Tesla disables feature after car is purchased, claims feature 'wasn't paid for'.

Lakados said:
So apparently the software licensing is non transferable, so if User A buys a Tesla, sells the Tesla and later rebuys a new Tesla not only does the original vehicle loose the license but User A has to buy another license for the new vehicle as well. It's supposedly in the fine print. It's shitty in the car market to be doing this, that is completely unheard of, Software world it is the new normal and I hate it.
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What's the source for this?
 
A car is not a computer, I mean technically it is, but it is not sold to function as a computer. Every appliance has some sort of embedded software on it these days, and it is part of the product, not something you need to license.
It seems like Tesla wants to be the Apple of car business. I can imagine the same type of people who swear by apple also willing to put up with this, hell even defend it.
 
Ok, but if you buy a second Tesla after selling your first do you still get the add-on features you paid for? If it's not tied to the individual or to the vehicle, WTF is the point of paying for it? You could drive off the dealer lot and get into a crash and lose your $6000 investment.
 
btgorman said:
Based on replies in this thread, it would seem that software does not have value.

Just because something is not a piece of material that you can touch does not mean that someone didn’t put work into constructing that something that you find useful and valuable. Actual labor and funding goes into stuff like intellectual property you know.

I think this topic bears some actual discussion instead of knee jerking. Like, what might this cost Tesla? Rootkit their cars for free features?
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Based on this response, it would seem you never read what the issue was at hand. The customer paid for features advertised. Tesla remotely disabled those features because they claim they were never included on the car, despite the fact that all documentation says they were there from the beginning. That would fall under a “bait-and-switch” on the part of Tesla. This has nothing to do with perceived value of software because everything the customer had indicated it was included in the price he was paying.
 
I'd blame this on Tesla. If the car dealership had it, then yea, they were selling it as is. If the seller agreed to buy it and in between that time Tesla disabled the software, then I blame Tesla. I love Tesla, but yea, they should just give it to the person and fix their permission issues from here on out. This sucks if the dealer has to pay for it.
 
So are the features sold to the driver and not to the car? I think once a feature is on a car it should stay. The only thing I agree to remove is something like free Supercharging. That to me is more of a perk for the buyer, like a thrown in freebie, of the car at the time of buying new, and not a vehicle specific feature.
 
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Smashed Ixnay said:
I'd blame this on Tesla. If the car dealership had it, then yea, they were selling it as is. If the seller agreed to buy it and in between that time Tesla disabled the software, then I blame Tesla. I love Tesla, but yea, they should just give it to the person and fix their permission issues from here on out. This sucks if the dealer has to pay for it.
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I actually own a Tesla. It's an awesome car, but dealing with the company that makes it is a goddamn pain in the ass. Because they don't have dealers, they don't have any sort of incentive to keep the locals happy, so their customer service is just OK enough to not get sued by the FTC. It's almost exactly like you'd expect the experience to be if Apple made cars.

* The service centers don't even have a phone number you can call. You have to request service via their smartphone app, and hope they can squeeze you in this year if they respond at all.
* They donated my Powerwall to Puerto Rico the day after I ordered it, made me wait nine months so they could manufacture another, but wanted me to go ahead and pay for it up front. I told them to fuck off with that idea and get back to me when they had product to sell.
* Their ordering system is confusing, with a ton of steps where it's not clear whether it's waiting on further input from you. It makes you do all the F&I legwork yourself, and then you sure as shit aren't getting your car until the last day of the quarter.
* You'll go to the service center to pick your car up, and then wander around for 15 minutes looking for someone - anyone - to tell you where it is. Because they don't do sales there, there's no one with any incentive at all to actually... you know... provide customer service of any kind.
* Some will dispute it, but I think reneged on some of the features of their cars with "premium interiors" when they locked those features behind a subscription service. Other Tesla owners tell me "Hurr hurr, it was always going to be like that" but I distinctly remember their website not mentioning any subscription service when I ordered my car. I didn't order the option in question, so it's not really any skin off my nose, but IMHO, it sets a really terrible precedent to take features away via an over the air update for basically any reason. To be clear, I think they should have set up the subscription service first, because the real issue is that those features use a ton of cellular data that the customer should be paying for, but the way they did it left a nasty taste in my mouth.

It's not a popular opinion for obvious reasons, but I think a big part of Tesla's problem is that they don't have dealers. You can say what you want about dealerships, but my experience is usually pretty good, and they at least have an incentive to maintain a clean reputation in their local area. Tesla's problems in trying to fill this niche are equal parts not giving a fuck and being too overwhelmed with demand to keep up.
 
HockeyJon said:
Based on this response, it would seem you never read what the issue was at hand. The customer paid for features advertised. Tesla remotely disabled those features because they claim they were never included on the car, despite the fact that all documentation says they were there from the beginning. That would fall under a “bait-and-switch” on the part of Tesla. This has nothing to do with perceived value of software because everything the customer had indicated it was included in the price he was paying.
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Nope, Tesla didn't remote disable. The guy that bought from the dealer/flipper never had it working. He gets mad at dealer, dealer blames Tesla. No documentation has been made public to support either party's claims of what happened. Dealer seems to have misrepresented their flip. Story becomes FUD circlejerk per usual.

If you sell your Tesla to someone, it will keep all upgrades like FSD, Autopilot, etc. If would've been news long before now if that was NOT the case.

But if you trade in your Tesla *to* Tesla (or they buy it back under lemon law like what happened with this car - apparently it had a yellow tint around screen) and Tesla resells it, they can remove all options prior to listing for resale so they can move it quicker.

There's something to be said about Tesla making this too complicated though. The lifetime R&D costs of developing FSD is going to be in the Billions for them, but they believed making it an optional upgrade would avoid punishing those not interested in the feature from sharing in its dev cost. But too many people are simples and don't value software like they do something physical ("hurr DLC"), so Tesla's creating perception problems and confusion.
 
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RazorWind said:
I actually own a Tesla. It's an awesome car, but dealing with the company that makes it is a goddamn pain in the ass. Because they don't have dealers, they don't have any sort of incentive to keep the locals happy, so their customer service is just OK enough to not get sued by the FTC. It's almost exactly like you'd expect the experience to be if Apple made cars.
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Sorry, you lost me at the Apple comparison. Apple has won every single customer service award that there is to win every single year for the last 30 years. Did you mean to say "exactly the opposite" instead?

odditory said:
Nope, Tesla didn't remote disable. The guy that bought from the dealer/flipper never had it working. He gets mad at dealer, dealer blames Tesla. No documentation has been made public to support either party's claims of what happened. Dealer seems to have misrepresented their flip. Story becomes FUD circlejerk per usual.
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This is the literally opposite of what happened. Maybe you're talking about a different incident? This type of issue seems to come up with them surprisingly often.
 
odditory said:
Nope, Tesla didn't remote disable. The guy that bought from the dealer/flipper never had it working. He gets mad at dealer, dealer blames Tesla. No documentation has been made public to support either party's claims of what happened. Dealer seems to have misrepresented their flip. Story becomes FUD circlejerk per usual.

If you sell your Tesla to someone, it will keep all upgrades like FSD, Autopilot, etc. If would've been news long before now if that was NOT the case.

But if you trade in your Tesla *to* Tesla (or they buy it back under lemon law like what happened with this car - apparently it had a yellow tint around screen) and Tesla resells it, they can remove all options prior to listing for resale so they can move it quicker.

There's something to be said about Tesla making this too complicated though. The lifetime R&D costs of developing FSD is going to be in the Billions for them, but they believed making it an optional upgrade would avoid punishing those not interested in the feature from sharing in its dev cost. But too many people are simples and don't value software like they do something physical ("hurr DLC"), so Tesla's creating perception problems and confusion.
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You should actually read what is happening and not make wild assumptions. Tesla auctioned the car themselves with the features advertised (proved in post #19). The features were working fine (dealer statement) until an update came along and disabled them. BOTH the dealer and buyer thought it was a software bug that would be fixed in a future update. So the buyer was clearly informed of the features not working when they bought the car. Tesla, as usual, is ignoring any attempt to work with either party despite pulling a clear bait and switch because THEY ADVERTISED THAT THE FEATURES WERE ENABLED WHEN THEY SOLD THE CAR.
 
Derangel said:
You should actually read what is happening and not make wild assumptions. Tesla auctioned the car themselves with the features advertised (proved in post #19). The features were working fine (dealer statement) until an update came along and disabled them. BOTH the dealer and buyer thought it was a software bug that would be fixed in a future update. So the buyer was clearly informed of the features not working when they bought the car. Tesla, as usual, is ignoring any attempt to work with either party despite pulling a clear bait and switch because THEY ADVERTISED THAT THE FEATURES WERE ENABLED WHEN THEY SOLD THE CAR.
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Do not be surprised that the response to this is going to being fingers and ears and saying la, la, la... I can't hear you, or something to that effect. :D
 
Derangel said:
The features were working fine (dealer statement) until an update came along and disabled them.
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Yes, but the person who bought the car did so on Dec 20, the update that removed them was on Nov 19th, so unless I'm interpreting the original articles wrong the owner of the car never had those features working in any fashion. Now if this is a case of the dealer who sold it didn't re-check that everything was working at time of sale, kind of on them?
 
sfsuphysics said:
Yes, but the person who bought the car did so on Dec 20, the update that removed them was on Nov 19th, so unless I'm interpreting the original articles wrong the owner of the car never had those features working in any fashion. Now if this is a case of the dealer who sold it didn't re-check that everything was working at time of sale, kind of on them?
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I like how this is now the buyer's fault and not that of thine holy Tesla. It's the buyer's fault that Tesla defrauded the dealer!
 
sfsuphysics said:
Yes, but the person who bought the car did so on Dec 20, the update that removed them was on Nov 19th, so unless I'm interpreting the original articles wrong the owner of the car never had those features working in any fashion. Now if this is a case of the dealer who sold it didn't re-check that everything was working at time of sale, kind of on them?
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You know, this was answered in my bloody post. It helps to read it.
 
Thunderdolt said:
I like how this is now the buyer's fault and not that of thine holy Tesla. It's the buyer's fault that Tesla defrauded the dealer!
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Yeah sure, I'm fine with Tesla being the bad guy in effectively screwing over a dealer.

That said, the "buyer" aka dealer, does have some level of responsibility to make sure said car they are selling is up to specs as advertised as well. There was a grand total of 3 days between buying (not necessarily receiving) and when the software updated. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if the dealer did nothing to verify any aspect of the car worked as advertised and simply threw it on their lots (or webpage) to turn a profit as soon as possible. So yeah, I see this as a used car salesman screwing over a customer by not verifying every aspect of the car worked as advertised. And sure there's the Tesla screwing over a used car dealership too, but I'm not a fan of this story turning into a case of Tesla screwing over the end user directly.

Basically if I bought an Alienware computer from Best Buy, and it is missing something from the specs, it's up to Best Buy to make this right to me, not Dell. Best Buy as a reseller can do what they want to go after Dell all day long. And we have a case here of I'm sure the dealer going public with this, because they don't want to be responsible for the used car they sold.
 
Wow you're kind of creepy with how far you're going with this.

Hate to say this, I'm not really a Tesla fanboy.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Yeah sure, I'm fine with Tesla being the bad guy in effectively screwing over a dealer.

That said, the "buyer" aka dealer, does have some level of responsibility to make sure said car they are selling is up to specs as advertised as well. There was a grand total of 3 days between buying (not necessarily receiving) and when the software updated. I wouldn't be surprised in the least if the dealer did nothing to verify any aspect of the car worked as advertised and simply threw it on their lots (or webpage) to turn a profit as soon as possible. So yeah, I see this as a used car salesman screwing over a customer by not verifying every aspect of the car worked as advertised. And sure there's the Tesla screwing over a used car dealership too, but I'm not a fan of this story turning into a case of Tesla screwing over the end user directly.

Basically if I bought an Alienware computer from Best Buy, and it is missing something from the specs, it's up to Best Buy to make this right to me, not Dell. Best Buy as a reseller can do what they want to go after Dell all day long. And we have a case here of I'm sure the dealer going public with this, because they don't want to be responsible for the used car they sold.
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You clearly have not read a single thing about this. The dealer VERY CLEARLY stated that the features were working prior to the update. The dealer also stated that by the time the update came through there was already a deal in place with the buyer. The dealer informed the buyer of what happened and they both assumed (as most sane people would) that is was some kind of software bug, BECAUSE THE FEATURES WERE ADVERTISED WHEN TESLA AUCTIONED THE CAR, and that it would be fixed in a follow-up update. The dealer has stated that since this time Tesla also disabled a speed package upgrade from his father's car that was also advertised at the time of auction purchase. Stop riding Tesla's cock, they're clearly at fault here. Absolutely no one else is at fault but Tesla.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Hate to say this, I'm not really a Tesla fanboy.
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And yet, here you are, blaming the dealer because Tesla sold him a car which Tesla themselves claimed had a certain feature set, the dealer then verified the feature set, and then Tesla removed these features after the purchase. So, even though the dealer (who, again, is like, totes at fault for being defrauded by Thine Holy Tesla) did, in fact, do literally everything you said the dealer should have done, it is still the dealer's fault.

Is everyone but you just looking at this the wrong way? Maybe the problem here is that Thine Holy Tesla actually gave the dealer a GIFT by stealing functionality from a car no longer owned by Thine Holy Tesla? I, too, am shocked that the dealer wouldn't have recognized such an obvious gift, no how lucky he was to have been defrauded by Thine Holy Tesla. Some people have to wait an entire lifetime for such a holy experience, and now this dealer is actually complaining about it. It's no wonder you're upset. Hopefully, you'll get your chance to be defrauded soon.
 
Thunderdolt said:
And yet, here you are, blaming the dealer because Tesla sold him a car which Tesla themselves claimed had a certain feature set, the dealer then verified the feature set, and then Tesla removed these features after the purchase. So, even though the dealer (who, again, is like, totes at fault for being defrauded by Thine Holy Tesla) did, in fact, do literally everything you said the dealer should have done, it is still the dealer's fault.

Is everyone but you just looking at this the wrong way? Maybe the problem here is that Thine Holy Tesla actually gave the dealer a GIFT by stealing functionality from a car no longer owned by Thine Holy Tesla? I, too, am shocked that the dealer wouldn't have recognized such an obvious gift, no how lucky he was to have been defrauded by Thine Holy Tesla. Some people have to wait an entire lifetime for such a holy experience, and now this dealer is actually complaining about it. It's no wonder you're upset. Hopefully, you'll get your chance to be defrauded soon.
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I bet the dealer didn't recheck the audio system if it could still fast forward songs the day they sold the car. Scummy dealer bastards!
 
People comparing this to missing parts and it being bestbuy is a joke ...it's more like bestbuy sells a 100% working floor model and Dell deatvates windows/sneaks into bb and takes 1/2 the ram out but doesn't change the spec sheet....yeah how would this be the retail/dealership problem?
 
chili dog said:
Just wait until all cars are like this. It should come as no surprise that governments are pressing high tech electric cars across the globe. Once the car is synced with your government social credit profile the possibilities are endless. Gps tracking, facial recognition of driver and passengers, monitoring the weight of driver and passengers, fingerprint locks/ignition, all monitored by the government and big tech. Didn't pay your taxes on time? Weight gain? Smoking in the car? Frequent the gun range? Visiting websites which don't stick to the approved narrative? Posting "offensive" content online? Your car's range is remotely limited like a perimeter fence, the cost of a recharge is increased for just you, or your car is remotely locked down temporarily or bricked.
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A State of Emergency has been declared with a curfew pending. Your car will remotely disable in 30 minutes.
 
What would happen if you ripped the cell antenna off the car and it was never able to phone home again?
 
longblock454 said:
What would happen if you ripped the cell antenna off the car and it was never able to phone home again?
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You would lose some pretty important features, I suspect. The navigation relies heavily on the cellular network, just like the nav app on a cell phone, as opposed to doing everything onboard. The Model 3 uses a cell phone as a key, and monitoring your phone's location is one of the ways that it does this. The cell phone key feature sucks balls, but it's at least more convenient than the cards. It wouldn't totally surprise me to find out that the speedometer is also driven by the GPS, which I suspect is part of the cellular phone module.

The most important thing, though, is Supercharging. I have a feeling that you would lose access to the Supercharging network, which is presently the only DC fast charging infrastructure worth using. Without that, you're stuck in a 100ish mile radius from wherever you live, basically.

Edit: For the moment, my Model 3 seems to be willing to just let me ignore the updates they push out. I suspect the service center would make me do them if I took it there, but if you're going full rogue, you probably aren't worried about that, either.

It's occurred to me in the past that it would be interesting if someone made an alternative firmware for Teslas (maybe call it "Edison", heh) that implements its own behavior for all of the car's functions.
 
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Bees said:
Update: Tesla made it right

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If they would stuck with it the implication would be official resale value of any model would drop to what bare bone version is at. This would really discourage costumers from upgrading to newer model since the value of the vehicle is in keeping the original owner on the title.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
I hate the business model of selling software unlocks.

If you don't want to include everything with your product, then phsycially remove it before selling it.
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Been going on since at least the 70's, as the IBM Mainframe at my old job was exactly like this. Company needs to upgrade the CPU speed, they pay, IBM tech comes out and flips a switch or installs some bit of license or something. The hardware was not changed but now it runs faster...
 
This is how it goes when you buy a car

1. you go into dealership, pick car with options you want
2. after agreeing on price, you sign papers and car is yours.

what Tesla did was try to double dip and they got caught

3. this was a lemon law buy back
4. Tesla sold car at auction to a dealer with features intact.
5. Dealer takes possession of car with features intact.
6. Dealer sells car to buyer with features intact.
7. before car is delivered to buyer Tesla sneaks in and disables features.

Tesla does not have any authority to disable anything on a car that they sold and is in possession of the buyer. Any automotive attorney would clean your clock in court over that.

What I suspect happened was: Tesla's legal team said you better not do that or you are going to know what that screwed pooch feels like.

If you are confused as to whom the buyer is, the original owner was the first one, tesla was the second one, the dealer was the third one and the person whom is in possession of the car now is the fourth one
 
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Lakados said:
Story is a little more complex than not but it looks like the used car dealer in question didn't do his homework and the buyers of the cars are the victims as a result.
Tesla sold car with features, car lemon lawed so tesla bought back car with all features, car then sold at auction auction showed original sticker which had those extra features that Tesla had since purchased back. Used car dealer sees feature go away after update, assumed it was a software bug and sold car to person, person later finds out it was not a software glitch but a proper removal because Tesla had since pulled that feature off as it was no longer registered to that vehicle but the new one the lemon was originally replaced with. This is a case of used car dealers being used car dealers, and not knowing how to deal with software licenses.
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While that all makes sense, it could also fall on Tesla for selling the car at auction with an original sticker that is no longer true.
 
"a miscommunication"

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odditory said:
they can remove all options prior to listing for resale so they can move it quicker.
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That's a fascinatingly horrifying theory. Just imagine doing that with features that are actually hardware, not software. "We're going to take the satellite radio out and replace it with a basic FM/AM radio so it sells faster." Or pick any other optional feature. "We're going to take the V8 out of this F150 and put in a V6."
 
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