Tesla's PR people are particularly misleading by comparing the situation described above to someone draining oil and then taking a car on a cross country trip. Draining the oil requires action by car's owner. Leave a car in a garage for six months and the oil will still be there. The whole point of the OP is that inaction destroys Tesla's vehicles.
So, to be clear, my understanding of this post, with full clarity, is: "A full discharge is disastrous. However, the situations reported were not full discharges. The controller in the battery shut them off before full discharge. The reported situations did require being towed, but once towed, it was trivial to recharge the batteries."
There is a fundamental problem when any rechargeable battery is discharged and then left to sit for months. Any boat owner understands that that's why you plug in a trickle charger when the craft is put into storage.
The line above indicates, on the contrary, that yes, if you don't drive it for a while and it wasn't plugged in to a sufficient power source, your car will in fact be bricked, and potentially damage its batteries. Apparently this is a problem with boats too, but that doesn't change the fact that it's a problem with electric cars.
This "response" is in fact full of double speak... Check this one out:
Another error on the part of the blogger is the claim that if the cars discharge fully, the battery packs will be damaged. This is blatantly false. The battery management system of the Tesla Roadster keeps the battery from being discharged to a damagingly low state of charge under normal driving conditions.
"This is blatantly false"......."under normal driving conditions". The original article was not talking about normal driving conditions. This reads like a deliberate attempt to mislead.
If anything, it seems to me that this article validates the claims made in the other article. It states:
This is the most likely explanation for the five "bricks" that the blogger claims to have heard about. They probably aren't actually bricks, but cars in need of servicing.
This is hardly the kind of certainty-filled rebuttal that one would expect if the original article's claims were, in fact, incorrect.
Also the author stoops to ad hominem by insinuating that the author of the original post is part of a conspiracy to discredit electric vehicles. The author of the original post claims to have a $5000 deposit in on a Tesla X which, if true, is not the usual behavior of an EV skeptic.
Your attack on this point is spot on. The point of the original post this one fails to rebut is that the cars are in need of servicing! Maybe that posts use of the word “bricked” is imprecise, but the real thrust of it was that it costs $40,000 to perform this servicing, which this post does not even dispute.
For the sake of electric vehicles, we need to know which of the three scenarios is true.
I'm not sure what happens to the value of the dead battery pack when they fit a new pack. Do you get to sell the dead battery back to them or to anyone else? Or is that included in the $40,000 charge?
Yes, you've hit the stronger point: why should you have to pay $40k, and it's not covered by your warranty or insurance?
How does it _directly_ contradict that? Ok so he mentions how the management system will stop the charge from dropping too low. How does it do that, does have a robotic arm and goes and finds the nearest outlet, does it expand solar panels, because batteries will discharge even if completely disconnected. And it also highly depends on the ambient temperature. So I don't see a direct contradiction I see this post building a straw man and then proceeded to demolish it.
Look at this another way. So let's say this post is correct and those Tesla roadsters were not bricks. Why in the world would Tesla then charge owner $40k then? Is it saying that a routine recharge and tow costs $40k? Or did Tesla, like a shady mechanic decided to scam the guy and make $40k off of him?
Did they? I'm not being glib. Was that conjecture in the previous post, or was it an established fact?
They do very little fact checking, if any.
However, being well-established might make them an easier target for libel / defamation. That doesn't seem to scare them into better reporting, though.
The orignial post appears to have better sources than this one, so I would say that it has been contradicted, but not refuted.
However, many of the people that bought a first gen Tesla are also the type of people when told 'you just lost 2-5% of your total range don't do that again.' Will say, just replace the battery. And when told 'That's 40k' they will say 'I don't care just replace it'. Which is a different situation.
PS: Don't forget you need to buy a 100,000$ car and not drive it for months before this becomes a real problem. Most people that can afford to do that have a vary different view of money than the average person on HN.