[mfarris]

"Fleet" is longstanding car industry lingo. Not something Tesla dreamed up to keep you under their boot.

Source: Father worked in car industry. All of my neighbors, too. Pretty much everyone I knew and then, eventually, me... albeit tangentially.

[rsync]

""Fleet" is longstanding car industry lingo. Not something Tesla dreamed up to keep you under their boot."

I am aware of that and I hear that terminology used by rental car companies and equipment dealers, etc.

My objection is to what I hear as a subtle difference - the post-sale automobile to a private, end-user is still referred to as belonging to their fleet - as if one's ownership and use of the car were a minor detail.

I dislike this subtle shift in language and attitude.

[monocasa]

It's not a shift.

It's the language used by the rest of the industry including manufacturers, not just private owners.

[coatmatter]

What's being scrutinised here is the difference of being forced to be a part of a fleet as opposed to separately owning and controlling your own fleet.

If you buy a Tesla, you will not be able to control access to it without limiting its normal set of features.

If you buy a normal bicycle, you always have full direct control of it. No software updates, no data uploading, no tracking.

Normally fleet is reserved to meaning ownership in the management sense, not the micromanagement sense. Even a Navy fleet has autonomy within. Not so with Tesla software by default.

This could be rms territory. Free vs non-free, or even Airbus vs Boeing, etc.

[monocasa]

I mean sure, but this isn't some encroachment by Tesla is the point I'm trying to make. At any car company for decades the set of cars for which you're currently responsible for sustaining engineering is known as a fleet.

And I think it's fair for the engineers that have responsibility to have an internal sense of partial ownership.

[kalleboo]

Do you prefer the alternative where after you bought the car, Tesla tells you to screw off if there's something wrong? "it's your car now, no more bug fixes"

As long as they still have responsibilities, they also have partial ownership.

[yuhong]

I think they are talking about how they can control the number of cars that have free supercharging for example.

[coatmatter]

This question is probably better answered by car owners, because I plan to never own a car. It doesn't really concern me like it might one of the (grand)parent comments. It still makes me wonder though as to what the best approach is - at the moment I'm sceptical that Tesla has an optimal approach to solving the world's problems (as some would appear to believe).

[rconti]

Parent is not objecting to the term; he's objecting to the implication that all of these dependencies and connections make the car more akin to something you rent rather than own, which is a legitimate concern.