Featured 2019 Prius Ready for Sunshine or Snow at 2018 LA Auto Show

This is good news, as friends with Teslas have complained to me about how closed the Tesla service system is. It's good to have a parts catalog - now they need to take more parts off the "restricted list". Can a body shop actually order things like taillight assemblies or suspension parts?

 

Exactly... Building a car company without stealerships is exactly what the stealerships deserve and that made the logistics of handling parts more of a challenge. But that situation is improving. Likewise repair shops are on the horizon, but that too is challenged by making sure that a bunch of criminals that think they have a legal right / racket that allows them to sell all the other cars on the market will never ever get to sell Tesla cars.

As for source code being locked down, that's why so many people have to spend countless hours on reverse engineering and spoofing. But as time goes by people learn enough to reprogram, Honda hackers being the leaders in after-market ECU hacks back in the 90's. And PriusChat was doing quite well with that back in the days of Plug-in Prius startups.

While Musk has not opened the doors to this yet, he's likely to do it way sooner than others, as he has already said that other auto makers are welcome to use its patents in good-faith because eliminating as many fossil fuel vehicles as quickly a possible is more important then profiting off of patented technology: Rethinking Patent Enforcement: Tesla Did What?

Clearly we have a long way to go, and things are rapidly accelerating because Tesla is disrupting business as usual when it comes to innovating and moving forward compared to this joke of an all-wheel drive feature that Toyota is promoting as new and "advanced."

 

Tesla's OS is a Linux-based system and the development of Linux has been revolutionary in the way it crowd-sources many programmers participating rather than a corporate system that locks it down and keeps people out like Apple and Microsoft.

Also the beta versions is where all the bugs of new firmware is worked out via people who actually enjoy the coding challenge of keeping their car from going off a cliff. Once they get good at that in beta everyone benefits in the next update. And as you point out Tesla already is building this crowd sourcing on a very limited basis... They're heading in the right direction. Other car makers, not so much.

 

Firmware is Linux-based, which is primarily used as GNU licensed open source software. They're still too protective of it, but way better than other auto makers who are the antithesis of why GNU was created.

 

it's a double-edged sword. We just had an four-wheel Model X alignment. Ultimately we saved nearly $200 because we went aftermarket. But many aftermarket alignment folk tried to say they needed to do more work than they actually had to do, like removing the entire aerodynamic under panel. Although non-OEM meant driving 100 miles round-trip, I was fortunate to be able to patronize a great shop up in San Gabriel.
Go non-OEM !!
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Yep... New cars designs make mechanics cautious about billable hours until they're more familiar with doing the work... Like remember all the people who at first thought you had to take the front end of a Gen2 Prius apart to change the headlight bulbs? Or all the mechanics that would never work on a hybrid battery pack and just replace it without even diagnosis and now every major city has people on Craigslist that work exclusively on repairing packs? Takes time to learn new stuff and who pays for that learning process is a hot potato.

 

You all out in CA forget that you have a whole ecosystem supporting Teslas that other areas don't have. Maybe "yet" could be added to that statement but so could "maybe never". Both charger availability intervals and service center locations.

In our extended family, we have 5 of the same common-maker vehicles. Neither of us lives more than 2 miles from a dealer. In our worst and rare (one in about 30 vehicle years) case where a very rare (no similar failure mentioned on the internet) part was needed it took 3 days to get a part for a vehicle no longer manufactured. Can Tesla assure that kind of convenience and support? I read of 30 days stores. And the repaint stories.

I've often been an early adopter of the "great new model" from several manufacturers (going back to 1970). And every time but one I've been burned with parts unavailability or service expertise inadequacy. Thus the reason why I consider service infrastructure in my buying decision. And part of the reason I hesitate to buy a first year of any model (even though the last such buy has worked out very well) are those same considerations.

I frequent a popular Tesla forum and the current "problems with the car on delivery" stories and the "wait times for repairs" stories are way too high for me to buy a car whose nearest service center is ~54 miles away. Heck I don't even know where the next nearest would be, Charlotte? (Yep, only other one in the state) A few years ago I sold a car for which parts were trivially available 20 years after manufacture and whose brand had a reputation for parts availability for as much as twice that long primarily because of the service distance even though it hadn't needed service in the last 4 years beyond oil changes. I hesitate to get into that box again.

 

I'd be curious to know how many of the problems in that forum are trivial vs. how many of them are a major danger that prevents you from enjoying the car? New car owners are the worst when it comes to thinking up everything under the sun that's not 100% perfect, not matter how trivial.

It's also good to consider the amount of parts in the vehicle that may need to be repaired and replaced, as well as service intervals? Tesla's drivetrain has a total of 17 moving parts, a standard vehicle has 200 or more moving parts. There's no oil or air or fuel filter nor any oil changes that ever have to be done. Seems in the lifespan of a Tesla, even in a rural area the parts and body repair issues are going to rapidly scale up and be more accessible in coming years. Add to that their charging network put 99% of people in the US less than 100 miles from a charging station. Too bad you missed out on your early adopter fun on Tesla... It's not too late though...

 

..... actually - the Raleigh-Durham service center is about 40 minutes from you - according to Google Maps. But the fact that there are "only 2" service centers in North Carolina, is not so much a matter of low quantity of service centers to go to for service work as much as it is there are so few people in the Carolinas, when compared to the densely populated states. When a state has a smaller population, that necessarily means an even smaller quantity of people that can afford a mid-range priced car ..... especially if the lightly populated state has an equally small amount of high-wage earners. It would be foolish to have 40 or 50 service centers in an area where such a quantity might represent a service center for every 50 owners.
Arkansas is a great example of that dynamic too.

 

and yet, you can't walk without tripping over a toyota dealer

 

Might have something to do with them selling 100's of 1,000's of cars & trucks, yearly, since the 1970s.

no - it's the nickel-&-dime, fit & finish issues for the most part. You pay upwards of six figures for many of these cars. That makes you (owners) expect perfection. But it's a relatively new company, so there is a higher incidence of quality lacking.
Many owners make their bicth-fest public in hopes of getting a faster remedy.
Yours truly is guilty as well, but now I just live with it. But this is how the Falcon Wing doors are not perfectly aligned as an example;

Oh boo hoo won't everyone please Cry Me a River?

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probably

 

If it is GNU licensed, their users are entitled to have them distribute the source they used or else they are not legally licensed to distribute the Linux software, GPL is about liberty & freedom for the user, not lock-in for the vendor.

 

I said Linux is "Primarily used as GNU" but Android, Tesla, and many other products are based on Unix/Linux code and not pure GNU when it comes to their use... There's alot to what all that means and I used to have to research and write about it and now I don't have to, so I won't.

 

people who use GPL as their Source to build off, then devote thousands of hours, & highly modify it, are free to charge whatever they want - so ... you don't pay, you don't get.

Is it legal to sell GPL software? - TechRepublic

Besides, this whole thing is a moot point as Tesla is already releasing their code.
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Yes!!! And if there's one thing we could do to advance society way faster to better deal with all the epic problems the world faces is to massively fund/subsidize people writing, sharing and refining code. Exclusionary capitalist ways of controlling code and technology in general has been slowing down technological advancements for more than a century... Capitalism is in the way of a more collective process of code advancement in the same way Capitalism is in the way of ending fossil fuels, saving forests, protecting the air we breathe, protecting unique subsistence-based cultures that don't destroy the land they live on.

 

They are, IF they offer you as owners the source code. Otherwise the GPL denies them a license to distribute.

 

My 54 miles statement was based on my house to the service center according to the fastest route google maps offered. I forget if it was the up Rt 1 or around the Beltline one but either way there are two options and neither is convenient. Now why not Cary, that is where I see many Teslas.

 

As one who made a living from some proprietary code products for 37 years, I have to say it provided employment for many hundreds of folks over that time. Funded my retirement too. The kids that worked for me wanted to just give the code away. When I thought about it, we could do that just as it sat but they would all be coding for someone else the next day as the $10m a year it brought in paid their salaries. The testing and support (documentation, training, certification) had to be funded somehow and it cost 10 times as much as just producing the code. Even with a few geniuses doing it.

And just because something is open source and hundreds of eyes can look at it doesn't mean the code is any good. I asked one of our junior coders to port a very commonly used open source protocol and he spent as much time fixing bugs in the original code as he did porting and initial testing. Unsecure was an understatement. (Yes, we respected the license and contributed the fixes)

 

I agree but if you start with a Linux base you must meet the license requirements since it is not your code to distribute. It was written others.