Unlike an abusive spouse, Tesla's dangerous features are opt in.
I love my Tesla. I think FSD is a horseshit scam with some neat tech that's nowhere near ready for the public. Fortunately, I don't pay for it, so it doesn't affect what I do with my car.
I do find it incredibly frustrating that the vast majority of Tesla conversations devolve into screaming matches between people who are rabidly pro or rabidly con, with both sides doing a pretty poor job of representing the truth. And those in the middle generally wander off to do something far more productive literally anywhere else on the internet.
This is a key thing that people often forget. Very similar to the shenanigans that social platforms pull on tracking of people that do not use their platforms.
The collateral damage to these types of decisions are invisible to the one actually using the thing causing the damage, and it is very hard to convince that it is real
off-topic, but I'm always struck by how great of a quote that is. I hope whomever came up with it at Dreamworks was given a raise and a promotion after Shrek.
> I do find it incredibly frustrating that the vast majority of Tesla conversations devolve into screaming matches between people who are rabidly pro or rabidly con, with both sides doing a pretty poor job of representing the truth
They sold it as autopilot. If you market something to do X and it does Y, you're bound to get people upset. Especially when it costs a chunk of the moon.
I don't own a Tesla, but if I refused to buy any product with misleading marketing, I'm not sure I'd ever buy anything more sophisticated than a loaf of bread. Then again, I also don't use any driver assist features beyond parking sensors and don't expect to see any actual autopilot within my lifetime, so maybe I just haven't been as annoyed by Tesla's nonsense. Regardless, for a purchase most people regard as rather significant, it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect them to look at least marginally beyond a marketing misnomer.
The people being upset don't seem to be the same as the people owning the Tesla's though? Just gauging from HN discussions, the comments with the most moral outrage seem to be coming from a place of pure principle.
Edit: I scroll down and the first thing I see is a first person account of some one having sold theirs after disliking the overall experience, turning white. Welp, guess this is an opinion I should reflect on.
"There are several paragraphs of warnings and disclaimers both on the sales page and when you use the product that exactly explain the limitations, but I absolutely insist on fixating on this one particular word. Nothing else matters."
Planes have autopilot too. It doesn't mean the pilot turns it on then goes and takes a nap. They still have to be alert.
Teslas always allow human input to override and they don't auto-steer through cones. There were several attack ads that exploited these two very reasonable behaviors to force the car to impact a dummy before blaming the impact on FSD. Is this one of them? This particular video doesn't look familiar from the last kerfuffle, but I see cones and I see a conflict of interest. Is there an interior shot showing the console?
I’m simply con because for the price the build quality is terrible and I’m tired of the hype FSD has been given. It’s all garbage and Elon and Tesla deserve a back hand for the marketing scam.
I'm sorry, but this is pretty much what I'm referring to regarding lack of nuance.
It's not all garbage, and the build quality these days is actually as good as any other car I've had. But FSD is vaporware, and Elon is an actual troll manifest.
Like most things in life, the cars are not 100% gold or 100% shit.
It's not an irrational hatred at all. Tesla released a dangerous feature onto public roads. That put the lives of Tesla drivers and people around these cars generally in jeopardy. They were forced by the government to recall every vehicle with self driving because it was so dangerous. It also damaged trust in automation generally which hurts more good faith actors taking more rigorous and comprehensive views on safety. The hatred is completely justified, especially when you factor in the facts that the quality control on Teslas is known to be garbage, and that your reputation is damaged by the antics of their CEO.
Most car companies have recalled cars at various times, sometimes for issues that have caused accidents.
Yet, somehow there is not a national news story every time a Toyota gets into an accident, with the reporter speculating that the accident was caused by a fault in the car, before any facts about the accident have been released.
Right? I sold mine, getting rid of that car was a huge sigh of relief. From parts shortages to labor shortages to weird manufacturing defects that no one could correct to the "overpromise and underdeliver" attitude of the company...
The car was cool for a few years, and then it became deeply irritating. We got a Volvo, and holy shit the Volvo had better tech.
I remember years ago seeing videos/posts about how much safer the Tesla was as far as build qualities. I don't know if those are still there, but surely they have been watered down with all of the software so the overall rating of the car is much less.
In fairness, if the problem is only with the self-driving, you can circumvent that by not using it. "He's a good dog, but he's completely uncontrollable if you take him to the beach because he tries to swim straight into the sea": well, if you don't go to the beach there's no problem.
It's a $15000 product. There's nothing fair about saying "just don't use it". That's not even a valid excuse for when your $2 flashlight doesn't make light.
I met an apple fanboy recently. His thing was that apple is amazing because they care the most about user experience, the design is so amazing, and it's so much better than anything else! After he talked at length about how everything about apple is great, I said that I'd learned that apple made iphones slow on purpose 3 years in and when caught said it was about saving battery. I said that's not a good user experience to me, if the phone becomes slow after 3 years. He told me that _his own iphone_ is going thru that, and he still hadn't time to buy a new one but he was going to, but it was great because it was a conscious design choice by apple.
Your misrepresentation of the issue reeks of ideological fanboyism itself.
As the battery ages, running at peak power can lead to random shutdowns/restarts. Apple chose to throttle the devices (which in most use cases is basically imperceptible) to avoid random shutdowns of the device, which in my view is indeed a better user experience.
I have seen no indication that competing phones do not suffer the same issue.
The notion that Apple deliberately hobbled their devices to reduce their lifetime in order to encourage sales is ludicrous; iPhones hold their resale value far better than other phones.
