I find the lack of public anger at the owners that defrauded Tesla with warranty claims arising from electronics damage using the SETEC to be interesting. And sad.
Meaning you have lost your fraud card.
I don't think this is quite fair.
First of all, we don't know what actually
caused the defect. We know what
triggered it (charging with a third-party adapter that attempted to emulate Superchargers), but a trigger is not the same as a cause. The presumed cause is that Setec's protocol violation was somehow mishandled on the Tesla side, leading to an overload of some kind, which then resulted in damage. If we accept that hypothesis, then here is how I view it:
My professional background is in software engineering, specifically network protocol design and implementation. One of the most basic principles is that, whenever two sides talk to each other, each side is responsible for protecting its own environment, including hardware, software, system state etc, regardless of whatever protocol violations the other side commits. The worst case scenario of a protocol violation should be that the communication and related activities (i.e. charging) fail. Hardware defects as a result of protocol violations are unacceptable. Always. Period. This means it is the responsibility of Setec to ensure that protocol violations by Tesla do not break the Setec adapter, but it is the responsibility of
Tesla to ensure that protocol violations by Setec do not cause damage to Tesla's cars.
If you accept that basic premise, then Tesla is responsible for any damage to Tesla cars happening during charging regardless of how, why or by whom the protocol violation happened, so there is no question of fraud here, because it simply does not matter which adapter or firmware was used. This is also likely how regulators would look at this. To me this incident is a black eye for Tesla more than Setec. Tesla's firmware is supposed to protect cars against this sort of thing, and it did not in this case. We don't even know the full extent of the problem, just that some PCBs were fried. Was the charging curve violated? If so, did some battery cells get damaged, and was the battery close to catching fire? What QA procedures does Tesla have in place to prevent these incidents, and why were they unsuccessful here? If regulators or lawyers ever look at these incidents then
those are the questions they will ask, not whether Setec provided a beta firmware to their customers.
I also do not quite buy the assumption that Tesla is/was somehow strongly opposed to the Setec adapter, as suggested by some. If Tesla had been, then they could long have acted. The Setec adapter likely violates Tesla's patents, at least when emulating Superchargers, so cease & desist letters, lawsuits and web site / sales listing take down notices would have been easy for Tesla, yet they apparently did nothing, which suggest tacit acceptance or approval. Understandable, because an "unofficial feature" of CCS support might boost sales of Tesla cars. Nor do I believe that the recent black-listing by Tesla is in any way related to the upcoming Korean CCS adapter. The timing makes no sense for that. Tesla would have waited longer, until closer to availability of the Korean adapter, to block Setec if competition was their concern. Also, I somewhat doubt that Tesla even sees Setec as competition. My impression has been, especially looking at ChaDeMo charger availability, that Tesla sees charging adapters as more of a necessary evil, not as their core business, and that they want to produce and sell only as many of them as needed, and rather preserve chips and other critical resources for cars and Superchargers. I expect the same thing to happen with the Korean CCS adapter, if we ever see it in the U.S., i.e. a slow roll-out and inconsistent availability.
As for Tesla's reaction to block Setec: that is completely logical, and I don't even see it as anti-competitive or retaliatory, just as prudent. Here is what I think happened: Tesla found out about the two incidents, and they were just as surprised about it as Setec. They then probably bought a Setec adapter, reproduced the problem, and started analyzing the cause. The black-listing of the Setec adapter seems to be simply a reaction to that. My guess is that a true fix of the protection mechanism of Tesla's firmware would have taken too long to develop and test, so black-listing the adapter had to be done as a stopgap measure. What this does suggest is that Tesla took that damage pretty seriously. Otherwise they would have not risked angering some of their customers by black-listing the adapter.
One question is if anything else is happening behind the scenes. Are Tesla and Setec talking to each other? On friendly terms? I don't buy the argument that Tesla is somehow upset with Setec because of damage to two of Tesla's cars. For a company the size of Tesla that repair cost is minuscule compared to the value of the test results Tesla gained in the process. Also, Tesla has to know that, unless Tesla goes after Setec legally, Setec will try a "cat & mouse" game to keep their adapter sales going, which cannot be in Tesla's interest, since it would tie up valuable Engineering resources for Tesla and would cause continuous aggravation for Tesla's customers. Instead Tesla may actually decide to cooperate with Setec, to ensure that at least Setec's ChaDeMo emulation is fully tested and approved by both sides. That would be a win-win-win for Tesla, Setec and us.
Beyond that, there is the interesting question to what extent the tightly integrated "verticals" were a contributing factor here, i.e. protocol design, Supercharger design and manufacturing, car charging board design and manufacturing, firmware etc. all from a single company. That is convenient for customers, but can easily lead to insufficient QA due to lack of matrix compatibility testing. Tesla needs to be careful not to run into a similar problem when they open up their Superchargers to other vendors (with some cars by other vendors perhaps subtly violating CCS and causing damage to Superchargers, since Superchargers previously may only have been tested against Tesla's own cars).
