I’m old school so an odometer should never do anything other than measure wheel rotations with a multiplier of circumference of the tire.
Maybe if you wanna get fancy have the multiplier occasionally recalibrated based on GPS but that’s it.
this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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Yeah, I think smart/honest engineers do it exactly like that.
The GPS validates the physical rotation data, corrects for errors. That's why the standard of accuracy has improved in the last 10 years.
Wait, isn’t tinkering with odometers like super fucking illegal in europe?
It's supposed to be in the US also.
It's trivially easy to discover odometer tampering in the USA, and the law is actually enforced.
Carfax, for instance, will automatically flag if any data point has the odometer lower its mileage. Each time a car is brought in for service or sold, the mileage is recorded. If any of the datapoints do not advance logically, the car is flagged and all sorts of liability questions arise.
If Carfax can purchase the data, I'm certain that insurers do, too. Insurance is legally mandatory, and the corporations don't want to cover the cost of insuring a car with a cooked odometer (and unknown true mileage).
That only catches the end user tempering with the odometer to lower it. It doesn't do anything to catch the manufacturer artificially advancing it.
Very accurate. Most anti-tamp protections watch for lowering. Because who in their right mind would increase the mileage, right? :)
No reasonable manufacturer would do that. A manufacturer would be caught if they did that and -- oh wait shit that's exactly what happened
None of the anti-tamper measurements that are based on odometer readings would catch this, it simply measures how many revolutions the wheels are doing, multiplies that with a set value depending on the wheel circumference, and increments the odometer value accordingly. For Teslas, that number is 742 revolutions per mile.
If the Tesla software would "accidentally" set itself to lets say 450 revolutions per mile, your odometer would simply start ticking up a mile for every 0.6 miles you actually travel.
The only way to catch that is to use a GPS to measure how far you've actually travelled and do a comparison. Good thing for Tesla, GPS is an extremely rare technology nobody has access to, and with EVs, nobody ever even notices such things as "range" and "distance traveled".
Oh, right. So uh, how exactly did they think they wouldn't get immediately caught..?
That's what fucks me up here! XD
Tesla is probably the most closely watched auto manufacturer on earth. And it's mostly fans! So like, friendly faces doing hypermileage content or commenting to other friendly fans about their fuel savings...
The video I linked is literally a Tesla fan being like "oh wait, it skipped a mile, what the fuck, did it always do that?"
I suspect... hubris.
They've - and really - Musk - have gotten away with so much for so long....
I would hope so. I would not be surprised that this is a US special…
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One of the drivers mentioned in this article has a youtube video showing his odometer going from 124,999 to 125,001, completely skipping 125,000. One of the comments asks him to reach out to the law firm handling the class action lawsuit, but the owner replies with:
Happy to help if you're interested in paying a consultation fee for my time-- but otherwise these actions only enrich the law firms and I'm not volunteering to do that.
This mindset is so frustrating. Class action lawsuits are legit, they hold companies accountable and they pay out cash to people. To say that they only enrich law firms is not just wrong, but I think actually harmful to repeat like he has, especially in the great age of enshittification where everything tries to force binding arbitration agreements into every contract and agreement.
Possibly comes from experience with the shitty ones. I was involved in one for a now-defunct tech school I went to and all I got out of it was like $100. I didn't have to put any time into it but that certainly didn't make me whole.
I'd be a lot of money that the excuse is just a lie he thinks make him sound like the good person he knows he is not.
I mean, the guy is not wrong. Class actions lawsuits have notoriously low payout while law firms pocket millions.
However, it's a tool to hold companies somewhat accountable.
The guy should join a class action lawsuit so that Tesla stop their fuckery, but it is understandable that he doesn't want to spend time on that considering the shitty payout.
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Well if the law firm pay 20 cents check after making millions, what's the point.
The point is that the company being sued has to pay those millions in the first place. The law firm does pay itself rather well for that work, but I'd consider class actions to be one of the more defensible legal actions.
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That's soooo many felonies, but Trump will just pardon them.
No wonder he was worried about going to prison if Kamala won.
influencer
We need to call them what they are; shills.
Seriously. This dude is delusional.
The law firm going after Tesla for this offered to represent him via a class action, and this idiot has the gall to ask the law firm for payment?
The world would be better off if his Tesla self-drove itself into a wall. Ideally with him inside.
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Can't argue with that XD
His main deal is that he does Tesla stuff. His website is "Tesla Pittsburgh," so yeah, he's a Tesla guy.
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I admit I didn’t watch the video — I’ve trained YouTube’s algorithm well at this point and don’t want Tesla content — but what the fuck is a predictive odometer? The tires roll a certain distance. We’ve had odometers for like 75 years.
The article mentions that Tesla is kind of justifying the behavior by saying it is based on energy consumption and some other bullshit. The expectation according to SAE, which I find very interesting, is to be in a range of +/- 4% and for GPS enabled odometers+/- 2.5%, Tesla is missing the mark for at least 36%.
So we traded a proven, reliable, physical laws based method (wheel roll) in favor of unreliable electronics. Nice.
You've summed up every aspect of the Tesla. Especially now that real car companies are taking EVs seriously.
Reinventing the wheel.
Literally. And it sucks. There's reasons they don't do it like this anymore.
Man, something I love is un-steering by simply reducing my grip against the wheel so it slowly resets to neutral, my hand's friction making sure it doesn't do so suddenly. This shit ass shape would make that impossible. It's like they hate driving.
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That makes your warranty expire faster. It's not in the users favor.
Electronics can be extremely reliable, but Tesla chose to be sleezebags.
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The video shows it going like 14999 to 15001 skipping 15000.
You'd think they would make it increment every half mile instead of doing something stupid like this.
Yeah if you're gonna do a fraud at least put the minimum thought into it. It's disrespectful is what it is. Gives honest grifters a bad name
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Amazing the Tesla dev team that made this was dumb enough to actually put it in the UI in real-time. Just updates the mileage behind the scenes in data, then only update the UI slowly along the way. Not actually double counting in the UI visibly fast lmaoo
Edit: fine maybe it was a product team or whatever. Someone somewhere made the decision NOT to decouple real-time mileage data from the UI lol
You think the dev team made the decision about this?
Also if I'm the dev on this project and I've been told to do this, this is exactly how to implement it. Malicious compliance baybeee
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A product that has a warranty which depends on any "predictive" metric is probably a scam, tbh.
Their insurance is (was?) kind of like that as well if you get the saftey score one. While some things are more general and concrete like following distance, time of day driving, they have one for forward collision warnings.
I'm not sure how much time you've spent in a Tesla, but that system is notorious for going off incorrectly. It's specifically really bad with parked cars on the side of the road on turns. So you're driving along a city street with cars parked on the side and it goes off and now your insurance premiums are more expensive.
I don't think you could find a single Tesla owner who hasn't had multiple false warnings, and consistently in certain circumstances.
So someone of course starts a lawsuit and Tesla initially defends itself, but just last week or something like that, it's no longer part of the safety score
What in the actual hell is a "Predictive" odometer?
"Whenever you want to scam people as a company, just invent some fancy words that sound like innovation" odometer
It predicts that Tesla could save money by padding the numbers, and does a little fraud automagically
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