Right, but presumably if Tesla doesn't throttle your pack it will more quickly degrade and become unusable at some point because of reduced capacity, which is not covered under warranty. Unless you can show that is somehow the result of a manufacturing defect. If you can show wording from Tesla at the time of purchase that your car will always be capable of some minimum charge rate which it no longer achieves then maybe you'd have a case. Likewise if you can show wording from Tesla that DCFC will not negatively affect your pack. I know some people were told that verbally but that's hard to prove.
Honest question, is your position that Tesla should simply allow full power DCFC no matter what the consequences, even if it means you car ends up melting down at a supercharger, and then replace it if still under warranty?
I'm pretty sure someone posted a link or two (at the very least) from Tesla stating that Supercharging would not harm the battery (which would also presumably mean CHADeMo would not, since it's even less rigorous on the battery during charging). Regardless, Tesla has never, prior to this discovery, told anyone that ALL DCFC would harm the battery. In fact, people have installed CHADeMos in their garages... I feel bad for them now. DCFC should not lead to battery degradation according to Tesla, therefore any battery degradation due to DCFC should be covered under warranty. How you prove battery degradation is due to DCFC and not something else, though, I don't know - but this is a hypothetical situation.
But warranty questions aside, as I believe that's another issue that probably needs discussion, but is not the issue at hand in this thread, is the fact that the car WAS most definitely advertised as being able to achieve certain charging characteristics. If the car is unable to do so, then Tesla has falsely advertised the product (see 2.8s 0-60 on a V1 and V2 P90DL pack). Tesla advertised charging times (and I believe even charging rates at one point), but come to find out the car is
artificially limited and prevented from achieving those speeds and not due to transient conditions, is plainly false advertising. Of course, since this issue was discovered, they have removed virtually all references to charging times and speeds on the website, but if you look on the wayback machine, you'll see a very different story from Tesla at the time.
So to answer your question, yes I think Tesla should allow me at least the choice to charge my battery at full speeds, regardless of the deleterious nature of that charging, as long as it's within the advertised capabilities of the vehicle. They should also suffer the warranty consequences should the battery indeed fail prematurely, because THEY are the ones that made the claim that I based my decision to purchase on. I can say with 100% confidence that if I had known what I know now about the 90 Pack batteries, I would never in a million years have purchased a $150k car with these characteristics. I would rather have had an 85 pack (at the time) or a 100 Pack if I had waited a few more months (and I would have waited if I had known about the design flaws in the 90 pack).
It's my opinion that this move by Tesla is not to save users batteries so much as it is to prevent warranty liability down the road with an 8 year unlimited mile battery warranty. There is little doubt in my mind that this would not be a thing if the battery warranty was 4 years and 50k miles. The real tell here is the fact that the throttle limit is an incredibly low number when weighed against 8 years and unlimited miles. The only people who will eventually NOT hit this number are the ones who NEVER DCFC. Even if you only DCFC 10 times per year (and you can hit that number in ONE round trip), you'll still hit the cap before your battery warranty is up.
If the battery were to naturally degrade over time and lose the ability to charge at a given rate, the throttle wouldn't be needed - it would naturally throttle itself. The fact that the throttle is in place for less than 6 Mwh (or a total of about 80 charge-ups of a 90 pack) of charging indicates to me that the sudden, catastrophic failure is possible very early in the battery life cycle with high charging rates. An alternate explanation is that high charging rates might kill a significant number of cells and cause a module to fail inside the pack, which would be a warranty issue as well. Either way, this move is a move to protect Tesla from warranty liability, not to protect the user. It may have that side effect, sure, but it's not the driving reason, IMO.
