Teslas have planned obsolescence

[Fishnut]

Tesla has been ordered to pay 136,000 kroner ($16,000) each to thousands of customers in Norway for slowing down charging speeds. Owners of Tesla Model S vehicles manufactured between 2013 and 2015 found that after a 2019 software update their cars had diminished range and slower charging speeds. Interestingly Tesla didn't file a response.

A lawsuit is being brought in the US for the same battery problem with the intention of becoming a class action.

Earlier this year Tesla claimed that its failing touchscreen was not due to a defect but due to a short lifespan of the product.

Addressing federal regulators, Tesla Vice President of Legal Al Prescott made the case that the touchscreen failures didn't constitute a defect worthy of a recall because the parts were only expected to last five to six years in the first place, which is certainly a novel strategy...

As the Washington Post notes, the way in which Teslas' high-tech components wear could have dire consequences on the vehicles' resale value. Unless there's a way to recycle and reuse these throwaway components, the disposable nature of them could also leave a bad taste in eco-conscious consumers' mouths.

Furthermore, why should consumers be expected to think that an internal component that's required to access key safety features of the car should be a wear item? While Tesla has since added alerts that warn owners of a pending eMMC failure, a processor embedded in the internal components of a car isn't something you can easily check on like a set of brake pads or tires, nor is it something that most consumers know to watch out for after so many miles of use.

[Bird on a Fire]

Wow. Like a big iPhone on wheels.

Slightly undermines their supposed green credentials if people are encouraged to buy a new one every 5 years.

Still, I'm glad regulators are taking this seriously.

[nekomatic]

I don’t see in either of those two articles where it is established that this is ‘planned obsolescence’. Batteries do degrade with use and you have a choice of ways in which to manage that. The analogy to a fuel tank isn’t a good one: a Li-ion cell doesn’t have a precise and unchanging ‘100% capacity’, you can fill it fuller or less full and do that faster or less fast and that has consequences for the cell’s subsequent performance and lifetime. How batteries perform in new real world uses such as modern electric cars is still being understood and it seems quite feasible that a battery management algorithm that worked for newer cars, or seemed to, might need tweaking as the cars age.

It’s possible that all that is true and also that Tesla are arrogant tossers, of course.

[jimbob]

I don’t see in either of those two articles where it is established that this is ‘planned obsolescence’. Batteries do degrade with use and you have a choice of ways in which to manage that. The analogy to a fuel tank isn’t a good one: a Li-ion cell doesn’t have a precise and unchanging ‘100% capacity’, you can fill it fuller or less full and do that faster or less fast and that has consequences for the cell’s subsequent performance and lifetime. How batteries perform in new real world uses such as modern electric cars is still being understood and it seems quite feasible that a battery management algorithm that worked for newer cars, or seemed to, might need tweaking as the cars age.

It’s possible that all that is true and also that Tesla are arrogant tossers, of course.

For comparison, a lot of the devices we make go into cars (and other vehicles). Bosch, Continental, Valeo, and the other customers require very strict failure rates (<1ppm over the lifetime of the vehicle), typically taken to be 10 years with a typical "mission profile" of estimated times at both high and low temperatures (-55⁰C to 175⁰C) and whatever voltages one would expect.

A 5-year lifetime in a non-critical component would be unacceptable to those companies.

We, and presumably our main competitors do manage such failure rates.

[nekomatic]

Yes, the touch screen thing is a different issue to the battery and a six year lifespan seems poor compared to what you would expect for a car component. If I read it right the failing component was a flash memory and those are known to have limited lifespan, so either Tesla significantly underestimated the degradation rate (sloppy) or realised and didn’t care (arrogant tossers).

[sTeamTraen]

Slightly undermines their supposed green credentials if people are encouraged to buy a new one every 5 years.

Teslas are sold to the kinds of people who buy a new car every 3 years or so anyway. The real issue is resale value. This is already terrible for electric cars because very few people who are in the market for a second-hand car want the potential hassle of major battery replacement (even for the Renault Zoe where you lease the battery, according to the rather indiscreet Renault salesman who told me how little they bring in on part exchange after 2 years). To have it confirmed that you're almost certainly going to be replacing £1,500 components from year 5 or 6 is going to make a boring Passat or whatever look a lot more attractive. We have come to expect that a well-built ICE car will run for 10 years without major problems in 90% of cases and ought to get to 15 at least.