
Tesla Gave Me Control of Their Site Forums - ilarum
https://www.dansdeals.com/more/dans-commentary/went-tesla-delivery-hell-tesla-giving-control-site-forums-1-5-million-tesla-account-contacts/
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sokoloff
> [I bought a $19K car because:] After we got stranded without gas for the 3rd
> time I knew I’d have to take the plunge and buy a car.

Or you could, you know, get the gas gauge fixed or stop trying to micro-
optimize the last 25% of the grocery gas discount. Either of those would cost
50-300 times less than $19K...

~~~
gnu8
I would like to know how this guy is going to get stranded less often in a
Tesla. At least with a fuel burning car he can call roadside assistance to
bring him some gas. When his battery is flat they can’t bring an extension
cord though.

What a world we live in that someone so careless has so much money to throw at
his problem.

~~~
all2
I sense a market here: supercharge trucks. A truck with a buttload of diesel,
a 1000kW generator, and an assortment of charging hookups.

~~~
shriek
I'm not a mechanical or electrical engineer by any means but how hard would it
be to have a swap-able batteries like in the old cellphone days?

~~~
hi5eyes
sorry I had to [https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/21/the-tesla-battery-
swa...](https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/21/the-tesla-battery-swap-is-the-
hoax-of-the-year/)

look at smartphone and laptop batteries now compared to 10 years ago. battery
swapping used to be a thing when companies were cool with right to repair and
independent shops fixing products; not so much now. look up louis rossmann and
the way apple dealt with him (spoiler sending customs to take everything under
the guise of using fakes)

~~~
all2
If you have a couple of hours, watch some of these:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertMurraySmith/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/RobertMurraySmith/videos)

He's developed carbon only batteries/supercaps that beat Lithium ion batteries
by something like double the capacity. Some of what he is working on can be
overcharged at high voltage and the cell comes to capacity in a very short
amount of time.

~~~
hi5eyes
I think I remember his videos, one went around during the whole graphene craze
on reddit

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zaroth
With customers like this, who needs hackers?

The customer support story was bad enough, and I mean this from Tesla’s
perspective. I do fault Tesla for not just saying NO when a customer
“complains” they want to change how their car is configured after they take
delivery.

There are a lot of Tesla owners who have some real issues with their cars that
they would like to address, while this guy is calling in to get more forum
posts. This guy, who after getting direct replies from Elon on Twitter
complains they don’t respond quickly enough on Twitter.

This guy, who after getting mistakenly elevated privledges in the forum,
proceeds to poke around the whole site, fuck with settings on his own threads,
start a conspiracy theory, and then crash most of the entire forum!

This guy, who now thinks he should be paid a bug bounty for that (rather than
being brought up on CFAA charges?)

Disclaimer: Took delivery of my Model 3 last Saturday and really enjoying my
new spaceship.

~~~
rkangel
If they'd said "now is the last opportunity to decide X" that would be fine,
but they said something else and then couldn't work out how to do it.

He tried to report the forum thing and was ignored for a period of time.

You should be able to get customer support without tweeting the CEO.

[disclaimer: I'm jealous of your spaceship]

~~~
zaroth
They do say that all over the site, in their deposit agreement, and in their
purchase agreement. The problem is it also says any changes can impact your
delivery date.

So I don’t blame a customer for wanting a change but not wanting to reset
their place in line.

Case in point, I ordered the upgraded 19” wheels, because I didn’t like the
look of the aero rims. I didn’t realize at the time you could pop off the aero
faceplate and have nice dark colored rims underneath. And I have the dark grey
metallic paint which would have matched.

So now I have silver rims which I plan on powder coating to match the dark
grey, which I paid $1,500 extra for plus another $1,000 to power coat, when
the aero rims with the faceplate removed would have been perfect.

But I didn’t want to bump my place in line, so I left it. And I didn’t tweet,
email, call, beg, escalate, and blog about it to get it “taken care of”
specially.

It’s not fair to the thousands of other early adopters to monopolize their
limited customer support resources like that and squeeze them for special
treatment.

Of course the squeaky wheel will get the grease. When something goes wrong
with my iPhone that is a bit fishy but _probably_ because it got dropped one
too many times, sure I press Apple to go above and beyond to make my day a
little better.

With Tesla I personally think it’s my responsibility to go at it the other way
around. They need customer advocates not customer leaches.

It’s part of being an early adopter to a company that is running everything so
close to the wire in order to radically change a very stagnant (and in some
ways corrupt) industry.

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Kaveren
This is extremely irresponsible, and never should've even been possible to
occur in the first place.

Imagine all the possibilities past goofing around:

1\. Could sell account contact information. (The _least_ threatening option.)

2\. Could make posts to influence Tesla stock price, either negatively or
positively. Either way, the stock would likely go down sharply afterwards if
this happened.

3\. Could social engineer financial information from customers.

4\. Could lead users to phishing sites or malware with hype of a fraudulent
announcement.

As per usual, Large Company Ignores Report of Serious Problem and Then Has To
Deal With Negative PR From Ignoring Said Problem When They Can Easily See How
Many Other Companies Fell Into This Trap And Tries To Pretend They Do Not
Ignore Problems.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _This is extremely irresponsible_

Innovation is a game in trade-offs. I’ve been, in the past, super critical
about Tesla trading off customer safety in its autopilot branding. This time,
however, ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯.

Tesla is scaling production on the world’s best-selling electric car, a jewel
in a world ignoring climate change. They have more important things to be
doing than keeping forums humming. This is a good case of knowing when to ask
for forgiveness.

~~~
ken
They weren't (AFAICT) trying to make innovative web forums. They weren't
(AFAICT) pulling overworked battery engineers off their workstations to handle
phone support.

Even a third-party hosted web forum would have done better than this, in cost
and security. This isn't the price to be paid for electric cars. This is just
carelessness.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _This is just carelessness_

Right. A lack of care given to this. Because it was—properly, in my
opinion—being diverted elsewhere. They needed a forum, someone quickly spun
something up, and then that someone properly stopped thinking about this and
got back to work.

~~~
kup0
They can't hire enough people so that the care isn't "diverted"? The same
person that put up the forums is also doing some "important" work on the cars?
Come on, now.

What boils down to a defense of "it's okay to be careless with X when you're
doing more important work on Y" is on-its-face ridiculous to me, in three
ways. One, the sentiment itself. Two, the implication that properly taking
care of your IT/web stuff is less important and/or handled by people that
usually do "more important things". Third, the idea that two important things
cannot be done because one of them is more important... since when are proper
IT/web security AND producing a good product mutually exclusive?

It sounds more and more these days like "innovation" is just becoming an
excuse to do other things improperly. Innovation is great, just not something
to be worshiped at the expense of all else

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _since when are proper IT /web security AND producing a good product
> mutually exclusive?_

Since finite resources. It’s not okay. But it’s an acceptable transgression
given what they’re doing and how close to the red line they’re operating.

Pulling back from that redline to keep every piece of IT infrastructure up to
date and secure would be a bad strategic trade. Waiting until a problem and
then fixing it makes more sense. Lazy versus eager allocation.

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DyslexicAtheist
another report of how tesla moves fast and breaks things :(

... it sounds like an internal system which scope has been expanded to include
customer support as the company grew (unaddressed _technical debt_ ) and they
forgot about identity management.

I'm not shocked though. It is perfectly in line with:
[https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376](https://twitter.com/atomicthumbs/status/1032939617404645376)

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Shivetya
Every time I reach out to Tesla to find something out it takes forever and
usually I have to call and wait an hour on hold to get the answer for the
question I asked in email. I have been directed back to my MVPA (the purchase
agent who insures your paperwork is complete and the delivery location has its
ducks in the row) more than once to get something answered that Tesla's phone
support could not provide!

Got to love it. Tesla support and service if anything shows a major reason the
dealership network is not obsolete. Now I own a TM3 and like the car very much
but it does have a few panel alignment issues that I am going to get worked on
when the tire rotation comes due. While I think there are truly bad dealers
out there most name brand dealers have to compete with others to get your
service dollars but Tesla doesn't. Hence they can leave you in limbo.

Back in 2013 when I had an issue with my previous car the dealership actually
got the regional rep in to approve a fix that originally was denied. Who can
go to bat for me when Tesla says no or just ignores me?

personal experience dealing with support:

My current outstanding question is, what is this check I received from Tesla
for? It is a couple hundred dollars but with no explanation for what it is.
There is nothing on my account page. My query is weeks old. Then again I had
to call and and reach out to my original delivery agent just to get Tesla to
pay off my trade forty five days after the deal had been done. This became an
issue because the state wanted insurance on a car I did not have, the lien
holder wanted insurance on it, but the insurance company was like you sold it,
you have documents to that effect, you cannot have insurance.

~~~
taf2
Really, my experience has been very good. I ran over a nail and not only did
they get a tow truck out to me and provide a replacement tire within 1 hour
they also came to my office to swap the tire out. Without any cost to me.

~~~
mkirklions
Tires are one of the easiest things to fix and/or replace.

Lets not judge a company based on trivial issues.

EDIT: I changed my own tire with 0 experience ever.

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yjftsjthsd-h
> people who now buy a Tesla via my referral code will get 6 months of free
> supercharging.

What a world we live in, when _cars_ have referral codes

~~~
azhenley
I recently bought a Model 3, but the 6 months free of supercharging is almost
an insult of an incentive.

Even if I supercharge every time (about once a week) for 6 months, that saves
me $168 (seems to cost me less than $7 per supercharge). So the incentive for
referring someone to buy a 50k car is... $168.

Also, Tesla encourages the use of home charging over supercharging which many
have interpreted to mean that supercharging is bad for battery life.

~~~
24gttghh
>Also, Tesla encourages the use of home charging over supercharging which many
have interpreted[sic] to mean that supercharging is bad for battery life.

I'm not sure what wizardry Tesla batteries use for their supercharging, but it
was my impression that you always want to charge lithium batteries at <1C to
extend battery life as long as possible.

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the_duke
Haha ouch, what a f-up.

Looks like the forums are based on Drupal 6 (maybe 7). I have not so found
memories of developing a few Drupal sites back in the day...

~~~
nolok
Haven't used it, but from what I gather the latest Drupal is a complete
rewrite using Symfony, so they hopefully dumped most of the legacy bad parts

~~~
josefresco
The problem with Drupal is not with the "latest Drupal" \- it's with the older
versions, and the many sites who cannot/don't upgrade.

~~~
the_duke
I still have nightmares from huge, almost infinitely nested, undecipherable
and undocumented arrays.

One small error and you spent hours finding the culprit, digging around in the
source code...

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tyingq
The fun just keeps coming. We've killed Tesla's forum now.

    
    
      Service Unavailable
      The server is temporarily unable to service your request. 
      Please try again later.
      Reference #6.6d0fd717.1542635887.2b540b\
    

Edit: It's back up now. It appears to be running Drupal version 7. Wonder if
it's patched?

~~~
mcpeepants
based on the contents of the publicly-available MAINTAINERS.txt file in the
root, I'm gonna guess no...

~~~
tyingq
I missed this screenshot earlier: [https://i.dansdeals.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/11/11015004/...](https://i.dansdeals.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/11/11015004/tess351.png)

 _" There is a security update for your version of Drupal...There are security
updates for one or more of your modules or themes..."_

And then this: [https://i.dansdeals.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/11/11104508/...](https://i.dansdeals.com/wp-
content/uploads/2018/11/11104508/tess42.png)

Shows that's it's version Drupal 7.59 and Mysql version is 5.7.14

So it has at least these issues: [https://www.drupal.org/SA-
CORE-2018-006](https://www.drupal.org/SA-CORE-2018-006)

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xphilter
If this is true, Dan needs to shut up, get a lawyer, and read up on the CFAA.

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pfd1986
"And does anything get cooler than this to avoid parking tickets?"

Seriously? No wonder so many people in Palo Alto / Bay Area hate Tesla
drivers...

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dorianm
I'm surprised they don't use Discourse for the forums

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Tostino
Well, that's horrifying.

