Since my last post, I've gathered quite a bit of electronic and physical data on this issue. At this point, I'm reasonably certain of the details at this point, but I don't think going into detail here is going to help anything at this moment. I'd also like to gather additional physical datapoints, and give Tesla some room on this for now. So, apologies for being a little vague here for now.
I have a dialog going with two different groups at Tesla on this issue at the moment. (Admittedly, seems like neither group knows the other is communicating with me, but that's Tesla's
excellent internal communication for you. /s) Both seem to be productive, however, so I'm going to continue them in the hopes of a solution.
Neither contact will admit to anything bad, obviously. But a few takeaways:
- I'm pretty convinced that the people who made this "fix" were unaware there was going to be any significant impact to anyone's usable range.
- Specifically, my understanding is that the change was a proactive measure to detect a very uncommon long-term failure mode of the battery. The conditions they were testing for didn't appear to exist in any battery in the fleet, but adding a check and mitigation was to be a preventative safety measure.
- The new test/fix they added seems to have inadvertently activated based on another completely separate set of triggers in some batteries.
- The people I've spoken to so far seemed genuinely unaware of this particular trigger being the trip up here, and are looking into it in more detail.
- Detecting this is a good thing, but the "fix" applied is not the best for what's actually the trigger here.
Again, sorry to be vague. Suffice it to say the details won't really help anyone right now anyway.
I'm also hesitant to say it, since, again, I don't want to inflate this issue beyond where it already is and cause further speculation, but: If you have a car with an 85-type pack (85 or 70) then you should probably update if you either supercharge a lot, charge to 100% often, or both.
No, I'm not saying your car is going to explode or otherwise have other issues if you don't update, so don't take it like that, but I do believe that what is being detected is an issue that will eventually need to be addressed one way or another, whether or not there is a safety issue involved, and if you are in that group it'd be better to know than not know.
Again, I want to give Tesla a good faith opportunity to work this all out before I start throwing things out their publicly. Right now, I do believe this particular situation isn't something they were originally aware of and just kind of stumbled across once this update hit the masses. They have been working to determine a reason for. I'm pretty sure my input is pushing that along in the right direction.
We're all painfully aware that Tesla has serious internal and public communication issues. Since the changes in the updates don't appear to have been intended to impact anyone at all at this point, they definitely did not seem to be prepared for reports of lost range and such, hence the canned responses to the same. Hopefully they'll better address this soon.
As most here are aware, I give Tesla a lot of grief on things when they, well, screw people over and deserve to be called out on their shenanigans. At this point, I don't believe there was any bad intention, so unless that changes, let's cut them a little slack for now and give them a chance to get things right.
And, if they don't, I think there is a lot of pressure that affected owners can put on them one way or another.
