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

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

#321

Post by rurp »

1shooner wrote: post #161
infogulch wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Hey sorry about your battery. We only had a 90 so we threw that in there. Enjoy. Tell everyone you know about how awesome Tesla was about fixing the problem and remember that next time you go to buy your next car" That would be such a great solution

Any rational marketer or PR officer would gladly give up that $4,500 to avoid this HN post.

They didn't even trade the bad PR for $4,500, they traded it for a chance at $4,500 since they don't know if the customer will pay it. This decision-making boggles my mind.

Either there are a ton of Tesla fanatics out there who will put up with a lot of dubious behavior, or Tesla is severely limiting its upside with all of their anti-customer service antics.

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

#322

Post by thayne »

zcw100 wrote: post #48

So the way I'm reading the post is Tesla swapped out a battery pack for a 60 with a 90 and enabled the 90. Tesla, years later, discovers that even though the hardware for a 90 was installed it should have been software limited to be a 60. (I'm assuming that Tesla only made the owner pay the cost of the 60 battery swap even though they replaced it with a 90). They go and "fix the glitch" and set it back to the 60. Sin…

Just the fact that they can do this makes me not want to own a tesla.

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

#323

Post by smsm42 »

oangemangut wrote: post #89
panopticon wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought an EV earlier this year. I ended up with a LR Model 3 because the dealership model really sucks still. I called Hyundai and VW dealerships in the tri-state area around me, and none of them could say when I'd be able to actually get a car. Instead I went to Tesla's website, placed an order, and got an ETA. Super simple; loved that experience. If it weren't for the crappy dealership model I probably would have…

It's not just the ETAs that are pushing me away, but just the entire dealership process generally is annoying. I wanted to order a vehicle from GM and I have tried close at least 10 dealerships at this point in the PNW. No one is straight up on the process of either getting an order in or what pricing will look like or when they might get an allocation. Some just say "sure, you're on the list" but who knows what that…

I think some companies just distribute cars between dealerships and let them sort it out, others allow people to actually order a car they like. I tried with Toyota, and they weren't able to get me the car I wanted or even tell me where one could be around, for months - and looks like different dealership don't talk to each other so unless I make deposit with every dealership around, I won't be able to get what I want. Subaru, OTOH, allowed me to place order for exactly the vehicle I liked and get ETA (though not a definite date, just approximate) - even though lead times are still pretty long.

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

#324

Post by shadowgovt »

jabbany wrote: post #227
gambiting wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> (I'm assuming that Tesla only made the owner pay the cost of the 60 battery swap even though they replaced it with a 90) It says right there that it was done under warranty. If my RTX3080 breaks, and Nvidia sends me a 3080Ti as a replacement(because maybe they don't have any 3080 in stock) then no, they can't lock it down to 3080 level 3 years later with a software update. And yes, I'm allowed to sell it on as a 3…

> no, they can't lock it down to 3080 level 3 years later with a software update I think the problem is that there are 2 different types of "can't": can't as in technologically impossible, and can't as in legally disallowed. In the past, the former was usually the case. Vendors literally could not technologically take away features because things either were not controlled by software or software could not tell the h…

Indeed. This is recapitulation of the old fight Intel got themselves into trying to implement market discrimination via selling chips that could be overclocked but setting them to underclock because it was cheaper to sell all the same chip and then underclock the ones that didn't pass their performance tests in the warehouse (or even that did, but they didn't have enough low-end chips in the pipeline) then it was to physically make multiple different dies of high and low clock chips.

Tesla installed a 90 battery because it was easier and faster to do that than wait around for a 60 battery to show up in the distribution pipeline. They then let the customer take advantage of the fact that they had given them an "overclocked" battery. Trying to force price discrimination at this point is at the very least a bad look and may actually be a violation of the law regarding principle of second sale.

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

#325

Post by jabbany »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #293
jabbany wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no, they can't lock it down to 3080 level 3 years later with a software update I think the problem is that there are 2 different types of "can't": can't as in technologically impossible, and can't as in legally disallowed. In the past, the former was usually the case. Vendors literally could not technologically take away features because things either were not controlled by software or software could not tell the h…

> Yeah, morally, but we need to start working to make this guaranteed legally. I'm not sure I disagree with you, but the invocation of the word "morally" here really reminds me of the software licensing debates from twenty-something years ago. Twenty years later most people seem resigned on the software licensing issue (although I doubt their opinion has changed), and they seemed resigned on limiting their ability to…

Yeah, there's no logical distinction, only a moral one.

Imagine 3 scenarios:

Company A rolls out a new mandatory update to a phone that addresses a CPU vulnerability, and to compensate for the reduced performance, overclocks the CPU so now your battery life is 20% shorter.

Company B rolls out a new mandatory update to a phone that improves the battery management so phones do not shut down unexpectedly. However, due to lack of hardware battery reporting when the device was built, they could only estimate the capacity based on the phone's age and natural battery degradation. This causes older phones to have 20% shorter battery life, even though some batteries that were not used as hard could have supported longer.

Company C rolls out a new mandatory update to a phone that detects the phones age and reserves 20% battery capacity on older phones, forcing them to have 20% shorter battery life so users are incentivized to upgrade.

The end result is the same, a phone with worse battery life, but we don't see all of them to be morally the same. The only real difference is the human intent behind it, which is why we probably eventually need regulations that make sure companies should justify that they have a reasonably good intent if challenged. Getting this right is very hard -- you don't want to overburden companies from frivolous cases, but you also want regulations to be effective so they can't just handwave them away.

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

#326

Post by aflag »

bena wrote: post #19

The only reason to software lock the capacity of the battery in this manner is to extort customers. There is apparently absolutely no additional labor, no additional material, nothing to distinguish a P90 from a P60 except for a software lock. That's labor that was not necessary. All the work needed to software lock the charge capacity of the battery could have been avoided. The only way it makes sense is if you get…

Not every P60 is a P90 with software cap. Only a few, when a P60 battery is not available. They swapped the battery for a better one in order to keep waiting times low and costumers happy. That's a good thing. Ideally, if it's an one off thing, they should just give the upgrade for free to the customer. However, if it's more of a systematic issue that extended for a while, it's reasonable that they cap it to avoid abuse.

Anyway, now that they already let it out without capping, it's pretty shitty to suddenly cap it. Specially if the car now has a different owner.

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

#327

Post by LgWoodenBadger »

gnicholas wrote: post #16

How can a potential buyer verify that a used Tesla they are considering purchasing is not subject to some sort of pullback like this? I feel like there's an information asymmetry between the used car buyer (who has likely never owned a Tesla before, and certainly doesn't know the history of the vehicle he's considering purchasing), the seller (who may specifically be aware that the car appears to have functionality t…

In the US that would be the Monroney Sticker that every new car comes with. Instead of throwing it out, sounds like most new car buyers should keep it as a fundamental record of ownership now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroney_sticker

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

#328

Post by dislikedtom »

It sounds like a broader problem: you buy something digital and manufacturer changes it (most of the people may even like the update but you hate it). Maybe subscription payment model would make more sense (but tbh the whole economy needs some rethinking).

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

#329

Post by MobileVet »

My first thought was back to the Celeron 300A CPU [1]. I had heard at the time that Intel had packaged Pentium 2 - 450s as Celeron 300As because they had too many but were not meeting the demand for the Celeron. It was cheaper to repackage already fabricated 450s than increase the 300A line throughput for an unknown demand curve.

The Wikipedia article says it was more of an efficiency improvement with the new Mendocino core with on board L2-cache. They really did mean for it to be a 300Mhz processor but it would easily run at 450.

Ah the days when if you got a fun product upgrade it couldn't be retracted years later...

Further, amazing that whomever made the decision to lock it down didn't consider the blow back versus the good will that was already established. ROI & Risk vs Reward... never forget them.

-- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celeron

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

#330

Post by misiti3780 »

Enginerrrd wrote: post #10

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'…

What business, running at scale in 2022 doesnt fall into this category - LOL
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