It is wild to me that people put so much trust in this company.
Even if Tesla hadn't squandered it's EV lead and was instead positioned to be a robotics and AI superpower, is this really the corporate behavior you would want? This is some fucking Aperture Science level corporate malfeasance.
It’s pretty typical of corporations, the cult surrounding its leader notwithstanding. Not even just US corporations - the VW emissions scandal was huge, and today they are doing as well as ever. That was a big shakeup; the kind of stuff we are seeing from Tesla feels like business as usual.
Nope - the VW episode was terrible, but they faced large fines and corrected course and it's history. I'm still slightly squeamish about accepting them but they've turned it around and I think I read have just overtaken Tesla in EV sales in Europe (a self-inflicted Musk wound, of course).
I see no course correction from Tesla. Just continuing and utter tripe from it's CEO, team, and Musk-d-riders.
This is an on-going issue for them and, at this point, with no further change? I hope it drives them into the ground (Autopilot, natch).
You can actively criticize VW on the internet without an army of sycophants coming for you. The standard behavior of Tesla stans is that any problem with the vehicle is in fact your fault and only your fault because it would not be possible for Tesla to do something wrong. It is cult-like.
I don't defend it but the specifics never bothered me. They cheated because their cars didn't meet new emissions standards. They were fine by the standards of the year before. So a bureaucracy just declared that a legal level of emissions was now illegal.
In my mind it's like suddenly declaring that blue cars are illegal, and they made a color-shifting car that is blue except when the authorities are looking at it.
It is wrong in the sense that it is normalizion of deviance, however. We live in a society and if we don't like a law or regulation the correct response is to get it legally changed, not to ignore it and cheat.
> They cheated because their cars didn't meet new emissions standards. They were fine by the standards of the year before.
> So a bureaucracy just declared that a legal level of emissions was now illegal.
That is not at all what happened and not how emissions standards are deployed. The EPA's Tier 2 standards were finalized in 2000 to phase in during the 2004-2008 model years [1].
I didn't say you are defending it. I'm saying that "companies do bad things sometimes" is not a full description of the Tesla phenomenon that people take issue with.
The reason for the laws mandating dealerships was to have a local party accountable to local laws, i.e., for service, lemons, excess inventory filling up neighborhood parking spots...
Tesla is speedrunning several decades of automotive history to demonstrate why dealership laws became a thing in the first place.
It’s 2025, it is trivial to hold all businesses accountable in any jurisdiction they do business in, especially with how easy it is to freeze electronic money accounts.
You can’t even sell something to someone in a different state without having to remit various taxes, even if you didn’t step foot in that state. A car manufacturing multi billion dollar business sure as hell isn’t getting away with it.
I am also not sure how a dealership would have preventer Tesla from deleting crash data, and falsely claiming it did.
You can’t even sell something to someone in a different state without having to remit various taxes, even if you didn’t step foot in that state.
This is not true. Sales taxes have a threshold requirement before out-of-state retailers are required to collect and remit sales taxes for customers in a state. It's usually 200 transactions or $100,000. If you're doing that much business with a state, you can and should be able to handle sales tax. And if you don't want to deal with it yourself, you can use a third party service like Avalara or TaxJar to handle the sales tax compliance for you (rate calculation, remittance, and returns).
especially with how easy it is to freeze electronic money accounts.
That is actually very difficult to do in the U.S. Generally, freezing accounts is limited to certain criminal matters or regulatory violations. It doesn't happen in civil litigation. At most the judge can order withholding or garnishment if the penalized party evades payment of the judgment.
I am also not sure how a dealership would have preventer Tesla from deleting crash data, and falsely claiming it did.
In most states, you can just go to a local dealer (or service center) to recover data from a vehicle if you can't do it using a third party. It's generally quite rare to go to the automaker to pull data from a vehicle. That's a Tesla specific thing, except in rare situations where a vehicle may be so damaged that special expertise is required.
Even if Tesla hadn't squandered it's EV lead and was instead positioned to be a robotics and AI superpower, is this really the corporate behavior you would want? This is some fucking Aperture Science level corporate malfeasance.