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Tesla Temporarily Boosts Battery Capacity For Hurricane Irma (sfgate.com)
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.
The crippled betteries are sold under cost.
That's not the case here. The extra installed battery capacity is perfectly fine, and under normal conditions, Tesla will allow you to unlock it for a fee. It is just part of their business model that they purposely cripple the hardware because they know that for the most part eventually their users will get peeved at the limited mileage and pay to unlock the extra battery capacity. People have different views on the morality of this.
You can never know everything, and part of what you do know will always be wrong. Perhaps even the most important part.
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 upgrade you paid IBM their truckload of lucre and they sent out a tech with a pair of wirecutters who would then open the case and cut a few strategically placed wires inside and voila! Extra processors.
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.
You car is carrying battery weight it does not need and cannot use simply so that when you absolutely need it, Tesla can sell it to you at an inflate price.
Brand loyalty aside, you will wake up at some point to realize how your being screwed there.
More information:
http://batteryuniversity.com/l...
Look at tables 2 and 3.
#DeleteFacebook
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.
Find me an IBM mainframe customer who complained about this, and I will show you a poorly managed IT department.
I have worked with Linux and Windows machines in the past, and now work with mainframes. The ability to increase a machine's capacity with just a flip of a switch is a godsend in quite a few unexpected surge situation.
Who cares what the machine, physically, could be capable of? Business made a decision to buy a certain amount of computing power at a certain price, and they got what they paid for. On top of that, would you rather they gave you a machine exactly to the spec and you would need to move to another machine (meaning delays and effort) to upgrade after you paid more? Or would you rather have the option just pay and then magically have the additional capacity? Any sane IT department would want the magic.
Build your own machine if you want to squeeze every last bit from it. Companies buy IBM mainframes to serve a need, and that need was served very well by the mainframes.