Slashdot Mirror
Tesla Issues Software Update To Extend Some Cars' Batteries Due To Hurricane Florence (electrek.co)
Tesla is temporarily enabling free Supercharging and extending the range of some cars' batteries for those in Hurricane Florence's path. "Tesla used to offer the option to buy a Model S or Model X with a 75 kWh battery pack software-locked at a capacity of 60 kWh," reports Electrek. "The option would result in a less expensive vehicle with a shorter range and the option to pay to remotely enable the longer range at a later stage."
Some owners on the Carolina Coast report that they've received a notification explaining the temporary new benefits: "We are temporarily enabling your car to access additional battery capacity, as well as free Supercharging, in preparation for Hurricane Florence. We hope this gives you the peace of mind to get to a safe location, and will notify you before returning your car to its original configuration in mid-October. Badging on your display may adjust during this period. Safe travels." From the report: This is a very cool move from Tesla. When they did it last year, it was misrepresented by many who focused on the software-limited battery packs -- saying that it means Tesla was screwing people over by limiting the battery capacity. The option was more about offering a less expensive battery pack without having to produce a different size pack, which helps streamline production. It gave buyers a less expensive option and they could always unlock the capacity later for a price. For those who decided to not unlock it, it now gives an opportunity for Tesla to let them have more range at a critical time by using Tesla's over-the-air software update capability.
Some owners on the Carolina Coast report that they've received a notification explaining the temporary new benefits: "We are temporarily enabling your car to access additional battery capacity, as well as free Supercharging, in preparation for Hurricane Florence. We hope this gives you the peace of mind to get to a safe location, and will notify you before returning your car to its original configuration in mid-October. Badging on your display may adjust during this period. Safe travels." From the report: This is a very cool move from Tesla. When they did it last year, it was misrepresented by many who focused on the software-limited battery packs -- saying that it means Tesla was screwing people over by limiting the battery capacity. The option was more about offering a less expensive battery pack without having to produce a different size pack, which helps streamline production. It gave buyers a less expensive option and they could always unlock the capacity later for a price. For those who decided to not unlock it, it now gives an opportunity for Tesla to let them have more range at a critical time by using Tesla's over-the-air software update capability.
they made more 75kWh batteries than 60kWh ones and rather than sit on them put them in cheaper vehicles.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Every engine manufacturer in the world does this. They'll have an 'iron set' which is a fixed engine block, turbo, injector, etc combination and the difference between 300 and 400 HP will be a software upgrade.
Clearly some Tesla owners disagree with you and are glad they have the freedom to choose based on their own opinion and not based on some poster on slashdot's opinion.
My thought: Even if the ORIGINAL buyer doesn't upgrade, having the bigger battery would be useful for resale. In fact, if it was a lease from Tesla, they could unlock the full capacity for "free" and resell the car at the higher capacity.
I think their motive is not unlike other companies whose product-lines have a "Good, Better, Best" structure, with pricing to match. These levels could be imposed by manufacturing yields, or by an up-selling strategy.
Sometimes a company runs out of "Good" and has to sell "Better" or "Best" in its place, in order to maintain the tier strategy. (For example, Intel may sell chips certified at lower clock-rates even though they might be overclockable.) But shipping "Best" in the first place, and enabling the tiers by software configuration makes it seem like the manufacturing cost is irrelevant to the pricing strategy. Or it may be as you say, that people who purchase at the lower tier have lower support costs, or can be upgraded more easily later if they crave the extra range.
Yes, it does seem like a dickhead move on Tesla's part to sell a product that is crippled intentionally by a trivial configuration choice. But they're not the only company who does such things.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
you should have full access to what you paid for
Except ... they didn't pay for it.
The buyers made an explicit choice to NOT pay for the additional range, in the full understanding that they wouldn't get that feature.
If I just run the battery to zero and am stranded, can I call up Tesla and ask them to unlock my extra capacity so I can drive home?
Maybe. If you have a 75kwh battery pack but only paid for 60kwh, then part of the 20% surplus is at the top and part at the bottom. So when your car is charged to 100%, it is really only charged to ~90%. When it reads 0%, you actually have about 10% left.
Is that 10% is enough to get you home?
By neither fully charging, nor fully discharging, you battery will last longer.
It's the same thing software and hardware vendors have been doing for decades, including additional capabilities that can be unlocked with configuration. It's no different than a hotel that says "sure, you can use the empty room next to you also, for a charge." Or an airline that says "sure you can use the unused seat next to you, for a charge."
The mini bar would be a better analogy. It's already there in the room you paid for. It's up to you whether or not you use it and pay the charge.
Beware of the Leopard.
What a hypocrite.
I notice you aren't paying for the bandwidth that the physical wire is capable of, but a much cheaper software limited package.
I notice you aren't paying for a volume site license for the enterprise features of windows but are using a much cheaper software limited version.
Ever host a website? You didn't pay for the entire machine and the entire yearly wages for the people running it, but a much cheaper package again software limited to your needs.
Ever buy a VPS or scalable os host like AWS, Google domain for business, or any other service? You certainly are not paying for the exobytes of storage on the platform but just the space memory and bandwidth you need.
You make the same choices that tesla owners make yet it's great when you do it and horrible when anyone else does. Hypocrite.
Until you chalk up the billions of dollars a month to pay for the entire resources available to you that you use *against your will* like you are demanding, you can fuck off.
I will choose to buy and not buy what I please, and pay as much as I choose to pay as I please, and don't give a fuck what you want to force me to do against my will.
You'll have to do better than hypocrite-bitch and whine on an internet fourm than that.
Come and make me, and I'll show you what I think about you wanting to force things upon me against my will.
People escaping from a hurricane, apparently.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
And before that, IBM used to do it with their card tabulating machines. An upgrade often meant that a technician came in and moved a belt.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
"You void your warantee if you root/fix your phone/fail to say three 'Hail Apples' every night" is one of the most enduring myths I've seen. Apple cannot "void your warantee" for anything they want, believe it or not, we even have laws that prevent it right here in the Banana Republic States of America. Alright, they're hardly ever enforced, so you can be forgiven for not knowing that they exist, but for what it's worth, Apple is violating the law by doing this, and the FTC is at least starting to pretend like they are going to do something about it. https://www.theregister.co.uk/... https://motherboard.vice.com/e... https://www.cultofmac.com/5407... https://venturebeat.com/2018/0... "But. but, it's a free market! Apple should be able to stick a three-foot long kilbasa in your rectum as punishment for not bricking your phone within 3 days of their releasing an update! What, you think you're special? If you don't update, you might get infected, and then infect others, so it's your obligation to brick your phone like everyone else because a working phone can be compromised! You owe it to them! It's right there on page 27 of the fine print! You agreed to it so you have to do it! You agreed to it! You agreed to it of your own free will! In a free market no less! A free market!" The "free market" hasn't devlolved quite that much yet, but give it another couple of years and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.
It makes sense for software, where there is no additional cost. But if it's cheaper for the manufacturer to give someone a full pack rather than a smaller pack, then it makes no sense to even have two versions. If a customer decides to never upgrade, we're just wasting perfectly good battery cells.
It's no different than a hotel that says "sure, you can use the empty room next to you also, for a charge." Or an airline that says "sure you can use the unused seat next to you, for a charge."
If you use the room/seat, then the crew needs to come and clean/restock it. That's extra cost to them.
You're not paying for the bar, you're paying for the drinks. Horrible analogy.
Reminds me of a number of incidents of downselling crippled hardware in the 20th century computer industry. Mainframes that ran with different clock speeds (model differing only by a jumper), for instance. Multi-CPU mainframes where extras served as spares and you paid for a firmware unlock, which paid for their higher risk of running out of spares if something fired and having to actually tear it open and replace a much-of-a-megabuck board.
One was a pair of 1960s IBM low-end page printers that differed only in model markings and firmware-controlled print speed. The faster printer was the same hardware, but all those moving parts wore out a lot more and needed more maintenance.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It's cheaper in that lithium batteries last longer if you don't fully charge, or fully discharge them.
By using a big battery and then ensuring it doesn't go below 10% or above 90%, it lasts longer, which saves money on warranty replacements. Depending on ambient conditions and driving patterns one might be able to degrade the 75 kWh battery enough, fast enough that Tesla would have to replace it at their expense. Limiting it to 60 kWh makes that a lot less likely to happen, thus it's cheaper to Tesla.
Warning: enabling this setting will allow your battery to drain past what is safe for extended lifetime of the vehicle,
Read again the summary.
The batteries are actually 75kWh batteries.
But when buying the car it's possible to ask them to be artificially limited to 60kWh and get a rebate.
Draining them to 75kWh is in no way unsafe to the batteries themselves, they were designed for that.
It's just Tesla offering to temporarily disable this agreed limitation, for free.
Whereas under normal circumstance, the user is free to ask it removed, but needs to pay (conceptually: needs to return the rebate).
It's a way to pay less now, and then get more further down the line by paying the extra at a later time.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Whether its using the full 75kwh or software throttled to 60kwh, its still the same battery and Tesla's manufacturing cost is exactly the same. If they can sell the car for $xxxx with the battery artificially limited to 60k then they can sell it for the same price without the limit.
It's a bit more complicated than that :
- market segmentation is a thing. read-up on that.
The demand/offer balance you've been hearing in school is a gross over-simplification. Items aren't simply sold at the price the market can bear.
As a company, you don't just want to sell at the perfect price point. As a company, you actually want to cover as many diverse price-points at possible. Because otherwiese you'd be still missing all the money that the "poorer" customer would be okay to throw at your product, and customer who'd be willing to pay you even more will only pay a lower price.
Thus you segment your market. You invent alternative "Deluxe" and "bagrain" offers targetting the lower end and higher end segment. And you try to make these product distinctive.
Tesla is doing that by, at one (higher) end offering bigger battery (batteries which are actually 100kWh under the hood) that they sell fur much more, and tons of high-margin options (there no way that the camera for the autopilot cost a total of 5000$).
At the other end, they also need to sell cheaper car for those who are only willing to pay less. The simplest way to do it, is to offer to limit the battery in exchange of a rebate - I works not so bad, because the potential buyer won't be feeling to be missing out by not going for the more expensive option : they can still pay at a later point to get the full battery ( <- this makes the people not wanting the expensive model even less reluctant to settle with the cheap option)
On the other hand, compared with Microsoft who is selling 20 different variations of Windows - which are all slight different configuration parameters (actually yes, just register the same DVD with a different product key and you get a different set of software based on what tier of Windows is that key for) - each sold at a different price, Tesla is pretty much tame.
- profits
Tesla isn't a government run plan to bring you the cheapest possible EV.
Tesla is acompany, and they are allowed to make money.
Even more so, if you squint a bit, you'll notice (given the invested money) that the current business of Tesla is *building manufacturing capabilities for EV*.
They are basically in the business of building factories but in order to offset the costs of the factory, they'll sell you an expensive lithium-battery, and for that price, they'll bolt a complimentary (relatively cheap) car body on that battery.
In the current phase Tesla needs as much money as possible to throw on their factory building (that's why some are accusing them of being unable to make money).
They'll do every single possible trick for that :
- they'll segement the model S market as much as possible to be able to sell even more units
- they'll currently only sell the high-end variations of Model 3, because they are a higher-margin, and only sell the cheapest variations later.
Thus make even more profits (on the cars) and get a little bit more on the precious financial ressource they need to finish building their manufacturing capability.
Once again we see money-grubbing Jews {...}
For your information, Elon Musk happens to be non-religious.
in action, always trying to squeeze the customer for more money.
a.k.a. pretty much standard variety capitalism.
If you're not happy with that, vote with your wallet, don't buy a Tesla.
Go see instead what Renault is collaborating in Portugal for a more state sponsored (more socialist / less capitalist) approach to EV. Go buy a Zoé instead.
(But beware, these only come with up to 44kWh battery with around 200-somethingish range (a.k.a. "400km NEDC"). On the other hand you don't need to buy the battery, you can also rent)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Owners should have complete control of their software/hardware even if it is a car.
Not unless they paid for the privilege. They agreed to the deal when they bought the car. If they didn't like that deal they can buy something else. And there is nothing preventing a technically competent person from taking control of the hardware and software if they decide to do so. This would obviously void any warranty support not required by law or contract from Tesla but they are free to make that choice.
The fact that they can change it any way, the fact that they can restrict your ability to change configurable settings with your device/thingy/car/anything is unacceptable.
Unacceptable to you maybe but obviously not to the people that bought these cars. I understand your objections and I support free software too but part of freedom is having the right to make bad choices too. There is no bright line distinction between having the ability to enable/disable features remotely versus doing so by flashing firmware without a network connection by a dealer during service. It's the same action at the end of the day and the car maker isn't allowed by law to change things you didn't explicitly agree to in a contract. You didn't decide what the engine mappings were for the car you are driving now are and that's no different. You can change them yourself if you want to but the maker of your car is under no obligation to support that decision or the consequences of it. Tesla sold a vehicle with a particular feature set. You can change it if you want but Tesla is only going to support the vehicle under the terms they sold it. The buyer of the Tesla agreed to these terms at time of purchase.
But its your decision and anyone having control of anything on someone elses thing that wasn't explicitly allowed by the owner is operating malware.
It was explicitly allowed by the owner when they bought the car. You can be 100% certain that they signed a document agreeing to those terms.
No it's like if you buy a house with a 3 rooms but when you move in you notice there are actually 4 rooms but one of them is locked and you don't have the key. When you inquire about this fourth room from the seller he says that he can open it for you a price of course.Seems kinda shady doesn't it?
No because there is no secret room like in your example. The owners of the cars signed a contract explicitly agreeing to the deal and the terms when they bought the title to the car. They were under no duress to agree to the deal so both parties were fine with it. So no it isn't shady at all.
The problem with Tesla is that obviously the price for the 75kWh battery is much higher than it needs to be if you can sell the higher battery for less money and still make a profit.
And what exactly is wrong with making a profit? If the buyer is willing to pay the extra amount then that is fine. Charge what the market will bear, same as literally every other company on the planet. If Tesla was asking too much then they would get more people refusing sales which is how it is supposed to work.
The correct solution for this would be to lower the price for the 75 kWh battery so that you can sell it at the actual manufacturing price but not at the fake made up price.
Your argument is based on the false notion that there is a causal relationship between costs and prices. The price ANY product is sold to you is a completely arbitrary decision made by the party selling the product. Generally it's a number larger than the cost but there is nothing that forces this to be the case for any given transaction. The seller can ask any price they want and if the buyer agrees to it then by definition it is a fair price as long as there is no coercion in the process - and nobody is buying a Tesla with a figurative gun to their head.
The 75k version is more expensive because it puts more wear and strain on the cells, which has implications on maintenance and warranty. Batteries really start to degrade when your charge them above 80% or discharge them below 40% of physical cell capacity. The 60k and 75k use a different definition of 0% and 100% of capacity visible to the user.
The Golden Rule of marketing is to price a good or a service at what each individual customers is willing to pay, and yes, the "options racket" is a way of charging customers different amounts for nearly the same thing.
The airlines have gone into this in a big way, not only with the system for offering cheaper tickets for advanced purchase, inconvenient times, or having to change in Atlanta, but also the upgrade fees for checked bags, extra legroom, or being the first person to exit the plane in case it catches fire after landing.
Oracle is moving towards segmenting the market for the Java JDK/JRE, where it remains free if you are on the treadmill to use only the latest version with security updates (and no more 32-bit X86 either), otherwise you pay. And there are no posted prices as you are supposed to call Oracle to be asked, "How much are you willing to spend?"
You could say that the 15K for the basket of options is "pure profit", but how do you know that the 30K for the baseline car is offering the car "at cost"? Running a car company, you basically are paying salaries, hourly wages, fringes and money to suppliers of parts, your factory and insurance utilities, and then you have money coming in from the sale of cars along with income streams from your captive leasing and financing subsidiary for customers not paying in cash up front. If the money coming in exceeds the money going out, you are "cash flow positive" and you are running "a going concern."
But what if the stamping presses need to be changed because after a couple years your car "is stale" to your customers and you need to "freshen it" by changing a few curves in the car's outline? What if government emission regulations will require major engineering changes to your powertrain by 2025? How are you going to pay for that -- take out loans that require interest payments? Sell more stock to investors expecting either cash dividend payments or a level of paper "returns"?
So you don't really know what it "costs" to build the base car let alone the "options." If no customer bought the 15K options package that costs you little to add on, is your company going to "go under" in a few years for the reasons given above? So maybe the 30K base car is "sold at a loss" to the cheapskates who forgo the "extras", but it "segments your market" and maximizes revenue from your line of cars?
This is the dilemma that Tesla is in especially because they or no one else really knows what it costs to make their cars, especially when they are incurring heavy "cap-ex" spending to grow their production of cars to meet burgeoning demand. The cash coming in from all of those Model 3's rolling of their line, however, will have to pay off the large amount they owe suppliers along with some big loan payments coming due, and if they don't synchronize the march of money in the door with money going out the door, poof!, Chapter 11 bankruptcy and that 40-50 billion dollars in share holdings at around $300/share last time I checked vanishes.
But no one really knows what it "costs" to make a Tesla -- it is all accounting formulas, that is, until they stiff someone they owe a large payment and the whole thing collapses, or they squeak through and they dominate the world automotive market.