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Tesla remotely extends the range of some cars to help with Irma
As Floridians in the path of Hurricane Irma rushed to evacuate last week, Tesla pushed out a software update that made it a bit easier for certain Model S and Model X owners to get out of the state.
Tesla sometimes sells cars with more hardware battery capacity than is initially available for use by customers, offering the additional capacity as a subsequent software update. For example, Tesla has sold Model S cars rated 60D—the 60 stands for 60kWh of energy storage—that actually have 75kWh batteries. Owners of these vehicles can pay Tesla $9,000 to unlock the extra 15kWh of storage capacity.
But last week, Tesla decided to temporarily make this extra capacity available even to Floridians who hadn't paid for the upgrade to ensure they had enough range to get out of Florida ahead of Hurricane Irma. A Tesla spokesperson confirmed the change to Electrek. The extra 15kWh should give the vehicles an additional 30 to 40 miles of range.
Pay to unlock the full potential of your battery.
(Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday September 13 2017, @02:11AM (3 children)
Maybe its cheap and being sold at a loss.
Most of the data I can find to provide links is for old lead acid batteries. The terms to google for are "depth of discharge vs lifespan graph" and stuff like that.
In the old days with lead acids and central office power supplies and solar panels for sailboats, stuff I was directly o indirectly involved in, generally a delta of 10% depth of discharge cost you a delta of about 15% of cycle life. So if your sailboat battery lived about three years if you drained it to "industry standard" 80% every day, then if you drained that sucker to 90% every day you could predict it'll die about 150 days younger, or it'll die about 2.5 years in. Or if you sized stuff to never drop much below 70% it very likely could live another six months longer than normal.
This has some financial implications for home (or marine) solar where the "cheapest battery per unit time" usually isn't the smallest battery that drains to zero before sunrise every morning. That kind of battery is cheap to replace, but the system cost is very high because you'll be replacing it very often. Its non linear and not as simple as the differential equation like estimate implies but two batteries drained to merely 50% will last a huge hell of a lot longer than twice as long between replacements than one battery drained to 100% every night. On the other hand a battery that's never discharged will internally corrode and die in 5 to 10 years even if it's never removed from the float charger, so there's no point in making the "Wear and Tear" aspect last 500 years if the "old age" aspect means its guaranteed dead in 9 years anyway.
Taking a wild guess that the 10%/15% rule still applies, its hard to get a straight answer about how much which Tesla pack costs as there apparently isn't "the" tesla pack, but "eh sixty grand total at the cash register to replace" is something I've heard. And draining a battery 15% deeper according to the 10/15 estimate should kill the battery about 22.5% fewer cycles. So $60K times it dies 22.5% earlier under warranty means it costs Tesla $13.5K in increased warranty/lease claims to drain the battery 15% deeper, but the story is they're charging only $9K, so they lose $4K every time someone pays to unlock a deeper discharge...
My ballpark estimate is Tesla is neither losing their shirt nor making a killing by charging $9K. We're talking about numbers that need two sig figs to know for sure and I have about one at best, but I can tell its not an out of line charge.
Now if you'd like to hear complaining about bullshit DRM lets talk about Rigol test equipment feature unlock codes.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Wednesday September 13 2017, @03:59AM (2 children)
Yea, that makes sense. Everybody was worried about being stuck with the tab replacing batteries so most electric cars have almost lifetime warranties on them. So in this case I won't say Tesla is being evil. It is their battery, if you want to punish it harder you pay more to cover replacing it sooner.
But the trend is awful. Automakers tried lockdown before, any modification outside an authorized dealer voided the warranty. Nope, knocked down by Congress. Good luck getting parts or even a decent diagram because they wouldn't sell you parts or manuals and tried suing any 3rd party. Nope, Congress smacked them down again. So now most of the interesting bits in a car, gas or electric, is software and you can't touch it because it is copyrighted and protected with DRM. Will Congress act again?
On the other hand though, with self drive becoming a thing, how the heck does that work if it isn't nailed down? When one screws up the vendor IS getting sued, by the owner, the victim, the various insurance companies involved, the governments involved, everybody. If the software is modifiable that throws a huge wrench into that feeding frenzy. Won't someone think of the lawyers?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 13 2017, @07:38AM
[Super Secret Equifax Encrypted Message begin] Crack Social Justice Warrior Special Response Team, Project jmorris, Special Report: In an interesting twist, subject is now defending lawyers.
The Team takes this as either a cry for help, or evidence that jmorris may actually be a shill account for the lawyers in either "Pelican Brief" or " The Devil's Advocate", but the Team is divided between Julia Roberts and Charlize Theron. But in either case, the morris may not be the totally insane rightwing nutjob he was thought to be? Or, this is all a ruse, like Limberger saying the Irma was a liberal lie, or Jones claiming that the Donald is being Medicated. At least Limby was plausible; everyone knows there is no medication for being the Donald. Monitoring will continue. Seems we suddenly have at least 14% extra battery life over what we were led to expect. Hmmm. [end Super Secret Equifax Encrypted Message, brought to you by Equifax, for all your on-line security needs. And if you want to know the credit rating, or home address, blood type, fingerprints, prescriptions, and weight of anyone in America, almost, call us at Totally_fucked@Experian. com.]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday September 13 2017, @01:33PM
In the old days if a shade tree mechanic screwed up a brake job, at least it was self contained and easy for the jury to figure out.
The real problems in self driving cars are trade secret and hyper tight coupling.
The trade secret part means maybe some mfgrs are going to eat default judgments as cheaper than giving away all the goods in public for every accident. There's 30K fatal car accidents per year, that's quite a legal trial load to think about.
Hyper tight coupling means installing an after market radio crashes the CAN bus that connects to the steering wheel controls which due to poor system design makes the second laser rangefinder take extra time to reboot so when a bug hits laser rangefinder on the highway, the backup rangefinder can't transfer data fast enough so it rear ends a car. Who's to blame for all those software and design errors? Whoever has the most money and/or least political power, of course.