I think the offer they've made is a decent one. Looking at my charging habits I would actually have preferred the $5k rebate over 6 years of supercharging. I wouldn't want to spend 30 minutes every week at supercharger, and charging over-night at home is dirt cheap.
This limitation is not based on the vehicle model you drive but based on the age and condition of the battery. Certain high-milage battery packs that have been supercharged frequently during their life tend to be the ones affected.
But if you replace an old, rate-limited battery with a new (or newer) one, you get back the full charging speed.
Today it is, but "energy crisis" headlines are pilling up.
Apple didn't get away with slowing down iPhones for this stated purpose, what makes Tesla think they can get away with it?
Yes, they update the maps every now and then when you take it to the service and when they remember to plug the laptop in for the map update. But an actual update that adds new features is next to unheard-of.
Actual new features beyond map updates for a 10+ year old car? Never been done before by any brand ever.
It doesn't sound impressive so much as excessive and dangerous. I would not want to purchase a car, which drives at high speeds on the road, the functionality of which depends on regular software updates from a company. I want a car that runs, won't kill me, and is easily and cheaply repairable. As far as I can tell, Teslas don't satisfy any of those concerns even if you spend a lot of money to service them.
Even the juicero couldn't kill you because of a software error...Tesla increasingly seems to me to be a piece of Silicon Valley fluff, and a dangerous one at that.
(I generally think the "all out-of-date devices must be burned" mantra is a tad overblown, but they are at least somewhat dangerous in a way that non-networked computers are not.)
Traditional have cars and they are trying to shove computers into them.
The traditional model of upgrading infotainment software has been "lol, buy a new car" for a good quarter of a century now. But now Tesla is changing the expectations with Joe mode and Dog mode starting as someone requesting stuff from Elon and the feature appearing OTA in a matter of weeks.
Dog Mode, is still a rarity in EVs for some reason. It's a dead simple feature: "allow the heating/ac to work while car is locked, optionally display internal temperature on infotainment display so that people don't break the windows to 'rescue' the dogs".
The few that have it (Polestar and Mercedes I think) limit the usage to max 30 minutes.
Trouble starts when the computer is networked and therefore vulnerable to more attacks. And for networked computers, security updates are table stakes. Feature updates are merely nice.
To compare apples to apples, you need to compare Tesla to another brand of networked cars.
I think that's preferable. That Teslas are "computers with a car built around them" that phone home to the mothership and get automatic updates is the main reason why I will never buy a Tesla.
Toyota lives in the 90's from a cyber technology perspective. It is so bad that I wonder how the engineers who work there can say to themselves "I did something great".
I do not know other cars but I guess this is similar.
Huh? So what happens after 30 minutes? The car heats up and the dog cooks?!
There are no technical reasons not to have the ac/heating run longer, they just decided to cap it to an arbitrary 30 minutes.
btw Android is not an end product like a car and Google doesn't really "provide updates" for Android phones, but I'll let they pass.
Asking because I am curious to see this take, not to dispute it.
And it's indisputable that Twitter is in serious trouble.
By Musk's own admission the company is worth less than half what he paid for it. Revenue has plummeted, toxicity is rampant, lawsuits are increasing and Twitter Blue has been a disaster that will likely be researched for years.
And so all of this chaos has dragged Musk's reputation down which in turn is affecting Tesla.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/12/elon-musk-is-no-longer-the-r...
/pedant
I have no doubt that hubris is a longstanding character defect in his case.
It sounds like a very long shot, though.
Is this a crisis? Too early to say, but nevertheless this all happend while competitors are catching up and latest offerings from German manufacturers looks very promising. There is a very real chance Tesla can loose the luxury EV segment.
I agree there will soon be more choices, but that's going to be a problem in 2 years, especially in the luxury segment.
This year everyone from Mini to Royce Rolls are selling EVs. Some such as BMW and Polestar are on their 3rd generation.
Eventually it gets old when everyone has the same looking car.
Seems like a brand in crisis to me.
To unpackage this further: a big part of Tesla's "cool" was that in allowed customers have luxury and performance while not trading off being "green", and by implication being pro-social. It was a have-your-cake-and-eat-it deal, for those who could afford it. People who had to accept tradeoffs bought a Nissan Leaf.
Now there are more EV options, and Musk's behavior has done irreparable damage to the pro-social brand associations that Tesla had. It's now more associated with the tech-bro archetype, and all the baggage that carries, similar to how Wall St guys were associated with Lambos a few decades ago.
That said, I still see plenty of new Teslas on the road in liberal areas, but they are often rationalized in practical terms, not with the religious zeal that customers used to have.
A gossip campaign of an improperly predicated assertion is called a “wrap-up smear” in some circles. What’s your basis?
If he'd stuck to running Tesla and SpaceX to the best of his ability, without picking stupid internet fights, and keeping his Twitter addiction in check, he'd still have all that respect, and not just wasted $44B.
The way he mismanaged Twitter makes pretty clear he doesn't really know what he's doing. Even if the decision to buy was made after too much wine, he's had plenty of time to sober up since then, but he just keeps doubling down on all the worst decisions.
He's a great salesman. Or was, at least. He was like Steve Jobs who could sell the amazing work of Woz and other Apple engineers. But that charisma has gotten seriously dented now.
Well if he has bad habits, like a lot of us do, then its not just a matter of sobering up like it's a one time event.
> But that charisma has gotten seriously dented now.
The guy never had natural charisma in my opinion - a kind of glamour perhaps, from the wealth and achievements. I don't see the comparison with Jobs though, who was a natural salesman - Musk is a terrible public speaker, and should probably let other execs in his companies do the presentations.
Regarding the Stark comparison - IMO it doesn't matter how involved he really was with the engineering, or that he bought tesla etc - isn't it impressive enough that he made stuff happen? Can you nominate a better candidate for that comparison?
I don't mean to be confrontational though, and I respect your points.
But he didn't make stuff happen, he just paid for it. Why should we consider "Have enough money to pay for someone else to do good things" an impressive trait? Maybe we should stop deifying management for just doing a useful thing once in a while in between all the milking franchises and wealth extraction.
People who haven’t tried to run a company often fundamental misunderstand the nature the extent of the job, but claiming Musk is just “doing a useful thing once in a while in between all the milking franchises and wealth extraction” comes off like sour grapes.
I guess you can make that argument if you tilt your head and squint a certain way.
But he did become involved in Tesla when the company had only 3 employees, and contributed >85% of the series A funding (and also led the B and C rounds). He's been there for 19 of the company's 19.5 years of existence... hardly a new kid on the block.
I think it’s a truly bizarre smear to claim he nor Jobs “didn’t invent any of the stuff he sells” when they are perhaps the two most notable technical visionaries of our time.