"Tesla commits fraud to void warranties."
There FTFY.
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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Feels like they should be able to view the software and hardware controlling the odometer, and if it's doing anything suspicious.
I wonder if they'll actually do anything if they find Tesla is doing fraud. Feel like everyone who OK'd the decision should be barred from working in the industry for life, and made to forfeit everything they gained while doing the fraud.
While I'm making magical wishes, I'd also like Musk and all of his followers to choke to death.
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Why is proprietary in devices we purchase bad? This right here. We are connected to the internet 24/7. Companies hiding what they control and what they collect, which is bad.
You mean the guy that thinks we live in a simulation and he’s the player and we are all NPCs is cheating to give himself an advantage? I’m shocked.
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Like they can't even be competent enough to hire a hitman to kill their whistleblowers. Boeing are just laughing at them.
Teslas are nothing more than heaps of junk, I just laugh at anyone driving a Tesla
So instead of lasers for self driving, we got cameras because they’re like eyes and they can do the same thing. Now odometers, they spin and the number gets bigger. That’s like a slot machine. They need lots of numbers, so we’ll make them like penny slots and just go one little bit at a time, and it’ll make you feel like a winner when the parts fall off!
Maybe location tracking from Google maps giving a date when the car was driven and where, with a simple excel of distances calculated and tallied up for a given month or two.
If the owner had a photo of the dash with the distance reported a few months earlier start there to see if the report distance matches what the excel table totals up.
love how the article is so corpo that they have to clarify it's not the whole warranty that expired
as if any of that shit is real and not a scam
ars technica 🙄
It cannot possibly be legal to have the odometer show anything except actual miles traveled.
Yeah I thought odometer fraud was like a serious thing, I wonder if it applies here.
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Hinton's lawsuit alleges that Tesla "employs an odometer system that utilizes predictive algorithms, energy consumption metrics, and driver behavior multipliers that manipulate and misrepresent the actual mileage traveled by Tesla Vehicles" and that his car "consistently exhibited accelerated mileage accumulations of varying percentages ranging from 15 percent to 117 percent higher than plaintiff's other vehicles and his driving history."
Here comes Big Government, trying to constrain cutting edge innovations in accurately counting how many times the wheel rotates.
I hope DOGE is able to save California from itself by defunding whatever court system might be involved in persecuting hard working odometer engineers with this flagrantly Woke and Soy legal case.
Tesla? Muskrat? Engaged in fraud‽‽
Well I am just shocked, SHOCKED...well, not that shocked
Very appropriate use of the interrobang.
For this six-month period, Hinton says his Model Y odometer gained 13,228 miles (21,288 km). By comparison, averages of his three previous vehicles showed that with the same commute, he was only driving 6,086 miles (9,794 km) per 6 months.
That's 2x. Seems too obvious to be happening on all teslas
The important bit in the article was that he had bought it used. I'm sure its not a standard feature for brand new Tesla, but I would absolutely believe that some kind of fuckery to keep pre-owned buyers from taking advantage of the warranty is SOP. It's counting double the miles, there's no possible way for that to happen on accident unless the odometer is completely independent of the cars systems.
I'm pretty sure old odometers literally spun according to the wheels turning as you drove. If Tesla is "calculating" mileage then they would absolutely be able to just inject commands to ignore the correct algorithm and make it hit 50k as fast as possible. I'm sure most of the people they did this to weren't keen eyed enough to notice.
Certainly not all Tesla, just the ones they think they can get away with. 38k miles is not very far from 50k, they assumed he would be a rube and just suck it up when they told him his warranty was invalid.
It would absolutely not surprise me if Teslas calculate miles driven via GPS instead of tire rotation or some other mechanical means.
It's the kind of "reinventing the wheel, only worse and more expensive" that Musk would do.
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I definitely lean toward this being genuine manufacturing error (or user error).
That said? Never underestimate the power of market research. I was just chatting with a friend about how neither of us understand cars beyond the most basic of emergency maintenance and I could 100% see a predatory system target us (moreso than the ones we know target us).
Similarly, I would assume most former grad students are used to actually monitoring mileage because we are trying to push our crap for as long as we can. Whereas someone who has been a tech bro for a decade probably expects to buy a new car every time they get a bonus and wouldn't care.
That said? Assuming this IS fraud on tesla's part (and that is generally a safe assumption), my money is on something like:
The odometer nudging is designed to make sure everyone hits their mileage based warranty after N years. Every M months it will estimate your average use and "nudge" you based on heuristics. Hinton had a particularly low mileage the period before so it scaled them much higher for the next period while they were monitoring it.
Maybe multiplying each driven distance by the number of owners? I wouldn't put it beyond them if they code that crap with AI.
Just literal fraud
by Tesla?? I'm shocked
Shocked I say!!!
It's far more likely that the odometer in Teslas are just poor quality crap like the rest of the car.
Odometers are one of the oldest consumer protection tools. If it's off, it's very illegal.
Yup, odometers were regulated specifically to protect consumers from widespread odometer fraud. Shit like companies requiring oil changes every 5k miles, and the odometer shows 5000 when it’s actually only 4000, so consumers pay for more service than they need. Or cases like this one, where a company is required to provide a warranty until the 50k odometer reading, and then fudges the odometer so it voids the warranty sooner than it should.
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Sure, but then you'd also expect to hear about Teslas with odometers that massively underreport the distance, too. Or that fail altogether. And while no one would be likely to report the former, the latter might be a bigger deal.
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We already know they knowingly lied about battery range, the capabilities of self driving, and a ton of other fraudulent practices. Tesla is doing it intentionally is more likely than poor build quality.
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Had a Tesla Model 3 before, have a VW ID.7 now. They're driven the same and it looks like they both agree about the distances driven.
FWIW
That cant be a defense?!
I mean, VW tried to blame poor quality software (aka a bug) for their abnormal emissions, before it was discovered it's fully intended to cheat emissions testing.
I wouldn't put it above Tesla to do the same here.
Sorry officer, I'm just really stupid.
When accused of crimes, deflect by admitting to even bigger crimes.
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