Tesla Temporarily Boosts Battery Capacity For Hurricane Irma (sfgate.com) 328
Slashdot reader mikeebbbd noticed this in the AP's Florida hurricane coverage: Electric car maker Tesla says it has temporarily increased the battery capacity of some of its cars to help drivers escaping Hurricane Irma. The electric car maker said the battery boost was applied to Model S and X cars in the Southeast. Some drivers only buy 60 or 70 kilowatt hours of battery capacity, but a software change will give them access to 75 kilowatt hours of battery life until Saturday. Depending on the model, that could let drivers travel about 40 more miles before they would need to recharge their cars.
Tesla said it made the change after a customer asked the company for help evacuating. The company said it's possible it will make similar changes in response to similar events in the future.
Tesla said it made the change after a customer asked the company for help evacuating. The company said it's possible it will make similar changes in response to similar events in the future.
Uh huh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or maybe Tesla could just stop artificially crippling the batteries?
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You act like they're the first people to do this. Spoiler alert: They're not.
Many companies make a thing on a single assembly line because it's less expensive then running two or more lines, and then artificially limit its capabilities when a version of it is sold as a lower-end model. See Intel, nVidia and others. And IBM. Not sure if they still do it, but one of their old mainframes had a ton of processors under the hood no matter which model you bought, but many were locked off. If you wanted to up
Re:Uh huh... (Score:5, Insightful)
The amount of people who do it doesn't make it right.
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Do you also think it's wrong that a software company charges a business for each user, even though they may only provide a single image to copy from?
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If Tesla can sell the same hardware at different price points and still make a profit then the higher price point is simply profiteering. I would rather they sell it at a fair price.
This is not analogous, but I will answer. If you sell software I think it's fair to come up with your own bus
Re:Uh huh... (Score:5, Insightful)
> If Tesla can sell the same hardware at different price points and still make a profit then the higher price point is simply profiteering.
Is it? Is it really? Is it not possible that Tesla can sell that lower price point car at the price it can because the cost is partly offset by the full range buyers? By your logic if I made a thing that cost me $9 and I sold it for $10 partly limited in some way and fully open at $20 for the "high end" version that was unlimited, then on the high end model I am profiteering to the tune of $11 per unit and am a bad person and should probably be lined up against a wall or something. But what if I then shared that I sell 2500 $10 units a month and 300 $20 units a month, and my staff costs on top of the $9 material and build cost are $3000/month. So what's the solution? Market research has shown that if I have just the premium model as the only model and sell it for $12, I won't sell 2800 units a month any more, I'll be moving 1000 if I'm lucky. So I'm supposed to work for free? My investors are supposed to get nothing?
Pricing in tiers like this is a highly complex subject and way more nuanced than "ZOMG - ripoff!" binary responses. There are some people who wouldn't have been able to afford a Tesla at all if the software limited battery pack wasn't an option, so it works to create more options for people. Same with iPhones for example. Apple could just make one size and say "$1000 on the table right now, or no iPhone for you." But they don't because they want additional market penetration across all classes of consumer.
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Apple could just make one size and say "$1000 on the table right now, or no iPhone for you." But they don't because they want additional market penetration across all classes of consumer.
Your iPhone analogy doesn't work. Apple doesn't sell crippled iPhones as lower capacity at a lower price, the hardware is actually different - storage capacity is not some bogus figure, it is the actual amount of storage physically installed in the phone.
In Tesla's case, they are selling different versions of the car with an artificially lowered battery capacity for a lower price. Note that I don't disagree with their logic behind this, and I do agree that it benefits people who cannot afford the premium
Re:Uh huh... (Score:4, Insightful)
If Tesla can sell the same hardware at different price points and still make a profit then the higher price point is simply profiteering. I would rather they sell it at a fair price.
"profiteering" is one way to describe it. "Selling different products that have different profit margins" is another, and IMHO better, way to describe it.
I get it, you have a visceral reaction that this is bad. I feel the same way about how Intel sells deliberately-crippled parts to maximize profits at all levels in the market they serve.
But prices are between a company and their customers. If you don't like how they do things, you don't have to buy the product, that that also doesn't make it immoral (as you implied in your +5 moderated post).
Tesla was trying something new: selling the first battery electric vehicle that doesn't suck. Safe, reliable, fun to drive, and usable for long trips. Nobody had made a car like that before. They weren't sure they would be able to sell enough cars with the bigger battery size, so they offered the 60 with the software limit on size, and tried selling that for a while. It let them set the starting price lower.
Tesla had (and still has) lots of expenses. They had to build their own network of Superchargers. They had to build out their factory. They built their own battery "Gigafactory". All of these investments will make it possible for people to buy the Model 3 at a less-crazy price than the Model S or X. And just maybe someday Tesla will be able to sell a car for the same cost as a Honda Civic, and BEVs will become truly mainstream.
So I am personally happy and grateful that a bunch of rich people spent a bunch of money buying Tesla cars, helping Tesla get to where it could start making the Model 3. And if that means Tesla made a higher profit margin on the fancier cars, I'm personally okay with that.
And by the way, Tesla's battery management software strongly encourages users to avoid charging their cars to 100%. Tesla owners routinely charge to 90% or less to preserver battery life. But since the Tesla 60 battery is actually a larger battery, owners of those cars simply charge them to 100% every day. Also, even a Tesla 60 has dramatically better range than the Nissan Leaf or the Volkswagen eGolf or various other options, yet people buy those. For many users who just want to drive around town, the 60 has plenty of range just the way it is, and they would rather have the car at the lower cost.
Finally, on the gripping hand, Tesla doesn't do this anymore. They now just sell 70 and 90 cars, neither one software-limited. But there are a fair number of 60 cars out there still.
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If Tesla can sell the same hardware at different price points and still make a profit then the higher price point is simply profiteering. I would rather they sell it at a fair price.
Say it costs a company $2500 to develop product X, and they can manufacture 500 of them for $5 each. That's $5000 total so to cover costs on those 500 they have to sell each one for $10, $5 for the R&D and $5 for the manufacturing cost.
What happens if they build 1000? Well the R&D cost per unit is now $2.5, making the price $7.5 per unit, but maybe there aren't 1000 people willing to pay $7.5 for product X.
So you come up with a way to cripple X and sell it as product Y. And now you sell 500 of produ
They aren't making a profit. I understand the feel (Score:2)
I absolutely understand the feeling, the gut reaction, that somehow that just isn't fair.
> If Tesla can sell the same hardware at different price points and still make a profit then the higher price point is simply profiteering.
"And still make a profit", you say. Newsflash - Tesla is not making a profit. They lose money on every car.
So our gut reaction at first of "that doesn't seem right" tells us we should look into it more. Looking into it, we find the situation is more complex than our initial, v
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A fair price? Is that what you think it should be, what I think it should be, what Elon Musk thinks it should be or (crazy talk) what the customer is willing to pay?
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If Tesla can sell the same hardware at different price points and still make a profit then the higher price point is simply profiteering. I would rather they sell it at a fair price.
The problem with this argument is that they typically can't. The same is true for Intel binning parts and other manufacturers that have similar practices. They can make a profit if they sell, for example, 75% of them for $n, 20% for $2n, and 5% for $10n. They can't make a profit if they sell all of them at $n. Your choice is for them to either sell them all for $1.65n, or sell 75% of them for $n and charge a premium for the rest. It's even more complicated, because these prices depend on amortising lar
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I agree! Let's outlaw it. So, how is that 30% jump in the price of economy... oops I mean "no longer economy" airline seats working out for you? With everyone on the airplane now paying the same price per square inch, those business class travelers are saving a ton too! Only a 20% premium over the lowest ticket now.
This is fine without DRM laws (Score:2)
Many companies make a thing on a single assembly line because it's less expensive then running two or more lines, and then artificially limit its capabilities when a version of it is sold as a lower-end model.
That's absolutely fine provided that anyone who purchases their product has the legal right to enable the full functionality themselves assuming that they can figure out how to do that. This is what ultimately limits this sort of behaviour. Unfortunately, all the modern DRM laws have killed this balance by making it illegal in many countries to develop and/or share methods to turn on blocked functionality.
Re: Uh huh... (Score:2)
If not to create stratification of product lines, then to provide a stopgap measure to reduce the likelihood of component failure. For instance, the same motor in corvettes as suburbans... with torque limiters on the 4 ton trucks to not potentially blow out the transmission or drive train, because trucks are supposed to be more reliable than a sportscar..
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And people will tune and further mod their cars to get better performance out of them, often exceeding the highest spec version offered by the manufacturer.
In most cases i've seen however, not all components were equal - you might have the same base engine, but the higher spec version comes with forced induction equipment for instance. Plus other components of the vehicle might be upgraded to handle the greater power, eg drivetrain or brakes etc. I know with my car the lower model lacks not only the superch
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They are "crippling" the batteries to make them last longer which, in cases of emergency, you do not care about. Still, it would be nice if they provided an interface to manage it ourselves instead of acting as mighty god through some kind of mighty galactic, over the air, update.
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So instead of the vehicle owner reaching under the hood and flipping the "emergency mode" switch, vehicle owners are content to patiently wait until benevolent Tesla, out of the goodness of their hearts, issue a code over the airwaves to unlock this feature in their cars.
Let me be clear on this point:
Fuck. That.
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Sorry about this, it is just an off topic comment about extending your sig; "putting out the fire with gasoline":
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyric... [azlyrics.com]
Wow! (Score:2)
Agreed. Tesla cars have just gone from desired items to never buy. I had profound respect for that company, and it's gone in a flash. I will not buy from a company that charges more for access to hardware I've already purchased, nor will I support the "Windows 10" mentality of the manufacturer being able to push out any changes they want to something I own. I had even considered buying some of Tesla's latest issue of bonds simply to support the company. I'm glad this came up now.
It's no wonder all the
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News flash: Products aren't sold at their BOM costs! They aren't ripping the customers off. As long as customers get what they paid for (ie., per spec), then what difference does it matter how much margin is in the design?
There are design margins in everything. Some are razor thin (typical consumer goods), some are quite large because it can make more sense for the company to optimize costs related to manufacturing and inventory management over absolute per unit costs. There is also margin in designs for
Re: Uh huh... (Score:5, Interesting)
The crippled betteries are sold under cost.
The problem with that business model is eventually someone will figure out how to "jailbreak" their car and enhance the battery life without paying Tesla for the privilege. This will create all kinds of legal nightmares. Historically car owners have been allowed to "soup up their ride" (as long as the resulting vehicle is street legal), but with this new kind of business model that Tesla has, that could change. When you buy a car will there be an EULA that forbids making improvements? This could be a slippery slope.
Batteries that aren't full-cycled last longer (Score:5, Insightful)
Hello,
With Lithium-Ion batteries, they last longer if you don't take them from 100% capacity to 0% capacity all the time. If instead you charge/discharge them from 80% to 40%, they last a lot longer.
I think it's likely that Tesla limits the batteries for lifetime purposes. And that this temporary software change is trading a little battery life, for, well, maybe saving the life of the Tesla car owner by getting him out of dodge?
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Re:Batteries that aren't full-cycled last longer (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't think the decision to get oneself out of dodge on the cost of some of the car's service life should belong to the owner and not to the manufacturer?
Re:Batteries that aren't full-cycled last longer (Score:5, Interesting)
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I get that there are reasons behind this. As you mention, the battery life thing seems reasonable. The performance limiting thing wasn't something most people would notice. The autopilot hardware is probably the cheap part, a
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Tesla is in good company. Apple has been doing that sort of thing for years, by denying older hardware software upgrades it can easily handle. Case in point: my 2011 MBP didn't get Night Shift when that was released.
Re:Batteries that aren't full-cycled last longer (Score:5, Interesting)
Mainframe manufacturers did this many decades ago. A different "boot" floppy on one mainframe I used would result in a substantially faster machine (of course, that floppy cost far more than the cost of manufacturing the floppy and the field engineers seemed really hard to bribe to "inadvertently leave the wrong floppy in the drive"). It was simply cheaper to give every machine the capability to run at the higher speed and "dumb it down" than it was to build two or more models and this manufacturer needed an array of models to compete at different price/performance points with IBM (who had baked enormous profits into every price point and, due to volume, could have more distinct model cost effectively).
Another mainframe had a feature (I don't recall the exact mechanism to enable it) where we could speed it up for some number of hours for a fee to the manufacturer - no hardware change nor (IIRC) a need to load new firmware or reboot.
I've not been around mainframes for 25+ years so I don't know, or care, if they still do this (I'm sure others here will know).
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I've not been around mainframes for 25+ years so I don't know, or care, if they still do this (I'm sure others here will know).
I can assure you IBM does this. Customers have been complaining about this since forever.
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It's like the situation where an unknown person is found unconscious. A responder doesn't legally need their (impossible to give) consent to save their life. It is assumable that any reasonable person would give that consent rather than die if possible.
If you are evacuating and prefer to get stranded rather than take a minuscule bit of battery lifetime off of your car, by all means, pull over. But don't complain if you find yourself blowing in the wind. Pretty much everyone else will take the temporary extr
Re:Batteries that aren't full-cycled last longer (Score:4, Informative)
More information:
http://batteryuniversity.com/l... [batteryuniversity.com]
Look at tables 2 and 3.
Re:Batteries that aren't full-cycled last longer (Score:4, Insightful)
The battery can put through a total of X kWh power in it's entire life (through charge/discharge).
From the cited table, the total number of full discharge-equivalents (NMC, LiPO4 ) for can be calculated as:
I'm not sure what the discontinuity at 20% for NMCs is about - I suspect a copy-and-paste type in their table. Most large LiIon battery installations advertise 60% capacity in the underlying storage as empty. From the cited table, you get twice as much total storage (five times as many 40% cycles than 100% cycles) by doing this. Discharging only down to 80-90% capacity will be even more efficient, but has the downside that you need twice the mass of battery if you're going to 80% than discharging to 60% for the same per-charge capacity, which is prohibitive in automotive applications (though not for fixed storage for renewable power plants - they cost might be).
These aren't lead acid cells which get damaged with a 100% discharge
No, they get completely destroyed. This is why the charging circuit doesn't let you completely discharge any LiIon batteries. If you want to see what happens, get a laptop battery, run the laptop until it reports empty, and then leave the battery for a few months for the remaining charge to leak. Don't store it near anything flammable...
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Hello,
With Lithium-Ion batteries, they last longer if you don't take them from 100% capacity to 0% capacity all the time. If instead you charge/discharge them from 80% to 40%, they last a lot longer.
I think it's likely that Tesla limits the batteries for lifetime purposes. And that this temporary software change is trading a little battery life, for, well, maybe saving the life of the Tesla car owner by getting him out of dodge?
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Nope. You can pay more money to have Tesla allow you to pull more energy (per charge) from the same battery.
Tesla only cares about saving your life so that they can continue to get cash from you.
Re:Batteries that aren't full-cycled last longer (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not the case here.
Tesla sold a 75kWh and a 65kWh model with the same battery in both. You could pay to unlock the extra capacity at any time. Even in the 75kWh car you could only use about 72kWh at most, the rest being reserved to prevent excessive battery degradation.
That's really all you need. Tesla and other manufacturers have found that the batteries will likely outlast the car, certainly outlast the warranty, with that much reserve.
right to repair is fighting EULA's that ban 3rd pa (Score:2)
right to repair is fighting EULA's that ban 3rd parts from doing repairs.
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The crippled betteries are sold under cost.
The problem with that business model is eventually someone will figure out how to "jailbreak" their car and enhance the battery life without paying Tesla for the privilege. This will create all kinds of legal nightmares. Historically car owners have been allowed to "soup up their ride" (as long as the resulting vehicle is street legal), but with this new kind of business model that Tesla has, that could change. When you buy a car will there be an EULA that forbids making improvements? This could be a slippery slope.
Some will, but most won't -- not many people are going to risk reflashing their $70K car to "save" $5K while losing warranty coverage. I doubt Tesla will care if people wait until the 4 year warranty period is up before reflashing.
Freedom comes piecemeal. (Score:2)
You mean people actually controlling the devices they own and deciding for themselves how that device should be maintained? Why that's completely unknown territory for automobiles, computer software, and so many other things. Oh, the horror of freeing oneself from corporate control.
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Re: Uh huh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Uh huh... (Score:4, Interesting)
You're welcome to not buy such a car.
Of course I'm welcome to not buy such a car. I'm also welcome to buy such a car and "hack" it and extend the battery life. The question is: will there be legal consequences for me if I do? Ultimately it will be up to legislatures to decide this matter and they are supposed to represent us, so do we want to live in a world where car manufacturers can restrict with legal means our ability to enhance our cars or not?
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In the USA, there's already some case law regarding the relationship between warranties and third-party software modifications which basically says that the warranty applies unless the manufacturer can show that the modification affected the warranted part. Modifying LiIon batteries to use deeper discharge cycles can easily be shown to do that, so your addition would likely void the warranty on the battery.
The problem is not your doing this, it's what happens to the person who buys your car second hand.
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The tractor is not free.
But yes, they most certainly do software-lock their tractors. They've also taken to suing people over trying to break the firmware locks and are causing quite a stir over it. They'll likely be the example case for SCOTUS to decide on ownership vs. DMCA anti-circumvention bullshit.
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It is not illegal, you just lose your warranty
That's not true. It's a violation of the DMCA and you keep your warranty. Some claims may not be honored if they can be proven to be a direct result of the modification - but it's otherwise illegal to nullify an entire warranty over a single change. And yes - the company will try to claim that everything is a direct result, so you may have a burden of proof.
Re: Uh huh... (Score:4, Insightful)
Tesla chose to sell them at that cost, noone forced them to.
They could have made cheaper, smaller (and therefore lighter) batteries available instead.
Why should customers be forced to have an artificially crippled product, dragging around extra dead weight of artificially disabled battery cells?
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Who's forcing Tesla customers to do anything at all? You're talking like someone put a large caliber gun to their head and said "buy this car, and not the one that costs 5% more for 20% more battery, or I'm going to turn your head into a canoe"
They bought the capacity that they bought, with the specs listed. And I think you'll find that the number of Tesla owners that are complaining about this is astonishingly small. The only people grousing about this are people that won't buy a Tesla to begin with and
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No one forced consumers to buy a tesla either. It's easy to make the opposite argument - by selling a version with fewer features for less money Tesla has made it easier for those of lesser means (giggle, $70+k car) to afford one.
It's not like they lied to consumers - the OTA update is readily available if you don't buy it with purchase. Same for several other features on their cars. Hell, they openly state that all the cars have the hardware for autopilot but you don't get autopilot unless you pay for i
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This could be true if the product was offered as-is, however they are also trying to sell you the extra 10%.
SSD manufacturers don't offer to sell you an extra 10% capacity for extra cost, foregoing the reliability benefits of the spare 10%. If they sell you a larger version at a higher cost is *still* has its own 10% margin.
Re:Uh huh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Before jumping to conclusions (Score:4, Insightful)
If anyone, you should know that there may well be a reason to "cripple" hardware despite its possible ability to function at higher spec. CPUs and graphics card anyone? What happens when an i7 CPU doesn't quite pass the QA tests? Switch off the cores that didn't pass and sell it as an i3. How many here have "unlocked" cores of cheap CPUs to turn it into a more powerful one? Do you think Intel does that because they enjoy making CPUs then sell them cheaply with some cores switched off for ... reasons? Or could it rather be that they switch off the cores because they fail inspection and can't be relied on, and it's still more interesting for Intel to sell it at a lower price than to throw it away?
I could imagine the same applies to other hardware.
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Re:Before jumping to conclusions (Score:5, Insightful)
It might not be quite so simple as a pure money grab on Tesla's part. Many battery designs will last longer if you don't cycle them quite a deeply and if capacity does diminish but still is greater than what you paid for you'll never know and Tesla does not have to replace it.
Given they grantee the batteries for a period of the time the extra cost for the 'higher capacity' version might essentially be what amounts to a pre-paid insurance policy for the battery by actuarial spreading the cost of the increased likelihood the batters used at higher capacity will need replacing under warranty among the buyers of the higher capacity.
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No but it almost certainly is. Its pretty basic economics. Your manufacturing costs include both the units you sell and the units you are forced to replace. Tesla's Li batteries are not filled with some magic unicorn poop that makes them work differently than other Li batteries in terms of failure modes and life cycle. So its pretty obvious this is the plan.
It gives them both price discrimination (which you might find objectionable but I would call good business) and allows them to better match revenue
Re:Before jumping to conclusions (Score:5, Informative)
This is done on basically every piece of test equipment with optional features.
What's the difference between a Rigol 1054Z 50MHz DSO and the 1104Z 100MHz model?
One costs $399 and the other costs $619.
The physical hardware that provides the bandwidth is identical. There is switch in the front-end to lower the bandwidth controlled by software. Doing this means the hardware costs more, but they can sell it at difference price points to get a larger market.
They offer software upgrades to increase the memory depth as well.
No to mention extra upgrades to unlock protocol decoding.
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If anyone, you should know that there may well be a reason to "cripple" hardware despite its possible ability to function at higher spec. CPUs and graphics card anyone? What happens when an i7 CPU doesn't quite pass the QA tests? Switch off the cores that didn't pass and sell it as an i3. How many here have "unlocked" cores of cheap CPUs to turn it into a more powerful one? Do you think Intel does that because they enjoy making CPUs then sell them cheaply with some cores switched off for ... reasons? Or could it rather be that they switch off the cores because they fail inspection and can't be relied on, and it's still more interesting for Intel to sell it at a lower price than to throw it away?
Another situation that can occur is that they manufacture and release a certain volume of products at each performance-level, but run out of the lower-priced models. Then they repackage and sell the higher-performance models as the lower-performance models, so that they don't disturb whatever linear-programming market calculations they made in order to maximize profits.
Any manufacturer or supplier of a product can encounter an unexpected shortage of a particular quality-level. Ever received an upgrade for a
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If you receive an upgrade then you (the consumer) benefit from the upgrade and generally won't complain about it (or perhaps you would with a rental car because an upgraded car might consume more fuel).
You're not asked to take the upgrade but not make use of any of the upgraded features.
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In this case my guess is they are in fact not all the same capacity battery and they have deemed it safe for a limited time to go above their advertised rating.
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If a CPU failed QA to run at higher speeds but is fully functional at lower speeds or with less cores then it's an inferior, lower quality product and deserves to be sold at a lower price point.
If you choose to unlock it, you run the risk that it won't work at all, or won't work reliably. Your unlocked product is still going to be inferior to the higher priced option.
If you paid extra for a higher performing CPU then you get a superior product, it may have started out the same but the manufacturing process
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What I get from this (Score:3)
DLC (Score:2)
Question... (Score:2)
I have a question. Do some of the people buying the lower capacity battery actually receive a lower capacity battery that exactly meets what they are paying for? If that is true then I presume, for reasons of mass manufacture and inventory availability, some people paying for the lower capacity battery receive a higher capacity battery but they cannot access the entire capacity.
When did this crap become normal? (Score:2, Flamebait)
Software limitations purely for the purpose of profit are evil. No if's, and's or butts.
The entire point of capitalism is to convince the manufacturer to provide the most product for the cheapest price.
Here we have a situation where the company can sell a better product for the same price but instead chooses to screw their customers. I understand the concept of variable pricing, the general idea is to convince each consumer to pay the most they are willing to pay for the same product.
But you are supposed
Tesla's Hurricane Irma Update Taps Into Our Fears (Score:3)
http://jalopnik.com/teslas-hur... [jalopnik.com]
"Earlier this week, Tesla remotely upgraded select Florida Tesla ownersâ(TM) cars to expand their mileage capacity in an effort to ease and assist with Hurricane Irma evacuation efforts. The move was praiseworthy and appropriate, but at the root of the gesture lies a terrifying prospect of our automotive future..."
Almost the same on petrol cars (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: That's disgusting (Score:3, Insightful)
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It's actually quite common for manufacturers to sell the same product at different price-points with different performance limits engineered in. They may justify it by the extra cost of supporting customers who demand the higher performance-levels. Or they may just be mercenary market-manipulating dicks. The point is, it's a common practice.
Re:That's disgusting (Score:5, Funny)
Thank goodness none of the companies in the computer business do this.
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Yes, thank goodness the CPU I'm using right now is not the same die as a higher performance part, but with some cores and cache disabled. Not because of yield, but because they need to produce a certain number of each model.
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Re:That's disgusting (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously they can afford to ship those batteries at the lower price point
Why is that "obvious"? The people that pay a premium for extra capacity are subsidizing those who don't. That doesn't mean Tesla would make money on the batteries if no one paid the premium.
My wife has a Tesla with a 240 mile range instead of the 300 mile range. That was our choice. No one "cheated" us. Whether it is more cost effective for Tesla to make two different battery configurations, or to make one with a artificial limit, is their choice. Neither option is more "moral" than the other.
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Don't kid yourself. Tesla is making a profit on every battery pack sold. They'd be out of business if they weren't.
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Don't kid yourself. Tesla is making a profit on every battery pack sold. They'd be out of business if they weren't.
Business doesn't work that way. You have development costs, capital costs, and marginal costs. In aggregate, you need to be able to cover all these costs to have a viable business, but an individual sale only has to cover the marginal costs to be profitable. So you can make plenty of profitable sales, but still go bankrupt because you aren't covering your interest and overhead. To do that, you need to find a way to price differentiate, and convince enough of your customers to pay a premium.
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No. This is what the modern business industry wants you to believe. It's all smoke and mirrors to justify millions of MBAs, CPAs, financial lawyers, analysts, etc. jobs. All of this is crap. If you make more money then you spend, you are profitable. I do
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No, they just have to make a profit on all the battery packs sold, not on each individual one.
Re:But you paid for the battery (Score:5, Informative)
You car is carrying battery weight it does not need and cannot use
The unused extra capacity increases the life of the battery. So it is not useless.
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Or maybe because there is a warranty on the battery, Tesla is the one who gets screwed with a less reliable product, and they price it accordingly.
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75kw battery pack can withstand 500 cycles, but if you charge it only to 80% (past that you must either slow-charge, or have really fancy chemistry), you can turn that into 800 cycles - and the battery is effectively 60kwh.
Now in this case you can indeed go over the 80% cap, but it will eat up battery life more ra
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You're getting extra unnecessary weight to carry around, which will reduce your battery life.
Those who paid extra for the higher capacity are getting a less reliable product with an inferior lifespan.
If they wanted to offer an over specced but artificially limited battery in order to improve reliability then those paying extra for higher capacity should receive similar levels of reliability.
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Not necessarily (Score:5, Interesting)
The proof is the fact that they did it.
Not really--suppose they are not turning enough of a profit on the cheaper model to justify turning out the line. Then the cheaper model lets them increase economies of scale and also make the car available to more people (driving down the production cost of the more expensive model and possibly its cost if the external market forces are right), while the more expensive model pays enough to justify having the line and gives you an economy of scale to knock down the price of the cheap model a bit. If you sold just the expensive model to everyone it might then need to be at a higher price point than the cheaper model, which would make it unavailable to people who would otherwise be able to buy the cheap one and reduce the number of consumers able to purchase the car.
Or suppose that they could sell the cheap one with a cheaper battery at the same price point, but by including the bigger battery they make it cheaper to produce due to economies of scale. The customer is still getting the cheaper car but with it being easier to upgrade than it otherwise would be, and the company is producing it more inexpensively. Because of the easy upgrade, the customer actually has a benefit as compared to if the company had decided to sell it with 100% control of a smaller battery.
I understand the urge to hate companies that introduce unnecessary structural monopolies into the marketplace and are unnecessarily hostile to the right to repair or the right to fully control your own property--but just because a decision sets off our radar about that doesn't mean the decision is necessarily harmful to consumers.
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The more expensive model has to be sold at an even higher cost to subsidise the cheaper model...
If they weren't doing this, then the expensive model could be cheaper. You'd end up with just a single model that sits between the price points of the current models.
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A single model that falls between two stools - with neither sufficient volume nor margin to be viable.
Differential pricing. It's econ 101, educate yourself.
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The proof is the fact that they did it.
Selling a product at a particular price doesn't prove that it's sustainable to do so.
They could even be taking a net loss on the car, and still be better off if by using the larger batteries they can sell them faster. It can be better for a company's financial situation to earn $60K today for a car that cost $65K to build than to earn $65K when you can sell it in 6 months when the smaller battery is in stock. And if you lose orders when customers are forced to wait longer for their cars, you could lose much
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Nobody said it was sustainable. They did it, and they're not filing for bankruptcy, therefore they could afford it. QED, motherfucker.
But they didn't do it. They didn't ship 75KWh batteries at the same price point as the 60KWh hour batteries. They shipped 75KWh batteries downrated to 60KWh to preserve the premium 75KWh model -- if they didn't do that, then no one would pay extra for the larger battery.
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I would be annoyed if I have to pay for the electricity to lug around a bunch of batteries that I can't use everywhere I drive. If the offer made it clear that I'd get a software-crippled battery rather than just a smaller battery, that would be OK (I've no idea if this is the case or not).
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BMW's drivers tend to be pretentious snobs who don't mind paying $200+ for a starter and couldn't turn a wrench if they had too.
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The battery will be a pack of small cells, not a single unit... Even if it's sealed inside a single case, internally it will consist of any number of cells.
Producing a pack which contains less cells would provide a lower capacity, while also providing less weight. Or even make the packs modular, so each 60kWh car contains 4x 15kWh battery packs while a 75kWh car contains 5.
Adding more batteries increases the range, but also the weight so you can't keep adding batteries to gain increased range. You'll eventu
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They probably warranty the battery for a certain number of years.
Battery life is dependent on many things: number of cycles, how high it's charged up, how low it's drained, the temperature at charge and discharge, the rate of charge and discharge, probability of manufacturing defects, etc.
With Lithium-Ion batteries, limiting the charge and discharge greatly extends the battery life, so if Tesla allows the batteries to be charged more and discharged deeper, they
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Except Apple don't charge you extra to disable that function...
All ipods and iphones refuse to boot with a low battery. That's a safety/longevity feature.
If they charged you extra to circumvent this, then it would be profiteering as it would show they are doing it purely for profit and arent concerned about longevity.
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If Apple or Sony did something like this with the iPhone or PS4, the comment sections would filled with people screaming boycott.
But when Tesla did this, yay, what a good guy!
Yep, this is the rampant fanboism in /. This is basically no different from mindless left/right, R/D, creationist religious nut that /.ers like to look down upon.
How do you know they don't? How do you know that the only difference between a 64GB and 128GB iPhone isn't that they blow a fuse at the factory to restrict the memory when they sell the 64GB model, but it has the exact same storage hardware? And if they do this, do you care? You paid less for the 64GB phone than the 128GB phone.
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Because several people have dismantled the phones and looked at the internal components. The smaller capacity models contain lower capacity (or in some cases less) flash chips, so apple at least has intentionally manufactured them at a lower capacity using different (cheaper) components to do so.
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They've done this on certain models from time to time. When they do it, they're usually quite clear at the time of purchase that you're getting a larger battery, but only paying to unlock some portion of it, with the option to pay the difference later.
So they're entirely up front about it.
Yes, you probably could hack it, but since the cars talk to Tesla on a regular basis (and you get lots of cool features through that), Tesla will notice that you've hacked it.
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Batteries do reduce in capacity over time, it's an inherent weakness of the current technology which people know and accept.
But the fact is tesla sell you the SAME battery, either with or without an artificial restriction imposed on it in software. If indeed the capacity restriction increases the usable life of the battery then those who paid extra to not have this restriction imposed aren't going to be happy with their less reliable (and more expensive) product.