That's pretty interesting. Without knowing the details around the situation I don't know how I'd handle that. Your car physically shipped with two chargers, but Tesla remotely disabled one? That's pretty messed up. I'd have raised hell.
Jason, It's a UK thing. Background:
The preferred charging option suggested by Tesla was to use a government scheme for installing a 32A single phase Type-2 point at your home. The glitch/oversight was chargers in an EU Model S cannot however charge at more than 16A @ 240V per phase. (In fact true single charger cars in EU are limited to 3kW when using public type 2 charging posts which did kick up a separate issue, but I'm digressing..)
In mainland Europe this wasn't a major problem because they could use the UMC with a "Commando" style 32A socket. In the UMC adapter for this style socket the input pin is simply bridged onto two of the phases inputs that go into the UMC itself.
However these sockets were up until recently not compliant with our electrical codes, as they do not have shutters. And at launch no 13A British style 3 pin adapter was available, so the UMC was not exactly living up to the "U" in it's title
So for UK cars the only play was to ship the cars all with physical dual chargers.
Now this is where it gets messy. Tesla software team were obviously not aware that that Tesla engineering team had taken this approach and Tesla sales team had still offered it as a hardware priced upgrade. So the early firmware as shipped to launch cars simply saw physically two chargers were installed, and on a 3 phase 32A supply we got the full benefit of dual chargers.
People posted up the results saying how pleased they were they'd got it FOC, and those that had paid for it kicked up hell. I would say for the early launch cars, the number of dual charger equipped cars was the majority, so offering refunds would have been very costly.
So Tesla OTA flashed cars with a new version that had a new software setting, not just reliant on the presence of the hardware. (Of course being Tesla they cocked this up, and flashed some people that had paid for it back to single chargers
)
Now of course this pales into insignificance compared to the launch cars being superseded with in a month with AP, which was IMHO rushed through to get Euro NCAP 5 stars. Effectively none of the launch cars are 5 star rated as they don't have emergency brake assist which is mandatory to get that result, but that's another issue, and one which Tesla UK faced immensely more flak for.
It's still a mess here. Recent changes mean that if you have an interlocked 32A commando socket it now complies to code for installation in a domestic property for the use of EV charging. As soon as this happened UK team changed the guidance and pushed the UMC along with a voucher scheme competing with the government one which only allows Type-2 (rightly IMHO), often citing Elon had demanded it for user experience reasons. I suspect more likely the reason is that a UMC is cheaper than a second on board charger.
However all has not gone to plan, and there has been some kickback, the UMC solution is electrically less safe and given the way the UMC bridges phases even though the end is physically a Type-2 connector, electrically it isn't. Plug one into a car expecting true phases on the pins and magic smoke escapes from that car. So some people are still insisting on Type-2.
ANYWAY...
The analogy that comes to mind was if I'd bought a regular ICE, picked it up and discovered I'd got say a full size alloy wheel instead of a space saver. Then Tesla snuck into my garage and replaced it one night.
A simple email saying it was going to happen, or an offer of some mats as a sorry, or well anything.. It's colored my view of Tesla for sure.
Will I kick up hell, tbh life's too short.
Besides, I've had my revenge. I got shipped some firmware that has caused my car to lock down to lower charging rates on 3 phase, so I knew _EXACTLY_ what was going on. However I played dumb and let the service center replace both the physical chargers, before they realized and downgraded my firmware :redface:
All of that said... with root I could re-enabled it. Just like I could change a 40 to a 60, enable autopilot on cars that don't have it enabled, etc. Will I do any of that? No, I will not.
TBH was tongue in cheek. If I had root would I switch stuff on I didn't pay for, well dual chargers yes given the background... but it's moot. I won't keep the car outside 3 years, and then it will get traded in, so I have no intention of doing anything that voids the warranty.
"The right to repair" vs "right to enable latent features" is going to be an interesting debate on out of warranty cars at some point though, especially the low spec ones where more gains are to be had.
