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.

Comments

Re:Before jumping to conclusions

[viperidaenz]

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.

Re:But you paid for the battery

[ShanghaiBill]

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.