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Tesla Sending New Wall-Charger Adapters After Garage Fire
JoeyRox writes "Tesla is sending its customers new home charging connectors after recent reports of chargers overheating in garages and one instance of a fire inside a wall socket that held one of the chargers. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the new charging adapter will contain a thermal fuse capable of terminating the charging process if it gets too hot. 'These are very rare events, but occasionally the wiring isn't done right. We want people to have absolute comfort, so we're going to be providing them with an upgraded adapter.' The company also issued a software update in December to address the overheating issue."
I'll get in before the nutjob Tesla detractors.
This is a very responsible move by Tesla which takes guts. They are changing the charger design to ameliorate a problem that has nothing to do with the car and nothing to do with the charger and everything to do with the house wiring. Obviously the nutjobs will point their skinny little fingers and accuse Tesla of papering over their own flaw, which is a lie.
This is a 100% serious reply - Once upon a time, software developers selected beta testers, who used the software with the understanding that it was still in a beta version and bugs should be expected and documented.
Now, no such "testing" occurs in both the software and hardware realms. The developers or manufacturers simply develop something that compiles or doesn't collapse under its own weight and sells it as the release version to customers that expect all that testing to have been done already, so it works. Customers pay full price, the shit crashes or falls apart(or catches fire), they complain to the company describing what happened, and then the company documents what happened and gives the customer a "new" but equally faulty piece in exchange.
There is no more "beta" testing - the beta testers are now referred to as "early adopters."
-- Ethanol-fueled
Alternatively... it could be exactly as he said, the car was not fire prone (as borne out by the stats showing it had lower fire rates than other cars, and better outcomes when they did happen), and that the fire department agree that it was not caused by the charger.
Instead, it could simply be that even though they're working fine, there's way to mitigate the risk of other faulty things causing problems, and it's nice to do something towards that.
Honestly, I hate this aspect of the modern world –no one is allowed to improve something without implying that something was broken before hand, or that it was their fault that something else was broken.
I was going to say, it's entirely possible the wiring in the wall was bad.
This is one possible scenario which has happened in the past. Maybe it was aluminum wiring, which has a much lower thermal expansion rate than copper. Back in the 70's it was really common for developers to use aluminum wiring in houses because it was cheaper than copper. My house had aluminum wiring. The previous owners of my house were really underhanded. They ran copper off the electrical box up in behind some insulation and connected it to the aluminum from junction hidden junction boxes, and because home inspectors don't do "destructive" inspections, meaning they don't even move insulation, we didn't find out until years after we had bought the house. We had a wall socket stop working and when I opened it up to see what was wrong I found the aluminum wire had completely detached from the terminals. Luckily my father-in-law, who doesn't live near by, is an electrician because we had to have the whole house rewired. It's still not illegal to use aluminum wiring, copper is recommended, but it's not requried. The higher temperature of the adapter could cause the aluminum wire to expand and pop off the plug terminals in the wall box, which can lead to arcing and fires.
It really wouldn't be Tesla's fault if developers were using cheap materials when building the house, but it is nice of them to do something to try and mitigate future issues after it becomes a known possibility. We can't account for every scenario that will ever occur, but we can learn as we go along.