Tesla accused of hacking odometers to weasel out of warranty repairs
I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me at NEW ZEALAND'S UNITY BOOKS in AUCKLAND on May 2, and in WELLINGTON on May 3. More tour dates (Pittsburgh, PDX, London, Manchester) here.
A lawsuit filed in February accuses Tesla of remotely altering odometer values on failure-prone cars, in a bid to push these lemons beyond the 50,000 mile warranty limit:
The suit was filed by a California driver who bought a used Tesla with 36,772 miles on it. The car's suspension kept failing, necessitating multiple servicings, and that was when the plaintiff noticed that the odometer readings for his identical daily drive were going up by ever-larger increments. This wasn't exactly subtle: he was driving 20 miles per day, but the odometer was clocking 72.35 miles/day. Still, how many of us monitor our daily odometer readings?
In short order, his car's odometer had rolled over the 50k mark and Tesla informed him that they would no longer perform warranty service on his lemon. Right after this happened, the new mileage clocked by his odometer returned to normal. This isn't the only Tesla owner who's noticed this behavior: Tesla subreddits are full of similar complaints:
Drivers noticed that they were getting far fewer miles out of their batteries than Tesla had advertised. Naturally, they contacted the company for service on their faulty cars. Tesla then set up an entire fake service operation in Nevada that these calls would be diverted to, called the "diversion team." Drivers with range complaints were put through to the "diverters" who would claim to run "remote diagnostics" on their cars and then assure them the cars were fine. They even installed a special xylophone in the diversion team office that diverters would ring every time they successfully deceived a driver.
These customers were then put in an invisible Tesla service jail. Their Tesla apps were silently altered so that they could no longer book service for their cars for any reason – instead, they'd have to leave a message and wait several days for a callback. The diversion center racked up 2,000 calls/week and diverters were under strict instructions to keep calls under five minutes. Eventually, these diverters were told that they should stop actually performing remote diagnostics on the cars of callers – instead, they'd just pretend to have run the diagnostics and claim no problems were found (so if your car had a potentially dangerous fault, they would falsely claim that it was safe to drive).
Most modern cars have some kind of internet connection, but Tesla goes much further. By design, its cars receive "over-the-air" updates, including updates that are adverse to drivers' interests. For example, if you stop paying the monthly subscription fee that entitles you to use your battery's whole charge, Tesla will send a wireless internet command to your car to restrict your driving to only half of your battery's charge.
This means that your Tesla is designed to follow instructions that you don't want it to follow, and, by design, those instructions can fundamentally alter your car's operating characteristics. For example, if you miss a payment on your Tesla, it can lock its doors and immobilize itself, then, when the repo man arrives, it will honk its horn, flash its lights, back out of its parking spot, and unlock itself so that it can be driven away:
Some of the ways that your Tesla can be wirelessly downgraded (like disabling your battery) are disclosed at the time of purchase. Others (like locking you out and summoning a repo man) are secret. But whether disclosed or secret, both kinds of downgrade depend on the genuinely bizarre idea that a computer that you own, that is in your possession, can be relied upon to follow orders from the internet even when you don't want it to. This is weird enough when we're talking about a set-top box that won't let you record a TV show – but when we're talking about a computer that you put your body into and race down the road at 80mph inside of, it's frankly terrifying.
Obviously, most people would prefer to have the final say over how their computers work. I mean, maybe you trust the manufacturer's instructions and give your computer blanket permission to obey them, but if the manufacturer (or a hacker pretending to be the manufacturer, or a government who is issuing orders to the manufacturer) starts to do things that are harmful to you (or just piss you off), you want to be able to say to your computer, "OK, from now on, you take orders from me, not them."
In a state of nature, this is how computers work. To make a computer ignore its owner in favor of internet randos, the manufacturer has to build in a bunch of software countermeasures to stop you from reconfiguring or installing software of your choosing on it. And sure, that software might be able to withstand the attempts of normies like you and me to bypass it, but given that we'd all rather have the final say over how our computers work, someone is gonna figure out how to get around that software. I mean, show me a 10-foot fence and I'll show you an 11-foot ladder, right?
To stop that from happening, Congress passed the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Despite the word "copyright" appearing in the name of the law, it's not really about defending copyright, it's about defending business models. Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, helping someone bypass a software lock is a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine (for a first offense). That's true whether or not any copyright infringement takes place.
So if you want to modify your Tesla – say, to prevent the company from cheating your odometer – you have to get around a software lock, and that's a felony. Indeed, if any manufacturer puts a software lock on its product, then any changes that require disabling or bypassing that lock become illegal. That's why you can't just buy reliable third-party printer ink – reverse-engineering the "is this an original HP ink cartridge?" program is a literal crime, even though using non-HP ink in your printer is absolutely not a copyright violation. Jay Freeman calls this effect "felony contempt of business model."
Thus we arrive at this juncture, where every time you use a product or device or service, it might behave in a way that is totally unlike the last time you used it. This is true whether you own, lease or merely interact with a product. The changes can be obvious, or they can be subtle to the point of invisibility. And while manufacturers can confine their "updates" to things that make the product better (for example, patching security vulnerabilities), there's nothing to stop them from using this uninspectable, non-countermandable veto over your devices' functionality to do things that harm you – like fucking with your odometer.
Or, you know, bricking your car. The defunct EV maker Fisker – who boasted that it made "software-based cars" – went bankrupt last year and bricked the entire fleet of unsold cars:
I call this ability to modify the underlying functionality of a product or service for every user, every time they use it, "twiddling," and it's a major contributor to enshittification:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
Enshittification's observable symptoms follow a predictable pattern: first, a company makes things good for its users, while finding ways to lock them in. Then, once it knows the users can't easily leave, the company makes things worse for end-users in order to deliver value to business customers. Once these businesses are locked in, the company siphons value away from them, too, until the product or service is a pile of shit, that we still can't leave:
Twiddling is key to enshittification: it's the method by which value is shifted from end-users to business customers, and from business customers to the platform. Twiddling is the "switch" in enshittification's series of minute, continuous bait-and-switches. The fact that DMCA 1201 makes it a crime to investigate systems with digital locks makes the modern computerized device a twiddler's playground. Sure, a driver might claim that their odometer is showing bad readings, but they can't dump their car's software and identify the code that is changing the odometer.
This is what I mean by "demon-haunted computers": a computer is "demon-haunted" if it is designed to detect when it is under scrutiny, and, when it senses a hostile observer, it changes its behavior to the innocuous, publicly claimed factory defaults:
But as soon as the observer goes away, the computer returns to its nefarious ways. This is exactly what happened with Dieselgate, when VW used software that detected the test-suite run by government emissions inspectors, and changed the engine's characteristics when it was under their observation. But once the car was back on the road, it once again began emitting toxic gas at levels that killed killed dozens of people and sickened thousands more:
Cars are among the most demon-haunted products we use on a daily basis. They are designed from the chassis up to do things that are harmful to their owners, from stealing our location data so it can be sold to data-brokers, to immobilizing themselves if you miss a payment, to downgrading themselves if you stop paying for a "subscription," to ratting out your driving habits to your insurer:
These are the "legitimate" ways that cars are computers that ignore their owners' orders in favor of instructions they get from the internet. But once a manufacturer arrogates that power to itself, it is confronted with a tempting smorgasbord of enshittificatory gambits to defraud you, control you, and gaslight you. Now, perhaps you could wield this power wisely, because you are in possession of the normal human ration of moral consideration for others, to say nothing of a sense of shame and a sense of honor.
But while corporations are (legally) people, they are decidedly not human. They are artificial lifeforms, "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic" (as HG Wells said of the marauding aliens in War of the Worlds):
These alien invaders are busily xenoforming the planet, rendering it unfit for human habitation. Laws that ban reverse-engineering are a devastating weapon that corporations get to use in their bid to subjugate and devour the human race.
The US isn't the only country with a law like Section 1201 of the DMCA. Over the past 25 years, the US Trade Representative has arm-twisted nearly every country in the world into passing laws that are nearly identical to America's own disastrous DMCA. Why did countries agree to pass these laws? Well, because they had to, or the US would impose tariffs on them:
The Trump tariffs change everything, including this thing. There is no reason for America's (former) trading partners to continue to enforce the laws it passed to protect Big Tech's right to twiddle their citizens. That goes double for Tesla: rather than merely complaining about Musk's Nazi salutes, countries targeted by the regime he serves could retaliate against him, in a devastating fashion. By abolishing their anticircuvmention laws, countries around the world would legalize jailbreaking Teslas, allowing mechanics to unlock all the subscription features and software upgrades for every Tesla driver, as well as offering their own software mods. Not only would this tank Tesla stock and force Musk to pay back the loans he collateralized with his shares (loans he used to buy Twitter and the US predidency), it would also abolish sleazy gimmicks like hacking drivers' odometers to get out of paying for warranty service:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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I guess you heard about the German Befindlichkeit when it comes to diesel cars. Corporations like VW are being critized following the emissions scandal (Dieselgate) und diesel sales dropped massively.
More cities will pronounce diesel bans this spring for certain streets. One of those streets will be Leipziger Straße, Berlin’s most important East-West axis, which is already suffering from constant traffic jams due to a 30 km/h limit instruduced in 2018.
So one day I spotted this old Mercedes T2 truck on Leipziger Straße and was wondering about the antennas and radars on its roof. I assumed it could be a mobile emission measurement station. Also, I noticed it had a 612d diesel engine, which was already outdated when it was released: It hardly matched the Euro 2 emission standard from 1996!
The Merc was on federal plates, so I wrote an email to the „Berlin Senate Department for the Environment, Transport and Climate“ – that’s what it’s called. I wanted to know, if this was a nitrogen dioxide measurement station. Also, I asked if it wasn’t absurd the City of Berlin uses ancient diesel cars while at the same time banning diesel to the public and if diesel cars owned by the City of Berlin would still be used after the diesel ban.
I received the following answer: “It’s not absurd, because the vehicle hardly moves, it only drives from one location of service to the other. Hence, it’s a movable working machine with complex technology. (…) It was moved in 2018 for about 50 km. During its 20 years of service, it was only moved for 2700 km, that’s 135 km per year. (…)” And: “Exceptions from the ban have not been worked out yet.”
Interesting, eh? In return I wanted to know, how the Senat reacted to angry citizens, who also did like 3000 km in the past years (e.g. commuters) and will have to take a detour soon – or even get a new car.
That question was not answered by the Senat.
—
PS: The EU recommends ways of measuring traffic emissions, there is no law. On other words: each country can decide WHERE and HOW to measure ALONE. In Berlin, the measurement devices are generally around 2,5 m above ground, resulting in rather high emission rates. Other European regions measure in 20-30 m height, resulting in obviously much smaller emission rates.
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New magazine cover for @handelsblatt_ about the morals values of the German car industry and how they have cheated for the last 20 years. #dieselgate #illustration (at Barcelona, Spain)
