In the first page, he says that the "entire problem" is Tesla's feature to limit charging current when it detects a signature that would indicate an arc fault:
The car dealt with 10kw charging for hours on end on that outlet , for a period of two years just fine. There is no need to find any fine spot. Tesla's choice to limit charging current after the fact is the entire problem.
It would be extremely unwise for Tesla to have one specific car on a special firmware just because of an environmental problem that exists either in his power supply or his car.
It would be extremely unwise for Tesla to permit an override of a safety device (the NEC doesn't list an exception to the AFCI breaker rule just because an owner has a misbehaving appliance).
Yes, Tesla *could* improve the safety feature, but they have to keep it just as safe. However, the fact that most owners are not having this problem points to an issue in qwk's environment -- a bad charger in the car, a misbehaving appliance on the grid, a bad transformer. He reports this happens in many different places, and I'd be willing to bet that it's something internal to the car. He mentions the poorly-designed UMC being the primary source of the issue, yet he's had the UMC replaced, and many of us use the very same UMC models in the same summer heat without the resulting back-down in current. I do concede that many more people have suffered the melting-pins problem, but I haven't seen many reports of that post-adapter-recall.
So when people have stated that they believe it could be a problem in the car, he had this to say:
See my long winded post. There is nothing wrong with the car, it's all firmware.
I'm not willing to believe that. qwk believes it's "all firmware" because he wants them to rip the feature out of the car or give him the ability to override a safety feature that is detecting an arc-fault signature. There is a problem somewhere in his environment, or we'd all be complaining about unnecessary downshifting in current.
The truth is that most cars are charging just fine, without a problem, in the same situations as qwk's.
I understand the problem, I really do, as I've seen my car downshift the charging current due to a misbehaving appliance -- it's just that he's not following the logic in following through to identifying and repairing the root cause of the problem instead of eliminating the symptom. He has said he wants Tesla to remove / override the safety checks in the system for him. My argument is that he needs, with Tesla's help, to find the root cause here -
because if the problem was indeed "all firmware", many more of us would be experiencing it. Like qwk, I charge in many different situations, at different campgrounds, in the heat of the day, with the same UMC model that he does. So what's the difference between his experience and mine? His environment - his specific car, or his specific locations.
Years ago, I worked in an IT organization that installed some software to test vulnerabilities in their IT systems. It crawled through systems and used some automated methods to try and identify security faults. When that software was turned on and let loose, it caused crashes of 5 major database systems that brought the company to a screeching halt. So how do you fix that? Do you just say "well, just don't scan then"? Or do you fix the underlying vulnerability that made the system crash in the first place?
). But c'mon, give him a break. There is clearly something going on here, something that Tesla has not yet determined as root cause. Nigel has mentioned another owner with similar problems.
