Comment by jabbany | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jabbany | Hacker News Reader

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IIRC some (?) of their lower capacity cars come out of the factory with higher capacity batteries + a software lock and you can pay to enable the extra capacity ($4500 according to this post apparently).

So, the dead mass is there even in brand new cars. I'm guessing the 60 -> 90 swap is because they're not making 60 anymore and it's just all 90 with a software cap... The OP thread even mentions that essentially Tesla forgot to lock the capacity and just left it with the full 90.

Basically it's the whole issue about takebacks of physical features via digital un-licensing. There is no direct parallel in the past. A dealership removing accidentally installed physical components after an unrelated service is unacceptable. A digital provider revoking accidentally provided licenses seems pretty common (I still remember Dropbox giving free storage in very early on promos and later going "oops, that actually expires!"). So this is kind of in the middle. A digital license that controls access to a physical good.

I feel like digital licenses that control access to physical goods should just be banned. Putting a 90kwh battery in a car and not letting people use it is incredibly wasteful in a world where battery supply is a key limiting factor on EV production.

Although I agree with you in some ways, there are things like SSDs that are overprovisioned so they have a bit of extra space that they can use as the flash degrades.

Not having that extra space will dramatically lower the lifespan and reliability of the drive. Same with these batteries.

They just need to be honest about what they're selling.

Aye but with my samsung SSD it's up to me how much overprovisioning there is and I can choose to disable it like

I'd rather have the manufacturer decide. They should know more about the reliability of their own device than a consumer possibly could.

I have a Samsung SSD. How do I know how much to overprovision? 100Mb? 200Mb? 1000Mb?? How would I know?

When they sell an SSD as, say, 2Tb but then I'm expected to assign 20Gb of that just for reliability, that's materially worse than a drive that advertises 2Tb but doesn't count the overprovisioning. But they're both advertised as 2Tb.

If they're selling a 2Tb drive, it should work as a (reliable) 2Tb drive.

Just like hard drives that manage bad blocks themselves.

I had a free sub-domain name go.to/blah offer for life, they started charging, and still went under. Bought by another company, I can't even get that subdomain name any more.

All large silicon chips (dram, CPU, GPU, FPGA, SSD, etc) are built with spare sections to replace non-functional ones. A 6 core CPU could be really only 6 but could also be a disabled 8 core when not enough people buy the more expensive 8 core, and they built too many of them. GPUs can be the same, but there are a dozen different functions that could be broken, so they sell it as the next lower SKU. For example, mining chips don't need HDMI, so if HDMI is broken, normally you would toss a 99% good chip. Contracts for digitally controlled goods need proper consumer protection. Tesla just happens to use the feature a lot. Much cheaper to lose 30kWh worth of raw material that might not have passed qualification, and sell it as a 60, than pay for inventory, scheduling, and swap/configuration stations on your assembly line.

Also, if rumors get out that SKU xyz CAN be overclocked or unlocked 10% of the time when a higher chip is used, people will buy and return 9 cards before getting the bonus, causing lots of grief to the entire supply chain and 9x packaging/refurb costs, and then have to sell as open box at a lower profit. Not gonna happen. These locks are heavily encrypted, or physically unaccessible.

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