this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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A Tesla influencer randomly caught his odometer double-counting mileage on video. Wild.

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[–] Jaysyn@lemmy.world 26 points 19 hours ago

That's soooo many felonies, but Trump will just pardon them.

No wonder he was worried about going to prison if Kamala won.

[–] riodoro1@lemmy.world 107 points 1 day ago (14 children)

Wait, isn’t tinkering with odometers like super fucking illegal in europe?

[–] bluewing@lemm.ee 75 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's supposed to be in the US also.

[–] KayLeadfoot@fedia.io 20 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

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).

[–] BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 23 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] KayLeadfoot@fedia.io 8 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 8 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

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..?

[–] KayLeadfoot@fedia.io 5 points 17 hours ago

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?"

[–] a4ng3l@lemmy.world 10 points 1 day ago

I would hope so. I would not be surprised that this is a US special…

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[–] noxypaws@pawb.social 166 points 1 day ago (8 children)

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.

[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 16 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 90 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Sounds like he's more loyal to Tesla than to the consumers it hurt

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[–] raltoid@lemmy.world 20 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Croquette@sh.itjust.works 19 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] kungen@feddit.nu 5 points 23 hours ago

Another side is that you're also bound to their agreement. If the law firm was too soft on them, tough luck.

In an ideal world, we'd have government agencies prosecuting illegal stuff (and putting huge fines back into the economy) instead of hoping that private law firms will do a class action, but oh well.

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[–] crystalmerchant@lemmy.world 49 points 1 day ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (3 children)

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

[–] riodoro1@lemmy.world 27 points 1 day ago (2 children)

You think the dev team made the decision about this?

[–] eepydeeby@lemmy.blahaj.zone 7 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] gamer@lemm.ee 4 points 19 hours ago

Wrong answer. If your employer orders you to commit odometer fraud, you quit and you sue. Never break the law for your employer.

[–] hovercat@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 19 hours ago

At a minimum they went along with it. "I was just following orders" is never an acceptable answer.

[–] purplemonkeymad@programming.dev 3 points 19 hours ago

Ui team probably not connected to milage cheating team. This is the kind of thing you can't do test cases for, so unexpected "bugs" will get out.

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[–] clashorcrashman@lemmy.zip 53 points 1 day ago (4 children)

What in the actual hell is a "Predictive" odometer?

[–] theneverfox@pawb.social 11 points 20 hours ago

It predicts that Tesla could save money by padding the numbers, and does a little fraud automagically

[–] Saleh@feddit.org 31 points 1 day ago

"Whenever you want to scam people as a company, just invent some fancy words that sound like innovation" odometer

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[–] ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 92 points 1 day ago (10 children)

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.

[–] ogeist@lemmy.world 83 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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%.

[–] SavageCreation@lemmy.world 79 points 1 day ago (13 children)

So we traded a proven, reliable, physical laws based method (wheel roll) in favor of unreliable electronics. Nice.

[–] Croquette@sh.itjust.works 8 points 23 hours ago

Electronics can be extremely reliable, but Tesla chose to be sleezebags.

[–] Duamerthrax@lemmy.world 57 points 1 day ago (6 children)

You've summed up every aspect of the Tesla. Especially now that real car companies are taking EVs seriously.

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[–] Cypher@lemmy.world 109 points 1 day ago (6 children)

influencer

We need to call them what they are; shills.

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[–] besselj@lemmy.ca 66 points 1 day ago (1 children)

A product that has a warranty which depends on any "predictive" metric is probably a scam, tbh.

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