Wherein I begin to describe for Elon Musk what his company should have done, versus what it did do.
I’ve struggled with this for several years now — though not all of that time was spent handling what I considered ‘urgent’ information. It has only been about eighteen months since I became seriously concerned about Tesla’s organizational management structure, and only three or four months about its approach to low charge states (low SOC) of the main system batteries of Tesla vehicles. I have for much longer than that been an active and ardent supporter of the company and of its famous leader.
The mass of information I am attempting to handle is essentially impossible to discuss with brevity in text; here I will deal with it using summaries which reflect what my assessments have been on the portions about which I’m aware. And a direct message of some length that I provided to Tesla personnel. A message which went largely unheeded.
[Note: I am actively seeking legal representation for a series of lawsuits against Tesla Motors, Inc. I will review information from firms prepared to represent me, but I require more than simply “go to” links. Tesla is not an organization which can be handled lightly, and as such I am hoping to discuss this matter in its length with a firm capable of rising to an occasion which may take many months. I would be happy to come to you. I am NOT at the present time interested in involving myself in class action suits brought by any other parties, and although I’m aware of some strong similarities in at least one of those cases, I will plainly assert my First Amendment rights if I am called to testify in any of those cases until further notice.]
This process has, thus far, been substantially easier than I expected. Prior to this morning, one of the more difficult parts was the oft-repeated accusation that I am “delusional,” “schizophrenic,” or “a liar.” Prior to this morning. Now such accusations are irrelevant to me, because I afforded them professional attention — just in case.
This certainly represents bullying, and it constitutes what Desmond Tutu described as “standing with the oppressor.”
It doesn’t matter that Elon himself represents the oppressed; a person cannot defend indefensible behaviors by carrying them forward and applying similarly flawed logic. I can’t conclusively know that he is fully aware of these events, but he has certainly developed an organization which relies on inappropriate management pressure and shortcuts to get things done. An organization which is largely deaf to the concerns voiced by its ad hoc software testing and marketing teams.
If that’s the way it must win, then let me be the first to say it should lose.
Cheaters never win, and winners never cheat. Regardless of the hypothetical wider ramifications. We don’t need a bully hero in this situation, we need people to start cooperating as though this were a situation more serious than a garden variety kitchen fire.
The most difficult part by far, however, has been the betrayal of people I considered my friends and confidants. People I counted on for input, and people whose interests I sought to protect — despite that doing so cost me additional hardship. People who are still silent enough to wake the dead. It is hard enough to move an elephant standing on a mouse’s tail without all the other mice opting to look the other way — earnestly in search of still more cheese to munch on or sock away. Virtue signaling down the road with smug grins on their faces because now no one will ever be able to pass them again.
I have named a few names elsewhere, but I’ve done so in a reasonably discreet fashion in virtually all cases; I’m not about to hate anyone for decisions they made, and it’s not my place to scold anyone other than to tell them quite bluntly that I’ve had enough now. I don’t spend my energy frivolously, and I’m not interested in talking with anyone who isn’t ready to take substantive action in a way that may right this ship.
I have decided not to be disappointed for the time I spent with people who might have done otherwise, but didn’t. Through them I find myself here, and I’m content with where I am in my life. I suppose if all of us didn’t feel the same way, we’d better strive to do things differently than we do. Whose fault is any of this but our own?
This morning I did report to an old friend, however. A psychologist who I’d talked with for some nine years, to at least offer the vocal few of you the chance of being correct in your assessments. Perhaps I was delusional. Perhaps I was overreacting. It would certainly make things easier if I were.
It’s too bad that I’m not, really. Had I been, perhaps this would all just blow away as easily it blew itself into my lap. My guess is that it won’t, at least not now it won’t. Tomorrow real law enforcement gets involved, the time was up when this post went live.
To begin:
This post is as brief an introduction to the underlying problem as I could reasonably make it. I am working on this issue with all of my time, and I have been for quite a number of weeks. The background study, for years.
The essential fact is that the Tesla battery management system has some sort of algorithmic firewall protecting the main traction battery from excessive discharge. This essentially protects a warranty-protected Tesla asset and can, in certain cases, fry a fully customer-owned part. This is what I have observed.
If such a firewall were the sole problem, it might not be a problem at all.
In fact, Tesla had some reason to institute the aforementioned code, if it is in fact the same code implemented during an over-the-air update which was designed to prevent the batteries themselves from catching fire. It seems as though it well may be. I can only speculate on that part, but I know that a device of some sort exists, and I know that said device certainly stood a nonzero chance of being the proximate cause of a part failure which Tesla personnel were willing to bill to me as a Model S owner. This is obviously some cause for concern, especially considering that they offered no plausible explanation for why what I specifically asserted to them could not — in their view — be the case. [This part comes later, but it is coming shortly.]
The overall issue is that this situation [existence of a software ‘firewall’ device of some sort], in conjunction with a few other conditions which are in some cases uniformly met, can result in the death or serious injury of drivers, occupants, or bystanders to the operation of certain Tesla Model S vehicles. While I suspect that the issue also applies to certain Model X vehicles, I can neither confirm nor deny that such is the case, because I haven’t thoroughly tested each model. Many of you are in the process of doing that.
[My advice in the interim is to keep your vehicles charged above 20%, and do not discharge them lower than that figure, as it appears that should provide a sufficient margin of error to ensure the code in question never activates. It is an excessively conservative margin of error, but having had my vehicle deactivate itself twice at low states of charge, and not being privy to the code itself, I cannot tell you what margin is safe.]
For reasons of intellectual property — both to Tesla and to myself — I will not discuss too many of the particulars at length here. I will simply refer you to the [second] report I made on the issue at 11:40PM Sunday, 1/12/20. I have copied it in its entirety below, with the exception of non-substantive alterations in grammar and wording, and substituting initials for employee names.
This report followed up a detailed incident report I offered Tesla on 1/3/20, and that followed a conversation I had with a service rep JW at the Henrietta service location on 12/18/19 and a couple conversations I had with the service manager, JL.
This message was first sent to JL, and subsequently forwarded to several other interested parties, including:
Who might have been acting on his own accord and in defiance of what good professional judgment would certainly seem to entail. Mr. McCarthy is the Tesla employee who I have confirmed has the highest level of seniority among those with whom I have directly discussed this issue.
I did relate the substance of these issues to JB Straubel via a LinkedIn connection we had, and a few minutes after I did so, he disconnected from me.
To: ITERATE¹
A writer’s fashion to consider lovingly bidding adieu to his car
Athena, also referred to as Athene, is a very important goddess of many things. She is goddess of wisdom, courage, inspiration, civilization, law and justice, strategic warfare, mathematics, strength, strategy, the arts, crafts, and skill.
I understand that I brought my car in the week before Christmas. I am sure when I did so I made it pretty clear that I wasn’t [at the time couldn’t be] in a rush to have it fixed. That was disclosed, JL. I’m not suggesting that my personal considerations should have any negative impact on the way you run your operations — as a customer, there’s a limit to what I can reasonably expect that you do. I couldn’t, for example, say, “Ah, I’m going on vacation to Puerto Rico for six months. Hold on to it for me and fix it in June.”
That isn’t what happened, however.
We both know that what happened is JW handled the base diagnostic very promptly. I brought it in on the night of 12/16 and by 12/18 or thereabouts he had an initial (second) diagnosis. He had apparently attempted replacement of the 12V battery and when that didn’t resolve the issue, he traced the problem to the DC to DC converter and concluded not simply that it was broken but that that was the root of the issue.
I will note here again that I have been skeptical about this conclusion as the root of the problem from the beginning. This doesn’t mean JW (or anyone else, for that matter) was lying or that he is a bad person. It just means that one of us is currently mistaken.
The point on which all of this clearly hinges is who is?
The fairest and least obnoxious way for me to approach this is to plainly and politely tell you from the outset that I seriously doubt whether you or anyone else can show that I am the one who has it materially wrong.
If you can, none of this is particularly a big deal, because that’s what I’m most interested in seeing at this point: proof that I am mistaken. As distinct from being reassured that I am incorrect. Reassurances mean very little to me in comparison to proof. I don’t depend on them readily, because they tend to involve interests which may (or very much may not be) my own.
To be clear, I’m not accusing anyone of anything at this point. However, I know that when judgment is involved, mistakes can be made. I know that when mistakes are made in the context of an environment where the repercussions for those mistakes are not uniformly considered fair and honest, the incentive exists to fail or partially fail to disclose those mistakes. Again in the interests of self. Because this is related to a field I study, I also know that such an environment is not conducive to some metrics of long term success.
It’s not ‘rubbing anyone’s nose’ in anything to say that a company which I love cannot have any such thing involved in it to any appreciable degree. Therefore it follows that at this point, I will determine conclusively whether it has such a thing — unfairness — involved in it, and if so, thereafter take its measure. At that point I’ll have another decision in front of me, but that point is not right now. However the general feeling of urgency might erroneously indicate, that point is not right at this moment.
If at all possible, what I’d like to avoid is further escalation of things. Unfortunately, what I know from experience — and what you are also I’m sure quite well aware — is that rushing creates errors which might readily have been avoided.
Urgency prompts rushing and rushing increases errors. Errors handled poorly foster mistakes which become problems, and problems which persist create risk to the long term success of endeavors.
Which means that the long term success of Tesla — which I am by any measure an unusually ardent supporter of — and my long term willingness to engage in support of an effort I consider having a very reasonable chance of success are both currently at risk in my eyes.
The reason is simple:
I consider the existence of mismanagement via unfairness to be a mortal threat to a company, and by extension a mortal threat to the assurance I have that I am supporting a winning team versus a losing one. In that order.
That’s not holding anything over anyone’s head, either. It’s just an advocate trying to figure out what exactly is going on. I can hardly be faulted for striving to do so considering that the balance of my time is expended in the interests of this: support of your company. I’m taking the measures which I can reasonably be expected to take in order to reassure myself that I’m spending my time and efforts in the way I think they ought to be spent. No one would be able to take such a liberty from me without killing either themselves or me in the process.
Besides which, I’m not defending myself so much as I’m taking up a defense.
This is a serious issue, particularly because if you’re like most people you’re probably adding the additional mistake of believing I’m stalling, joking, or otherwise playing games. You might readily misperceive all of this to be a threat from me rather than a threat in general.
That would complicate matters greatly, especially in light of the fact that it’s taken me the better part of a week to frame this portion — my portion — of the discussion. In essence to let cooler heads prevail, but which might as I said have honestly been misperceived. Which thusly might well have been understandably (albeit mistakenly) aggravating to you as an employee who has plenty of things to do.
Being mistakenly aggrieved is among the most counterproductive wastes of energy there is, and it’s also a place where trouble can either begin or end.
I think you well notice a threat exists. My previous email (1/3) was written in plain enough English for anyone familiar with these kinds of topics to understand that product liability is at least in some sense involved. This is not at all an attempt to gain attention for me, but rather to draw attention to an issue which I consider genuinely alarming. In the context of working at what amounts to a fan club, I can get why you might make that mistake as well.
When a threat exists, fight or flight happens. It happens and there’s basically no way around it. I don’t regard that to be a problem, per se, but rather an opportunity to fight together rather than against one another. Fleeing isn’t an option this time. If we correctly identify the threat which exists (rather than conflate the threat which exists with the customer who has taken time and strenuous efforts to point it out) we stand a reasonable chance of successfully addressing it and thereby altering the course of things.
Unfortunately, the possibility of misperception is extremely high in this situation: you absolutely could and very reasonably might believe that because you work for a ‘fan club’ and because you’re clearly dealing with an ardent supporter you’re correspondingly dealing with a fan: Someone who anxiously awaits his opportunity for a vis-à-vis with your boss.
If that’s the case, I can tell you right now you better get it straight in your mind. I am a ‘fan’ of sustainability. I am a ‘fan’ of doing things properly. I am a fan of Tesla as a company because Tesla is the company which, in my estimation, is doing things I support in a fashion very closely in line with the way I believe they ought to be done. I’m a fan of Elon Musk, but mostly as an obvious proxy. In other words, I am not a person who conflates things very readily. It makes it very difficult to get to the root of problems.
I certainly love the guy. I love the things he’s largely been responsible for bringing to fruition, and I love the fact that he’s willing to take the amount of flak that he does — more than half of which I consider undeserved. I don’t relish the thought of concluding that, at the end of the day, he is the one responsible for any of this, but that doesn’t mean I don’t consider it a possibility. In the unlikely event that he is, then I guess I’ll have the tête-à-tête you could be forgiven for thinking I want. If he isn’t, that’s plenty fair too.
However, one way or another I’ll have my resolution. It doesn’t matter whether you or he or anyone else thinks I can’t get to it, because I will most assuredly do so. My tone here should sufficiently indicate a capacity for restraint, and perhaps also suggest I’m only willing to use the amount of force which is necessary to ensure the concerns herein are addressed — even if I were not also explicitly telling you that such is the case. In the unfortunate event this still does not convince you it isn’t worth testing the resolve of someone who has utterly limitless quantities of it, please at least know that the only thing doing so would accomplish at this point would be to waste your own time and marginally delay the inevitable, because it won’t bother me in the slightest.
I live to support the things I believe in. That means this isn’t work for me, which is a simple way of saying I consider it neither laborious nor something I need some sort of additional reward to keep right on doing. Nor must it be convenient, or otherwise an activity which carries no challenge.
It hardly bears mentioning that I won’t ever tire of something I take a great deal of pride in and enjoyment from, but I’ll say it anyway because by offering full disclosure you should be able to easily determine that attempting to exert pressure of any kind on me is a futile endeavor. Which in particular includes attempting to extort my liberties from me, which is a description which would readily explain a few things. One of the ugliest and worst kinds of offense, in my view.
To continue where I in some sense left off:
This is a de-escalation letter, NOT an escalation letter. I can gather that you’re anxious about the situation, and one reason it was best to take my time (in general and here) is because I know how the endocrine system works and I know that the effects of adrenalin and cortisol are time-mediated. They subside over time. Why not let cooler heads prevail?
But that wasn’t what happened, either, not exactly.
What happened was repairs proceeded without my authorization, and once they were ostensibly complete, I was informed that when those repairs were certified I had — I think it was — four days to pick up my car, after which a storage fee of $35/day was built into the contract in some way.
I recognize that to be a lever, and I know how levers work. However, I also realize attempts to leverage someone who has leverage on you when they already know they have such leverage will never succeed. It’s similar to standing on a board and trying to pick it up: it just is not going to happen.
Contrary to possible suspicion, I don’t say that to be cute, either. I say it because I’m attempting to illustrate by example what to the nth degree careful thinking under pressure might look like. That should accomplish at least the purposes of:
- helping you determine for yourself that if you classify me as an adversary, you can be sure I will not likely miss anything particularly salient
- helping you correspondingly determine that if it were within my interests to fight you, I could likely do so with an extreme degree of effectiveness
- making the conclusion that I don’t want anything particularly simple (which notably includes fighting) rather easy to arrive at
The lever in question cannot be effective. The reason it can’t be is because the chief concern I had — which was abundantly expressed in an email (1/3) which the balance of probability indicates predated even the repairs which were made — has still neither been answered nor otherwise addressed.
And even though I am well aware that a comprehensive [read: legal] consideration of your (and by extension the company’s) options would certainly involve questioning the assertion in the above paragraph, it doesn’t even matter whether you take it as a given that such is not the case, because the storage costs aren’t the primary thing at issue here anyway.
In other words, it doesn’t even matter whether you [Tesla] could successfully make the legal argument that I owe the company for storage fees, and if so, were at full liberty to determine the date on which those storage fees should commence. The consideration of that component of this issue is, strictly speaking, irrelevant.
[I will pick up again at the conversation I had with JW on 12/18 or thereabouts.]
The conversation we had was quite direct and rather brief. I’ll not take the time to check the exact date and the length of the conversation, nor to recall the precise words. I did not feel that all of my conversations with Tesla repair personnel let alone Tesla representatives in general should be recorded. I have a lot of faith in the company and its people, and this hasn’t shaken my faith one whit. I realize people make mistakes. I’m just one of the few people who also realize it’s better to exclude as best we can the additional mistake of wasting a lot of time and effort making sure they’re held accountable. Especially not before we figure out conclusively why what happened happened.
JW told me that it was the DC to DC, and after a pained pause informed me that it was a $1600 replacement part — which would also require an hour or two of labor. I understandably took pause myself, and then quickly Googled for replacement parts — used — finding one for $600 instantly on Ebay. I asked JW if it were possible to use such a part and he told me that he would have to check with you. I thanked him, at some point told him that I would try to write up the concerns I had by that Friday, and we thereafter concluded the call.
That point was pretty obviously the next point of decision. Certainly if he were going to check with you, the acknowledgement that he would do so as well as the action of thereafter completing the task both indicate that he well understood that the next decision I would make as a customer was predicated on the results of the query. Which correspondingly means that failing any other contact with me, no repairs to the car should or would proceed. No “conditional authorization” was made, nor could such a possibility be reasonably considered as having merit: there would be very little utility in offering such an authorization considering the fact that I could easily be and had already easily been accessible by phone — even if we exclude the fact that I am not only a person who considers things very carefully but that I had had, at that point, hardly any time with which to do so.
The holiday season delayed the process of detailing my concerns, which I ultimately completed on the afternoon of Friday, 1/3. Having had no further contact from anyone at Tesla to that point, on the afternoon of 1/3 I notified JL my concerns were on the way, confirming via a text exchange precisely where I should send them. I sent them via email at 3:37 pm on 1/3/20 and I can reasonably assume they arrived promptly. Not only because it’s electronic correspondence, but because had they not done so despite being expected for some time and expected to arrive with some immediacy, as a diligent manager JL might well have noticed and taken a moment to remind me. [When I spoke with him afterwards, he neither said nor even suggested that my email arrived later than Friday afternoon, quite the contrary. He told me that two individuals had read it, that in looking at it both of them had apparently concluded he should read it, and that at least one of them notified him after they had done so. He did not tell me when they did so, but the fact that it was prior to the repairs being done is all but completely self-evident: those repairs were never authorized, and the only reasonable chance they might have proceeded by conditional authorization would have been for such an authorization to be within that email, which it most assuredly was not.]
This is the part that gets tricky. Recall that we are still at 3:37 PM, 1/3/20.
I cannot conclusively determine the root reason why the subsequent events didn’t proceed in the fashion which they might reasonably have been expected to, but I know that ultimately they didn’t. What follows is my speculation on why they might not have proceeded the way I expected, but bear in mind it is speculation. It doesn’t rise to the level of an accusation, it merely represents what it appears to me might have happened versus what I could and did reasonably expect.
I think at some point JW must have determined that Tesla does not allow its technicians to use parts other than brand new Tesla parts. I don’t know when this was, but it seems possible that he knew even at the point of our 12/18 conversation (which is to say before that conversation.) JW’s demeanor is pleasant, he seems a diligent worker, I observed that before he told me the price of the replacement part he took pause, and I think that was because he knew how hard the news would hit me. He was operating from a difficult position; he knew it was the holiday season, he had access to my car and from that access he could probably easily ascertain that I am not especially wealthy: I had a well-worn and not particularly valuable car, etc. I would hardly blame him if — even if he knew the policy when we spoke — he couldn’t bring himself to tell me the bad news at the time. In fact, if that’s what happened, I’m kind of glad he didn’t tell me. That’s the kind of white lie people can be expected to make from time to time if they have any heart at all. JW’s position was defensible by ethos and pathos if not by logos. It may not have been the right decision, but it certainly was as understandable one.
Anyway, at some point he knew the policy. He also knew that I would be sending an email, and perhaps my delay in doing so was the proximate cause of the repair delay in general. It seems pretty likely that it could have been. Maybe JW was waiting on that message in the hopes that it might change something — it’s quite possible. Perhaps he thought that that would be the time someone would have to inform me that if Tesla service were going to complete the repairs, those repairs would have to be completed with a new Tesla part. In any case, my message was delayed, no one informed me of the policy, and by the time I sent my concerns it was 1/3, rather than the overly optimistic 12/20 estimate that I told JW it might be done.
I think JL and/or JW might well have been wondering what my repair concerns were. It would not surprise me in the slightest if the email I sent on Friday (1/3) were both received and read on that day. I have seen extreme diligence from Tesla employees too many times to think email boxes aren’t checked fairly religiously. In concert with the facts that I had notified JL it would be coming, that the two of them had already discussed my case, that my car had at that point been in service — to JW’s eyes fully diagnosed and ready to be repaired — for two full weeks, the contents of the email I sent, and the likelihood of internal pressures from Tesla to get vehicles in and out the door, it appears to me that the sequence after I sent my message most likely followed this course:
- one or more Tesla employees read the message relatively quickly
- JL became informed of the contents of my email and recognized a cogent threat of product liability contained within it
- all parties involved in the decision about whether or not to repair the car with the new Tesla part — with the notable exception of the owner — guessed that the repairs should proceed despite the owner’s concerns, and as such to some degree countermanding the owner’s wishes
What appears most likely is that these things taken together:
a. the Tesla policy which does not allow extraneous parts (not even parts salvaged from Tesla vehicles) to be used by service personnel in repairs
b. the Tesla policy which generally or formally (through the use of metrics, for example) incentivizes the rapid repair of vehicles
c. the normal urgency with which people demand the return of their vehicles
d. JL and/or JW’s awareness of how difficult it is for a customer placed in a position such as that one — i.e. the awareness of the cost of opting against repair with a brand new part, possibly to retrieve the car and take it elsewhere — and their appraisal that I would not likely be able to afford such
…and probably a few more things which I’m at the moment forgetting — led JL to make the executive decision to order the repairs to proceed immediately.
At the time he probably suspected that once repairs were done — once I knew both what the prevailing policies and comparison costs of taking my car elsewhere were — I would be glad that my car had returned to basic working order, even though I never did authorize the repairs which were done to it. He might have considered our exchanges and determined that I seemed genial and understanding enough that I’d overlook such a liberty — especially considering the fact that had it not been done the way it was done I’d almost certainly end up paying more anyway.
And I can guess what you’re probably expecting me to say at this point, but I’m not going to say it. Because I don’t conduct myself like other people and I don’t plan to use this opportunity to start acting like it.
I don’t blame JL, exactly, for doing that — if that’s an accurate appraisal of what happened. Nor would I blame a person put in the position I illustrated above for doing such a thing. I wouldn’t argue that’s what they should do, but I wouldn’t and don’t blame them — not them, exactly — when they do.
My argument is that people should not be placed in such a position, and that’s an argument I’m willing to defend far more strenuously than even the twenty minutes you’ve just granted me might indicate.
The point is, if something like that did in fact happen, it wasn’t my fault or JL’s fault or JW’s fault either. It was Tesla’s fault.
When you put people in bad positions, you get bad results out of them, it’s that simple.
This leaves the predicament I alluded to further above: I can’t directly forgive a company nor can I continue to support the company in question until at least I know conclusively why these issues arose. That’s why, as I mentioned earlier, I’m going to need a sensible explanation.
In lieu of an explanation, I will understandably withdraw my support, and in such case, I will invariably relinquish that support back to the community at large(r) and that will bring us right back to the conflict in question.
The bottom line is that my concerns — the concerns in the email I sent — will have to be addressed. I’m not going to delineate them exhaustively at the moment, but I will summarize what they are in brief:
- It’s quite possible this situation arose as the proximate result of a battery management system issue which serves to protect the company financially in preference over the customer
- It’s also possible that not only are the already-completed repairs ineffective at solving the root problem, but that the root problem is a problem which could ultimately kill me and/or someone else.
- The most obvious similar precedent to this situation is the 2014 GM ignition switch recall, summarized on wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch_recalls
- A bystander — someone who knows not the half of what any of the people likely to read this correspondence knows about Tesla — might easily regard all of these as extremely reasonable concerns and the approach I’ve taken to address them as both thoughtful and reasonable in itself.
- Taken in the context of everything else here, the fact of (4) appears to suggest that I personally don’t have to force anyone to do anything, but that as a consequence of (2) if not (3) if not both of them taken together, time will do it regardless. Which basically means if I wait more than is necessary or reasonable, I’ll be partially culpable for whatever might happen — which is not something I can or will allow to happen.
Together, all of this means that regardless of whether you consider the issue to be a threat or not, it should be abundantly clear that *I* very much DO consider it a threat, and virtually any reasonable person who sees what I have here roughly illustrated will do the same. Reassurances notwithstanding.
Which correspondingly means someone else could find the issue in question as readily as I found it, they will find it eventually, and from there it seems fair to guess they won’t take the approach I have. More likely they’ll just attempt to leverage it for financial gain. Whether the inferences are correct or not, it looks like they may be and that’s all fear, uncertainty, and doubt needs to work reasonably well.
It isn’t up to me to decide and it isn’t up to you either. It’s up to Tesla management to conclusively prove I am mistaken. Either that or let time and additional pressure on me force the hand — “chips fall where they may.”
[As a final note, it obviously isn’t worth further threatening me with ‘continued costs’ and it isn’t worth even trying to incentivize me with anything other than the solution to this puzzle — which, to be clear, looks to me like a software problem and one which might potentially be fixed somewhat readily via a software update. Additionally, I would like to ask that continued correspondence follow a written format whenever possible, and that you or someone else would confirm three things for me, the first by Tuesday (1/14/20), the second by Wednesday (1/15/20), and the third no later than Friday (1/17/20), in each case by 5:00pm respectively:
- that the above message was received and reviewed in its entirety, as well as when it was received, when it was reviewed, and by whom
- that the aforementioned storage costs will be waived in due consideration of the complexity of this situation, and that I will be notified via electronic correspondence as such
- that the concerns above have been forwarded upward or laterally and to whom. You need not provide me with the email information of those parties, but I do want to know whether they left your desk, if so when and where they went, and if not, why not.
If the dates and times associated with these three requests do not seem reasonable, please let me know as soon as possible the reasons why further delays may be necessary.
I look forward to hearing from you soon, though I realize this isn’t something which can necessarily be dealt with quickly.
Thank you for your time.
Brian Kent
The message above was quite lengthy, but it was also quite substantive and it followed a similarly detailed incident report which, as mentioned toward the close of the above message, a reasonable person might well be concerned about.
JL failed to meet each of those deadlines, which were designed specifically to ensure that the problem be isolated to parties to whom I could approach for a resolution without unnecessarily alarming anyone. At that point, I still considered that there may well be a sensible explanation for the situation, but it is quite noteworthy that none was ever provided me. Not verbally, and not in written fashion. I received only assurances.
Thus I continue to be understandably alarmed during the continuing operation of what is otherwise a perfectly good vehicle.
I had no choice but to escalate the matter, and in response, Tesla continued to behave more and more unreasonably. For now, the above information should be sufficient to illustrate the significance of my concerns. The next post will contain the substance of the initial incident report, the narrative of which I filed precisely as I would have had I been serving in the role of professional software tester for Tesla — a general role I served for four years at Angel Studios, an Interactive Entertainment company based in Carlsbad, California.
Life and property threatening exceptions must necessarily be triaged immediately, unless the veracity of those concerns is questionable.
Tesla did not have a choice but to answer a customer bringing it such information, because it clearly did not know that the code it put in place to protect customers and their assets could ultimately kill them or seriously damage their property. I sought to inform them of the issue, not to leverage my knowledge of it for any sort of personal gain.
I am sorry I was forced to make this information public — because it’s certainly possible that the risk I know is there has a low enough probability of occurrence that it just will not happen very often or just can’t happen with many of the vehicles or might happen only in the most impossibly rare cases, however…
If you have not handled the exception cases sufficiently, and you have no means of collecting those cases, quantifying, evaluating, and subsequently making a defined decision to address them or not to, you are behaving irresponsibly. Your software is not and cannot be shown to be reliable enough for customers to uniformly rely on it, and the question becomes
Where do you draw the line?
In the forward-looking case of autonomous vehicles, it hardly bears mentioning that NO ONE at Tesla has the right to make determinations like these without the public’s full knowledge and say so.
More on these events tomorrow, same time.
Thank you for the long read. If you are an attorney such as I’ve stated above, please use the contact email: negativecarbonroadtrip@gmail.com with the subject heading, “Representation” appended with your physical location.
