JRP3
Hyperactive Member
You think they are limiting charge rates because the batteries are as good as new?
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Sold my Model S after 5.5 years...moving on
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Yeah - I think degradation means a lot of things. It has been touted to mean lower range - ie lower capacity. But not being able to safely take a fast charge can be considered "degradation".The actual meaning means to break down chemically so I think in fact it is degradation.
What Tesla has done is to limit charging speeds as a battery gets older, as they degrade. But it is Tesla's actions that people are complaining about.
So the question is, if Tesla has learned that degraded batteries can't safely supercharge as fast, what should they do about it? Clearly they should limit it - but perhaps they should tell people they did and why?
And I would say that I personally have no idea of the ramifications of doing so on legal exposure, accounting rules, etc.
Most owners would appreciate transparency and clarification. Safety vs warranty? A pathway for replacement with clear costs? Warranty on replacement with degradation warranty including supercharging speeds. There are ways forward but it is also possible that Tesla is trying to gather more data before coming out with a plan. Or it is also possible that Model S owners are an expendable group as 3 and Y owners are the shiny new thing.
What Tesla has done is to limit charging speeds as a battery gets older, as they degrade. But it is Tesla's actions that people are complaining about.
So the question is, if Tesla has learned that degraded batteries can't safely supercharge as fast, what should they do about it? Clearly they should limit it - but perhaps they should tell people they did and why?
And I would say that I personally have no idea of the ramifications of doing so on legal exposure, accounting rules, etc.
Most owners would appreciate transparency and clarification. Safety vs warranty? A pathway for replacement with clear costs? Warranty on replacement with degradation warranty including supercharging speeds. There are ways forward but it is also possible that Tesla is trying to gather more data before coming out with a plan. Or it is also possible that Model S owners are an expendable group as 3 and Y owners are the shiny new thing.
So you admit they are being artificially limited and it’s not degradation? Great. We’re on the same page.
If they are limiting based on battery age why are some 2015 models capped but 2013 models are not?
Perhaps because it's battery age that is based on charge cycles and how many times it's been exposed to high current charging rates. A one year old battery with 1,000 supercharged cycles on it may be capped while a 7 year old battery with 100 supercharger cycles on it may not?
Perhaps we're not dealing with a linear measure. These are fairly smart cars and the diagnostic capabilities I would imagine are up to the task to determine an individual battery's current state of health and thereby adjust its charging rates and it's maximum voltage on 100% state of charge.
To sum up 22 pages, Tesla is making significant changes to the car's performance without notifying the customer who paid for a level of performance that was unilaterally abridged.
We can throw words at anything and try and make them stick, like "I need to wash my car because of all the degradation from rain and dust" for example... but battery degradation is an actually scientifically defined process of physical damage that is irreversible, like rust. Tesla's slowed charge rates and volt caps are not degradation, because they are artificially software imposed and are completely irreversible. Tesla has already reversed them, so we know it's not degradation because being able to reverse degradation would be a trillion dollar nobel prize winning scientific discovery the entire world's scientific community would be talking about constantly.
Tesla's artificial limits are intentional and reversible. NOT degradation by definition.
This has been discussed for a year as tesla doesn't shed any light on the criteria they use to impose unilateral downgrades, but we know it can affect cars of any age, cars that are supercharged every day and cars supercharged every other year, high mileage and low mileage, never charged over 80% and always charged to 100%... there is no consistent criteria and seems to be completely random. Which is probably why Tesla has never said anything about how we can avoid being downgraded, maybe they don't know either. It's probably just some inherent flaw in all of our batteries' fundamental design or an assembly defect that only applies to certain batteries. We can't say what causes it, but it's widespread so we can use the process of elimination to see that it isn't consistently triggered by mileage, supercharging, age, and so on.
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cpa
Active Member
This is true. Just check out the other thread.
And while we are parsing vocabulary here, may I suggest that degradation refers to an irreversible process due to chemistry or physics or other natural causes? When talking about other sorts of reductions in utility, may I suggest using declension?
Of course this would be in the sense of declining, and not in the linguistic sense of declension which is rare in English outside of verb conjugation.
I had my 2015 85D for MORE than 4.5 years before the first supercharger within 500 miles was installed. I literally supercharged 2-5 times per YEAR in that timeframe and I was limited at the SC with that 2019 software update. I was careful with all of my home charging, not going past 90% unless I was going to leave on a long road trip within an hour, probably didn't go to 100% more than once per month on average. Mega disappointment to put it nicely. I believe they unilaterally slowed down likely close to 100% of the 85 packs. I no longer trust Tesla in the long run and I echo the OP’s sentiments. I chose to spend my money with another company when it came time to get a newer car... a gas car.
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whitex
Well-Known Member
The limiting is done based on some data that Tesla keeps track of, which indicates that the better cannot safety take higher charging or deliver higher power. Unfortunately Tesla is famous for iterating designs continuously in production (Elon used to boast about making changes in production every 2 weeks), so even cars a month apart in production date can have different design batteries. Add to that Tesla's lack of manufacturing consistency experience, so even the very same design manufactured on the same day might not have the exact same specs. This might literally be linked to "cars which has a good batch of experimental batteries" are ok, while others are not. I bet Tesla has deployed different chemistry batteries, and different software algorithms to manage them, possibly varying things ever so slightly, without ever communicating to the outside world how many different designs they have out there. Then they collect the data on longevity of those variants, learning what works and what doesn't. Unfortunately, people with less successful battery design iterations (or maybe same batteries but managed for 5 years using a different algorithm to see which management algorithm preserves batteries best) are stuck with those now. Experimenting on customers is the Tesla way of learning.
Keep in mind that was all speculation of course. My car is capped also for reasons unbeknownst to me. They decided to protect me from myself I guess. But the car that I have now is not the one that I bought and it's nowhere near as useful. Had it been what it is today at the time of purchase, I may not have bought it given my use case scenario.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
So you think the limit is being put in place because the batteries are exactly in the same state as new? Obviously not, something change internally, that something was not a good thing, hence degradation. We already had this silly debate in the other thread, I provided scientific papers that clearly stated batteries degrade in a number of different ways, not just capacity loss.
I think some people are hanging their hopes for a legal victory on a very narrow interpretation of the word "degradation", which is unlikely to hold up to scrutiny, as I clearly showed, with scholarly references. Expect lawyers to do the same, and more.
The first (and correct) legal theory is “trespass,” followed by “unauthorized computer access (tampering)” among others, long before you get down to simple “breach of contract.”
Tesla doesn’t own the cars and doesn’t have permission to enter their computer systems and degrade, disable or remove features - it’s really not any more complicated than that.
Even if you think Tesla’s motives are good (a lot of us here think Tesla is simply dodging their responsibilities because they are inconvenient or expensive), that does not matter. Let’s say I see someone speeding down the road in an ICE and want to protect them from possibly harming themselves or others, so I break into their home in the middle of the night, enter their garage and steal some of the spark plug wires off their engine so they can’t drive so fast. Have I committed criminal and civil wrongs? You betcha. And that’s exactly what Tesla has done, just with electronics.
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Are you saying Tesla was "trespassing" when they installed a software update after the owner clicked the button to schedule, or install it?
Yeah, I know a few people have reported forced updates, but most people approved the updates.
Are you saying Tesla was "trespassing" when they installed a software update after the owner clicked the button to schedule, or install it?
Yeah, I know a few people have reported forced updates, but most people approved the updates.
Absolutely Tesla committed trespassing when it widely forced “updates” on cars without ever asking permission, often without notifying the owner that there would even be an “update,” let alone informing them of the ramifications of the “update.” Heck, in the case of cars which have recently been sold, Tesla typically doesn’t even have any idea who the owners are!
Pointing to some people who clicked “update” isn’t a “get out of jail free” card for Tesla even for those “updates.” Let’s say you go to a website which offers you one thing, say a free computer game, but doesn’t tell you that downloading it will also install key-logging malware on your computer: does that criminal escape justice by saying “but MP3Mike clicked download”? Of course not.
Please let’s drop all the red herring arguments trying to excuse Tesla’s bad behavior. It should restore all original functionalities which it has disabled and if it then has to cover more warranty claims and/or repair cars under safety recalls, then those are its legal responsibilities. Automakers cover these as a cost of doing business. If Tesla failed to calculate these future costs correctly, that is its fault, not its customers.
Just because we like Tesla’s cars or it’s mission doesn’t mean it gets to flout the laws everyone else has to follow.
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JRP3
Hyperactive Member
I wasn't arguing the legal merits of the case, I was simply speculating why certain people seemed so determined to ignore the meaning of the word "degradation" when applied to lithium batteries and were irrationally clinging to a narrow and inaccurate definition.
So you’re saying my battery is defective and should be covered under my original warranty? Great. We’re still on the same page.
JRP3
Hyperactive Member
Yes. I've never denied that there is a problem with the packs, obviously they are not operating as expected and that's why Tesla imposed these limits.
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