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by sangnoir 1643 days ago
> 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?

1 comments

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.