Tesla flips a switch to increase the range of some cars in Florida
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Does anyone know exactly how this is done? does the battery just never charge up all the way? does it claim it's empty when there's actually more charge left? Are some of the cells locked down and just don't charge? How does it impact the health of the battery (since not being able to charge or discharge completely would presumably affect the health of the cells)
Tesla gets to sell a car it otherwise wouldn't get to sell, and a consumer gets a vehicle they otherwise couldn't afford. Why is that lame? That's capitalism.
It's lame because the value change is one-sided.
The value is being adjusted by taking away options from a good which has the same intrinsic material value as another to change the market value of the good.
It's capitalism, sure, but it's not one of the better parts.
Definitely not true. The parts are the same, the support contracts are not.
I don't know the details of Tesla's batteries exactly, but I'm pretty sure they're just use a ton of 18650s. If too many of them won't hold a charge, then instead of fixing it they can just call it a 60 rather then a 75.
https://electrek.co/2016/07/26/tesla-upgrade-software-limite...
That's a bit silly. I suppose in someways it is nice for the consumer that they have the 60kwh version if they're basically selling it close to a loss with the hope that you'll pay for the battery upgrade, but obviously it begs the question why the 75 model can't just be the same price.
Because Tesla would make less off of each 75, which is no good when you need cash to expand operations. Have to squeeze every dollar out of each sale, manufacturing and R&D costs money!
There usually isn't anything notable about a business approximating a rational economic actor.
Price discrimination is bad for consumers.
The vast majority (in the US at least) of price discrimination instances are cases where anyone is free to choose the cheaper option. Rich people can clip coupons too, they just decide it's not worth it for them. Heck, the whole reason for a Tesla Model 3 and Model S is price discrimination. I think it's a great thing I'll be able to get a Model 3 while richer consumers can choose a Model S if they care to.
Let me give you an extreme example.
Imagine that a company perfectly knew the exact maximum amount of dollars that you personally are willing to pay for their product. Then, they offer you that product for 1$ less than your maximum.
This is called perfect 1st degree price discrimination, and results in ~zero consumer welfare, because consumer welfare is the difference between actual price paid, and max willingness to pay price, which in this case are both ~equal to one another.
Alright, then there is no 60 kWh version of the car. Is that a better version of capitalism?
Price discrimination is horrible for consumers.
Why? 75 kWh version requires a more intensive support contract, more warranty repair, and more service.
That's implicit short-term thinking which I find strange given the speed at which such technology improves nowadays.
Even assuming the government made a law against artificial software lockdown punishable by death, this luxury vehicle would still come down in price and improve in quality well within the lifetime of most of the people who are currently drooling over it.
That's not an argument for making such a law, just a refutation against what is probably a false dichotomy between car and no car.
That's a fundamental problem we've been having for a long time, then - you own the device, they own what you can do with it.
It's the very same issue a lot of us have fought tooth and nail for, for the last decade and a half.
Edit: someone replied - then deleted - that effecitvely this is a free market issue. I agree with that, and I by no means think that government needs to get invloved. Still, as a consumer of such devices/cars, I still feel uneasy (to say the least) about this scheme/business practices. It's "lame" for the reasons I outlined.
[0] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xykkkd/why-americ...
Pretty crummy.
it just seems perverse in this situation though. vehicles have more of a 'life and death' component than a digital camera
As pointed out multiple times in these comments, Tesla is not the first company to do this. VW, Honda, and many others have been doing this for decades.
Easier to validate and build one powertrain on the assembly line than 2-3 variants.
but I don't know of any ICE models where the difference is solely software that locks features down (or, as you said, drilling a hole somewhere to limit functionality). They may share parts like bodies or engine blocks (not sure, I'm not a mechanic) - but there's a lot of additional hardware that makes it safe for them to beef things up via software.
not sure though - can you think of any two ICE models where difference between the two is solely locked down via software? or the only difference is a hole drilled in a cylinder, etc etc. It may exist and I'm just not aware of it.
b) I'm on mobile, cannot find exact models now, but yes, there were two engines having the same engine block&head, acessories, turbo, powertrain and were only tuned differently in ECU. Not sure now if it was for the same model of the car itself, though, maybe it was used across different model series. And a pretty common practice in European diesel cars with average power, loading ECU maps from higher versions - although often, the car would have smaller brakes or less Nm rated powertrain.
Diesel trucks tend to be like this too. If I recall they put the same 7.2L engine in a bunch of F-250 to F-550(although there your also paying for better built frame/suspension) models.
https://www.whatcar.com/bmw/1-series/hatchback/review/on-the...
There are some advantages in having a s/w locked down battery rather than a physically limited battery. Since the battery charges slower when it is above 80% capacity, you can recharge to "100%" much faster with a software limited battery. Similarly, charging to 100% is supposed to cause more battery wear, so in a real 75 you don't want to do that very often. But in a 60, its no problem, since 100% is really 80% of the physical capacity.
So doesnt that make this update a little late and kind of useless?
The evacuation order was days ago. People have already left their homes--where they would have charged their cars. They already made it to where they were going on the 60kw charge they had or they didn't. The hurricane has already reached FL. http://media.miamiherald.com/static/testdir/weather/storm-ra...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_N47
There are two basic versions of that engine both have four cylinders, a 1.8L and a 2.0L, that's only a difference in sleeves and pistons but it is not just a software change.
There is no 2.3L version of that engine and I'm not aware of a 323d.
The next level up is a six cylinder version:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BMW_M57
Which comes in three different displacement variants.
For a couple hundred quid you could "chip" the engine to match or exceed the rated power of the BMW version. They even installed it in such a way that the chip could be removed before you took it in for a service so as to avoid warranty concerns etc.
This is a thing in OBD2 ICE cars as well and has been for years, particularly the VW series of cars in the 2000s. The GTI had most of the same parts as the Golf but the GTI had an ECU "tuned" to maximize performance.
Hondas were not that much different, though not as egregious. The rise of Hondata and scavenging JDM parts overseas is a testament to that.
"Software" just feels different. But it really isn't, whether it's firmware (ECU) or a few extra holes/different tolerances in the machinery.
In the case of the tesla, they're taking something good and just tuning it down.
I wonder how people would react if they did this with the next iphone - i.e. it only charges to 80% unless you pay for an upgrade.
I just wish I could pick these modes for my phone, especially if it's a non-repairable battery. My Lenovo laptop actually has something like this - it puts the laptop to sleep at 20% and only charges to 80%, unless I choose otherwise.
In the case of the Golf/GTI, there wasn't. The hardware is virtually the same in both, the only difference was ECU tuning. This is the same as the Tesla, it's not tuned up or tuned down... it's identical, just rolls off the line with a different body, accessories, and ECU.
>>In the case of the tesla, they're taking something good and just tuning it down.
That's exactly what VW and car makers have been doing for decades. And Intel, AMD, Western Digital....
>>I wonder how people would react if they did this with the next iphone - i.e. it only charges to 80% unless you pay for an upgrade.
Probably about as poorly as this is being received, even though it's been going on forever.
This is done all the time in other industries - aircraft engines are derated, SSDs are over-provisioned, all to preserve longevity. It's also done with CPUs, perfectly good cores disabled in lower performance models.
It's annoying, but on the other hand it would be kind of neat to avoid paying for the upgrade until the first day you find you need it. Maybe you never do?
Lithium-ion cells are remarkably finicky and fragile. There's no clear cut-off that demarcates "over-charged" or "over-discharged", you're just increasing the stress on the cell. A highly stressed cell has a much shorter cycle life, so there's a tradeoff between durability and capacity. The 0% and 100% you see on the charging icon are essentially arbitrary lines, chosen by the product designer to best exploit this tradeoff.
Drone racers will often charge their cells beyond 4.3v and discharge them below 3.2v to eke out every last joule of energy. These cells will lose 20% of their capacity within a few dozen charge cycles and might fail catastrophically due to dendrite formation. A perfectly reasonable tradeoff in this application, but a disaster in an electric car.
For obvious reasons, electric car manufacturers lean strongly on the side of durability. Nobody will care about an extra 20 miles of range if their battery fails after 40,000 miles. Consumer electronics manufacturers started using more conservative battery management profiles when non-replaceable batteries became the norm - by sacrificing a bit of capacity, they could double or triple the cycle life of the battery.
Note: this explanation is grossly over-simplified in the interests of brevity. Battery chemistry is ludicrously complex.
What’s wrong with blurring the lines between hardware and software? We do in app purchases all the time, and if standardising hardware across all product levels makes things more efficient anyway, why not?
All of this seems very implausible for a company like Tesla, but cars can last a very long time and companies and society change over those time scales. It's not hard to imagine an authoritarian government forcing an auto manufacturer to mess with the cars of protesters, journalists, or anyone else they don't like and to use the implicit threat to encourage compliance from everyone else.
I'm not saying this is a likely outcome for anyone who buys an electric car, but it is new failure mode that didn't exist in older, non-internet-connected cars.
It's kind of frustrating that there doesn't seem to be a middle ground between giving an enormous amount of power to supposedly-benevolent-for-now product manufactures or finding and disabling the car's antenna and not getting any updates again ever. (Hopefully the car doesn't just refuse to function if it's not able to phone home?)
You probably actually have implied (or express) warranty protection against the manufacturer screwing with your car. Certainly for the first four years, possibly even after that. I feel like software updates ought to come with their own implied warranty, though that's far from standard understanding right now. Beyond that, it's likely that anyone deliberately degrading your car, even the manufacturer, is a tort.
I bet you don't leave home without locking the door though.
Maybe the sensible thing for most IoT-enabled car owners is to get all the software updates for the first few years as the manufacturer works out all the major bugs, then disable the network when the manufacturer's attention has shifted to the next new thing and drive it until the wheels fall off.
This has some pretty serious implications...
The 60 watt model s has the same battery as the 75 watt model s. It's well known that you can pay tesla $200 to upgrade your 60 to a 75. If the road testers were testing the 60 watt model, they'd be testing it with the software lock on.
The article says that it costs $5000...
This also could apply to the battery's overall lifespan - by releasing more capacity with software as the battery degrades, they can make their "60kWh" battery seem to last far longer than any other competing battery. While this is nice for the consumer, it is very disingenuous if they do it and claim "we have better batteries"
Edit: To clarify I'm not claiming they do this, but just bringing up another possible use of this "software switch" that they could use maliciously. We just can't possibly know because there's zero way TO know...
They did pay for a larger battery for a car with a 60kw promise. They just gave those people lots of spare cells to use as their battery ages.
They could have built a cheaper battery to fill the same promise and it would have failed earlier.
So don't they in fact have better batteries?
I don't understand the objection.
No consumer is buying batteries by looking at what technology was used to create it. They're buying it for X range, X recharge cycles, for X dollars. Those are all of the variables. So giving them more recharge cycles for the same money IS better.
This is exactly the way the SSD market works btw.. in fact its worse, because the largest manufacturers are actively investing money to make shorter life (but denser MB/area) cells (SLC > MLC > TLC), while building more spare capacity into each drive to meet their reliability targets.
Without it, SSDs wouldn't even exist.
So I assume you are talking about mac?
Why would you buy hardware for double the going rate for a given set of specs and remove the OS that you paid so much for? Macbooks are OK, nothing against them, but I never understood who would buy one to run linux on. (I bought a Dell, and it actually included support out of the box)
They all work great (a little bit of extra work setting up) - but you are right, I wouldn't have bought them if I knew I was going to ditch apple software ahead of time.
Of course you can... first of all, the OS itself is (at least partially) open-source. Second, there's tons of apps in the App Store that are open-source. And third, you can obviously also compile open-source software yourself and install it too.
One step further; the car is free and self driving, but you're bathed in a 360 degree never ending stream of advertisements, targeted to you based on where you've been, and where you're going (not just your digital/google footprint but real world).
In assembly line, all chips would start off as DX with math FPU. In order to make SX variant, they would use just disable FPU function, though they eventually made different chip to cut out FPU altogether.
For all the talk of Tesla's lead in electric vehicles being short term, their software DNA feels like an even greater competitive advantage.