If their response is merely, "Okay, but we're not responsible for damages," then that's great, who cares. But if they take any sort of measure to remotely disable your car or to hamstring your car's software, that would be a very slippery slope to start down.
Why not? It flies just fine now with physical goods. If someone hand-builds their own bicycle wheel, and installs it on their bicycle, and then the wheel breaks and they crash... no one is blaming the bike manufacturer. No one is saying "that bike company should have welded the safer wheels on and issued a license prohibiting wheel alterations."
Everyone gets that the customer took the liability in their own hands once they started using their own hands to modify the product. It's the classic trade-off of freedom vs. security.
This ability to allocate liability to the customer is part of what we DO need for software, IMO. Right now there is a popular perception that software cannot be modified or interacted with by anyone but the company who wrote it. I don't think that has to be true forever though.
I'm not saying that it's ideal for Tesla to lock down the system like this. I'm saying that, given the risks they face, in terms of legislation, regulation and public opinion, their approach is very understandable.
Why not? It's how everything else works. If you buy a house and then install your own electrical wiring which causes your house to burn down, you have no claim against the construction company and nobody blames them for it because it was your fault, not theirs.
This recent attitude of "people won't understand, therefore corporations have to be paternalistic" is patronizing and factually incorrect. People do actually understand. The worst outcome is that technology-ignorant bureaucrats require companies to clamp down on modding. But having companies do that to begin with is no improvement.
The basis of this seems to be the conceit that manufacturers can actually control their products after they've been sold. It can be true for a time, in the sense that it takes people that long to figure out how to break back into the things they own, but it happens. If you can jailbreak an iPhone then you can jailbreak your car.
Which means that we have a choice. The first option is to accept the inevitable and support it. Expect people to make changes and take responsibility for their own changes, and facilitate that. The second is to try to lock everything down, so that the people making modifications have no access to documentation and have to be running out of date software because the old version with the jailbreak vulnerability is the same old version with the anti-lock brake glitch, which makes it much more likely that people will die. What does that do for your brand?
I think you're really overestimating both the level of technical comprehension generally, and people's attitude towards "due diligence". People understand what a house is and what wires are. They are not, as of yet, that clear on how neural nets, sensor systems, and dynamically updated software come together to make a self-driving vehicle. If modders cause problems, especially with something as mobile and potentially destructive as a car, the general reaction could easily be "this is mostly the fault of the self-driving Tesla, and the fact that they didn't do due diligence in preventing misuse." It is not a very reasonable reaction, but it is a likely one - and one that could have serious consequences for Tesla as a company.
>The worst outcome is that technology-ignorant bureaucrats require companies to clamp down on modding. But having companies do that to begin with is no improvement.
It's not the same. A bureaucrat's rules are mandatory for everybody. Tesla has competitors who may choose a different route.
> The basis of this seems to be the conceit that manufacturers can actually control their products after they've been sold. It can be true for a time, in the sense that it takes people that long to figure out how to break back into the things they own, but it happens. If you can jailbreak an iPhone then you can jailbreak your car.
A self-driving Tesla is not an iPhone, because an iPhone is unlikely to run somebody over or block a freeway. Risks are relevant. Self-driving systems are also dynamically updated and dependent on networked information. It already is a service, not a fixed product. You don't own a self-driving system (at least Tesla's idea of it) any more than you own an Amazon Web Services server rack by having something hosted on it.
> Which means that we have a choice. The first option [....] which makes it much more likely that people will die. What does that do for your brand?
Maybe in the future, when such things are more familiar, Tesla will feel confident enough to open their products up to modders. But right now? When even the idea of self-driving cars is a challenging sell, and they're being criticized for it not being secure and consistent enough? No, not now.
What happens when they, say, strike a deal with McDonald's and ban drivers from going to Burger King locations? It sounds far-fetched, but I don't see any difference. Where we take our cars and why should not be Tesla's business.
And I don't think they'll ever ban people from going to places - as long as you use approved Tesla tools to request that destination.
