The lead plaintiff in the case, Nyree Hinton, bought a used Model Y with less than 37,000 miles (59,546 km) on the odometer. Within six months, it had pushed past the 50,000-mile (80,467 km) mark, at which point the car’s bumper-to-bumper warranty expired. (Like virtually all EVs, Tesla powertrains have a separate warranty that lasts much longer.)
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.
Edit: I just want to point out that I just learned that changing your tires to ones of a different diameter can also affect how your spedometer clocks. So yeah, this issue is full of nuance and plausible things as to why this could not be true.
Has anyone compared it to a GPS?
Just fit your own dashcam. Some models have GPS logging so you can track where it is every second of driving.
Another way would be to log OBDII metrics, and compare the vehicle speed, odometer and time. If you don’t get s=d/t then something is up.
The dash cam would work. I wouldn’t trust obd because they could be sending the same info through or doing some VW diesel gate stuff. Maybe comparing obd to waze to what’s displayed on screen would be better. When I mount different size tires on my vehicles I use waze to compare the speed on the speedometer vs waze. Most vehicles in the past read faster than it was going, it’s only in the past few years I’ve seen them being more accurate, around when telemetry started being more prevalent.
I tested my car and the speedometer, trip meter and OBD give 3 completely different values. It’s kind of expected because all manufacturers make overreading speedometers.
I think comparing trip meter/odometer, OBD and GPS is the way to go. It would be amusing if Teslas are programmed to behave when something is monitoring it over OBD.
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
Maybe multiplying each driven distance by the number of owners? I wouldn’t put it beyond them if they code that crap with AI.
I don’t know. I couldn’t tell you my average monthly usage. I could definitely look at my oil change rate and work backwards, but it’s not just something I regularly think about or keep at the top of my mind. I’m sure plenty of people haven’t noticed it.
I couldn’t tell you my average monthly usage.
Open up your Google Maps (or navigation app of choice) and you’ll likely have a record of how far you’ve traveled within a given time period.
Subtract off any cab rides and rides in friends’ cars, and that’s your number plus or minus some distance in driveways or parking garages that the app can’t accurately measure.
I don’t use Google maps. Anyway like I said I can go off oil changes more or less to get a decent estimate. Of course I could also just take the age of my car and it’s total miles and divide.
Sure. But then you’re still relying on an accurate odometer. I assumed the question was how you do it when disputing one.
In the case of the article, the plaintiff is using prior vehicle mileage rates as countervailing evidence.
lol duh you’re right I definitely just kind of forgot the entire context for this discussion
If you don’t have an especially long commute, good chance you’re between 12k to 15k per year. That’s a typical yearly amount, and leases are usually set around there.
13k in six months is about twice the average.
Just did some math and surprisingly it’s actually a lot less! But I’m lucky in that I don’t have a particularly notable, regular commute. Looks I’m averaging about 5k/yr
Obviously UK consumer protection is different so they may not have the “feature” here, but cars get their milage recorded yearly (after the first 3 years) as part of roadworthiness testing, available online given the licence plate, so I can see I did 7041 miles in the last year.
Does the DMV not have something similar?
I imagine if I looked at the registration of the car it would have that information yes.
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.
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.
Oh perfect, that means I can resell this Tesla I’ve been using and abusing for dyno testing and other stationary things as having 0 miles driven! /s
I really doubt it, a lot of people would notice their odometer doing twice the work it should be doing.
I think the most likely explanation is someone wrote down the wrong value.
One person sure, but then they found lawyers who almost certainly asked for more information. So maybe your explanation is not the most likely.
If it’s his lawyers, they’ll take your money on the most ridiculous things.
You would think, but this guy didn’t lmao
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!
Good thing we have the CFPB to register and punish companies for shady practices like th…oh, nevermind.
deleted by creator
Or intentionally?
A odometer is a smell sensor, no?
That’s a smellometer!
Let’s use the Smelloscope!
They don’t install those in new cars, you need one made in the ol’factory.
No
But odor!
Hodor
How silly, it’s obvious that would be an odormeter. An odometer is about something else entirely.
Obviously!
In the past, Tesla lawyers even initiated lawsuits against customers who dared to criticize the quality of their cars or services. Such cases are documented and therefore not fake news. Last week, moreover, DOGE dismantled the department responsible for safety control and approval of new cars entering the market. Tesla experienced too many problems with this department in the past and now, through DOGE, took the opportunity to simply dismantle it. Moral of the story… buy a Tesla, a “safe” decision.
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.
Hah, I’m not convinced that interpretation is wrong. It’s weird how influential he’s been on the world, right?
I mean if this is that sort of simulation, he’s probably a player right?
Because he was born rich and failed up his entire life?
That’s true, but there are a lot of those people in the world, tens of thousands. Where are all they in the news? He seems different in some way, right? Do you know the name of the CEO of Hasbro or Ford or CocaCola? I bet they’re rich, I bet they grew up rich…
They’re smart enough to stay out of the spotlight and Elon isn’t.
Though Jim Farley, CEO of Ford, has a podcast. So perhaps not the best example.
So you think the main difference between Elon and other rich people is that other rich people keep a low profile?
So does that mean you think that other ultra wealthy people are just as influential (and damaging to the world) as Elon? Because I don’t doubt that the ultra wealthy are problematic in general, but I think Elon is worse, like in a big way. And he’s been changing a lot in the world for the last 20 years, like a lot more than literally anyone I can think of.
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.
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.
This is one case, right? If the judge finds against Tesla, everyone who had repairs occur within 10% or 20% of the warranty expiration date could be part of a class action suit, and probably that would be easy for them to win.
That’s 70 miles a day, for anyone who doesn’t want to do the math. I don’t know where Hinton lives, but that’s almost two laps around all of the highways surrounding the city I live in. That’s 2 hours of driving on surface roads, not including stop lights and stop signs.
I wonder how much money Tesla has saved by breaking the law this way?
Or about 11 swedish miles per day.
What Swedish mile?
The unity mile, of course. It’s 10,688.54 m.
What’s that in Ikea meatballs?
112 km a day, not a bad commute by Toronto standards - it’s one way for the Barrie to Toronto drivers
Sure, but it’s an additional 70 miles. Not something that would go unnoticed.
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 is bad.
It is weird that he probably saw Danny DeVito rolling back the odometers in Matilda while in a K hole and misconstrued the whole situation. That scene of Danny with the drill taking thousands of miles off an old beater probably seemed like a jackpot idea in that drug addled mind of his.
Hey man, drugs have nothing to do with his mind. It was that way before drugs were involved
“Tesla commits fraud to void warranties.”
There FTFY.
Changing your tire sizing only changes the speedo and odo a few percent. You can usually just ignore it unless you’re making drastic changes.
Yeah for the odo to do that, you need to put golf cart wheels on a Tesla.
Yeah aeems a pretty useless edit for an obvious fact. Especially as in this case you would need tires half the circumstance of the original to make sense… Gotta be some tiny tires…
Edit, had it the wrong way around
Hey Siri how do I convert from inches to circumstance
ha, ha, people getting screwed over by musk makes me laugh.
