People seem to expect their batteries to work forever at their original capacity.
> Sorry you can't keep AC at the temperature you want because doing so will reduce the longevity of this appliance and we can't guarantee it will meet under warranty.
You would find this scenario absolutely unacceptable
Edit: do note this applies to older cars, it's a bit slower than EVs but 10year old cars will not have the same mileage and power as a new one even with the same specifications.
This is not true, especially the part about "significantly".
The only real mechanism for a loss of performance over time would be if the engine's compression starts to drop as the rings get worn, but this isn't an issue on any modern engine.
Take a car with 10k miles and run it on a dyno. Dyno the same car again at 150k miles and it will probably be within 5%. In fact, performance may even go up as the motor "loosens" up.
This has been my experience.
The amount of dirt a car is exposed to varies by 2-3 orders of magnitude between a farm truck compared to a sports car.
Rarely will you see an old sports car lose more than 20% power. Farm trucks lose 50%+, and the farmers keep running them until they just don't move at all.
*Side note, dirt does sometimes help. As a teen, I had an old ford festiva I shared with my brother. One day we washed the filthy engine bay and after that the thing would not idle. Turns out the dirty grease was plugging a vacuum leak around the pivot on the throttle valve.
When the batteries in a remote control, clock, or even a car go bad then it’s trivial to change them. So while this problem has existed for as long as battery powered devices have the difference is that no one noticed. Now you can’t change the battery yourself. So it becomes a much bigger burden to understand “oh, the max ability of my battery to charge has degraded.” It’s just a new piece of knowledge for lots of people.
Throttling and limiting capacity in exchange for increase durability are inherent to the lithium battery charging process. It seems perfectly reasonable that as field data comes in the OEM would refine the tune.
This is like the EV equivalent of a service bulletin that flashes a new ECU image that actuates some emissions doodad slightly differently to improve longevity or whatever but costs you a fraction of an MPG of a couple horsepower at part throttle.
Yes the messaging to consumers was clearly insufficient but I don't see anything fundamentally wrong here and I'm generally no fan of Tesla.
Apple slowed down your phone because the battery probably couldn't provide enough power to keep it running at its original speed.
But all they need to do is say: do you want us to slow down your device/restrict its battery someway, or run it over spec and it'll be worse in the long term? And let the user pick.
But then they'd be 1000 articles about how batteries are terrible and so are the companies who use them, because terrible journalism