Even Mexican drug dealers bury their supply line. We still put electric lines overhead where failures are more due to exposure.

State of Tesla Autopilot: dude drives 45 minutes, through 8 miles of city and on 3 highways, with no intervention other than to set the car's speed and tell it when to do a few optional lane changes.

The car doesn't have to manage any stop signs/lights, or complicated yields, or weird traffic, or bikes or people or geese walking across the road, etc. That's not included in the current Autopilot. But this level is still pretty impressive.

https://jalopnik.com/tesla-remotely-...mer-1841472617

Don’t buy a used Tesla, because Tesla turns off features for the new owner.

Right out of Apple's playbook for the iPhone. :eyebrow:

i don't want the self driving option anyway.

John Deere beat'em to it.

It seems peculiar that corporations would be full on destroying the concept of ownership. They would seem to be opening a door they are not ready for.

They would much rather have an ongoing income stream rather than the episodic bursts from "purchases". Witness SaaS (Software as a Service) from Microsoft with the Office 365 product. It's a subscription model now. They've traded a couple hundred dollar *one time* purchase for a much less expensive, but much more frequent, indeed, continuous membership/subscription/licensing/buzzword payment. It seems to be the natural evolution of built-in obsolescence.

While I'm at it, I'd like to say a word of praise and gratitude for my analog vehicles with their battery-free iron keys and their mostly mechanical engine control systems. They're harder to hack. They'll be the unstealable stick shifts of the (very near) future. "What do you mean you can't get a signal? Ping the doors again."

I wonder if they will ever be banned from the roads as new cars start to talk to each other and can't talk to the old cars?

"Ever"? Sure. In George Jetson's time. Meanwhile, the ramp up from any autonomy to some autonomy on the way to total autonomy will necessarily include some shared road time.

In another perspective, we already do have *some* roads that are limited access and could much more readily accommodate talking cars only.

They are opening the door to liability and damages that lawyers for insurance companies will be caravanning through in droves.

By the way, hot rodders swapping in bigger engines from late model cars face a nightmare of electronics. A couple aftermarket companies are building stand alone electronic controls that the engine will plug into, easy peasy.

One story I heard on the Tesla in particular was that it was as "lemon law" trade-in, and the option was supposed to have been transferred to the new one, but somehow wasn't removed from the old one. So, if that is accurate, it may not be a straight policy of new vs used cars, as refurbished lemons aren't quite the same as used cars, but the mistake was Tesla's and they should fix it.

When I read that I assumed they gave the buyer his money back, but if they gave him another car that would make sense. Bad communication makes for bad PR though.

Either way (exchange or refund), I don't have a problem with removing an option like that for a factory-refurbished car, but it has to be done before the car is auctioned off with the option enabled, not after.