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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

#301

Post by clintonb »

matsemann wrote: post #286
meltyness wrote: post #120

My perspective is that this simply begs the question, "How does one buy and sell a used Tesla vehicle?" And by doing a bit of research, we arrive at the throat of the issue. Tesla is a competing Used Tesla Dealer, this is listed in their 10K as a part of their automotive segment: - https://www.tesla.com/support/ordering-used-tesla This page provides no clear guidance on how licenses transfer for "upgrades." Presumabl…

It's actually a bit scary. When considering what upgrades to buy, I'm afraid those won't be able to be transferred. So if I pay $XXXX for a feature, I have to account for that being worth $0 if I were to sell the car. Is the price point then really worth it?

All upgrades (e.g., FSD, acceleration boost) stay with the car. This is huge source of frustration for those of us who purchased FSD, but want to move to another car while retaining FSD.

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

#302

Post by masswerk »

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…

I think, the decisive point is really in the warranty regulations, like "equal or better". You chose one (which may have been the most convenient to you at that time) and went with it. Anyways, this is how you chose to fulfil the contract. Are you really going to "fix" this years later by a withdrawal? Who has ownership of the car?

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

#303

Post by rootusrootus »

infogulch wrote: post #69
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…

> "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

In other words, the Apple Solution, most of the time. Many things they do I don't agree with, but customer service is one of their stronger points. Friend of mine had a laptop go in for repair, they couldn't repair it, sent him a brand new current equivalent of his nearly three year old laptop. Now that's customer service. For the remainder of his life he's going to sing happy Apple praises to anyone who asks.

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

#304

Post by corrral »

throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #98
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…

A decade or so ago you used to be able to unlock cores on certain AMD CPU's; there was no guarantee that the core would be stable though. The core could be fine without heavy load and have errors when pushed closer to 100%. If there was a similar level of binning done for Tesla batteries they should be able to limit the battery especially if there are safety concerns; sounds like that's not the case here though.

At least as early as the late 90s, servers were sometimes sold with parts—disks, controller cards, CPUs (in the days when multi-socket was more common), et c—disabled in software, unlockable if you paid for an upgrade.

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

#305

Post by ClumsyPilot »

bgirard wrote: post #131
sjm-lbm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the previous owner misrepresented the car as a P90 and modified the badge then it's on them. I'm not entirely sure if I agree with this - they didn't just modify the badge, they also provided the additional rage from a P90. As a thought experiment: if I sell you a BMW 328i as a 340i but I also swap the engine and sell it with the additional power that comes with that change, have I misled you? Perhaps - I'm hone…

The key of this issue here is that there's a software lock that's been incorrectly unlocked. So it's a reasonable assumption that it might become locked again in the future. Regardless of the product, I believe that morally it needs to be disclosed to the buyer so that they can be aware of the risk and factor that into their buying decision and pricing. > I don't think selling a car with a P90 badge that also include…

> it's a reasonable assumption that it might become locked again in the future

it is absolutely not reasonable that someone will mess with your car, whether they do it by software or by breaking into yuour garage. Both should be treated as crimes.

If they want to touch the car, they need concent of it's legal owner or they can go to court, and make their case to the judge. I wonder if they can convince a Judge that Joe Bloggs should let them mess with his car, because they made a mistake while servicing Jamed Smith 10 years ago. Most likely the judge would tell them to get lost, it's their mistake after all.

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

#306

Post by Mountain_Skies »

throw_nbvc1234 wrote: post #98
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…

A decade or so ago you used to be able to unlock cores on certain AMD CPU's; there was no guarantee that the core would be stable though. The core could be fine without heavy load and have errors when pushed closer to 100%. If there was a similar level of binning done for Tesla batteries they should be able to limit the battery especially if there are safety concerns; sounds like that's not the case here though.

That sort of thing has been going on for a long time. The 32K TRS-80 Color Computer often had 64K RAM chips installed. Early on they were populated with "half bad" 64k RAM chips, with a jumper set to which half contained the bad memory. Later in the product cycle, half bad chips really didn't exist anymore, but Radio Shack still wanted to be able to charge more for 64K models, so they still jumper disabled one of the banks of memory on models sold as 32K. Lots of people figured out they could remove the jumper to get a free upgrade of double the memory.

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

#307

Post by clintonb »

Gunnerhead wrote: post #211
_ea1k wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wondered that too. It'd be extremely unusual for Tesla to go as far as changing the badge. OTOH, a car dealer along the way might do that if they noticed the discrepancy between the badge and what the software reported. It'd be hard to blame them too, since people do sometimes downgrade the badging on cars (eg, this "218i", lol: https://carsandbids.com/auctions/Kmm4AgbK/2016-bmw-m2 ). It still leaves Tesla as the b…

Mind explaining the 218i joke?

"M" is the highest trim level for BMW. 218i would be the lowest trim for the BMW 2 series. The owner is passing an M2 as a 218i.

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

#308

Post by protomyth »

So, if you buy a Tesla, know your resale value is artificially low because of the actions of the company. I would expect you will also be a target of a lawsuit if Tesla reduces features to the next owner by update unless your sale contract is ironclad. Even then, if you claim features in your ad or sale agreement that might come back to haunt you. In this case, if it was branded a 90 then you are in deep.

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

#309

Post by rootusrootus »

What a terrible PR stunt. Leaving the extra capacity in place costs them nothing. The money for the bigger pack spent long ago. Now they have bad PR and an unhappy customer. How many people are going to read this and say to themselves "Yikes, I won't ever be buying a Tesla, look how they treat their customers!"

They should have used it for a little warm fuzzy "Hey we see this was in the system wrong, your car is in fact a 60, but you may now consider it officially a 90. If you haven't already, we'd be happy to send you a complimentary 90 badge to put on the back." Cost practically nothing, instant goodwill.

I enjoyed my Tesla, won't be buying another however.

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

#310

Post by ericd »

crooked-v wrote: post #53
mlyle wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only reason to software lock the capacity of the battery in this manner is to extort customers. I have mixed feelings about schemes like this, but I don't think they're inherently bad. You start off making 60kWh and 90kWh cars. Customers are happy buying both. You notice you can save costs overall by just selling the 90kWh cars at the 60kWh price-- but revenue will fall if you don't lock the pack down to 60kWh.…

There's a huge difference here compared to binning: binning generally involves chips that are physically incapable of performing to the higher spec because of defects.

Initially that’s the case, but once the production yield improves, they frequently start gimping large numbers of them.
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