Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a āutopian socialist.ā He lies about being a āfree speech absolutist.ā He lies about which companies he founded:
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2
He lies about being the āchief engineerā of those companies:
He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:
The fundamental laws of physics donāt care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossibleāāāas though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isnāt a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named āOle Bubā:
Previous tech barons had āreality distortion fields,ā but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isnāt doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. Thereās an entire site devoted to cataloging Muskās public lies:
https://elonmusk.today/
But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, heās much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, heās been promising āfull self drivingā¦next year.ā
Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isnāt its cars, itās Teslaās business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:
Once you start unpacking Teslaās balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:
That valuation represents a bet on Teslaās ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Teslaās batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you donāt own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:
Thatās just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You donāt own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Teslaās shareholders:
To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own carās software without Teslaās permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:
This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:
But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.
Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, thereās no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your deviceās software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.
But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:
All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:
DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.
The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldnāt have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its usersā privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:
Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:
The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars canāt attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.
But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, youād immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.
But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, youād figure something was up pretty quickāāālike, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.
So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers arenāt getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.
But thereās a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but canāt go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.
This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, thereās nothing wrong with the car. Itās performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars werenāt broken.
This new unitāāāthe ādiversion teamāāāāwas headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasnāt defrauding them.
When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobsās āYouāre holding it wrongā):
The drivers who called the Diversion Team werenāt just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their carās range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, theyād have to request a callback, which could take several days.
Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.
The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.
Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on driversā cars: a source told Reuters that āThousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their carā without any diagnostics being performed.
Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.
Other countriesā regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.
Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsivelyāāāthink of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isnāt merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human beingāāābut rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla arenāt just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observedāāāthey also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.
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:
This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, Iām appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning āGhost Postā Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.
Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]
Image:
Steve Jurvetson (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg
CC BY 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
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