Tesla remotely converts battery pack, cutting 1/3 of range

--------Transcript of tweets, for those that don't want to go to birdsite--------

Tesla really fires me up sometimes.

I have a customer who's the ~3rd owner of a 2013 Model S 60.

At some point years ago the battery pack was swapped under warranty with a 90 pack. It wasn't software limited. It was effectively made into a 90 by Tesla.

Years went by.

Car is sold twice since, and now has a new owner (my customer). It says 90, badged 90, has 90-type range.

He has the car for a few months, goes in and does a paid MCU2 upgrade at Tesla after the 3G shutdown.

All goes well. The upgrade is done, car is working fine.

Later on, while the car is parked in his driveway, Tesla calls him to tell him that they found and fixed a configuration mistake with his car.

They remotely software locked the car to be a 60 again, despite having been a 90 for years.

He now has ~80 miles less range.

Furious, he demands they restore it back to the way it was, and they refuse. "We can unlock it for $4,500."

This guy bought a car, & years later Tesla reaches in remotely with no warning and literally cuts his usable range by a third!

(I confirmed story w/logs)

Imagine walking out to your car to find it's now 1/3rd as good as it was 15 minutes ago, and Tesla making it out like this is a good thing! They fixed the problem!

What do you do?

He tried for a while with them with no progress.

I try to help, but without completely disconnecting the car from Tesla, when I change it back to a 90 their "teleforce" bot reaches in remotely and flips it back to a 60 within moments. There's hacky ways around this, but none are ideal.

Tesla won't help him at all.

Honestly, this is pretty f*cked up.

Guy had no way to know that this was going to be done by Tesla. They basically robbed him & are demanding a ransom to get back what he had before.

That's just wrong.

@Tesla @elonmusk - Do better on this and make it right. DM for VIN.

"I feel like this is more mundane on Tesla's part than many are making it out to be. A mistake was made years ago. An employee recently discovered and "fixed" it. Terrible communication and customer service, but nefarious? Nah."

At this point I feel like terrible communication and service is an intentional business strategy for some companies who found that by making support so baroque as to be inaccessible or just eliminating it entirely that they can slash costs accordingly. I do consider it to be nefarious in such cases.

Software locks themselves are nefarious. Is it the owner's car, or Tesla's?

Maybe. Maybe not.

If I sold you my car, and I wanted my stereo but forgot it, the first sale doctrine covers the whole thing as delivered. If I was to go to the car, while in your ownership and possession, and attempt to remove the stereo, you'd call the cops for vehicular theft.

That's because it's covered under first sale doctrine. And being a vehicle (unlike most other goods) has an attached ownership registered with the state in the forms of a registration.

Previously, that was simple. I sell you X; you pay agreed price; we trade green paper for thing. Now, with remotely tied crap, people have no say on their properly owned things. That 3rd party who controls the software can do whateverthefuck they want - and that's because copyright and software erodes actual ownership.

In reality, this "correction" on Tesla's part is no different if I decided to keep a hole in my previous company's servers, and then "reach in" for extra-legal 'modifications'. This should be a federal crime, including interstate commerce clause, wire fraud, and hacking. People should go to prison for this kind of thing. - and I'm talking about C levels, not ground-level techs.

I'll spare the moral judgements against Tesla for this:

The real moral of the story here is that if your business plan and practices is creating occasional weird issues and huge cognitive dissonance in your customers, it's the wrong business plan. Also... the number of people this applies to is likely so low that Tesla really screwed up by not erring on the side of the customer. (They didn't buy from Tesla, but they're still a customer buying servicing from them.) If the bad publicity alone causes even a tiny fraction of the population to choose another manufacturer, the've lost their $4,500 and then some.

Harmony is a really underrated concept. When things are harmonious, you don't have problems like this, and you can still make money.