negligent death essentially removes the possibility of any large company existing even down to hospitals simply can’t exist in such an environment.
The paradox here is that aviation for example is filled with cases of negligence causing large numbers of fatalities, while at the same time the industry has become extremely safe. It’s not that negligence has become more common it’s simply rolling the dice more frequently. By comparison having someone install solar panels on your roof is stupid dangerous at scale, but individual homeowners don’t notice that risk. Should we send every homeowner that had solar installed into their homes to prison? If not why should it apply at a larger company.
It’s not that these companies get a special expedition, it’s that everyone gets that same exception. Killing a pedestrian for example rarely results in prison time. People are often punished more for a DUI without an accident than a sober fatality caused by simple negligence.
I understand your point, and note I didn’t say 1:1 time.
I don’t think you understand though how bad Boeings case was and that we will never be rid of that kind of risk taking when the trade off for the risk takers is piles of money if it goes right but essentially a slap on the wrist if it goes wrong.
That’s fair, I think most agree that some threshold for punishment is a good idea. Deciding where and when that is if it’s not 1:1 gets politically and ideologically messy.
Can confirm.
When my dad often one-handedly turned around and beat the living crap out of me and my two sisters in the back seat, whilst also one-handedly driving down the autostrada, the most he ever got was a stern look from my mum who was smoking at the time.
While I’m not saying summon is a great feature, it would not have hit the things you’re mentioning.
Its major flaw is thin upright things like small trees or poles (although this may be better on vision only cars, I’m not sure). If it sees a person or child in its path, it’s just going to stop.
You can do dumb summon (straight forward/backword) with the key; not smart summon. The description in the article is consistent with what you could do with the key; likely article author misunderstanding the feature (easy mistake).
I could see that if they are holding the financing. If the car is financed by a third party, I cannot imagine why the dealer would want or care to get involved.
The "main issue" is that Tesla is even able to assist the bailiffs in this manner.
If a remote party can, by design, lock you out of your car and take control of it without your consent, do you even really own the vehicle in the first place?
Others have argued "well, you don't own the car, the bank does", but unless Tesla is somehow unable to do this with cars not owned by a lienholder, that's kinda beside the point as far as I'm concerned.
It's not owned by the bank until you foreclose, after which it's most certainly owned by the bank.
As an aside, how often is it for the manufacturer/dealer to own the bank that issues auto loans. I got mine from Capital One, and I assumed most auto loans outside of the sketchy loanshark used car dealers were issued by the big national banks
In most states the financing bank owns the title to the car and is the "Legal Owner" as opposed to the "Registered Owner" who is the one who is buying the car.
The used market is likely different but for new cars from Dealerships, GM Financial, Toyota Financial, Ford Credit etc are Billion Dollar subsidiaries.
Is that true? In my state the financing bank has a lien recorded on on the title, but they are not the owner. Maybe that is the exception?
Edit: reading some other comments ... I'm talking about the traditional financed purchase of a car, not a lease. Agree that for a leased car (which is quite common now though I've never done it), the ownership stays with the leasing entity.
When you live in a title-holding state, the title will be issued to the registered owner/operator of the car, regardless of lien holder. Though your lien holder will receive a separate document verifying their connection to the loan, you will be in possession of the title itself.
There are only nine title-holding states: Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New York, Oklahoma, Wisconsin. In the other 41 states, titles are issued to the lien holder of your vehicle until the loan is fully paid off.
It used to be quite common; at various times in its history you can make the argument Ford sold cars at a loss to help Ford Credit sell profitable car loans. Even today, Ford Credit (loans/leases etc) is responsible for about 50% of Ford's annual profits:
There have been quite a few years Ford made more profit as a "bank" than they did from making and selling the cars. If you get a new Ford from a dealer and request finance/lease options, its pretty typical for Ford Credit to provide the backing.
In my mind there's a significant difference between a dealership using their knowledge of the car to assist with repossession, and a manufacturer demonstrating that you never really had control of your own car in the first place.
It just feels like a betrayal. Your car is loyal to the manufacturer, not to you. It will act in a manner directly opposed to your best interests as the owner if company that sold it to you orders it. I understand that's true for most software these days, but that doesn't make me any happier about it, and it really feels worse when the software in question is inextricably tied to and in control of an expensive piece of physical hardware that you purchased.
> That is why there are legal contracts. This is just automated repossession.
There is value in adding friction to enforcing law/contracts: I don't know if FSD-repo crosses the line for me, but I know automating enforcement is bad for society.
What if everytime Tesla cameras detect the car speeding, or has crossed double-lines, it helpfully charges the fine to the linked credit card? After all, its just automated ticketing, right?
I agree with your point about automated enforcement being bad, but there is nothing automated about the situation .
A lien-holder determined that the lender wasn’t paying the bills, so they manually made a decision to repossess the car. Just like with any other brand of a car, they reached out to the dealership (in this specific case, manufacturer is the same as the dealership, because Tesla sells directly with no franchises) and requested a way to access the vehicle. Normally it is done via a key copy. In this case, they used a digital version of it. Not that it matters meaningfully at all, but the car didn’t drive across town to the repo parking lot, current summoning feature cannot do that (the distance limit for the feature is a few hundred feet iirc).
And why does it matter if it was made easier to actually repossess the vehicle? It isn’t related to the automated ticketing analogy at all. There was no automatic detection, only automated enforcement. Just like with speeding tickets, i am totally ok with the cop not wasting his and my time writing me the ticket manually or making me wait for it by email, if it instead can be automated with a digital ticket/infraction in the system that i can check out when i get home.
To be more clear on why i think it is a bad analogy. Automated ticketing is automating human decision-making, which is an ambiguous blackbox process open to interpretation. As you said, doing so leads to a lot of unintended consequences. Actually physically repoing a car (after a manual decision to repo the car was made by a human) isn’t automating decision-making. The decision has already been consciously made, and there is not much room for interpretation when it comes to the physical process of repoing a car. The only variable is if the lender decides to hide the car or do something equally dumb, so it is not a good variable to have. And remotely disabling the car based on a manual human evaluation just seems to make the process of repoing it less prone to unintended bad variables.
I'd have no issue with the lienholder having ultimate control of car until the loan is paid off. As I said in my initial comment, that's completely beside the point.
The problem here is that Model 3s are apparently "loyal" to their manufacturer rather than the owner, regardless of who that owner is (whether that be a lienholder, the car's "user", or anyone else that's not Tesla).
That Tesla used that misplaced loyalty to give the car back to the lienholder in this case is irrelevant to my point.
If you don't own the car outright, why would an entity with a lien on the vehicle not also have access to such "strong crypto" legally? This is an issued with a secured loan, presumably in a crypto world the repossession would be allowed by "smart contract" if the borrower defaulted.
This is by no means limited to Tesla, and is true of almost every new car sold now.
As an example, almost every new Ford sold in the USA since 2019 has standard 5G/GPS remote connectivity; even the cheapest entry level cars at Ford like the new Maverick can remotely over 5G unlock doors and remote start the engine (just like the 'owner' can in the Ford pass app, now standard spec on virtually all Fords.). The manufacturers of course love the extra usage metrics and can also over the air sell upgrades like 5G hotspot access and so forth. Many cars now have 5G/GPS receiver for metrics even if no connectivity or nav features whatsoever exposed to user.
My point is; aside from the use of "summon", this kind of locate, remote unlock and start by manufacturer is available on almost all new cars sold today, no matter how cheap - the 5G remote access tech has become increasingly ubiquitous. This is not something unique to the way Tesla creates it cars at all, especially in 2021.
In the UK that would be interference with goods (a tort) or taking a vehicle without the owner's consent (a criminal offense).
Still in the UK, although I suspect that holds more generally, when you buy something using a loan you own it. What you bought may be a security for the loan but that's different. Leasing a car or using a lease/purchase scheme is also different since leasing means you rent but don't own.
Yes, you really own the vehicle, and that is why if Tesla intentionally just bricks/locks you out of your car because they feel like it, you would sue them and almost certainly win in court.
I agree, though I think that ideally companies are advocates for their customers. For example, companies have to turn information over to courts, but they can push back on some, and publish transparency reports for others. Yes, they have to comply with the law, but imo a company has an obligation to advocate for their customers.
This depends on the jurisdiction and the agreement you've entered into.
In general:
Lease - Finance company owns the asset, you are obliged to service the payments. You may have an option to transfer title at the end of the period (depending on jurisdiction).
Loan - You own the asset, secured against the asset.
(There are some UK/US-specfic product types due to difference in things like tax law)
Leasing (in general) is popular as it has tax-advantages for smaller businesses/individuals around depreciation, which can lead to good pricing for end lessee.
(source: Made software for the asset finance industry for a decade or so in the UK/EU + US)
At the time of repossession - You no longer own the asset. It's not like they send the repossession guy out the first time you miss a payment. Repossession happens after the bank has taken you to court (Admittedly, through an expedited process, because this type of claim is so so common), and the repo guy is acting as an agent of the court.
This is the law. It is working as intended. It's also moral - If you enter into a contract to buy something on credit, you should uphold your end of the contract. Specific instances have been wrong, and we can argue the merits of this particular case, but car manufacturers assisting the new owners of assets that have been repossessed in securing their asset is at worst morally neutral.
The bank uses title of vehicle as collateral. You own the vehicle but allow repossession for failing to clear the debt. But just because the car is repossessed doesn’t clear the debt unless the vehicle covers the debt wholly. Bank will sue for the difference.
The UK has some tricky loan contract law which allows a lender to do this, unless the purchaser challenges it in court it using a very specific procedure - which of course most of the population doesn't know about.
Many people are surprised by this. They assume repossession means the loan is paid off - until they discover they've lost their car and are still on the hook for more or less the current market value.
I don't think that's quite right, you own the vehicle legally and you owe the bank the loan. However as soon as a repossession takes place the legal title to the vehicle does change.
That varies by state. Where I live, the financing institution with the lien keeps the title until it is paid off.
Kinda nice when you trade in a car you still owe a bit of money on, as you don't really need to bring anything with you other than the key and your drivers license; the dealer does all the work getting it cleared and transferred.
Isn't it reversed: that the repossession takes place because the legal title to the vehicle changed, due to the contract being broken by lack of payment?
If the car was titled to the bank, they would have to be involved and would be listed in the registration process with the state getting plates, etc.
You are the owner, they simply have a lien on the vehicle which is noted on the title. Once you pay off the loan, they send you information to get the lien removed and a clean title.
It could be we're not distinguishing lease vs. finance in these threads. In my experience in Massachusetts, lease titles were in a holding company's name, while financed vehicles were in my own.
P.S. Looking around a bit there is a lot of variation on how this works depending on locale. So I guess lease vs. finance is just another way things can differ out there.
I wouldn’t be surprised it varies a lot. Just vehicle registration varies. In California the plate stays with the car, but in other states new plates are issue and old plates move to the original owners new car.
No doubt it would be fascinating to see how each state does it. I only have experience with a few.
It's not universal. Some places have specific regulations that govern this and so they specifically carve out a weird "ownership but non-ownership" scenario. E.g. mortgages here in South Africa. Other places yes it's in your name but you put it up as collateral on the loan itself, etc etc etc.
Bottom line, the government just makes it obscure and difficult to determine the real dynamics between the two parties, and the weird interaction it may have with existing laws governing theft/ownership.
You don't own the vehicle if you have a loan, the bank has the title. The title holder is the owner. The best part about paying off a financed car, to me anyway, is the day the title shows up in the mail and you actually own your car.
I'm sure that somewhere has crazy rules but the general idea of a secured loan is the lender can easily take your security if you don't pay the debt. If not for that it isn't secured, is it?
Car loans are secured on a car. If you want to just borrow money with no security you can get a (likely far more expensive) unsecured loan if the bank judges this to be a good risk, or take an overdraft on a current account or use a credit card, all unsecured debt.
Collaterals don't require ownership by bank where I live. Loaned cars are owned by their loaners (but leased cars aren't, although they may transfer ownership to the leaser after a period of time, depending on the terms of the lease). Not sure how these things work in the UK, though.
1. Unsecured loan - if you have the credit facility available then you can borrow an unsecured amount of money and purchase a car. Neither the seller nor the bank have any ownership interest in the car. The loan isn't secured on the car. You are free to sell the car on and transfer its title to anyone else. If you default on the loan then different proceedings may take place to recover the money owed, but that may not necessarily include re-possessing the car (if it's valued under GBP3000.00). The loan company can come after any of your assets.
2. Hire Purchase - the seller lends you through a credit company the price of the car (and interest). The seller transfers the title of the to the credit company. You do not become the "owner" of the car, instead you rent it until such time the total amount of the loan is paid off. You don't have any right to sell or transfer ownership of the car. If you do the unfortunate buyer of the car may wake up one morning to find that it's been repossessed. This is why as a buyer performing HPI checks for any outstanding hire purchase or secured loans on the car are fairly important.
There are also other schemes such as leasing which make it more obvious that if you don't keep up with the payments then the seller or finance company can come along and repossess the car.
To take a contradicting pov... I think this sort of expectation/ideal has done us more harm than helped.
As advocates, companies are fickle and unreliable.
Presenting as advocates, companies always stress how aligned their interests are with customers'. We'll, that's true until it isn't. Once it isn't, it flips.
That's useless. Better to keep in mind that companies aren't your advocates. They're your salesman.
The principle-agent problem is not just limited to companies. Everything you've written applies to people in general. Advocacy in and and of itself is a fickle enterprise.
> If Telsa are also granted the rights within the court order to assist the bailiffs
From what limited knowledge of law enforcement I have (and it's very little, I admit), it's reversed: everyone by default is legally obliged to assist a law officer, on their request, to enforce the law and order; there are some limits beyond which explicit court orders are required, but those limits are rather broad.
This is an assumption based on current events and climate toward LEOs and is very far from the truth. There are very clear boundaries for assisting with law enforcement. Warrants are not magical documents that allow anything to happen.
As a bicycle and old motorcycles user I am gobsmacked that so much people accept that the vehicule they are using is connected or regularly phone home to the manufacturer. I guess if you share all your life on facebook and instagram, why shouldn't you also give away all your errands to any third party.
Is there at least a license agreement you are showned at and have to agree to upon delivery? Can you operate those vehicules offline by choice?
It may be preferable to have some automated system that fines you for excessive speeding versus the alternative: police with guns. At least in the United States.
I don't like this type of advice as everyday technology gets more evil. It's shifting the blame to the consumer instead of the makers of the evil, and it's nearly impossible to follow. I'm a software developer/tech nerd and couldn't tell you which cars do and don't track you, and we expect the average purchaser to know..? It's not like the window sticker will say 'hey this car tracks you', that detail will be in the middle of a 30 page dense legal speak document that almost nobody reads.
It's very similar to when a large food conglomerate does something terrible and people try to boycott. I'm completely aware of the terrible things food company x did and try to be at least somewhat informed with my purchasing, but food company x has 50 subsidiaries who have 50 subsidiaries, etc. I don't know about you but when I go shopping I don't have all day to google on my phone if the specific product I'm looking at is 4 levels down from evil company x. And I have a relatively large amount of free time in my life at the moment - it's a completely hopeless endeavor for someone with kids or other responsibilities that significantly cut down on their idle time.
If only our government would step in and you know...stop companies from getting away with evil things.
I am not really surprised people don't care, they mostly want technology for either status or convenience and I don't think I can blame them for the latter
I do know you can drive the car while the computer is rebooting (when it's rebooting the screen is completely black and you have to gauge your speed by comparison to other cars the road), so in theory it seems you don't need the computer for basic driving, which would suggest maybe what you say is also possible, if there's a setting for it.
I haven't checked because I like the benefits of being connected — starting and stopping a charge remotely, seeing the state of charge while it's charging somewhere far away, opening / closing windows, unlocking the car, flashing lights or honking horn to locate car, preheating, and coming soon, seeing car's location on a map when it's being driven by someone else, viewing live dash cam (sentry) footage while the car is parked remotely, etc. etc.
I mean I do see your point but I've listed some of the benefits, and life is full of tradeoffs. I'm not saying that the takeoffs that work for me would ever in a million years work for you.
It would also be great if all of the above could be done through a neutral third party or through one's own server. But as a startup that was struggling at the beginning, that probably wasn't the low hanging fruit for Tesla to work on, and there are benefits for Tesla to having the connection be to Tesla. And some of those benefits accrue indirectly back to consumers through safer cars, better accountability for accidents, and better data for future self driving software.
> seeing car's location on a map when it's being driven by someone else, viewing live dash cam (sentry) footage while the car is parked remotely...
I'm concerned these features in specific may be used by abusive spouses to track and control their partners (or extract revenge upon them). It's honestly pretty grim when you can't even use the "shared" (abuser likely would be the sole 'owner' on the title) vehicles to escape an abusive situation. Any upside of this kind of feature is very must overshadowed by the abuses enabled.
Additionally, I'm sad that if I do something stupid in a parking lot (say I fall and hurt myself) that the video can be recorded by any number of vehicles and posted to facebook/youtube/etc for yucks. Nothing can be done about it, there's no way to stop it. I hate it, though, and I hate that people are excited for these terrible slipshod "features" that won't help them as much as they hurt others.
Agree about the abuse / tracking thing. Again, tradeoffs. Keep in mind these cars get updated over time and it can get better.
Management of driver profiles
is still a work in progress for example. Some things work great and some features simply aren’t there yet. For example I have issues with music handoff between two different drivers on one family Spotify account (where each driver has their own Spotify account using their own distinct email). They could easily make it so that it knows by phone proximity which driver is in the car, and play only their music, but they haven’t gotten to this yet.
Anyway, in addition to stuff like music profile improvements, I’d expect privacy options to get better too.
The parking lot thing, I don’t see the harm really until the day when the likes of Google has a car gathering these recordings.
At least with the tracking, thieves are now using Apple Air tags to track and plan carjackings. With a Tesla, so much focus being on the app and connectivity, it is more likely that a person would be aware of this tracking or at least the capability of it. FWIW my wife knew about the location finding, she just had never actually followed me driving around.
She found out when I used it coordinate a birthday surprise at our place, I could tell when she left her office and was about 30 minutes away.
Why would I want so? I want to warm up/cool the car before i get into it, listen for the music without plugging my phone every time , have a decent gps that is free, notify me about traffic, tell me if the charging station i'm going to is busy, alert me if someone is breaking in into my car. Heck I can even check the camera's from my App so I don't need to run if this is false alarm. I can even say something to this person to scare him away before he/she broke the glass.
Thank you but no. Tesla sales are skyrocketing because people want smart car that makes their life easier, safer. Legacy car makers also trying to keep up with trend.
It's a typical misconception. You were young back in the days the car didn't have all this amazing features. Not having this features doesn't this car magical just because of your sentiments about you been young. Driving a dumb car will not make you younger either.
I'll surprise you, most of tesla owners pay extra money ($10/mo) to have a better connectivity. Not the other way around.
For me it's about control. I'm fine with having whiz-bang features on my equipment, so long as I am the final authority on anything and everything about them.
About a year ago I took my fancy EV on a ferry. I kept it on and ran the air conditioner because it was hot outside. Partway through the crossing I guess the suspension sensors interpreted the boat rocking as "something is seriously screwed up," and it locked the brakes and wouldn't release them when it was time to disembark. I had to sit there in my fancy EV looking like an idiot while everyone filtered around me and I took another trip across the water with cones around the car.
When I frantically called the dealership in the middle of all that, they said, "Sorry, your car has decided that it isn't safe to drive. You'll have to get it towed in so we can take a look at it. Oh, and since you're on a ferry, our roadside assistance won't help you. Good luck!" When I asked the ferry staff what I should do, they replied, "Uh, usually we just ask the owner to shift into neutral, and we push the car off." Only the car decided for me that this wasn't a possibility, and the brakes remained engaged with no way for me to disengage them.
The next thing I did after I finally got back home was research which cars I could still buy today with manual transmission and an emergency brake attached to a lever and a cable. It's not at all about holding onto my youth. It's about being the final authority over my own goddamned property.
it's a problem of your car brand, not the EV's. My EV still has neutral. Let me guess, you probably choose a legacy brand EV car, that has no culture on how to buy electronics, because you know I can trust this brand better since they are so long on the market. The same automatic problem could be on the car with manual transmission nowadays. Since they all required emergency braking and many other items are mandatory e.g nothing to do with EV itself.
> it's a problem of your car brand, not the EV's. My EV still has neutral.
True that I bought a brand that doesn't have a long history of EV tech. However it does indeed have a neutral button. It's just that after throwing itself into some exception state, "shifting" into it by hitting the button on the console would highlight the "N" letter as if it acknowledged my "request," but some logic in the car simply refused to actually fully execute my "request" to shift into neutral. There was no "STFU and do what I say; I don't care what your logic thinks about the situation" because the product managers and/or engineers who built it had the hubris to believe they had thought of everything and there would never be any need for that mode of operation.
If I can physically pull a manual transmission stick into the neutral position and release a brake cable, my car will roll. After my experience on the ferry, I no longer want any software logic at all being able to prevent my car from moving when I want it to move. "Just find a car brand that has better logic that you can probably rely on" isn't the solution I'm looking for. Software systems in cars are way too complicated, and there will always be corner cases. I demand a failsafe manual override. I am the one driving the vehicle, and I make the ultimate judgement call on what it does and doesn't do.
One car I found that has manual transmission and a pull-lever emergency brake is the 2021 Subaru Crosstrek. The manual transmission Crosstrek reportedly doesn't have EyeSight, and hence there's no automatic emergency braking (AEB).
Imagine you live in Texas, there is a massive power failure that also affects cellular towers and the car you need to use to save your live does not work because it is so smart online, but too dumb or not working at all offline. Then pay extra 10$ for that.
There was a story of some rental car that couldn't be unlocked again on some remote parking lot, because it was out of range. The customer did nothing wrong. They ended up having to tow the car in the end, if I remember correctly.
With actual possession of vehicles going down, in favor of leases (or leases-to-buy) and short term rentals/"ride-sharing", and with ever more permanent monitoring, the future seems to go into a direction where you're required to have a constantly available data connection in your car back to the car company or lease company, and they will be able to remotely disable access if you don't pay up. And they will probably consider loss of such connection as "tampering" and disable the cars until it gets online again.
There's a difference between owning something or renting it. When you rent something, there's a contract you sign that specifies what you can and can't do. You generally expect the owner to have the technical capability to enforce the contract in case you breach it. But when you own it, then no one else should retain any sort of control over it, period. It's yours only. (You obviously don't own something if you got it on a loan, not until you paid it off.)
Agreed, but with DMCA (and probably other laws) our concept of ownership is gone. Any music one buys that has DMCA, isn’t owned it’s just rented, and yet most people don’t realize that. So there’s a precedence for thinking we own something when in practice we just rent it. I can see that happening with cars. For example the law that was just passed that new cars will have to come with alcohol detectors https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2019/10/16/bil.... Whether we think this would be good or not, it’s eroding our concept of ownership.
I'm specifically talking about the old-school, physical kind of ownership. Whether one could "own" infinitely copyable information at all is highly debatable.
> For example the law that was just passed that new cars will have to come with alcohol detectors
On the one hand, this is a welcome innovation because one is free to do whatever they want as long as that doesn't endanger others and drunk driving does endanger others quite a lot. On the other, if you own your car, what's to stop you from bypassing the detector like some people would bypass the seatbelt beeping thing?
I suspect that's what the OP meant. (I'm also not sure anyone sells digital music files with DRM anymore -- books and movies, yes, but not music. But I think it's kind of become cemented as the go-to example in a lot of people's minds.)
> But when you own it, then no one else should retain any sort of control over it, period.
Right. But there is another issue especially with vehicles... You need insurance to operate them on public road. And insurers like to monitor things now that the tech is available/becomes available...
And the current US government wants your car to monitor your "impairness" as well[0] and brick itself if it considers you impaired.
All the data is stored in the car and next time during regular service it gets transferred to the manufacturer using wired connection? Have no proof for that, but it sounds very reasonable and technically doable to me.
Well all my bikes are "muscular bikes" for one thing, and I build most of them out of spare parts. And I haven't jumped on the electronic shifting band wagon either. I don't necessarily see all these technos as bad but I spend enough time in front of my computer and I want my bikes to stay part of the analog world.
A bunch of years ago, when Tesla and Google's car were only just starting and it was fashionable to discuss the implications of self-driving cars, one dude wrote (approximately):
> People are discussing: if the car has to choose between running over a pedestrian and sacrificing the driver's life, what should it choose? Well it's obvious: the driver pays for the car, so they wouldn't buy a car that kills them in case of an incident.
I guess now that we're headed straight into cyberpunk, the driver's wish turns out to be not that important. The overriding concern is actually: what will make the company look better. If swerving into trees wins points for Tesla for saving pedestrians' lives, so be it.
I'm pretty strongly of the position that high levels of self-driving are impossible for artificial intelligences to attain, because they're built by corporations. Driving is VERY risky, and involves an irreducible assumption of both risk and liability on behalf of the driver. Humans are natural risk-takers. Corporations are not; and any artificial intelligence a corporation produces is always, at some level of meaningful abstraction, a projection of their own values.
While I agree with you 100%. High level self driving is impossible on a technical level too imo, there's too many aspects of human perception, processing, and intuition that aren't possible to emulate or account for in, what machine learning really boils down to, a statistical model. There will always be novel situations that you can't simply math your way out of that a human could navigate effortlessly.
As much as the idea of full self driving is nice in theory, living in the northern midwest and having times in the winter where the traditional rules of driving go out the window when there's a question of "drive in the middle of what might be the road or find the ditch."
I'd like to see driver assist and some augmented reality for driving. Things like "driver's seat with bumps on the back to assist in awareness of 360° objects around the car". But self driving? I'm not sure I trust it yet or will for another decade or two. Developing software, I've seen how the sausage gets made - that doesn't inspire confidence.
I'm with you on the seeing the sausage made. I work in software development and algorithm research (though in a completely unrelated, but much better funded and cutting edge field) and the idea that we're anywhere close to truly level 3 autonomous driving, let alone 4 or 5, is laughable.
I love technology enhanced features, like radar cruise control, lane detection, etc. But only as extra sensory input for the driver, not replacement.
From Tesla's release of their full self-driving beta and its performance in a recent CGP Grey video where it successfully navigates the most dangerous road in America[1] I think a lot of people are going to have to eat their hats on this stance very soon.
I consider myself bullish on this tech, and I have worked closely with autonomous robotics, but I didn't expect it this soon.
> where it successfully navigates the most dangerous road in America
Twistiest, maybe. Most dangerous, not even close unless you or someone driving towards you do something dumb.
Historically Autopilot's weak spots have been crappy/ambiguous road markings, low speed corners on high speed roads, and large vehicles stopped on/across the road. This video hit none of those points. The lane markings are clear, the posted limit is low, and large vehicles aren't even supposed to be there.
It's just CGP Grey, not NHTSA. Hyperbole is to be expected.
I know he's a darling among the chattering tech class, but it's been several years since he jumped the shark from "insightful, carefully researched, and well thought out" to "just another vlogger doing and saying what is needed to get views."
Not to mention it's dangerous because of the amount of people acting irrationally and speeding there. There were barely any cars on the road with him (and he did that on purpose, possibly to save people the hassle or actually not kill others).
> your historical observations are irrelevant for FSD beta. It's a new system
1. I find it very unlikely that Tesla completely scrapped the previous system to start from scratch for the FSD beta.
2. If they had, that would make me even more suspicious of the new system because that would mean no one would understand its weaknesses yet.
Either way, being most interested in where the previous generation system and other semiautonomous systems have historically failed makes sense.
> it works amazing without markings on the road at all.
I have yet to see any videos of the new system handling poorly marked high speed roads one way or another, but the crash where it tried to veer in to oncoming traffic doesn't provide confidence. All the unmarked/poorly marked roads I've seen so far have been low speed residential/urban, and even there performance has been unpredictable at best. Let's see it on a highway where night time rain has made the markings hard to see. Let's see it when snow covers the road and your only hing or lane
The state of the art is such that it can simultaneously be amazing and terrifying to think that normal people are allowed to "test" it wherever they feel like trying on public roads. What it does with the limited inputs it has is incredible, but at the same time it has dangerous failure modes that do not seem to be predictable even to those who use the system regularly.
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Don't get me wrong, there is nothing I'd love more than never having to manually handle a traffic jam, or "go home car, I'm drunk", but the way this is being released will kill people.
Lmao, their tech is faaaar away from anything remotely usable in real life. Sure it can follow a double yellow in the middle of the woods, I could do that when I was 10, as soon as you put it in city traffic it's game over in 15 seconds.
We will not have fully autonomous vehicles in our street until we ban human driven vehicles and completely rework our infrastructure, aka probably not in our lifetime.
Following a well-marked winding road is not a difficult challenge for self-driving cars. Driving in a city, with bus lanes, light rail, bikers, and pedestrians is much harder.
BTW, if anyone wants to experience the boredom of 18 km of turns among the trees, without actually going to NC/TN—there are custom circuits of Deals Gap/Tail of the Dragon for rFactor, Assetto Corsa and perhaps other sims. (Possibly ‘Grand Prix Legends’ was the first one to get the mod.)
Whilst impressive, that's also a "pretty good setup" for the Tesla - the yellow line is well marked as is the white line; and the Tesla isn't speeding.
I own a Tesla and it's the best car I've ever owned. However, the FSD software is garbage, I'd sooner trust a drunk human over the Tesla FSD any day of the week.
Those are irrelevant tangents. You don't win the game by being best at solving the trolley problem. You win the game by making a car that is good at not crashing.
I had a medical bill for a small amount like $60 sent to collections because they didn’t have the right address. Never called or emailed me. Judging by the comments here, the healthcare co would be well within its rights to pickpocket me.
Ugh I just had the same exact experience... right as I'm trying to get a mortgage. I wish they would have just pickpocketed me and not try to murder my credit over like $100.
Seriously, they chase down normal cars for repossession I don’t feel strongly that this is all that different than it getting towed from your driveway.
Would I be really annoyed if it was my car? Yeah, but at the same time it’s up for repo either way.
We already knew that Tesla HQ can control the cars for service and such
For me neither. As much as I admire Musk for being the driving force behind the progress that his companies are making for electric mobility and especially space launch but a guy who fetishizes a dystopian cyberpunk future and works on hooking up brains to computers might have slightly different vision for the future than you and me.
Repo agents, for decades, will roll up on a vehicle and hook it up to a tow truck and take off. People go out of their way to hide their vehicles, or block them in with other vehicles, when they haven't paid their loan and know their vehicle is now eligible for repossession.
This just makes it safer for the repo agents, because they can recover the vehicle faster and don't have to risk some nutjob running out of a house/apartment/office with a bat/gun/knife trying to confront them because someone was like "Dave, someone's hooking your car up to a tow truck".
Things are literally better now than ever before. More access to food, healthcare, and literacy on average for everyone in the world. More protection of basic human rights on average for everyone in the world.
If now is the dystopian future, when in the past would you like to time travel to? Before or after polio vaccine? Gay rights? Before/after Abolition of slavery (in select countries)?
It's must be sad for people to go through life with no ability to appreciate comedy whether it is good or bad. To think everything is so draconian in that it must be exactly how you want it to be is just further proof that it's darker than you want to believe.
Yes, it should be. You pay extra in your fees to cover the possible loss of the entity giving you a loan, but they want the extra and not having to deal with the possible loss. They should just suck it up TBH.
While this is an "interesting" story, I'd love to get some verification on it.
It sounds plausible, but almost illegal ? I'm in EU so don't know how really things work over there, but I would assume Tesla would need a judicial order siding with the bank to be able to do this ? I mean it's probably not the wild west over there. Or is it ?
In the US this is legal. Banks are authorized to repossess property if you’re late on a payment^. Private companies are allowed to participate in repossession as long as they don’t break any other laws. Tesla didn’t break into the owner’s house to steal their passwords or keys, they didn’t assault the owner. All they did was take his car. They verified that they were taking the correct car. Since the repossession was being carried out on behalf of a bank, there was no theft. This is completely legal. If you don’t want a car company to assist a bank with repossession, don’t get a car with remote access features- which pretty much means an old car.
^There are rules on how late you have to be though- it’s not like they are taking your car after you’re 1 day late for the first time. The required amount of lateness depends on the state. And they are only allowed to take property that was used to secure the loan. In the case of a car loan that is usually the car itself.
It doesn't go through the judiciary (e.g., it would if it were an an apartment and you stopped paying rent), but the owner signs a loan note that specifies that the loan is in default after missing N payments (usually after 3 months). Once in default, the bank can repossess the vehicle, but they'd rather not since their business is lending money and anything else is a money-losing distraction. So they will usually try to find a way for you to keep the car (and keep making payments). They usually only repo if they can't contact the debtor or they can't come to an agreement.
Repossession of any kind (car, house, etc...) is typically an option of last resort for the bank after the debtor refuses to work with them or enter into other agreements that could help. They really just want to keep collecting payments from you.
The other big thing at play here, is that car lenders get about 1/3 of the expected loan value if they repo the vehicle. Most of them don't want to do it unless they have to, it's usually far more profitable if the consumer continues making payments.
The court typically only gets involved if the lender has reason to believe you might do something malicious and can convince the court to execute an immediate right to seize the vehicle (quickly after default). A court can also order a person to return the vehicle, if they've managed to successfully evade the repossession action by hiding it. This is a good thing so long as it's reasonably balance (ie the consumer doesn't get their vehicle repo'd on day one of being late), so our court system isn't filled up with car loans.
This is a report based on a Facebook post by a random person telling a story about her repo friend who once told her that Tesla could help him get control of the car.
Until someone reports this happening first hand, I'm going to assume that either a lot of details are missing or that the story is straight-up fake.
I think the surprise or even incredulity people over here in the EU have is not to do with "You don't pay for your stuff, we take the stuff back" (I think we're all familiar with the concept of paying for things), it's to do with how the seller remotely took actions on the item.
It's a bit like not keeping up your mortgage repayments, and the bank remotely locking you out (or in?) your house — except it's a bit worse, because the mortgage provider wouldn't have to use GPS to track where you and your house are. Perhaps that's not a shocking idea in the USA, but I think it is in the EU. I'm not for or against, just explaining where the shock factor is coming from here.
Now for my own opinion: The header here shouldn't be "Make sure you keep up your repayments", it should be "Don't buy stupid shit you don't need, can't afford, and is controlled by someone else".
Nope, it won't. Ask anyone who ever lent money and they'll tell you that lending is actually the easiest part, now getting repaid is where most of the work goes into. Heck, you probably yourself can remember an acquaintance of yours who once borrowed figurative $20 from you and never returned them.
I think the mention of a bank is misleading. I think in this case the owner organised finance with Tesla directly. When he failed to pay Tesla on time they repo'd the car themselves.
> I'm in EU so don't know how really things work over there, but I would assume Tesla would need a judicial order siding with the bank to be able to do this ?
If a car was used as collateral for a loan, then bank would need a judicial order. But common way to buy a new car is leasing, where the car is owned by the leasing company during the period of the contract. If the contract says that lease is terminated when payments are not done, then i do not see why would leasing company need judicial order, when it is legal owner of the car (unless there is a specific legislation related to such kind of leases).
Yeah, it's weird how a random Facebook post with no evidence is the basis for this story. It's one thing if your aunt believes it. It's another if some content farm posts it as fact. It's quite embarrassing to see such an article on the front page here though.
It's probably possible, and dealerships usually work with repo men/banks, but the point is, the article certainly did nothing to verify anything.
Then you have to go through some government entity for repossession etc. But for sure we don't have it where some tow truck driver comes to your property pulling out the car.
I suppose it really depends on exact legal contract. Is the financing that is loan against the vehicle and it is owned by the user. Or is it essentially rented.
And in first case even with court order there is good question about other creditors...
While potentially completely unrelated, I've seen how "cowboy-like" the whole bounty hunters situation is over there, so it honestly and unfortunately wouldn't surprise me as much if it were the case with the creditors ...
Th title is in the owners name with a note of a bank lien on it. When you sell the car the bank lien is settled first and then the transfer can begin. In most cases you can’t register the car without the title and you cant drive the car without it being registered.
My state it's all electronic now. I have a paper title for my records but the it's just a fascimile of the digital original. To complete the sale I'd need to bring it into the tax collectors office where they update the digital record and print a new paper title for the next owner or do it at a dealership.
Bounty hunters are uncommon in the US and very little of the law enforcement system is privatized in the US. It's in fact rare compared to the number of government law enforcement officers we have (local cops, county cops, state cops, federal cops, prison & jail cops, specialized, etc).
Having eg a private security guy working at your grocery store is not privatized law enforcement. That's the equivalent of a bar bouncer watching the property, not the equivalent of law enforcement and they don't have the legal powers of law enforcement either.
So at what point will Teslas also start snitching on their own owners and other drivers for driving too fast, being in the wrong place at the time a crime happened and reporting copyrighted music played in the wrong country?
Is there already a design doc for that somewhere in Teslas ticketing system?
well, they are planning on offering their own car insurance program.
Funny thing is, the initial sell of Tesla was 'high performance', the kind of driving which tends to encourage high-risk behaviours.
so now it is "you can buy this great car with all this high-performance stuff, but we'll know every time you use it and dock you on insurance rates to compensate"
They already provide their own insurance. My brother's Model Y, that he has Tesla insurance for in CA, makes wonky noises when he's engaging in unsafe driving (not looking at the road, breaking too late, etc) and he said it might affect his insurance rate as well.
The car was technically Tesla's property they contracted the repo agent because the owner stopped paying the finance so as long as you haven't finished paying your car to Tesla it makes sense for it to still be their property.
The issue would be if they start doing this for illegal parking or similar stuff.
I think the personal freedom and privacy implications of self driving cars with centralized communication are rarely talked about. What happens when your vehicle decides you can't travel to an area of civil unrest (for your safety), or refuses to drive you to the gun store?
I don't think this is quite that extreme of a slippery slope.
For one, areas of unrest are already restricted by physical police and national guard barriers. For example, during the unrest in 2020, Chicago physically raised its drawbridges. Anyone who really wants to get somewhere difficult would probably choose a bicycle or legs, so you need physical police barriers in that case.
Refusing to drive you to the gun store sounds kind of silly when the government would more easily just ban gun stores (the right to bear arms doesn't include the right to buy them at a retail store). I realize you're just giving out an example but it was not a great one. Preventing you from driving somewhere is a simple as putting up a gate and closing it.
Also, driving at all is not a right. It's a licensed privilege that can be taken away if you break traffic laws or drive while intoxicated.
I think your perspective is coming from a car-focused area of the country (which is most of them). But, someone in NYC or Chicago might point out to you that they use a transit card that has the ability to track their movements through stations, and that they mainly travel by buses and trains that have government-owned surveillance cameras all over them. Despite this, it has has failed to turn into any kind of dystopian urban nightmare.
What I'm getting at is that the technology is blamed for things that are actually just public policy, laws, and law enforcement. The privacy implications for using a smartphone in the Western world are a lot different than in China, even though the technology itself is identical.
What we actually need is legislation surrounding automotive communication and centralized control and privacy. The rights that automobile owners have should be better enshrined in law rather than trusting auto manufacturers. This, I think, will eventually happen. We're still sorely lacking a general nationwide privacy law on the Internet in the US.
Nah, I will continue to buy disconnected vehicles for as long as possible since I chose to live in a rural area of the country, and I expect my machine to start when I tell it to. People that live in Chicago or New York choose to give up their ability to travel without the need for the government that is their choice. And didn't the pandemic have a major impact on some public transit lines operation? Again I believe in personal responsibility and freedom, I choose not to have that level of reliance on others.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/06/nyregion/mass-transit-ser...
And while driving on public roads is not a right, I still want my vehicle to start regardless of the governments opinions on whether I should be traveling :)
I chose guns because it was something that large corps like to virtue signal about. Also, while the bill of rights does not protect buying guns at retail, most of the cries for increased gun control actually want people to be forced to buy firearms in a retail setting so that the transfer can be tracked in the nation DB, which does not happen with private sales.
> I still want my vehicle to start regardless of the governments opinions on whether I should be traveling :)
No government was involved here, just a private company, who has the freedom to do as they please with their property and the responsibility to protect their assets.
> People that live in Chicago or New York choose to give up their ability to travel without the need for the government that is their choice.
What you're implying here is that city dwellers are government-dependent babies, which is very condescending to them. Choosing to drive your car on the public roads of your suburb or rural town doesn't make you any less dependent on society or the government.
Yes, transit systems had cuts due to ridership and revenue issues, and shut down at certain stations during unrest. Do you think a bank should keep its doors unlocked when there's unrest going on outside? These city transit systems were exercising their personal responsibility to protect public property, right?
> Again I believe in personal responsibility and freedom, I choose not to have that level of reliance on others.
Like it or not, you rely on others. There is little choice involved. There is almost no way to end that relationship entirely.
You probably drink from water that was managed by a government, and your poop is taken away either in a public sewer or on a septic truck driving on a public road. Unless you literally live out in the woods off of the land and never leave, you are a part of society, and libertarian hyper-individualist rhetoric can't change that. "Freedom" doesn't mean you're just allowed to do whatever you want at all times regardless of how it affects other people, but a lot of Americans have misconstrued the concept of freedom to mean just that.
Freedom as in democratic freedom has a lot more to do with freedom of speech, press, and elections. It doesn't mean you're free to drive on a road that is closed.
I was very clear in stating that I believe we need laws to prevent technology from becoming dystopian, but also I don't believe technology reaching the most dystopian version of its theoretical capabilities is inevitable or even particularly common. We can blame the technology all we want but it is rules of society that protects us from its abuse, not "personal freedom and responsibility."
The irony of your messaging is that your belief in freedom and responsibility would have to be applied to corporations as well as individuals. If you're free to make any choice, so are companies. Again, Tesla is, allegedly, exercising its own freedom and responsibility to protect its asset by repossessing its car.
Self-driving, interconnected cars could be an incredible boon to public safety, as car crashes are one of the top causes of premature death. Cars that can talk to each other and basically never crash into each other would be a dream world. We can talk about how technology would turn that into a surveillance dystopia, or we can build systems, laws, and checks on power that would make that technology enhance everyone's lives without significant downside or encroachment on "freedom."
The fact that Tesla cars are connected to a central server isn't the cause of abuses, it's the present legality of their harmful business practices. A great example: the car dealer system that Tesla lobbies against was put in place to protect consumers against overbearing manufacturers. Has that worked? In some cases, yes, in some cases, no.
In our present and most definitely not-libertarian society, the government has at least curbed unchecked corporate power by enacting laws like HIPAA that protect consumer rights and enforce interoperability. We need similar legislation and enforcement for non-healthcare technology. We need our own GDPR, but better, more comprehensive, and better designed. That will be difficult to achieve given the corporate influence on politics, but I do think we'll eventually get something, because even the elites in our society need protection from companies who want to exercise their freedom.
We have different lifestyles, needs, and goals. I realize mine may be flawed but these are the opinions I have due to my personal experience. I am not trying to force anyone to share my lifestyle and I simply ask the same.
OK, I don't want a private company to be able to have any control over the starting over my car either. I didn't say we should ban these cars, I originally said that I don't think people realize how much freedom and privacy they are giving up by owning them
>What you're implying here is that city dwellers are government-dependent babies, which is very condescending to them. Choosing to drive your car on the public roads of your suburb or rural town doesn't make you any less dependent on society or the government.
I am not implying anything, I am stating my opinion that the people that choose to live in those cities have decided to trade personal freedom and privacy for the luxuries that come from living in those cities. These are tradeoffs, I chose to build a home in rural America with the goal of trading luxuries for personal freedom and privacy, as well as a reduction in crime.
And I realize why the transit systems had cuts and why they shut down due to unrest, but that is some of the freedom those who live in major cities give up. I am not far from the Twin cities metro and I was able to get in my car and drive to Minneapolis the morning after the riots started to personally look at the damage.
I do have a well and septic system, every few years it has to be pumped, you are right about that. I never said I was not part of society, nor did I say that my lifestyle is not dependent on society's infrastructure. I choose to live on the end of the spectrum to reduce my reliance on others as much as possible because I have personally seen and learned first hand what government oppression and social unrest can do to dense communities.
AFAIK under US law Tesla is well within their rights to use their technology to repossess their cars if they want to, or enforce whatever restrictions they want on the use of their vehicles, but it won't be from me. I am not advocating for tesla to be stopped by the government, I am simply asking for people to think through the consequences of their purchases. I completely agree that tesla is free to do what they want as a corporation(within the current laws), and I am free to not buy their vehicles as a citizen, you are correct about that.
You can feel free to give up your freedoms in the name of public safety, and eventually I will be forced to as well, but I will continue to resist as long as possible. I very much enjoy the act of driving to the point of it being one of my hobbies, I am in no rush for the impending future of driving being a luxury for the rich. I distinctly remember the feeling of freedom I got when I got my driver's license at 16 and bought my first car, it was actually a pretty critical point in my life and allowed me much more autonomy, freedom, and responsibility than I had ever had before.
I just really think that your desire for federal laws for privacy protection are wishful thinking and quite unlikely to happen, hell our current president has actively tried to ban encryption without backdoors on a few occasions(actually indirectly causing pgp to be developed https://www.wired.com/2012/12/joe-biden-private-email/), this seems actively antiprivacy to me.
Hmmm, I feel like this reply is making light of other's deaths. I was more talking about the ability to attend a protest. I believe in personal freedom, as well as personal responsibility.
I don't really understand the connection to some sort of hypothetical situation about protesting in the street. My position is that I want my vehicle to start when I turn the key, and drive to where I take it. I think people are giving up a lot more freedom than what they are actually thinking about when they buy these cars that are able to be remotely controlled or disabled.
Not at all. But getting run over is certainly the reasonably foreseeable consequence of your actions. It’s not victim-blaming to suggest that people are ultimately responsible for their own safety, and they ought to take precautions.
So what? People can choose to have connected vehicles if they want. I choose to avoid them and the newest gm vehicle I have owned was a 1997 Saturn. My personal choices and decisions are a product of my values and beliefs, and I intend on avoiding the potential for remote intervention as long as possible.
Impossible is a massive exaggeration, I have not had an issue with it without even trying. Heck I am shopping brand new 911s right now, and they are not connected unless they have a SIM card inserted.
The same as would happen in any other repo case. The repo agent bags them, writes an inventory of them, and must return them on request. Different states have different laws on the conditions on that. Most don't allow any fees to be charged for this, but generally you have to go get them, they won't be brought to you.
Huge amounts of stuff is never returned, either because the repo guys were careless/stole it, because retrieving is hard/inconvenient for someone who no longer has a car, or because the owners just don't care.
Not that payments shouldn't be kept up to date. But that it moves decision making on the issue to a corporate entity a million miles away and you can bet there won't be any accounting for personal situations, or admin errors, or anything else. Your car will just be gone.
If this wasn't preceded by months of angry letters explaining when and why the security would be repossessed, then yes. Shitty.
However, if the owner was made aware that the vehicle would be reposessed, then obviously there isn't much else the lender can do.
The owner has (hopefully) already dodged several opportunities to simply drop the vehicle off.
No, there are consumer protection laws in most, if not all, states that require a period of notification and discussion prior to repossession. When a car is repossessed it should never be a surprise to the "owner."
With respect, I've seen the suprise element happen too often for it to be considered rare (possibly different country, different legalities, but still, it's a global company.
Mail goes to the wrong address, e-mail ends up in spam (looking at you, Google), a pin code is lost, meaning you need time to identify yourself or etc etc etc and you're basically lucky or not as to you you're dealing with as to how it gets resolved.
I agree that I should not have used the word "never" in my comment. Thanks for pointing that out. Perhaps "unlikely" would be better. You are correct that sometimes stuff just happens, but after volunteering with a financial counseling program, I do think most people know when they have stopped making payments and most banks make lots of calls and send several letters before they go grab the property. There are exceptions of course, such as third tier used car dealerships which push the laws to the limit to make the repossession happen as quickly as possible. Sadly, people with the most fragile financial situations are much more likely to deal with the most predatory lenders.
Many people living on the edge financially are so stressed that they have trouble prioritizing things in what would seem to be a logical choice to someone on the outside. What is often not understood is that honest (and early) conversations with lenders can frequently lead to adjusted terms to help people get through a difficult period. Without that conversation, they lose transportation access which leads to reduction in job opportunities, and then the whole thing starts to spiral. Very difficult.
That's the purpose of allowing sob stories by people that advocate for that approach. The real idea is to choke the system to death and crash it de facto.
That's how you get insane squatting laws where you can't remove people that are illegally occupying your property (house, apartment, etc) for years. The process becomes badly choked in the sob story process which the squatter takes advantage of.
And very obviously all that would happen if you allowed the sob story process to become common in auto loans, is a huge backlog of people would become delinquent and abuse it, knowing they can drag out the consequences for a very long time.
Is this only news "because Tesla"? User jcims mentioned Ford's having the same feature. Probably GM's do, too. For years, I've seen occasional news stories about car dealers adding similar features to vehicles which they sell to buyers with sketchy credit.
I feel pretty confident that GM’s Onstar is primarily a service oriented for GMAC/ally so they can locate and limit speeds and unlock vehicles they hold title to but have not received payment for. Oh and sure they give you a big blue button to punch in case you have a flat tire, for peace of mind. They advertised the speed limiter capability “in case of a vehicle theft” and repo situation (driving a vehicle not paid for) isn’t too far removed from theft
Ya’ll are overlooking the reasoning behind this for Tesla: this would make a bank more willing to give out a loan to nearly anyone, even with questionable credit, if the car assisted with its own repo. It’s a play to get more Teslas on the road.
Only in the same sense as making any usability improvement. Making car loans in general is also “a play to sell more cars.” There’s no point to such interpretation.
They don’t need to be the underwriter to affect the underwriting process. By enabling this feature, banks could be more willing to make loans to credit challenged people, thus rendering more Tesla’s on the road.
A few years ago Netflix had a problem processing the payment for my subscription. They charged me again, also had problems, charged again. 3 times, every time the money left my account as the bank confirmed. A few days later, with no warning, they suspended my account while I was watching a movie.
I don't like the power these companies have in relation with their customers. The customer has no power at all, in most cases. In my case I had to ask the bank to revert the charges and close my Netflix subscription, but it was just ~ $30-40 at stake, not a $50,000 car. How many times cars are repossessed without any fault of the customer?
When reading the tweet, I get the feeling that it is satire (kind of like the Onion).
I am not aware that Tesla is directly financing the vehicles, so why would they hire a repo person to go repossess it? In addition, given the OTA update capabilities of Tesla, they could probably just remotely disable the car, and not have to worry about the expense of liability of a repo agent. In addition, the picture is weird, as if you had such full control of the car, why would you need to put a "boot" on the car to immobilize it, since it would make driving it back to Tesla harder.
I am calling satire on the tweet, until further proof.
Indeed, Tesla’s own lending page seems to point to banks as lenders, not Tesla or a Tesla finance company. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding though, I’ve never looked deeply into this before.
I was a repo man in the 1980s. When we'd get the repossession paperwork from the bank, we'd also get a copy of the car's title. We'd take that paperwork into a dealership and they would cut us duplicate keys.
Tesla cars are not licensed for operation without a control of a driver. It's unlikely Tesla (the company) would take the financial responsibility to cause any damage or injury during an unlicensed operation without a driver.
Straight from the Model S manual:
"Model S may not detect certain obstacles, including those that are very narrow (e.g., bikes), lower than the fascia, or hanging from the ceiling. As such, Summon requires that you continually monitor your vehicle's movement and surroundings while it is in progress, and that you remain prepared to stop the vehicle at any time using the Tesla mobile app, by pressing any button on the
key fob, or by pressing any Model S door handle."
Helpful mental model to help you overcome bias: imagine for a moment, that instead of Tesla, it was that company you hate doing this. You know, that privacy-invading company that's just the worst - would you still feel the same?
It's two sides to the same coin. The stuff that makes this possible is the same stuff that makes all the futuristic tech on a Tesla possible. So you could theoretically jailbreak it (Rich Rebuilds probably figured it out by now) disabling the stuff that would allow this to happen would also disable half the futuristic features on your car.
No but you (most of the time) lose the ability to get software updates which are a pretty significant feature of Teslas.
I also wouldn't be surprised if Tesla locked out your sim if they found you to be abusing it so you'd have to try to get a new one (not sure how that works with eSims).
Does this mean that Tesla is the owner of the loan?
I'm skeptical that Tesla will be helping random banks get their money back like this, but it sounds like this is direct financing through Tesla.
Also, keep in mind that this is just a tweet with a picture of a car on a trailer. This is absolutely not verified as true. Tesla nor the car's owner have verified or commented on this from what we can see in this article. Literally just some guy who says "a friend told me."
Lowering friction amplifies your ability to make mistakes. Yes, this is legal. But the increase in scale of these actions is probably bad. I’d hate to see what Hertz would do with this tech.
Jesus no. The potential for abuse is just way too high. We can't even trust cops to not stalk random women [1] or to not beat up their family [2] - giving them even more possibilities to conduct crimes is not a good thing. Not to mention: what the police can exploit, so can attackers.
I agree that this capability should never, ever be in the hands of the state, but don't extrapolate isolated instances and debunked statistics about the police as truths. Your own article demonstrates one of the major flaws of the domestic violence statistic, but doesn't discuss the most egregious methodological flaw: the criteria used for domestic violence, which includes shouting in the cited study.
Cops are sourced from the general population, so incidence rates need to be compared to the general population, and you'll find that police have significantly lower "negative" behaviors compared to the general population in virtually all aspects. That doesn't mean they should be allowed to remotely disable your car though.
They are notably not. Usually, immigrants are drastically under-represented compared to general population (at least in Germany, you have to hold German or European citizenship to join the police force).
> so incidence rates need to be compared to the general population
Oh hell no. Police officers act on behalf of the government and with powers that are both far greater than those of ordinary people and not immediately appealable. As a result of that, police officers in Germany are actually held to extremely high standards by law (§34 BeamtStG - https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/beamtstg/__34.html) and receive at the very least two years of training.
I won't say our police are perfect (because they aren't, they still are a bunch of bullies), but they are orders of magnitude better than the trigger happy, barely educated (seriously, 360 hours of training?! - https://www.nola.com/news/crime_police/article_9dd5d48b-2152...) morons that make up the US police force.
My point still stands. The fact that police exhibit extremely low detrimental behavior rates compared to the general population illustrates that they are held to much higher standards.
Police in the US have far higher post secondary education rates than the general population. Over half have a bachelor's and over 80% have at least an associate's. And that's overall. Many states and larger localities require post secondary education, particularly in urban, higher crime areas.
>but they are orders of magnitude better than the trigger happy...
Can you prove it? Tens of millions of police interactions a year and less than a thousand deaths is pretty damn good and not at all indicative of the narrative you're spewing, especially when you account for how much violence the police experience at the hands of criminals. Sounds to me like you've bought into a narrative completely unsupported by data.
I sincerely doubt that my fiesta has either of those things, and it is a 2017. Yep, just as I thought it does not have ford's cellular or gps systems in it.
I also have a 2004 f-250 that will likely outlive me, and it is completely tracking free.
to every person writing here "is this the future we will be living in"?
So do you want legal owners hire people who will spy on you, ask family members where is the car, etc...
After they'll find the car their life will be more complicated , they need to make a key. Coordinate if this is the right car. If car is locked/has custom security, lots of noise in neighborhood due to alarm, so basically everyone around your block is stressed because you didn't pay.
And that's fees people who pay the bills will cover. Do you think this kind of services are cheap? If they can't return the car, that will be also split between future lease agreement. They will be included one way or another in your loan/monthly payments.
Doing so , they basically decreasing the price of such event at least 5x.
Knowing that Musk had the project to let your car drive as an automatic taxi without you, this is not surprising. We will have to get used to cars doing stuff without their driver.
What is legality of making alternative firmware for Tesla? I guess they could argue with safety. Does the car loose road worthy certification, if its software is altered?
Can't comment on certifications but aftermarket performance upgrades that are not from Tesla already exist through hardware modification with some attempt at the "cat and mouse" game of detection and evasion one might expect from such activities. Haven't hard of any lawyers getting involved though.
I would assume if you do something dumb with the electronics or software you wold probably be found liable in terms of insurance.
The advantage of autonomous cars is that they can resist their owner. That enables big cost savings for everyone (insurance, manufacturer, rental, leasing, repo). Well, everyone except for the "owner".
Who is legally the owner when a car is repossessed?
I'd say autonomous vehicles are pro-social machines. They will, in general, act to follow the rules established, ideally more often than a "dumb" car operated by a human.
Given how many traffic accidents are human caused, that's sort of the point of the entire exercise.
I would argue that before it is successfully repossessed, the old person is still the owner. They'd also be the one liable if something goes wrong. So we have disconnected the liabilities of ownership from the advantages of ownership. In the past, this type of disconnect has led to companies exploiting it for profit.
Possession is separate from ownership, those are well-defined concepts with very distinct meaning, and repossession (as the name hints) is explicitly about possession, not ownership. The moment of successful repossession does not change ownership. It may be that the ownership has already changed (and was a reason for repossession), it may be that it's "just" a collateral and the ownership will either never change and the car will be returned when the payments are made, or that the ownership will change some time after repossession after it's settled that the car will not be returned and the repossessed car is sold as collateral when liquidating the debt.
> So we have disconnected the liabilities of ownership from the advantages of ownership. In the past, this type of disconnect has led to companies exploiting it for profit.
You are 100% right, but that is the circumstance with loans to purchase cars independent of whether the car is autonomous. Banks do make a ton of money on the interest from car loans and they are, indeed, not liable for service or maintenance of the vehicle.
When repossession occurs, the person in possession of the car is not the owner anymore. That's why the repo man is allowed, legally, to take the car. They are transporting it to the rightful owner's place of choice.
I would not argue against it being yours before reposession. But whose car is it after a legal repossession has started?
I would argue that once the repossession clause in the contract has been activated (criteria has been met and bank decides to exercise the right) then from that decision forwards the bank is now the owner.
Possession is not 9/10 of the law if a contract says control reverts to bank under a condition that's clearly been violated.
This is not a game where if just hide for X time then contracts expire. It's not a game of tag, where "it doesn't count" until a reposession has been completed "fairly". You don't need to give someone a fair chance to avoid the consequences in a contract.
So…in case you plan to not pay for it but still keep it anyway?
I am really struggling to understand the mindset here of what I assume are mostly well paid professional software developers. If I defaulted on a car loan (I don’t know the details exactly off the top of my head, but this entails more than just missing a payment) I’d be quite ashamed of myself and return the car myself with an apology. I cannot understand the mindset of someone who would feel justified keeping the car, much less getting angry at the method used by the bank to reclaim their property.
It’s not like this is a cheap car either where you’re threatening someone’s livelihood who is not going to be able to get to work.
That's not the point. The car has a capability to lock you out, and all it takes is for someone to activate that capability. I don't want that in a car.
> I cannot understand the mindset of someone who would feel justified keeping the car
No-one said anything about feeling justified keeping the car. People take issue with the backdoor. I too, would rather clean the car, take my stuff, and return it with an apology (if the bank refuses to negotiate an extension to the loan) than find that a backdoor has been used against me and it's just all gone one day.
I appreciate I left little to assist your conclusion, but that isn't it at all.
This isn't the the path I want us going down. If this applies / impacts a few thousand Tesla 'owners' so enamoured by the that cultish brand that they'll accept this BS, so be it.
But apply variations of this to the world, and the countless mistakes and mishaps that can happen and you're in further down into a nasty world of things happening.
I mean, look at getting something fixed with Google or a Facebook. Those bastions of the tech world.
It has absolutely nothing to do with the money aspect of this.
Case in point: literally this happened yesterday. I set up a D/D with one of our internet providers 3 months ago. They have been chasing me for 3 months for payments. New supplier so their email went to spam. I have evidence I did all the right things to do this. And yet, yesterday, I checked my spam luckily and there was a 7 day suspension notice if the bill wasn't paid. So, basically, our business internet connections relied on me being lucky that I caught a stray e-mail ... apply this to your car ... or your home (where there have been stories of this kind of BS, only for the owner come home and realise their home had been sold on and they can't get it back).
Basically, automation is great, but don't automate interaction with your customers on key situatons.
The repossession has nothing to do with it being a Tesla. Cars are repossessed every day. The unlocking made it easier, but without that assistance, a repossessor would just drag it up a ramp onto a truck and drive off.
Is 'buy' the correct verb in this context? I mean, if you would buy it in the traditional sense you wouldn't have any monthly payments you could miss and you would actually own the car. But this case seems a bit different.
No, if you don't pay for it then it's the bank's car.
It's like saying "the super stole my TV!!" when actually the super just let the police in with a search warrant, and they took the TV you stole down to the station.
Tesla still has remote access to the cars its has sold and can unlock them if the authorities request them to do so. If that is not a backdoor I don't know what is.
Evidently, the car isn't yours, even though you have paid for it. Tesla still owns it.
You didn't need to and given that was already avoided here; it now has been admitted. Thus, it is by definition a 'backdoor' then especially a directly 'remote' one. It doesn't matter who it is, we just know that Tesla and many others have this ability directly; no locksmith needed or whatever.
So the future is connected cars where not even you can fully control your own car and it is still 'owned' and can be externally controlled in the hands of the manufacturer, just like our phones. Since they are already giving out OTA updates to it.
Tesla owners like this backdoor ability. Indeed, some people consistently unlock their car with their phone (via the cloud), I hear.
In this case though some people are objecting to who the "owner" is. And I think that the people objecting are wrong. And (I assume) so does the law.
Your car is not protected from the bank or the government by its keys, but by the law.
Same as your house. If you lose your house legally, you'll lose your house physically.
The fact that the bank (indirectly) called Tesla instead of a locksmith is to me irrelevant in this case.
Now, in the abstract, is it uncomfortable that the car manufacturer can unlock your car? Sure. But we knew that they could. How else could your phone do it.
I hate to break it to you, but your telco can tap your phoneline. The bus can track your public transport movement. I can follow you on the street. Your power company can effectively track when you're away on vacation.
This case was not abuse. And it doesn't even have to be cloud-connected to enable this kind of owner-depriving abuse. As soon as cars got their first microchip they could have gotten firmware that would brick the car unless it went to an authorized dealer twice a year for "reset".
I'm not saying there aren't dangers, but this case isn't it.
> You didn't need to and given that was already avoided here; it now has been admitted.
It's interesting how you seem to think this was a "gotcha".
It's like the people who say "there is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer". Yeah, just like there is no bakery, it's just someone else's oven.
> just like there is no bakery, it's just someone else's oven.
That may be analogous to "the cloud", but not to the subject here: When you buy a car or a phone, it's supposed to be "yours". (That's what "buying something" means.)
When you go to the bakery every morning to buy your breakfast baguette, you don't think you're buying the bakery -- you're just buying the bread. And that is yours after you've paid for it. Or does your baker have an electronic backdoor to the bread he sells you?
(And you're not just renting the bread, or "buying the service of using it for a while". Or does your baker come around and collect your poop after you've digested the bread?)
If Telsa are also granted the rights within the court order to assist the bailiffs, then presumably it would be a fully legal action.
At the end of the day, you sign a contract wherein you agree to keep up payments on an item, and if you don't the item will be repossessed. If you don't like those terms, don't get stuff on payment plans.