The Tesla remote software update system is one of the great assets of the brand, which uses it to regularly introduce new features by activating factory-preinstalled hardware components.
But it also happens that the manufacturer uses it to restrain its cars. It is the misadventure that relates Electrek about the owner of a Tesla Model S who saw the autonomy of his electric car reduced before being presented with a bill of 4,500 dollars.
To understand the reason for this intervention, it should be known that at the beginning of the marketing of the Model S, Tesla used a battery pack whose capacity was locked by software. This offered the possibility of extending the autonomy of the vehicle after the fact and at a cost. Tesla thus avoided having to produce different versions of the Model S. This practice has been abandoned, but the brand’s after-sales service continues to use it for warranty replacements of battery packs of certain capacities that it no longer produces. .
In the case in question, the owner purchased a Model S 90 kWh used that was previously a Model S 60 kWh. The update to increase the autonomy had been carried out in a completely official and legal way.
Bronca on social media
This customer recently visited a Tesla Service Center to have their internet connection upgraded. At the end of this intervention, he learned that the technicians had carried out an update which cut the autonomy of 128 km and that he would have to pay the equivalent of 4,432€ to find his initial configuration.
Faced with the end of inadmissibility of You’re here, he asked Jason Hughes, a Tesla hacking specialist, to help him break this restraint. But it is impossible for him to intervene without creating other problems. On the other hand, he revealed the affair on social networks. The news has…
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