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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: 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.