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: Uh huh...

[BitterOak]

The crippled betteries are sold under cost.

The problem with that business model is eventually someone will figure out how to "jailbreak" their car and enhance the battery life without paying Tesla for the privilege. This will create all kinds of legal nightmares. Historically car owners have been allowed to "soup up their ride" (as long as the resulting vehicle is street legal), but with this new kind of business model that Tesla has, that could change. When you buy a car will there be an EULA that forbids making improvements? This could be a slippery slope.

Not necessarily

[SeattleLawGuy]

The proof is the fact that they did it.

Not really--suppose they are not turning enough of a profit on the cheaper model to justify turning out the line. Then the cheaper model lets them increase economies of scale and also make the car available to more people (driving down the production cost of the more expensive model and possibly its cost if the external market forces are right), while the more expensive model pays enough to justify having the line and gives you an economy of scale to knock down the price of the cheap model a bit. If you sold just the expensive model to everyone it might then need to be at a higher price point than the cheaper model, which would make it unavailable to people who would otherwise be able to buy the cheap one and reduce the number of consumers able to purchase the car.

Or suppose that they could sell the cheap one with a cheaper battery at the same price point, but by including the bigger battery they make it cheaper to produce due to economies of scale. The customer is still getting the cheaper car but with it being easier to upgrade than it otherwise would be, and the company is producing it more inexpensively. Because of the easy upgrade, the customer actually has a benefit as compared to if the company had decided to sell it with 100% control of a smaller battery.

I understand the urge to hate companies that introduce unnecessary structural monopolies into the marketplace and are unnecessarily hostile to the right to repair or the right to fully control your own property--but just because a decision sets off our radar about that doesn't mean the decision is necessarily harmful to consumers.

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

[Aristos Mazer]

I wish we could leave it to the owner, but in USA, I'd expect owners to sue the manufacturer when the battery life comes up unexpectedly short because of the owner's abuse. Even if the lawsuits are frivolous, making such lawsuits go away becomes expensive. Given that, it seems prudent to me for the company to produce a device that works to some specific spec and the customer buys that specific spec rather than a device that the user can use how they want. Then if they jailbreak, they know they're voiding their warranty and any guarantees the manufacturer provided.

Re: Uh huh...

[BitterOak]

You're welcome to not buy such a car.

Of course I'm welcome to not buy such a car. I'm also welcome to buy such a car and "hack" it and extend the battery life. The question is: will there be legal consequences for me if I do? Ultimately it will be up to legislatures to decide this matter and they are supposed to represent us, so do we want to live in a world where car manufacturers can restrict with legal means our ability to enhance our cars or not?

Almost the same on petrol cars

[havana9]

This happens also on regular petrol cars. The 1400 cc 16 valves turbocharged petrol engine made by Fiat is available in three versions: 120 HP, 145 HP and 170 HP. You can reprogram the ECU from a 120 HP to a 175 HP version quite easily and It will works for some time. But transmission, brakes, air manifold and exhaust are different. This is the official FIat upgrade kit So you can for a moment overboost the petrol engine power, but without changing other components you'' get a coffin on four wheels. I suppose that the power capacity difference could be linked to some different parts for the car that coul do the work ok for some times but can't be span the same lifetime if used on higher power.

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

[uncqual]

Mainframe manufacturers did this many decades ago. A different "boot" floppy on one mainframe I used would result in a substantially faster machine (of course, that floppy cost far more than the cost of manufacturing the floppy and the field engineers seemed really hard to bribe to "inadvertently leave the wrong floppy in the drive"). It was simply cheaper to give every machine the capability to run at the higher speed and "dumb it down" than it was to build two or more models and this manufacturer needed an array of models to compete at different price/performance points with IBM (who had baked enormous profits into every price point and, due to volume, could have more distinct model cost effectively).

Another mainframe had a feature (I don't recall the exact mechanism to enable it) where we could speed it up for some number of hours for a fee to the manufacturer - no hardware change nor (IIRC) a need to load new firmware or reboot.

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).