Tesla's Dieselgate
Elon Musk lies a lot. He lies about being a “utopian socialist.” He lies about being a “free speech absolutist.” He lies about which companies he founded:
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-cofounder-martin-eberhard-interview-history-elon-musk-ev-market-2023-2
He lies about being the “chief engineer” of those companies:
https://www.quora.com/Was-Elon-Musk-the-actual-engineer-behind-SpaceX-and-Tesla
He lies about really stupid stuff, like claiming that comsats that share the same spectrum will deliver steady broadband speeds as they add more users who each get a narrower slice of that spectrum:
https://www.eff.org/wp/case-fiber-home-today-why-fiber-superior-medium-21st-century-broadband
The fundamental laws of physics don’t care about this bullshit, but people do. The comsat lie convinced a bunch of people that pulling fiber to all our homes is literally impossible — as though the electrical and phone lines that come to our homes now were installed by an ancient, lost civilization. Pulling new cabling isn’t a mysterious art, like embalming pharaohs. We do it all the time. One of the poorest places in America installed universal fiber with a mule named “Ole Bub”:
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-one-traffic-light-town-with-some-of-the-fastest-internet-in-the-us
Previous tech barons had “reality distortion fields,” but Musk just blithely contradicts himself and pretends he isn’t doing so, like a budget Steve Jobs. There’s an entire site devoted to cataloging Musk’s public lies:
https://elonmusk.today/
But while Musk lacks the charm of earlier Silicon Valley grifters, he’s much better than they ever were at running a long con. For years, he’s been promising “full self driving…next year.”
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money
He’s hasn’t delivered, but he keeps claiming he has, making Teslas some of the deadliest cars on the road:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/10/tesla-autopilot-crashes-elon-musk/
Tesla is a giant shell-game masquerading as a car company. The important thing about Tesla isn’t its cars, it’s Tesla’s business arrangement, the Tesla-Financial Complex:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#Rat
Once you start unpacking Tesla’s balance sheets, you start to realize how much the company depends on government subsidies and tax-breaks, combined with selling carbon credits that make huge, planet-destroying SUVs possible, under the pretense that this is somehow good for the environment:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy
But even with all those financial shenanigans, Tesla’s got an absurdly high valuation, soaring at times to 1600x its profitability:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/15/hoover-calling/#intangibles
That valuation represents a bet on Tesla’s ability to extract ever-higher rents from its customers. Take Tesla’s batteries: you pay for the battery when you buy your car, but you don’t own that battery. You have to rent the right to use its full capacity, with Tesla reserving the right to reduce how far you go on a charge based on your willingness to pay:
https://memex.craphound.com/2017/09/10/teslas-demon-haunted-cars-in-irmas-path-get-a-temporary-battery-life-boost/
That’s just one of the many rent-a-features that Tesla drivers have to shell out for. You don’t own your car at all: when you sell it as a used vehicle, Tesla strips out these features you paid for and makes the next driver pay again, reducing the value of your used car and transfering it to Tesla’s shareholders:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/6/21127243/tesla-model-s-autopilot-disabled-remotely-used-car-update
To maintain this rent-extraction racket, Tesla uses DRM that makes it a felony to alter your own car’s software without Tesla’s permission. This is the root of all autoenshittification:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
This is technofeudalism. Whereas capitalists seek profits (income from selling things), feudalists seek rents (income from owning the things other people use). If Telsa were a capitalist enterprise, then entrepreneurs could enter the market and sell mods that let you unlock the functionality in your own car:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/11/1-in-3/#boost-50
But because Tesla is a feudal enterprise, capitalists must first secure permission from the fief, Elon Musk, who decides which companies are allowed to compete with him, and how.
Once a company owns the right to decide which software you can run, there’s no limit to the ways it can extract rent from you. Blocking you from changing your device’s software lets a company run overt scams on you. For example, they can block you from getting your car independently repaired with third-party parts.
But they can also screw you in sneaky ways. Once a device has DRM on it, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it a felony to bypass that DRM, even for legitimate purposes. That means that your DRM-locked device can spy on you, and because no one is allowed to explore how that surveillance works, the manufacturer can be incredibly sloppy with all the personal info they gather:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/29/tesla-model-3-keeps-data-like-crash-videos-location-phone-contacts.html
All kinds of hidden anti-features can lurk in your DRM-locked car, protected from discovery, analysis and criticism by the illegality of bypassing the DRM. For example, Teslas have a hidden feature that lets them lock out their owners and summon a repo man to drive them away if you have a dispute about a late payment:
https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/
DRM is a gun on the mantlepiece in Act I, and by Act III, it goes off, revealing some kind of ugly and often dangerous scam. Remember Dieselgate? Volkswagen created a line of demon-haunted cars: if they thought they were being scrutinized (by regulators measuring their emissions), they switched into a mode that traded performance for low emissions. But when they believed themselves to be unobserved, they reversed this, emitting deadly levels of NOX but delivering superior mileage.
The conversion of the VW diesel fleet into mobile gas-chambers wouldn’t have been possible without DRM. DRM adds a layer of serious criminal jeopardy to anyone attempting to reverse-engineer and study any device, from a phone to a car. DRM let Apple claim to be a champion of its users’ privacy even as it spied on them from asshole to appetite:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar
Now, Tesla is having its own Dieselgate scandal. A stunning investigation by Steve Stecklow and Norihiko Shirouzu for Reuters reveals how Tesla was able to create its own demon-haunted car, which systematically deceived drivers about its driving range, and the increasingly desperate measures the company turned to as customers discovered the ruse:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-batteries-range/
The root of the deception is very simple: Tesla mis-sells its cars by falsely claiming ranges that those cars can’t attain. Every person who ever bought a Tesla was defrauded.
But this fraud would be easy to detect. If you bought a Tesla rated for 353 miles on a charge, but the dashboard range predictor told you that your fully charged car could only go 150 miles, you’d immediately figure something was up. So your Telsa tells another lie: the range predictor tells you that you can go 353 miles.
But again, if the car continued to tell you it has 203 miles of range when it was about to run out of charge, you’d figure something was up pretty quick — like, the first time your car ran out of battery while the dashboard cheerily informed you that you had 203 miles of range left.
So Teslas tell a third lie: when the battery charge reached about 50%, the fake range is replaced with the real one. That way, drivers aren’t getting mass-stranded by the roadside, and the scam can continue.
But there’s a new problem: drivers whose cars are rated for 353 miles but can’t go anything like that far on a full charge naturally assume that something is wrong with their cars, so they start calling Tesla service and asking to have the car checked over.
This creates a problem for Tesla: those service calls can cost the company $1,000, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with the car. It’s performing exactly as designed. So Tesla created its boldest fraud yet: a boiler-room full of anti-salespeople charged with convincing people that their cars weren’t broken.
This new unit — the “diversion team” — was headquartered in a Nevada satellite office, which was equipped with a metal xylophone that would be rung in triumph every time a Tesla owner was successfully conned into thinking that their car wasn’t defrauding them.
When a Tesla owner called this boiler room, the diverter would run remote diagnostics on their car, then pronounce it fine, and chide the driver for having energy-hungry driving habits (shades of Steve Jobs’s “You’re holding it wrong”):
https://www.wired.com/2010/06/iphone-4-holding-it-wrong/
The drivers who called the Diversion Team weren’t just lied to, they were also punished. The Tesla app was silently altered so that anyone who filed a complaint about their car’s range was no longer able to book a service appointment for any reason. If their car malfunctioned, they’d have to request a callback, which could take several days.
Meanwhile, the diverters on the diversion team were instructed not to inform drivers if the remote diagnostics they performed detected any other defects in the cars.
The diversion team had a 750 complaint/week quota: to juke this stat, diverters would close the case for any driver who failed to answer the phone when they were eventually called back. The center received 2,000+ calls every week. Diverters were ordered to keep calls to five minutes or less.
Eventually, diverters were ordered to cease performing any remote diagnostics on drivers’ cars: a source told Reuters that “Thousands of customers were told there is nothing wrong with their car” without any diagnostics being performed.
Predicting EV range is an inexact science as many factors can affect battery life, notably whether a journey is uphill or downhill. Every EV automaker has to come up with a figure that represents some kind of best guess under a mix of conditions. But while other manufacturers err on the side of caution, Tesla has the most inaccurate mileage estimates in the industry, double the industry average.
Other countries’ regulators have taken note. In Korea, Tesla was fined millions and Elon Musk was personally required to state that he had deceived Tesla buyers. The Korean regulator found that the true range of Teslas under normal winter conditions was less than half of the claimed range.
Now, many companies have been run by malignant narcissists who lied compulsively — think of Thomas Edison, archnemesis of Nikola Tesla himself. The difference here isn’t merely that Musk is a deeply unfit monster of a human being — but rather, that DRM allows him to defraud his customers behind a state-enforced opaque veil. The digital computers at the heart of a Tesla aren’t just demons haunting the car, changing its performance based on whether it believes it is being observed — they also allow Musk to invoke the power of the US government to felonize anyone who tries to peer into the black box where he commits his frauds.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world
This Sunday (July 30) at 1530h, I’m appearing on a panel at Midsummer Scream in Long Beach, CA, to discuss the wonderful, award-winning “Ghost Post” Haunted Mansion project I worked on for Disney Imagineering.
Image ID [A scene out of an 11th century tome on demon-summoning called 'Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros. Anno 1057. Noli me tangere.' It depicts a demon tormenting two unlucky would-be demon-summoners who have dug up a grave in a graveyard. One summoner is held aloft by his hair, screaming; the other screams from inside the grave he is digging up. The scene has been altered to remove the demon's prominent, urinating penis, to add in a Tesla supercharger, and a red Tesla Model S nosing into the scene.]
Image:
Steve Jurvetson (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S_Indoors.jpg
CC BY 2.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
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Steve and Eddie go through the whole adoption process in 1996, despite how difficult it was to find somewhere willing to help them at all and despite their conflicted feelings on adoption.
The way they saw it though, providing a loving home for a child who needed one was better than the alternative. Eddie had enough experience with temporary foster homes to know stability was better than constant moving and questionable foster parents.
They get a foster placement almost immediately, a six year old girl named Amelia. She’s quiet, but not in a way that worries them. She’s very focused, and enjoys going to school more than any regular children’s hobbies. Neither of them know what to do with that other than keep encouraging it.
She stays for months, months turn into a year, and the agency finally gives them the go ahead to complete the adoption process.
But they don’t do anything without talking to Amelia.
She’s happy there, her therapist signs off on it immediately and explains that Amelia has shown more personality development and less signs of trauma with them than she had even living at home. Not to mention they actually brought her to appointments, unlike her previous guardians.
To celebrate, they throw a party with all their friends and family and tell Amelia she can invite anyone from school she wants. She invites everyone.
Turns out their daughter is a social butterfly and is friends with everyone.
At the party, Eddie pulls out his guitar, plays a bunch of popular kid-friendly songs after a very scathing look from Steve as a reminder to behave.
Amelia walks over to him after a few songs, on a sugar high like he’d never seen on her before, and asks to play the guitar.
He’s hesitant, but not because he’s still protective of his guitars, more because he doesn’t want her to embarrass herself in front of her friends. Kids are cruel, even and especially at seven, and the last thing he wants is this to be the thing that kids talk about for the next ten years.
She sits on the couch and holds it, arranging her fingers…correctly. Eddie watches.
Steve is watching from across the room.
She starts strumming, very quietly at first, not as confident as she’d been a moment ago. And then she starts really playing.
It’s one of the songs Eddie wrote. He played it for the last four months nonstop as he perfected it, and she’d apparently been watching.
Eddie’s jaw is on the floor and he quickly looks over to Steve, who has a similar look of surprise on his face.
He doesn’t interrupt her. She makes it through the entire song.
She looks up.
“When did you learn to play guitar?” Eddie asks.
“When I was watching you.”
“But have you played before tonight?”
Amelia shook her head, looking down. “Didn’t wanna touch it without asking.”
Eddie pulls the guitar from her hands and sets it aside, then pulls her into his lap and hugs her. Steve sits down on the couch next to them, hand on her back.
“You can always ask, sweetie. And if you’re this interested and this natural, we can buy you your own guitar if you want. I didn’t think you were interested in playing.”
“I wanna be like you,” Amelia admitted against his shoulder.
Eddie was done for. He looked at Steve, half-panicked, trying not to cry in front of these people, but Steve wasn’t faring any better.
“Then we can go get you a guitar tomorrow. You can get your own picks, too. They might even have purple ones.”
“Can I have red? Like yours?”
“Of course, sweetie.”
It only took them two days after that to realize she could play by ear, just like Eddie.
And then it only took another day after that to realize she had taught herself to read music too.
They spent hours and hours every week playing together while Steve cooked dinner or checked her homework or just watched them.
When Eddie’s band decided to record another album and go on tour when Amelia was 12, Eddie insisted that she get to be on it.
She ended up helping write one of their songs, played on the track on the album, and with a lot of work, convinced Steve to let them homeschool her for the entire 8 months they’d be on tour so she could perform on stage with her dad.
“Can’t believe she’s not even genetically yours. Are you sure you didn’t have an affair?” Steve asked the night before they were leaving for Europe.
“When would I have had an affair? I came back to the tour bus or hotel with you every single night,” Eddie kissed him softly. “She’s amazing, huh?”
“She is. What happens when she wants to be a full blown rockstar like her dad too?”
“Then we make sure she’s protected and has good people around her like I have. She could be a rockstar easily. She’s got the talent and the presence,” Eddie smiled. “And she’s got me to make sure no one takes advantage of her. But she’s only 12. We’ve got time to worry about that later.”
“You’re bringing her onstage every single night all over the world for the next eight months, baby. I think later is now.”
Eddie sighed. “She’s gonna blow them all away. I’m proud of her. Let’s focus on that for now.”
And she did blow everyone away. The fans and the media had nothing but good things to say, and Steve didn’t have to go into overprotective mom mode at all until she was 15 and signing a record deal of her own.
But between Eddie and him, the entire industry knew better than to fuck with her or them.
They made rules, of course. School still came first, she still had required family events to be at, she still had regular friends at home. She wasn’t allowed at any parties, not even the events for award ceremonies.
But she didn’t really need those rules. She had no interest in parties or abandoning her friends or family, and she was a straight A student who still had hopes of getting into Brown for Journalism like her Aunt Nancy. She had a passion for music and wanted to share it, but not at the cost of the rest of her life.
And Eddie and Steve did everything they could to make sure she got to have everything. That’s what they’d promised her from day one.
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