Please don't make it worse by being negative about negativity. The only thing that works is to post the kind of thing we want here: curious, informative, thoughtful. When so inspired.

It's parsimonious of me, but "hacker" includes the idea of "pushing hardware into uses not intended by the manufacturer."

This is an API that's being straight-up handed to you by the manufacturer, a manufacturer that historically has had a challenged relationship with the various hacker communities that have formed around their products.

Do you really think this was originally a planned feature by Tesla? That some cynical marketing manager sat down ans though "if we do this we'll get X impressions leading to Y new sales, lets allocate 0.7FTE engineers to the task"?

I very much doubt the design requirement for the Model X include a specification for "muat be able to produce Christmas shows". This sure looks like some engineer had a spurt of creativity, which qualifies to "hacking" to me.

If Ford made the lights on some cars flash, would it be a mega corp trying to go viral, or the hacker spirit alive and well?

I like it, the the cynical angle has some merit.

There is an awesome GitHub repo with lots of cool stuff to hack on for Christmas on millions of electric cars. This is about as hacker worthy as it gets.

Is it not possible for an individual engineer within Ford to have some creativity? To hack on something they weren't supposed to? Not every output from a company is top-down, corporate-overload, profit maximizing.

Well it fucking sucks, what do you want?

If this was a jailbreak to control the lights, people would be a lot more excited. Tesla closes off their hardware to hackers - not exactly the spirit of hacker news