Researchers jailbreak a Tesla to get free in-car feature upgrades::A group of researchers found a way to hack a Tesla’s hardware with the goal of getting free in-car upgrades, such as heated rear seats.
“you wouldn’t download an in-car feature”
It would be my pleasure.
I’d do it even if I didn’t want the feature.
You are stealing that feature. Because of you some innocent tesla owner will have their in-car features taken away by the piracy enforcement team.
I’m amazed that it’s legal for a car company to sell you something, and then after you own it, remotely disable xyz aspects of the functionality unless you pay them more. How can that be legal? I own the car, it’s MINE now, how can I not use every single thing that’s in it?
Same reason it’s legal for HP to brick your printer if you use third party ink. You violated their shitty TOS that none of us read because it’s 80 pages of legalese, but you agreed to it.
hmmm yes I suppose that’s true. Okay so let me rephrase: I’m amazed it’s legal for a car manufacturer to even HAVE a TOS like that when you purchase a car. It shouldn’t be legal to write language like “you are purchasing this but agreeing that you can’t use it” … wtf?
I agree that it’s wrong, but I don’t think, at least in the U.S., that there’s any law against it. Like I said, HP does the exact same thing with their printers. I certainly would like for it to be illegal.
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In Germany, BMW and VW both offer subscriptions for functionality already built into the car. BMW is notorious for their heated seat subscription here and the Mk8 Golf I leased for a while had a bunch of minor stuff pay-walled like automatic high beams, changing color of the interior ambient lighting, etc.
You can still outright buy those features but it’s totally insane to pay for something that’s already physically inside the car. And it’s not like these are budget brands that need to upsell a bunch of stuff to be profitable. A base Golf starts at €31k…
As for Tesla, at least where I am in the EU, there is only one feature offered as a subscription: a mobile network connection for the car. Keeping its SIM card active basically. That one makes sense, I’d say.
Then there are three “features” that you can buy outright after the fact: an “acceleration boost”, that one is dodgy, and two levels of their auto-pilot/self-driving. The latter two currently do effectively nothing (especially in Europe that is also true for enhanced autopilot), so they are more or less an option to say “here have some money for future development” if you have too much…
No heating subscription or anything like that. I was going to say that I think the local laws seem to have at least discouraged them a bit, but BMW and VW are trying it too, so I don’t know.
So I’ve been in discussions like this for equipment on trains. It functionally goes:
You paid for X. The hardware we plan to use for faster build supports X+Y. You can either:
- pay for Y
- have us artificially prevent Y
- wait until the hardware that just does X comes in
I actually agree with the options prevented above. I just think that, as the owner, you should still have the right to reverse item 2 if you can figure out how. Especially if it’s out of warranty.
Don’t like it? Don’t buy it. Simple.
“Don’t like it? Move”
That’s the same dangerous logic. Heaven forbid people try to make things better.
First they enshittified Tesla and I didn’t care cuz I didn’t buy Tesla
Then they enshittified GM and I didn’t care cuz I didn’t like GM
Then they enshittified Toyota and I didn’t care cuz I didn’t buy Toyota
…
Then they’d enshittified everything, and since they also cut all corporate taxes and subsidized the oil companies my town has no public transit and I walk by the side of the road.
Lets be fair
TOSs you need two lawyers and an ai chatbot to explain to you, shouldnt be legal vs regular citizens.
They cannot expect anyone to read all TOS they get thrown in their face throughout a lifetime. Let alone understand them. Its often not written super clearly and not all users can even read the language very well to begin with.
I don’t disagree. I’m just saying how things are, not how they should be.
I really wonder if there’s a way to use LLMs just to point out every concerning thing in a EULA/TOS
To what end? Probably every eula/tos you click through has concerning shit that is against your best interest. Either you use the product or you don’t.
Yeah but I want to know just how fucked I am when I sign it
TLDR If you’re the consumer, you’re always the fucked party of a TOS.
That’s why EULAs or other contracts are not necessarily legally binding if they contain specific parts that could be considered “unfair”; at least in the European Union.
You can give this a try
Probably not ChatGPT because who knows what was in its EULA and we couldn’t use it to summarize it before agreeing to it.
Bet you could but not sure what that would get you. So you don’t click agree to it. Now what?
Lobbying.
The captalism, American politics bought and paid for.
I mean you are correct to some extent. But I’m curious, how does this not happen in a system where the state has full control? The only difference is the consumer has no other choices and the “politics” don’t have to be paid for as they are already fully in control.
Unless you mean to say that by the good graces of the government they’d never do that in a state run economy because it’s morally wrong. In which case… Lol
People who say things like that don’t understand what regulations are or that better regulated capitalism is probably what they want
Unless you pay them more every month. Not everything needs to be a subscription and they’ll keep doing it unless people stop buying.
Because you don’t own the car, you’re just leasing the use of it.
the state does not look out for the interests of the people, so it makes perfect sense really.
I’ve seen a bunch of lab equipment do this as well. For some, there are firmware hacks available to enable features only available on models twice the price.
It’s a bit inevitable. There’s a market for a range of features - i.e. some people don’t want to pay extra for extra features. But it’s simpler (i.e. cheaper) to produce all models with the same hardware. So, to fill the market, some features are simply disabled in software.
Imagine buying a house but you didn’t want to pay extra so one room is padlocked, or several windows boarded up, or a pool walled off.
If it brought down the price of the house, people who didn’t need those things would absolutely take the deal, and that’s the point.
do you think it’d be right for people to break into the room
Were the terms of the purchase in the contract that the purchasers weren’t allowed in the room? If so, then no. That would be breach of contract and wrong.
To be clear. I’m not a fan of paid upgrades for things that are already physically included but inaccessible without payment. But I get it because it still brings the price of the thing down to those who don’t care about having the extra thing.
The point is being locked out of something you own is immoral. People being will to take the immoral deal doesn’t make it okay.
Oftentimes it’s done because it’s cheaper, though oftentimes it’s actually more expensive but they calculate that money from licenses post initial sale gets them more revenue and margin in the end anyway.
Still, even if it always was cheaper for the manufacturer this way, the point here is companies should not be able to control something you physically own once you have purchased it. It’s a dangerous precedent to set and things like this will creep into more and more products if we let it.
Companies have owned your hardware for decades. Apart from a few open hardware systems like x86, everything comes software or mechanically locked to the price you pay.
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consumer activism, rich people that think they’re helping the world and feel good about themselves by buying a brand new electric car. also most people are just technologically illiterate so yea.
Champagne socialists.
Champagne liberal*
I’m not defending this practice (it’s gross), but
people and critics almost universally lovemany people and critics who actually own/drive Teslas love them.So, you’re kind of mischaracterizing them as “worse than other cars.”
edit: it’s unsurprising that this comment is downvoted in a thread hellbent on shitting on Tesla. I don’t know what I expected.
This is an interesting comment to make. For years I’ve seen people shitting all over musk and Tesla, specifically because they have a ton of build quality issues
No, it’s not “almost universal”. Even before musk becomes public idiot number one, there was a lot of hate for these cars
Maybe my opinion is dated/anecdotal.
My belief re: critics comes from early days of Tesla, when the concept of a fast ev was very foreign to most auto journalists. So, most of the reviews were something along the lines of “I wanted to hate this car, but goddamn if it isn’t faster than insert critic’s favorite sports car and way more useful too. I’m converted.”
Re: people in general, I’m basing it off of people I know who own them. That’s admittedly a very small sample size (~a dozen), but their opinions are the polar opposite of what you’ll find on random Internet forums. There’s definitely selection bias going on in both directions.
For what it’s worth, I’m very aware of the QA issues and no I don’t own a Tesla myself.
Tesla does a lot of things right - their cars are amongst the fastest around and their charging network is superior to any others to date
But their build quality is poor and their autonomous driving features are overstated compared to what they can deliver
Plus their service support is limited due to their direct sell model - there aren’t many places to get Tesla’s repaired
Tesla did make EVs mainstream though. Consider that their cars outsell popular ICE cars even though the Tesla’s cost 50%+ more
So, it’s a mixed bag with a lot of their customers, and some outsiders, absolutely fanatical about them, some people hating them by proxy because of Musk, and some people 50/50 on them like any car brand
Most people that have purchased Teslas have already been invested and just about everything ever including gut feel tells you at that point that they’re not going to say it was a mistake to buy a thing they spent $50-100k on.
People don’t like admitting they were suckered, and certainly not to people they are trying to impress.
We have a Tesla and most owners love them because they’re good cars. Cost of ownership is next to nothing and our Model Y had next to no issues so far (scratch on seat when we picked it up which they replaced with a service appointed).
It costs less than $2 per 100 km to run while the prior car cost closer to $20 per $100 km in premium fuel. Also no oil changes or other significant maintenance (spark plugs, transmission oil, etc.) We save $3000 of gas per year and we’re in a luxurious/premium car. What I don’t understand is why anyone would buy a GLC/Q5/X3 over a Model Y. Who wants to spend $15k on gas in 5 years?
The economics are compelling, but the cost of ownership for someone like me would also have to factor in the extra interest paid on a loan at least $20K more than a comparably-sized ICE car
…people and critics almost universally love Teslas…
Not sure where you get that from. Elon and Tesla cult members might have you think so but a Google search on Teslas reputation show differently. Consuser affairs showing about 60% positive.
https://www.consumeraffairs.com/automotive/tesla_motors.html?#sort=top_reviews&filter=1
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How high are you right meow?
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Most car manufacturers charge money for those kind of upgrades. The difference is they specifically build or do not build the features into the car. If Tesla doesn’t charge meaningfully more and if they do not turn it into a subscription, I wouldn’t knock them for it.
There’s a lot to bitch at Tesla about, but being able to decide after the fact that you want a heated steering wheel isn’t one of them. FSD being bullshit even if it was free (and it is far from free!), the refusal to allow Android Auto/CarPlay, the intentionally rosy range estimates, the association with Musk… those are what I’d focus on. Unlockable steering wheel heating is not an issue.
but being able to decide after the fact that you want a heated steering wheel isn’t one of them.
No one is bitching about being able to decide that you want a heated steering wheel. You can decide to install it on literally any car brand or model.
People are bitching about the hardware that they have paid for and they own being locked behind by a software paywall. This would cause a riot with practically any other consumer electronics. Imagine if the fingerprint scanner on your smartphone was an extra $50 to unlock? Or quick charge being an extra $75?
That would be the most anti-consumer horseshit we’ve seen, and that’s exactly what Tesla is doing.
Kind of like adding a little chip to the charger cable of a cellphone that identifies the charger as a brand cable and without that chip, the phone won’t charge or use the perfectly good cable for data transfer. If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s what Apple did/does.
E: fixed autocorrect
It’s not even extra to unlock in some cases. They want a monthly subscription. They want you to own nothing. They want you to “license” your car from them and then turn your shit off if you miss a payment.
It’s all rent seeking bullshit and I’ll ride the terrible public transit instead of buying another car if those are my options the next time I go to buy a car.
Imagine if the fingerprint scanner on your smartphone was an extra $50 to unlock? Or quick charge being an extra $75?
Or not including a charger, or doing away with useful features like removable batteries or 1/8" Jack’s so you have to buy new earbuds… shit
Elon is pulling this shit because it will probably work
Also… what happens if the heater breaks? Are you still charged for fixing it or is that included in the subscription?
Right? If the hardware is in the vehicle, there’s no additional cost for them to enable it on all vehicles. If they want to have a way to offer vehicles for cheaper to increase sales, they’re not saving any money by doing it the way they are. They’re just saving on not having to make multiple models. But if that’s the case, just give everyone the damn heated steering wheel if it’s installed in the car.
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You know what? I am going to just maintain my old economy car until I die. I am out of the system. I don’t want a touchscreen or a subscription or vendor locking. I want a machine that takes me from place A to place B when mass transit or my bicycle isn’t practical. That’s it. You people enjoy your car as a service bullshit model. Don’t come crying to me when the batteries light on fire and the brakes require you to upgrade flash.
You did not understand what I wrote if your retort is on the “car as a service” subject.
Guess I didn’t. Explain it to me like you would Bitcoin and I will give the attention it so richly deserves.
Bitcoin can fuck off.
The point here is that car companies already charge for these things. The reality is basically two scenarios when ordering a car:
A: You pay $x, and they offer you heating steering wheels for $y. If you do not get them then, you do not get them ever.
B: You pay $x, and you can pay $y at any time to get heated steering wheels.The business “bet” that (B) represents is that maintaining additional SKUs for each upgrade-feature and splitting off production lines to include or not include various combinations of features 1-2-3-etc. will cost them more money than just including it in every car. Then they can sell it to you on a whim. The actual feature itself does not cost anywhere near $y in either scenario to include, which is an important component of making this possible.
Now, you can say that (B) is a shitty scenario in a vacuum: if they’re willing to include it in every car, they should just charge every car what it costs to include plus some minor markup to allow the business to operate. E.g. if it costs $50 to include, they can increase the price of every car $55. And in that vacuum I’d agree. But it isn’t in a vacuum. That is not the scenario (B) is competing with. (B) is competing with (A). In (A) you are going to pay $200 or $300 or whatever for that $50-cost feature up front, or you never get it ever. In (B) you pay that $200 or $300 whenever you like.
It operates in a similar world to how Apple charges $200 to go from 8gb of RAM to 16gb of RAM, when that might cost them $10-20 at volume pricing. Or to use a well-liked company, how Valve charges $250 for a ~$10 SSD + ~$5-10 carrying case + ~$5-10 glass coating, on the base Steam Deck vs the fanciest Steam Deck.
This is not a “as a service” model. It’s a simple upselling business model. Profits on base models are low so as to have a low sticker price, and then they try to create profit off of upgrades. In this case, the software locked version is preferable to the consumer over the default version because it’s something you can unlock at any time, instead of only at purchase. It is not a new business model, nor is it even limited to electronics. The overall business model is shitty, but that applies to every instance of it: (A) and (B), and (B) is not differently shitty.
Service based systems are based on recurring revenue, in this case anything with a subscription. Which I specifically called out as something that would make it shitty and pointed to their subscription based or subscription-incentivizing behavior as shitty.
Subscription model is what the manufacturers are heading for. They see the dollar signs and are chasing after it.
Yep, rents. That’s what all of these assholes want. No more ownership. No more selling products. They keep the ownership and you rent the privilege to use their junky piles of shit. I’ll sooner walk everywhere than involve myself in such an agreement.
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Because BMW moment
It’s unbelievable either way, my near base model Elantra has both heated seats and heated steering wheel. And a 60k electric car doesn’t?
good. software locks are anti human and anti consumer. everyone inherently feels ripped off by them, but the more capitalist minded think ‘oh that’s the company’s right to do’
if it’s my property in my house I can fuck with it to do whatever I want
Unfortunately because most of this is locked behind DRM you may be subject to crimes best described by someone else as “felony contempt of business model”.
How dare people find ways around our artificial scarcity. /s
So you think you should be able to pay for a base model and get all the features of the top of the line model? Try that at a Toyota dealership and let me know how that goes.
Flipping a bit in software doesn’t cost Tesla anything, the hardware is already installed.
It would be totally different if Tesla didn’t install the hardware by default, and you had to pay to have it put in.
If they put the premium shit in the car and software locked it out, fuck them. It’s part of the car I paid for, I’ll do whatever the fuck I want with it. Don’t like it? Don’t put the premium shit in a base model.
I think that if they’re letting those cars go out the factory door with the parts for heated rear seats, then I own those too, and I’ll do with them what I please.
and if they softlock it they should pay a price for taking up space and load that you didn’t ask for.
I love that you think Tesla isn’t pricing the premium features into the base model.
Yes! Back to jailbreaking!
The future sucks.
Hardware companies trying to copy the software companies with a subscription model really sucks. What’s next? Intel charging a monthly fee to unlock 5 GHz boost? Nvidia charging a monthly fee if you want to do anything AI-related with their GPUs? Samsung and LG charging a monthly fee if you want to use a TV or a monitor for more than 2 hours a day? Greed knows no bounds.
Funnily enough, Intel tried something similar already in 2010 (way before their pay-as-you-go bullshit). It was a Pentium that you could unlock hyper-threading on for $50.
Thankfully they sold terribly, but one has to wonder how long until they try it again
Don’t they have that on server cpus now?
That model is here already for cloud computing, literally dollars for CPU cores and bandwidth and memory. But that only works out well for renting other people’s servers and would be bad for any product that you purchase outright. I suggest we all not buy those products if they do that.
I hope no execs are reading this thread because if they had these ideas they’d have no qualms about implementing them
Pretty sure intel do something like that with their server CPUs.
Yep: Intel on Demand
This isn’t unusual for Enterprise grade IT hardware. Mainframes have been sold/licensed that way for decades. I recently dealt with a performance issue that we solved by buying a license to use more of a piece of hardware that was already in our data center (we didn’t realize the piece we owned had twice the capacity that could be unlocked just through licensing till we engaged the vendor)
Don’t give them ideas!
Is that not what the K versions of their processors are? Pay more for the ability to overclock and get good speeds
Amd did that back in the day. All the chips were the same but locked out. You could scrape and use a pencil to draw in a jumper and make your chip the flagship one.
The future involves piracy.
of course it was the PSP. I’ll say it again and again; secure computing is like adding a back door that you know about. Fuck intel me, fuck amd psp, fuck apple sep, fuck microsoft tpm, and fuck anyone who wants to have control over a device I own.
Google: time to add DRM to chrome
Google has betrayed Google.
As all corporations eventually do.
Google is eating its children.
That’s a story of TITANic proportions
Can somebody build & sell a dumb electric car? Or at least one not permanently internet-enabled and/or that has no functionality and capabilities locked behind software and subscriptions?
Ive been genuinely thinking about getting into business selling dumb stuff exclusively. Dumb tvs, fridges, washers, phones, printers watever. Just a safe online vendor where you know that what you buy wont connect to the internet, need a subscription, or require a credit card on file to work. I just need a business name.
That’s a neat idea, and definitely a product group that I’ve been actively looking for. But I do find it ironic that your business model is of an online vendor that sells offline versions of online appliances haha
Was on the market for a TV for my grandparents recently. I just need a monitor, digital receiver, and remote - in one neat package. How hard can it be?
Very, apparently. Can’t even find cheap Chinese crap that isn’t “smart” these days.
Thrift stores are where the remaining dumb tech is currently housed… until they, too, are emptied.
Dumbly: Uncomplicated Technology for a Complicated World
The Dacia Spring fits the bill out of necessity (price). It is not fast, it has low range, uses cheap materials and it is rather small.
But I don’t think it can spy on you and it’s charming through its simple honesty.
I’d download it alright
Assuming you are in the part of the world where they are being sold
You can do it yourself!
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Technological serfdom. You don’t own anything anymore. You can perpetually rent from your lord or you can suffer the consequences.
The “you wouldnt pirate a car” crowd will be shook when they finally realize " yes we would"
I used to think " I wouldn’t because that’s a stupid metaphor" but now that it’s not a stupid metaphor oh yes the fuck I would.
Or just don’t buy a luxury car
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A group of researchers said they have found a way to hack the hardware underpinning Tesla’s infotainment system, allowing them to get what normally would be paid upgrades — such as heated rear seats — for free.
This may also give owners the ability to enable the self-driving and navigation system in regions where it’s normally not available, the researchers told TechCrunch, though they admitted that they haven’t tested these capabilities yet, as that would require more reverse engineering.
“We are not the evil outsider, but we’re actually the insider, we own the car,” Werling told TechCrunch in an interview ahead of the conference.
Werling explained that what they did was “fiddle around” with the supply voltage of the AMD processor that runs the infotainment system.
With the same technique, the researchers said they were also able to extract the encryption key used to authenticate the car to Tesla’s network.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good bot
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Heated rear seats I can get behind
Why would you want to be behind the heated seats? Seems like it’d be warmer on the seat, not to mention that there’s no 3rd row in a Tesla so you’d be in the trunk…
Oh, you!
Well it was a pun.
Get behind
This looks to have already been discovered years ago as this company sells an OBD2 plug that can toggle all of this stuff, as well as highjacking some controls to add new functionality, as well as adding 50HP to those cars with a specific rear motor version https://ingenext.ca/products/ghost-upgrade
Is this method software only? Because the upgrades on that site are pretty expensive and proprietary.
as well as adding 50HP
Holy shit, IRL health buffs to mounts
Takes pay-to-win to the next level
If you read the article it is different. This relies on physically bringing connections to gain root access to the file system.
It’s also unlikely Tesla can’t just watch for modified files and update them everytime the car goes into drive or something. They probably won’t do it, but to claim it’s impossible is just disingenuous
If I hear I can solder a modchip to a Tesla to get free features, bypass paid subscription stuff, I totally would.
I guess? But I also would never, ever, buy a Tesla.
Teslas have x64 CPU’s? What the hell?
It does have the letter x in it…
/s
Researchers jailbreak Tesla to allow usage of the entire car they purchased. FTFY
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Please don’t call him the r word, that’s an insult to the mentally challenged
His intelligence and reasoning skills are hindered or reduced in performance; i.e. retarded.
Just because a slur appears with a definition in a dictionary, does not make it acceptable. And maybe it was acceptable at one time, but things change.
“Retard/-ed/-ant” has many formal applications, and should not be considered a slur when used properly; unlike other slurs that only exist these days for hate.
For example, Airbus airplanes inform pilots during every landing of what they should be doing. Some may argue it reminds the pilots what they are, should they fail to do so.
whooosh
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This is great. When you buy the car, you own it. I don’t care what kind of weird licenses and contracts they put together. If I buy the car and there is hardware in the car that allows for heated seats, there is no reason why I shouldn’t be able to enable it myself, tear it out, or do whatever I want with it. It is mine.
I can understand there being safety concerns for modifying a car. But the owner of the car already accepts liability for the operation of that car. If I do not modify the car and I get into an accident due to Teslas auto pilot feature or another thing baked into their system, does Tesla accept liability? No, they do not. If it is my responsibility for the safe operation of the vehicle, then it is also my responsibility to modify a vehicle in a safe manner. 
