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

Uh huh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe Tesla could just stop artificially crippling the batteries?

Re:Uh huh...

[iCEBaLM]

You act like they're the first people to do this.

The amount of people who do it doesn't make it right.

Re: Uh huh...

[dbialac]

Go sign up for a cell phone service that doesn't force you into arbitration. Wait, there aren't any.

Re: Uh huh...

[Bert64]

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?

Re:Uh huh...

[barc0001]

> 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.

Re:Uh huh...

[steveha]

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.

Re:Uh huh...

[TheRaven64]

The battery comes with an 8-year warranty. If they discharge to 60%, then it will last for longer than if they discharge to 50%. Battery failures are not 100% predictable though, they're statistical. The extra 10% capacity translates to a higher probability that the battery will fail under warranty. The price of the increase is designed to compensate for this.

Re: That's disgusting

[MattKeith]

I wonder if they are also doing this so the battery pack lasts longer. A larger pack has more miles worth of charge cycles, so if it's sold as a 60 but really is a 75 it'll be capable of the same total number of miles of use. I'd actually like that.

Before jumping to conclusions

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:Before jumping to conclusions

[DarkOx]

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.

Batteries that aren't full-cycled last longer

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

-

Re:Batteries that aren't full-cycled last longer

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[TheRaven64]

Most of what you say is wrong.

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:

• 100% (full discharge): 300, 600
• 80%: 320, 720
• 60%: 360, 900
• 40%: 600, 1,200
• 20%: 300, 1,800
• 10%: 1,000, 1,500

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...

Re:Batteries that aren't full-cycled last longer

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:That's disgusting

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:But you paid for the battery

[Anonymous Coward]

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.