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Why Tesla Cars Aren't Bricked By Failing Batteries
itwbennett writes "Don't believe recent claims made by a blogger that non-functioning batteries in the Tesla Roadster cause the electric cars to be bricked, says IDC analyst Sam Jaffe. 'Here's the primary fact that the blogger in question doesn't understand: the Tesla battery pack is not a battery,' says Jaffe. 'It's a collection of more than 8,000 individual batteries. Each of those cells is independently managed. So there's only two ways for the entire battery pack to fail. The first is if all 8,000 cells individually fail (highly unlikely except in the case of something catastrophic like a fire). The second failure mechanism is if the battery management system tells the pack to shut down because it has detected a dangerous situation, such as an extremely low depth of discharge. If that's the case, all that needs to be done is to tow the vehicle to a charger, recharge the batteries and then reboot the battery management system. This is the most likely explanation for the five 'bricks' that the blogger claims to have heard about.'"
'Bricked' is a term that originated with iPhones (failed jailbreaks etc). iPhone's are made by Apple therefore 'cool'. Ergo 'Bricked' is a cool term (by association). Therefore bloggers want to use it as much as possible (so they seem cool by association and 'with it'). Hence they use it as much as possible - even if they don't understand what it means and use it incorrectly. Much like the massive over-use of the word 'epic' nowadays to mean anything slightly-above-average.
So Bricked = failed and unrepairable ... which is why Tesla requires owners to shell out $40,000 to REPLACE a completely discharged battery.
The funny thing here is that the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt were both designed specifically to avoid this type of thing - you'd think someone asking you to shell out over $100,000 for a car would've been smart enough to think of that too.