With this car, 100% is actually 73%, so you can safely charge to 100% daily.
IOW, pretty much every EV on the road is driving around with about 20% of "wasted" battery.
Having a quick look, it seems that it's roughly linear, but slightly in favour of lower discharge?
One spec sheet I saw said 80% dod had 2500 cycles, and 50% dod had 5000 cycles, which means you get more "lifetime capacity" with a 50% dod compared to 80%?
We can change things for something with different but lesser problems. And anyway, can you 100% vouch that the gas car manufacturing apparatus has zero child labor as well?
There are reasons that it's bad, but I don't see how it's bad for consumers. They just get increased optionality, which is almost never a bad thing. If the alternative were just lowering prices on the S and X then I guess it's bad relative to that, but we don't really have any reason to believe that Tesla would do that if this weren't an option.
I don’t generally like subscriptions on hardware features, I wouldn’t get one and I worry about what they’ll do in the future if this test goes well. But the “hardware I own” is not any more restricted than it was before they started the subscription option.
I would never buy hardware from a company that locks the capacity down with software, so a Tesla (nor BMW) is not the car for me.
> But if you don't want that to happen, you can just pay for the full-priced version.
Consumers should have full access to their hardware, limiting that is limiting consumer rights. It's also bad because it encourages other companies to do the same and soon people will be left with no options.
I get it, but too few people sell for what they need to, they sell for what they CAN. if there was more competition, that would force telsa to eat into this profit margin. Same goes for all businesses and industries.
I think the bigger issue though is the hypocracy. A large part of Tesla's marketing is based on pretending to care about the environment.
If you paid for capacity that you don't need then yeah, I'd say you at the very least made a bad purchase.
But the reality is that they aren't.
If you're already paying 80 or 90k for an electric car, does making it $10k cheaper make much of a difference to you? Range is almost incidental; probably most Tesla owners most of the time (I would guess) won't miss that extra range.
At the very least, it will be a good test of the price sensitivity of Tesla buyers. If they are looking to ship more units, this is a good way to figure out how to do it. My guess is it won't really matter much.
This does make sense however, if the range of the car can later be upgraded, and, it still uses the entire battery, and just cuts out at a higher % charge than the full range battery would as that'll make it last even longer.
Also, many people are surprised to know that even a full range tesla does not use 100% of their pack capacity. It always leaves some in reserve for the sake of prolonging battery life, so this move really isn't too strange, and the benefit of manufacturing a single battery pack likely drives costs down more than having to manufacture bespoke battery packs for each and every variation.
... oh, you're serious.
OK, this is categorically untrue and observably so. 1) One could write a book on consumers buying things or entering into deals that are long-term bad for them but have some combination of short-term convenience / affordability vs. long-term ill effects.
2) In this specific instance it's bad for consumers because Tesla is buying the same amount of raw materials, driving those prices up, and then not actually making them accessible to the user.
3) This assumes that other products that "don't do that" will be available, rather than a common pattern of Vendor A doing a consumer hostile thing, and then all other vendors following suit. I'd point to airlines as exhibit A in this regard. Sure, if Delta does something crappy people might look to Southwest instead ... until Southwest copies Delta due to shareholder demand that they extract maximum profit.
On a safety-critical, public-endangering, federally-protected vehicle? Good luck with that attitude.
Economics say we can't do that.
People will continue to buy Veblen goods because people have been tricked into thinking it will raise their social status.
I appreciate that it rankles the hacker in most (myself included) when Intel blows a fuse or Tesla flashes firmware to price discriminate.
But the math on whether more or less EVs get sold because the high-end subsidizes the mid-range, how that affects consumers and the environment, where this all sits legally?
Almost certainly complicated AF. It seems a bit hasty to consider just one data point out of that insane Pareto topology and call it good.
It's good for cost-sensitive short-range drivers because they're no longer subsidizing warranties for long-range drivers. You'll have to do the math for yourself to see if it's good for you.
What solution would you propose instead?
This seems like something we should have regulations to protect against. Bad for the environment and bad for the consumer.