Tesla's "Predictive" Odometers Had 9+ Drivers Complaining of Inaccuracy Before Lawsuit. We Even Found Video!
(fuelarc.com)
from KayLeadfoot@fedia.io to technology@lemmy.world on 23 Apr 21:03
https://fedia.io/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/2092709
from KayLeadfoot@fedia.io to technology@lemmy.world on 23 Apr 21:03
https://fedia.io/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/2092709
A Tesla influencer randomly caught his odometer double-counting mileage on video. Wild.
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We need to call them what they are; shills.
Pathetic losers. And, even “Nazis” if they’re still in the Tesla community.
I see you go all over Lemmy electric media systems communicating in Twitter-length reactions, behaving like Elon Musk X media platform users (and Elon Musk himself) and Donald Trump on social machines like Twitter and Truth Social.
Can't argue with that XD
His main deal is that he does Tesla stuff. His website is "Tesla Pittsburgh," so yeah, he's a Tesla guy.
Seriously. This dude is delusional.
The law firm going after Tesla for this offered to represent him via a class action, and this idiot has the gall to ask the law firm for payment?
The world would be better off if his Tesla self-drove itself into a wall. Ideally with him inside.
Insanity hey. Goes to show you can very easily be wealthy but not smart.
Yeah I used to think that all these Tesla fan channels on YouTube and Instagram were because the brand was seen as somehow special and exciting, like Apple used to be under Steve Jobs. But now I’ve come to the conclusion that most of them are being paid under the table and not declaring it, because their collective reactions to the past year or more of insanity just don’t pass the sniff test.
Breaking news. Learned something new today.
I mean this utterly unironically: I'm glad :)
I admit I didn’t watch the video — I’ve trained YouTube’s algorithm well at this point and don’t want Tesla content — but what the fuck is a predictive odometer? The tires roll a certain distance. We’ve had odometers for like 75 years.
The article mentions that Tesla is kind of justifying the behavior by saying it is based on energy consumption and some other bullshit. The expectation according to SAE, which I find very interesting, is to be in a range of +/- 4% and for GPS enabled odometers+/- 2.5%, Tesla is missing the mark for at least 36%.
So we traded a proven, reliable, physical laws based method (wheel roll) in favor of unreliable electronics. Nice.
That makes your warranty expire faster. It’s not in the users favor.
You’ve summed up every aspect of the Tesla. Especially now that real car companies are taking EVs seriously.
Reinventing the wheel.
Literally. And it sucks. There’s reasons they don’t do it like this anymore.
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a1e2d967-9781-43e2-a514-7646a135dcc7.png">
Man, something I love is un-steering by simply reducing my grip against the wheel so it slowly resets to neutral, my hand’s friction making sure it doesn’t do so suddenly. This shit ass shape would make that impossible. It’s like they hate driving.
Now you can un-steer way faster! /S
imagine the hand smack once the other side turns in… ow
But shittier!
I think that pretty much sums up the entire ethos of Silicon Valley these days.
DISRUPT THE MARKETTTTTTT
It’s not really that reliable as it it will depend on the diameter of the wheels that can vary with pressure, wear, and and actual tyre size.
A better method may be a sensor like the one used in optical mice.
Fair, and thinking about it it doesn’t account for unnecessary wheelspin
It absolutely does. Typically, all 4 wheel speed sensors are polled and averaged, so unless you’re doing lots of extended 4 wheel burnouts, you’re talking an incredibly small margin of additional error.
…but what are we actually trying to measure here? The miles travelled, or the wear and tear that’s caused by the wheels spinning?
Mileage by counting the number of rotation of the wheel.
The mileage is a measurement to give an idea of the wear, combined with other information to give a holistic view of the state of the car.
I have test all three methods. GPS is the best, but it has drop outs. You can add an inertial gyro system to compensate, but that becomes sloppy the longer it goes without GPS.
The tire method has a lot of variances, but the measure at the transmission is often worse.
So if I replace the wheels on my car with monster truck wheels, I’ll be able to cheat the odometer?
Well yeah. My bicycle odemeter has settings for different size wheels.
We used to take vehicles in for calibration and then all runs had to use the same psi in the tires.
Electronics can be extremely reliable, but Tesla chose to be sleezebags.
The video shows it going like 14999 to 15001 skipping 15000.
You’d think they would make it increment every half mile instead of doing something stupid like this.
Yeah if you’re gonna do a fraud at least put the minimum thought into it. It’s disrespectful is what it is. Gives honest grifters a bad name
“shit i always do that i always mess up some mundane detail” ~ Tesla Engineers probably
Except in this case they’re defrauding customers instead of corporate like in Office Space… not quite as fun.
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You can remove YouTube videos from your watch history, so they don’t influence your algorithm.
Or don’t use YouTube on their platform.
FreeTube, Grayjay, etc are better experiences by far
A product that has a warranty which depends on any “predictive” metric is probably a scam, tbh.
Their insurance is (was?) kind of like that as well if you get the saftey score one. While some things are more general and concrete like following distance, time of day driving, they have one for forward collision warnings.
I’m not sure how much time you’ve spent in a Tesla, but that system is notorious for going off incorrectly. It’s specifically really bad with parked cars on the side of the road on turns. So you’re driving along a city street with cars parked on the side and it goes off and now your insurance premiums are more expensive.
I don’t think you could find a single Tesla owner who hasn’t had multiple false warnings, and consistently in certain circumstances.
So someone of course starts a lawsuit and Tesla initially defends itself, but just last week or something like that, it’s no longer part of the safety score
Video link for the layzee.
One of the drivers mentioned in this article has a youtube video showing his odometer going from 124,999 to 125,001, completely skipping 125,000. One of the comments asks him to reach out to the law firm handling the class action lawsuit, but the owner replies with:
This mindset is so frustrating. Class action lawsuits are legit, they hold companies accountable and they pay out cash to people. To say that they only enrich law firms is not just wrong, but I think actually harmful to repeat like he has, especially in the great age of enshittification where everything tries to force binding arbitration agreements into every contract and agreement.
Sounds like he’s more loyal to Tesla than to the consumers it hurt
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Brace for downvoting from the Teslaholics cult.
Do they exist anymore?
I have heard they’re still on the old site. I dunno, I avoid the old site as much as possible.
Well if the law firm pay 20 cents check after making millions, what’s the point.
The point is that the company being sued has to pay those millions in the first place. The law firm does pay itself rather well for that work, but I’d consider class actions to be one of the more defensible legal actions.
I got like $50 from an Apple settlement a month or two ago
In 2012? 2013? Not sure exactly when, but i got two 4 packs of red bull because it does in fact, not, give you wings.
I’d be a lot of money that the excuse is just a lie he thinks make him sound like the good person he knows he is not.
I mean, the guy is not wrong. Class actions lawsuits have notoriously low payout while law firms pocket millions.
However, it’s a tool to hold companies somewhat accountable.
The guy should join a class action lawsuit so that Tesla stop their fuckery, but it is understandable that he doesn’t want to spend time on that considering the shitty payout.
Another side is that you’re also bound to their agreement. If the law firm was too soft on them, tough luck.
In an ideal world, we’d have government agencies prosecuting illegal stuff (and putting huge fines back into the economy) instead of hoping that private law firms will do a class action, but oh well.
Possibly comes from experience with the shitty ones. I was involved in one for a now-defunct tech school I went to and all I got out of it was like $100. I didn’t have to put any time into it but that certainly didn’t make me whole.
Actually based. The law firm is going to make a bunch of money from this and pay out a pittance to people (like a $50 Tesla merch gift card or some shit). Charging a consulting fee isn’t going to kill the case, it’s just going to make the law firm slightly less money, and they’d be stupid to ignore such a powerful piece of evidence.
What in the actual hell is a “Predictive” odometer?
It predict when the Tesla is going to fauk and void the guarantee ?
“You should have driven this much after owning the car this long, so we’re going to put that in the odometer.”
Was my guess.
Probably to void warranties, make cars come back sooner for preventative maintenance, and come back sooner for leases.
“Whenever you want to scam people as a company, just invent some fancy words that sound like innovation” odometer
It predicts that Tesla could save money by padding the numbers, and does a little fraud automagically
Amazing the Tesla dev team that made this was dumb enough to actually put it in the UI in real-time. Just updates the mileage behind the scenes in data, then only update the UI slowly along the way. Not actually double counting in the UI visibly fast lmaoo
Edit: fine maybe it was a product team or whatever. Someone somewhere made the decision NOT to decouple real-time mileage data from the UI lol
You think the dev team made the decision about this?
Also if I’m the dev on this project and I’ve been told to do this, this is exactly how to implement it. Malicious compliance baybeee
Wrong answer. If your employer orders you to commit odometer fraud, you quit and you sue. Never break the law for your employer.
At a minimum they went along with it. “I was just following orders” is never an acceptable answer.
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Ui team probably not connected to milage cheating team. This is the kind of thing you can’t do test cases for, so unexpected “bugs” will get out.
Wait, isn’t tinkering with odometers like super fucking illegal in europe?
I would hope so. I would not be surprised that this is a US special…
Not in Germany. Here in France we know to never buy a used German car : the odometer would certainly have been tinkered with.
How the hell is this not illegal in Germany?! They love to over regulate everything
It is illegal in Germeny, if the purpose is to falsify it, and legal to correct a wrong record: www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stvg/__22b.html
The trick is to correct it to a wrong record!
This is misleading, it is illegal in Germany, if it is about changing the odometer to a wrong record, and only legal to correct it, if it was broken or is replaced.
Yes you’re right. However it seems that around 30% of the used cars sold from Germany are concerned. A law that is not enforced is a fake law.
Is the odometer not recorded when having yearly inspections? Or do people cheat it before those as well?
They are recorded in multiple different events (repairs at a professional service, oil change, inspections, etc.), but as a buyer you would have to become active, ask for and check the papers, contact past owners, inspect the car, etc.
Because changing the odometer is easy and cheap, and can raise the price at an average of 3000€ per car, it is done rather often and not discovered in many cases.
While there are laws against it, the implementation of more manipulation resistant odometers by the car vendors is still not there yet broadly.
Source: www.adac.de/…/tacho-manipulation/
What do you mean with “not enforced”? Do you mean that people that find manipulated odometers with proof go to court and then nothing is done?
I get that it is sometimes difficult to proof a manipulation of the odometer, and that fraud here is pretty wildly spread, and maybe more prevalent in Germany compared to France, but that doesn’t mean that other countries are not doing it.
I would also agree that anyone should prefer buying from local sellers first, but just saying that this is a special issue that only Germany has to deal, because they do not care about the law and order is wrong.
This is the same logic that some people on the right have: “Crimes happen more often in cities, and the reason for that is that they do not care about the law there.”
When I lived in Germany I found that the people were far more self-policing than Americans. There just seemed to be a general attitude of, “we know we’re not supposed to do that, so we don’t.”
Fully anecdotal, sure, and that was 15 years ago, but nonetheless it’s hard for me to imagine “ze Germans” tampering with odometers to sell cars.
It’s supposed to be in the US also.
It's trivially easy to discover odometer tampering in the USA, and the law is actually enforced.
Carfax, for instance, will automatically flag if any data point has the odometer lower its mileage. Each time a car is brought in for service or sold, the mileage is recorded. If any of the datapoints do not advance logically, the car is flagged and all sorts of liability questions arise.
If Carfax can purchase the data, I'm certain that insurers do, too. Insurance is legally mandatory, and the corporations don't want to cover the cost of insuring a car with a cooked odometer (and unknown true mileage).
That only catches the end user tempering with the odometer to lower it. It doesn’t do anything to catch the manufacturer artificially advancing it.
Very accurate. Most anti-tamp protections watch for lowering. Because who in their right mind would increase the mileage, right? :)
No reasonable manufacturer would do that. A manufacturer would be caught if they did that and -- oh wait shit that's exactly what happened
None of the anti-tamper measurements that are based on odometer readings would catch this, it simply measures how many revolutions the wheels are doing, multiplies that with a set value depending on the wheel circumference, and increments the odometer value accordingly. For Teslas, that number is 742 revolutions per mile.
If the Tesla software would “accidentally” set itself to lets say 450 revolutions per mile, your odometer would simply start ticking up a mile for every 0.6 miles you actually travel.
The only way to catch that is to use a GPS to measure how far you’ve actually travelled and do a comparison. Good thing for Tesla, GPS is an extremely rare technology nobody has access to, and with EVs, nobody ever even notices such things as “range” and “distance traveled”.
Oh, right. So uh, how exactly did they think they wouldn’t get immediately caught…?
That's what fucks me up here! XD
Tesla is probably the most closely watched auto manufacturer on earth. And it's mostly fans! So like, friendly faces doing hypermileage content or commenting to other friendly fans about their fuel savings...
The video I linked is literally a Tesla fan being like "oh wait, it skipped a mile, what the fuck, did it always do that?"
That’s soooo many felonies, but Trump will just pardon them.
No wonder he was worried about going to prison if Kamala won.