Tesla has confirmed that its new “Standard Range” Model S and Model X have the same battery pack as the Long Range version, but with its capacity being software-locked.
Jesus fucking Christ how does anyone buy any of his shit anymore, this is the most insane dumbfuck bullshit I’ve ever heard. Next up, Tesla model X x edition that projects musks xes all over your windshield and the car wont drive unless you pay $300 a month.
Personally I’d be down with that. Jailbreaking your car is already a thing and there will be an entire homebrew community for software and all that if he keeps being dumb.
Some people will just see it as free hardware!
I don’t understand how this changes the cost of manufacturing the car… I don’t understand why this exists. Only thing I can think of is maybe it reduces the risk that they will need a battery replacement after 8-10 years since it has less wear? I think with the other standard range models its recommended to charge to 100% regularly where the long range ones take a little bit more care to not go over 90% daily.
Honestly Tesla is better than a lot of others when it comes to subscription locked functionality. The phone key and app is a great example of a standard feature basically everyone else is charging for.
If popular enough they’ll probably build another battery for them down the road.
But this allows them to test a different price point and see what the market does without doing any investments other than the reduced margin on each model they ship.
That said, they’ve done this before with the S at least.
This isn’t a new concept, or exclusive to Tesla. I know first hand that camera companies do this too. Commonize the imaging chip and software lock the available imaging quality behind price tiers. You get somewhat lower manufacturing costs by having just one component sku and larger volumes of that sku. You need to sell at a certain price point to make it viable, but still have to offer lower price point options to keep and keep market share.
I’m not saying it’s a good idea, but it’s not new or unique . Far more common than people realize.
Yeah but with chips it’s often a yield optimizer. Back on the ps3 days, the cell chip had 8 “cores” but getting a full wafer of chips with all 8 working was really tough, let’s make up numbers, let’s say 60%. If you instead say, we’ll, 7 functional then maybe 85% of the chips have that and the cost per chip goes way down.
There are dual and quad core cpu setups that shit as 2 with some cores turned off- there are tricks to get them back, and they may even work- or your system might become incredibly unstable and crash all the time.
Sensors in cameras would be the same- you could reuse “bad” full frame sensors because they have dead spots somewhere by cropping down to a smaller area and get more yield out of the batch.
This is different than with a car- they done make a battery pack that’s half fucking functional and then go “oh well”. They’re literally just soft locking it to some diminished capacity so you can pay for an “upgrade” that “feels like magic” pumping more battery into your car at the speed of Wi-Fi or some bullshit.
Yeah it’d be nice if they just reduced the cost of the base models by 10k but I guess they don’t want to do that for whatever reason.
On another note I wonder how this will impact battery degradation. I would guess it’s like the article says you can charge to 100% at all times and there’s plenty of buffer for degradation.
