[Ajedi32]

In my mind there's a significant difference between a dealership using their knowledge of the car to assist with repossession, and a manufacturer demonstrating that you never really had control of your own car in the first place.

It just feels like a betrayal. Your car is loyal to the manufacturer, not to you. It will act in a manner directly opposed to your best interests as the owner if company that sold it to you orders it. I understand that's true for most software these days, but that doesn't make me any happier about it, and it really feels worse when the software in question is inextricably tied to and in control of an expensive piece of physical hardware that you purchased.

[AtlasBarfed]

As stated in other places here, if you have leased or financed your car, YOU DON'T OWN IT. You pay for the right to use it on a monthly basis.

That is why there are legal contracts. This is just automated repossession.

[sangnoir]

> That is why there are legal contracts. This is just automated repossession.

There is value in adding friction to enforcing law/contracts: I don't know if FSD-repo crosses the line for me, but I know automating enforcement is bad for society.

What if everytime Tesla cameras detect the car speeding, or has crossed double-lines, it helpfully charges the fine to the linked credit card? After all, its just automated ticketing, right?

[filoleg]

I agree with your point about automated enforcement being bad, but there is nothing automated about the situation .

A lien-holder determined that the lender wasn’t paying the bills, so they manually made a decision to repossess the car. Just like with any other brand of a car, they reached out to the dealership (in this specific case, manufacturer is the same as the dealership, because Tesla sells directly with no franchises) and requested a way to access the vehicle. Normally it is done via a key copy. In this case, they used a digital version of it. Not that it matters meaningfully at all, but the car didn’t drive across town to the repo parking lot, current summoning feature cannot do that (the distance limit for the feature is a few hundred feet iirc).

And why does it matter if it was made easier to actually repossess the vehicle? It isn’t related to the automated ticketing analogy at all. There was no automatic detection, only automated enforcement. Just like with speeding tickets, i am totally ok with the cop not wasting his and my time writing me the ticket manually or making me wait for it by email, if it instead can be automated with a digital ticket/infraction in the system that i can check out when i get home.

To be more clear on why i think it is a bad analogy. Automated ticketing is automating human decision-making, which is an ambiguous blackbox process open to interpretation. As you said, doing so leads to a lot of unintended consequences. Actually physically repoing a car (after a manual decision to repo the car was made by a human) isn’t automating decision-making. The decision has already been consciously made, and there is not much room for interpretation when it comes to the physical process of repoing a car. The only variable is if the lender decides to hide the car or do something equally dumb, so it is not a good variable to have. And remotely disabling the car based on a manual human evaluation just seems to make the process of repoing it less prone to unintended bad variables.

[josephcsible]

We want things to be "loyal" to their owners. But the key point in this story is that if you don't pay for your car, then you're not the owner of it.

[Ajedi32]

I'd have no issue with the lienholder having ultimate control of car until the loan is paid off. As I said in my initial comment, that's completely beside the point.

The problem here is that Model 3s are apparently "loyal" to their manufacturer rather than the owner, regardless of who that owner is (whether that be a lienholder, the car's "user", or anyone else that's not Tesla).

That Tesla used that misplaced loyalty to give the car back to the lienholder in this case is irrelevant to my point.

[josephcsible]

Are you okay with manufacturers helping with repossessions by cutting new physical keys for non-connected cars? If so, how is this any different?

[Ajedi32]

See my comment 4 levels up from this one.

"I know what this person's key was when I sold him the car. Here, have a copy."

VS.

"I have full control of this person's car, even though I'm not the owner. Here, let me remotely disable it for you."

[donio]

    Directive 4: [Classified]