Tesla, Inc.

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Tesla Motors is a company founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003, funded and taken over by Elon Musk between then and 2008, when both original founders left their positions. Elon Musk has taken the company in radical directions since and started on a foot of trying to follow in Apple's, from a consumer protection standpoint, controversial steps with things like requiring subscriptions or just flat-out being a Tesla technician to fix 2012's Model S, and then going beyond that and truly waging war on consumers, whether it's the continued denial of adding Apple Carplay or Android Auto to their vehicles, putting an expiry date on their cars and leaving people woefully at the whims of Elon Musk choosing what can and can't be done with their vehicles; or making a $100,000 "utility" vehicle whose warranty is void by a simple carwash.

Controversies

Tesla was early in holding functionality hostage that the car owner had already bought and paid for, when Tesla decided to "offer an acceleration boost" that made the car accelerate faster once the "acceleration boost" software change was bought.

Tesla advertised how good and useful it was that their Tesla Model 3 cars had a hardware radar installed. A few years later Tesla decided to no longer include the radar hardware in their Tesla Model 3 cars they build from then on. But Tesla kept including the radar hardware in their more expensive Model S (and maybe also Model X?) cars. Shortly thereafter Tesla released a forced software OTA update that disabled the radar hardware in all older Tesla Model 3 cars too. One consequence of disabling the already bought radar was that the older cars now also had a forced TACC (Traffic-Aware Cruise Control) following distance interval reduced from 1-7 to 2-7. Another consequence was that those cars now also had a lot worse ability to be aware of traffic around them which made their autopilot decisions much worse, such as panic braking for no apparent good reason.

Tesla regularly removes car features that everyone takes for granted nowadays eg. their Ultrasonic Sensors (parking sensors) presumably to save Tesla money, most of these changes are done silently with no public or media announcements.Tesla also has removed their hardware rain sensors for similar reasons and similar consequences.

Tesla once sent a legal threat to a Swedish car repair company called "Grufman Bil AB" to take down a Youtube video that they had posted that showed them smashing a car component that was supposed to hold up a wheel, with a big hammer, showing how that component was made of metal that was a lot weaker than one could reasonably expect. Grufman Bil said in the video something like "Fix your shit, Tesla" at the end of that very short video. Grufman Bil decided to quickly take down that video and when someone asked them why, Grufman Bil said "because it's not worth getting sued over". Which indicates that Tesla was possibly threatening to sue people who show important car defects and post video proof of it on Youtube.

Someone who remembers this incident in greater detail and can give sources and proof etc, should modify this paragraph I've written so it's much more clear and trustworthy etc. Someone who has the skills of being a reporter should ask Grufman Bil AB about this and try to find the original Youtube video as evidence of my claim etc. I understand that the legal fight would not be worth it to a small car repair company but it's important to the overall society to be aware of that Tesla does things like this. Tesla's argument for why Grufman Bil must take down that video was that "It hurts Tesla as a company financially if people can see that video" IIRC. But the counter argument would be that a car part that uses too weak metal is a danger to Tesla car owners and that they can be hurt physically if such weaknesses are hidden by Tesla. So someone please improve this paragraph because I think it's important that big companies should not get away with bullying smaller companies like this, and succeeding in hiding important weaknesses in their cars from their buyers.