What does making it right look like? I fully expect that the battery pack in my car will degrade with time. Tesla has never promised and does not owe me that it will stay at 100% of original capacity or 100% of original charge rate forever. So what amount of degradation and what amount of slowdown is acceptable? This is a serious question.
"Making it right"
would have been as simple as being up front with people and telling them of previously unexpected degradation / impacts that would necessitate reducing charging rates, as soon as Tesla knew they would be doing so. Instead they just dumped it out there and (IMO)
hoped no one would notice.
So after making the foreseeably bad decision to just dump the charging restrictions on their start-up customers, they doubled down on their stupidity by refusing, to this day, to open up about the entire subject. NOWHERE is it mentioned on their sales website that they may restrict charging rates on customers at any time (or indeed take away any capability they decide they want to), at their sole discretion.
Lithium battery capacity degradation is a long-known fact, and Tesla did not hide that. In fact, they added the 8 year unlimited mileage warranty to the early vehicles in large part to offset that particular concern. Now they've realized that may have been a bit hasty, so they emasculate the charging rates (something they never warned might happen until well past mid-2016) to keep from having to replace batteries that are degrading much faster than they expected.
From my perspective, "making it right" now entails replacing older batteries with the current versions, at the additional cost to the owner that the higher capacity battery purchase would have been when it first became available. For example, the 100Kw battery Model S would have cost about $3k more than my 90Kw battery Model S, as I recall. So offer the upgrade to me for #3k.
I think most "early adopters" aren't unreasonable. Most of us understand that high-capacity battery usage for automobile propulsion was full of unknowns. Unexpected things were bound to come up, like the apparent need to throttle charge rates in order to control battery degradation. Had Tesla shown the respect they should have to their customers,
and the same loyalty to their customers that their customers showed to them, reasonable charging rate throttling would have been a lot more acceptable. Unfortunately, they chose another approach and squandered much, if not most, of that customer loyalty.
