This is quite interesting, I hadn't seen or heard about their intention to restrict like this, prior reading it tonight:
"Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year."
I don't think our legal system should allow car manufacturers to impose these kinds of restrictions on cars fully owned by their operators. If I have the title on my vehicle, I should be able to use it in any legal capacity. This restriction is an attack on the fundamental ideas of ownership and property.
the question is one of responsibility in the case of accident. is it the owner of the car? or the driver? what happens when there is no driver? well, my guess is that TSLA the manufacturer of the auto-driving software is going to be liable in place of the driver, and as such, they have every right to say, nope, no using our auto-pilot for commercial activity unless it is on our own network where we can self-regulate to make sure we are liable for as few of problems as possible.
When Tesla say you can't drive passengers commercially it is probably because of liability concerns. Insurance for taxis are much higher than insurance for personal vehicles.
Volvo CEO said already in 2015 that Volvo will accept full liability whenever one of its cars is in autonomous mode.
>what happens when there is no driver? well, my guess is that TSLA the manufacturer of the auto-driving software is going to be liable in place of the driver, and as such, they have every right to say, nope, no using our auto-pilot for commercial activity unless it is on our own network
Why does this argument hold true only for self-driving cars, and not current cars ? As such, self-driving cars are just a point in continuous evolution. Current cars are already quite different from what they were a few decades ago. Why is now a good time to draw a line ? Every change in this eveolution goes through government approval. If it is approved, it should be safe enough for everyone.
It sort of does hold for current cars. Generally a driver (in most cases, a human) must obtain a further license or some form of government permission/authorization to drive a vehicle for commercial purposes like a taxi or other passenger carrying service. This seems to be simply pointing out that the same restriction will apply to the software-based driver in a Tesla...?
There is no legislation about ride sharing/taxi with self driving cars. So whether or not an extra authorization is needed by the owner of the car is a different issue. Here Tesla is asking you to not engage in ride sharing unless Tesla gets a cut. i.e., Even if the government and insurance companies allow you to do so, Tesla won't unless you hand over your cut to them. Is there more to it than that ? Tesla is getting approval to make a car road legal. An insurance company may underwrite insurance for various purposes including taxi. Why do I need tesla's permissions to combine a road legal car for taxi purposes ?
Because Tesla is assuming responsibility (that is, guaranteeing fitness for purpose, and all the ramifications that come with that) for the car being able to drive you under the same circumstances as any other private person driving. They would be taking on much more (legal, insurance, etc.) risk if they were to allow the car to drive as a passenger carrying, fare accepting, commercial entity, therefore it seems fair that they require you to use their managed system to (I assume) mitigate and/or manage that risk. I would guess that it would also be possible, eventually, to license the autopilot software for your own arbitrary commercial use.
This has been happening slowly in a lot of areas already. We went from manual transmission to automatic transmission without much fanfare. Even with the current self-driving trend, it is happening pretty slowly with various assisted technologies. I doubt things will change overnight.
How is this any different than Microsoft restricting Home versions of Office for non-business use? They've been getting away with that for decades now.
Because when you buy software, you know you are renting it - you technically can reverse engineer/decompile, copy, clone, resell - but you know you shouldn't.
If I buy a car and want to take the engine out, or a light and resell it - I would be very stupid, but, it is my property and I should be able to.
If Tesla want to lend instead of sell you something - fine, just be honest!
A functioning commercial regulatory apparatus would not allow vendors to call the practice of providing encumbered software licenses in exchange for money by the term "selling software". That we put to with this practice, which basically lives on consumer confusion, is a bug.
It's a lot like our allowing people to sell patent medicines as "supplements". In both cases, we let people distort the meaning of regular words for commercial gain.
Copyright is a very stupid concept. Just because we benefit from it doesn't mean that we should support it until the end of time. Perhaps we should start taking about getting rid of copyright.
Now, I'm not saying we get rid of all laws. End of copyright will not allow me to put a maliciously crafted copy of Microsoft Windows or Google chrome online in order to deceive users into thinking they are genuine. I still may not misrepresent when I copy things. In fact, I think these laws need strengthening which we can if we ditch copyright.
Vehicle makers are already starting to make that argument, that because they own the software, you can't do anything to the car without their permission:
When you buy a car, the title is signed over to you, and you become its owner. Microsoft Office is information that Microsoft agrees to share with you subject to certain restrictions on your use of it. To actually purchase Microsoft Office the intellectual property, as opposed to a license for it, would cost you about 9 orders of magnitude more.
They're also restricting their customers' actions in meatspace (you can't drive people around in exchange for money) while the Office restrictions (you can't create business-related files) are IP-related.
A more accurate analogy would be if Microsoft banned you from using a Surface for business purposes (or for business purposes while running Windows, but it's impossible to install a different OS).
IANAL so I don't know if Tesla is on solid legal ground (I would guess that probably they are), but I think there's certainly a clear philosophical distinction.
Given that the car can not operate at all without the software enabled (and not just Autopilot, as Tesla has demonstrated with salvage title cars), this is a distinction without a difference.
Well it isn't currently clear that they do. Tesla can write whatever they want into the car version of a EULA, but it doesn't mean there is legal merit to any of it.
Assuming Tesla eventually "catches" someone using a Tesla for ride sharing profit outside of their network they could remotely disable the car, at which point they will surely be sued and the courts will decide.
And they will very likely decide against Tesla, IMO. The immediate reaction to this statement is bound to cause people who work purely in the software realm to protest, but to most courts software is still a very nebulous thing. Disabling someone's car (after selling it to them outright) because they did something with it that you didn't like is EASY to understand, anathema to the entire history of car ownership and I really don't think it'll fly.
If a court rules against the person who has the risk from controlling the risk, they will get themselves out of that situation. That will either mean changing the law, changing to a lease model and ceasing sales, or stop selling self driving at all.
Tesla: We can't place restrictions on fully owned vehicles? OK, from now on we don't sell cars - we rent them for 50 years. Now can we place restrictions?
I personally find this to be better and more honest. If we as customers don't own something, companies shouldn't use words like "your" and "ownership" to mislead people.
+1. Even if there's no difference in practice, at least a long lease signifies unusual restrictions. Makers of big heavy pieces of industrial equipment also sometimes offer only long leases and never sales.
If you consider that the hardware is entirely comprised of third-party commodity parts* then yes, whatever it is that makes Autopilot a distinct product/proposition is entirely software.
* It's all really just off-the-shelf cameras, sensors, processors etc sourced from various suppliers. Of course we should acknowledge that the validation and alignment of these parts plays an important role, but there's not really any secret sauce there.
I wouldn't say that. It certainly not exclusively software and I don't think it is honest to divide a system like that into "soft" and "hard" components, since neither one has value for customer on its own.
Really? You don't see this as any different than iOS running on an iPhone? I can't use the iOS license on any other device, I can't run binaries on the device outside of what's available on the App Store. I'm wholly restricted to their rules on both the hardware and software sides of things.
I don't get what's the disagreement here. Apple sells you a whole system, iPhone + iOS. They don't sell you two things, like in PC world, for example, and that's different and that's okay as long as everyone is upfront about it.
What I am saying is that Apple sells you a product. You own it. You can do whatever you want with it. Feel free to alter any part of it, just don't expect it to work or keep your warrantee. The fact the product has limitations out of the box is a different matter. (Kind of like no one complains that kitchen timer can't boil water, or doesn't have nanoseconds precision — you want those things, you buy a different thing or make your own.)
What Apple doesn't do is to restrict you in how you use their product. There's no such thing like "you can only non-commercially photograph your family" or "never resell your iPhone", or "detaching screen is illegal".
And, more importantly, there is nothing Apple can do to stop you from doing any of those things.
It's not going to work, things will change or we will have no self driving cars. There must be someone who's liable, and that person will be the corporation that wrote the software. That in turn will mean restrictions; the software must be updated on a timely basis, and the risk to the company must be controlled in an actuarial sense just like vehicle insurance.
Vehicle insurance like today can't be used because incentives aren't aligned. Fully self-driving cars will come with an insurance package, and the company will need to control its insurable risk, or there will be no self-driving cars at all. If it's against the law, the law will change, not the model.
I'm sorry, but society will demand it. You will not and cannot have full ownership control over a self-driving car.
I wonder if it's to prevent the following scenario in the future, where the self-driving capabilities are perfect and legal: rich people buy as many Model 3's as possible, and deploy their own taxi fleet. Each one pays itself off in 4-6 months (est ~$15/hr, can operate 24/7), and generate lots of passive income forever.
This is not how markets work. Once the "self-driving capabilities are perfect and legal":
- investing in such a fleet would be like investing in any other kind of business: it's easier if you have the money, but if not you can go to any bank and get a loan.
- prices for a trip with a self-driving taxi will drop immensely, this is probably going to be a big liability if you would start the aforementioned business
- other effects that I can't think of right now
It is true that in a lot of places rich people have an edge on the less-wealthy (it's easier getting/staying rich if you are rich), but that's more of a generic problem than something that would be amplified by change to self-driving cars.
Do you work for Deere or something? That's exactly the opinion that most people are against when applied to hardware as evidenced by the support (among people aware of them) for "right to repair" movements.
The "you don't actually own the hardware you paid for" model is slowly becoming untenable for hardware sold to individuals.
Unfortunately, such a thing will never exist, at least in a road legal sense. No government is going to approve it if it can be modified by the user. At best, you can have "look but don't touch" kind of open backed by some company if it has to be road legal. We aren't even fully over wifi router firmware yet.
They've been clear on this point for quite a while. When I purchased mine with full self driving capability, I read it in the fine print and thought it was very smart of them. It's a weird proposition to turn your luxury car into an autonomous Uber. I would never do it.
What is so smart about it ? Literally every company on the planet has been doing this for at least a few decades now. And if you are plonking $100-150k on a car, what is weird about expecting some sort of return on it ?
That means a city is in uncertainty if it tries to buy 3 or 4 Tesla to serve as paid minibuses on local territory – neither can a company for a campus, TV channels for a huge studio range, entertainment park to drive their agents around or a shuttle service to the airport who would like to provide limousine services.
I think it kinda makes sense considering that Autopilot is going to need constant maintenance/updates/investigations, plus the whole legal liability thing.
This is scary. Or rather pointing to a scary future. Does it mean I won't be able to play with my future GF fake boobs because they are only allowed into the iClinic network participants?
"Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year."