Andyw2100
Well-Known Member
I really think this warrants its own thread. We're also cluttering up this thread with a completely different issue. I'll PM a mod, and request that the posts on this topic be moved to a new thread.
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Pack Performance and Launch Mode Limits
- Thread starter Ingineer
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- Tesla Inc.
Muzzman1
Active Member
Let me clarify, I am not trying to disagree here, but they are still offering the 60-->75 upgrade "at anytime" on the buy me now website: (as of 12/15/16)
While I don't disagree with your suggestion/idea - just a related thought:
There seems to be a pattern here with the launch-limiter allegation that is similar to the old story: Tesla's alleged suggestion that P100D does not have this issue. That is the same moving of goalposts that has happened with the 85 kWh battery allegedly (really 81 kWh, one had to buy 90 kWh to get past 85), we know it happened for the P85D (vs. Ludicrous), which was unable to reach its promised speeds and feeds, and to a lesser extend to early P90DLs which also had some performance-promise issues... which were fixed in subsequent silent upgrades to the pack... but did these new ones have the limiter still? P100D to the rescue...?
Tesla seems, if this info is correct, to be pushing what they can promise/say about their high-end beyond what they can deliver at each time, thus leading into the same mess again and again...
They seem to be much, much more conservative with their low-end, underpromising and overdelivering in the low-end.
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@Muzzman1 At least one person has said that the upgrade is no longer offered to them in their MyTesla account where you could actually purchase the upgrade. (For someone that already has a car.)
Our assumption is that Tesla is going to update the wording to be more accurate, but we really don't know.
How do you know how many kWh you have lost? Are you measuring that somewhere, have you hacked your system, or are you calculating a value based a multiple of an estimated value and a calculated value? Not to denigrate you, but as you calculate these values, do you know what the precision of the measured value is/are, and therefore use significant figures in the math?
Regarding the alleged launch-limiter, can anyone think of any industry parallels of software being used to clandestinely alter the car's behavior? I don't mean component degradation or breakage, but actual software manipulation?
The obvious one springs to mind - Volkswagen had to recall a fleet in some markets because fixing the emissions through a performance penalty was not allowed - but beyond that, what kind of precedence (or reaction) could there be to a car self-destructing (permanently disabling) by software part of its performance without the owner knowing beforehand (or perhaps even afterwards)?
Any examples? Of course at this time we do not know if Tesla does this or not either.
The obvious one springs to mind - Volkswagen had to recall a fleet in some markets because fixing the emissions through a performance penalty was not allowed - but beyond that, what kind of precedence (or reaction) could there be to a car self-destructing (permanently disabling) by software part of its performance without the owner knowing beforehand (or perhaps even afterwards)?
Any examples? Of course at this time we do not know if Tesla does this or not either.
The miles quoted aren't both apples. The EPA changed their estimation scheme, so you can't directly compare the 2013 values and the 2016 values. IIRC the change happened in mid 2014.
Lost rated miles, and rated Wh/mi from the car itself. It's as accurate as the BMS is. You're not going to get back 1800Wh from sig figs, sorry, and even that is very low number for battery degradation.
edit - and really you don't need to do anything special to get the figures that wk057 got, just from the normal in-car displays, as long as you know which things to multiply together. Getting directly in kWh units from the car is neat though. These are huge numbers, well past any doubt of precision.
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Some people have earned trust... Ingineer is one of them.
The link is back up on my page with different language. It now just says " upgrade to 75 kW". Still says kW so they are still saying the battery is a 75 kW battery.
jeffro01
Active Member
Despite my earlier posts, I am in agreement with you on this entire post 100%...
Jeff
Now that the link is back up on my page, I'm going to order the upgrade. I've known from Tesla's literature all along that the differences didn't add up and that the 60 is clearly a better value. However, I have discovered since my purchase that the extra 40 miles are of value to me. Would I like more bang for My buck? Sure, but I knew the price all along. The belief that Tesla plays fast and loose with specs has been around fo a while, and was factored in. This overpromising thing is going to bite them in the butt one of these days.
On the surface, I agree. However, my problem with this is tracking the override. If there is incremental damage to the drivetrain over time, then the car is traded in or sold privately, how will the buyer know? And if there are other opt-outs like the easter-egg one, how many different "risky" choices must the buyer be aware of when shopping? Will the MCU just display a huge red animated flag?
Andyw2100
Well-Known Member
There are other issues too with respect to selling a used Tesla.
If this practice becomes widely known, any educated buyer would want to know how many launches the car they are thinking of buying has left. Would there be any reasonable way for the buyer to know this? Would Tesla offer the information on CPO cars, and possibly even reset the counter to 0 for CPO cars, giving them an advantage over private used Tesla sales?
As I see it, the whole thing is one huge can of worms, which was probably caused by Tesla trying to push the hardware too hard, and then deciding that to protect it (and protect themselves from costly warranty repairs) they needed to pull back.
If Tesla was up-front about all this and said something like "You can only do 100 full-power launches before we will turn down the power", then they could just have a counter, much the way an odometer shows mileage. It would be shown on the screen so you know exactly where you were at and used cars would be easy to check.
Engineering-wise, I don't see an issue with pushing the hardware hard, but with a limit on the number. When you need to engineer the system to last a certain amount of time/cycles, it's much easier to do so when you know exactly the numbers of cycles to target. This way they can allow the hardware to really be pushed to the max and give us the most bang for our buck and still know the reliability targets will be met. The alternative is to just dial back the performance so you have a big safety factor. Having the digital control of things means it's easy to have advanced control of the parameters your system is exposed to.
In fact, in the future we may have a much better metric than "miles" to determine a cars age and history. Tesla already gives us lifetime miles/kWh which gives a used car buyer an idea of whether the car was driven hard or gently. Other cars don't give us that. I can imagine a stats page showing all kinds of metrics such as lifetime cornering force, tire stress, road roughness, etc. The Model S/X already has all the instrumentation to log these kind of things.
Tesla, this launch limit is ok, just let us know about it!
Engineering-wise, I don't see an issue with pushing the hardware hard, but with a limit on the number. When you need to engineer the system to last a certain amount of time/cycles, it's much easier to do so when you know exactly the numbers of cycles to target. This way they can allow the hardware to really be pushed to the max and give us the most bang for our buck and still know the reliability targets will be met. The alternative is to just dial back the performance so you have a big safety factor. Having the digital control of things means it's easy to have advanced control of the parameters your system is exposed to.
In fact, in the future we may have a much better metric than "miles" to determine a cars age and history. Tesla already gives us lifetime miles/kWh which gives a used car buyer an idea of whether the car was driven hard or gently. Other cars don't give us that. I can imagine a stats page showing all kinds of metrics such as lifetime cornering force, tire stress, road roughness, etc. The Model S/X already has all the instrumentation to log these kind of things.
Tesla, this launch limit is ok, just let us know about it!
I agree being upfront about pretty much anything makes it OK... and certainly if a car's performance has a software-set hard limit on some lifetime activity... that is definitely a thing to be upfront about...
However, I still find the concept of a hard, software-imposed lifetime number limit for some automotive activity hard to digest. Gathering of miles and other gradual, physical wear and tear is understandable and a fact of life, that's OK. Having a limited warranty to reflect that for some activity or for some parts, that is normal and OK too (cars often have certain amount of miles for each part). Over time gradual loss of performance, things may start breaking (or not) eventually etc. sure...
But the car imposing a hard limit that can't even be reset by, say, some regular maintenance routine? One that 100% would result in things stopping for the life of the vehicle, without a fix available even at cost, instead of say, just the risk of something breaking rising?
How would that work (or indeed, in Tesla's case, how does it allegedly already work?). Say a car would be limited to 100 launches and there is a counter on the dash. Sure, they'd be upfront about it in that case, you can see it going down, but unlike the other limits (like miles) that come with gradual wear and tear, this one would have guaranteed and dramatic consequences - loss of a feature for, what, the life of the car?
I would definitely not be very happy about such a feature. In fact, if Tesla would have chosen to keep quiet about such a feature as you suggest, I'm pretty sure they know neither would many people. Now, the ability to turn off the offending activity at service and have a car without a counter of performance death, would probably be an OK solution to this, if one knew about all this before purchase... but yeah, the permanence of the counter would make every one of those launches a bit unpleasant IMO and subject to ridicule from passengers.
IMO the solution is not to introduce products that have to be protected from breaking themselves by a lifetime counter, that's just bad form. If the system can't handle something, you design it to handle it, or limit it in the first place not to go outside of tolerances. If there is a wear and tear component in the system - and that's quite OK with cars of course - you introduce a maintenance regime at cost for that and pre-announce that regime.
Say, after every 100 - just picking a number out of thin air - launches, book a time at the SC and they will do this and that for 1,000 dollars (and every 1,000 launches it is up to 2,000 dollars) and you're good to go again. Then that permanent counter instead becomes a running cost that you can decide if it is worth it or not.
IMO this unfortunately sounds like, if there is such a hidden launch limiter, Tesla did not design their system to handle the stresses of these launches (perhaps except allegedly the P100D?). Instead they pushed their system to meet specs they wanted or needed for marketing. If they had designed for it, there either would not be such a limit at all, or there would be a clear maintenance regime to handle any excessive wear and tear issues (beyond usual gradual losses).
It certainly does no good to the reputation of EVs either if they have built-in counters after which they stop working fully, without remedy.
@Ingineer,
Up until now, I thought the performance limitation you mentioned is something temporary until the battery cools down, just like the way the track performance is limited after a short time. However, after your last message, it sounds like it is a limitation on the lifetime launches the car can perform since it was manufactured. That's a completely different story. This would affect things like the resale value of cars.
I just wanted to point out that your description has not been very clear. Especially, at the very beginning when you described this, it completely sounded like a temporary limitation based on temperature. Instead "launch limit", you could call it "lifetime launch counter" or something similar to avoid confusion.
Up until now, I thought the performance limitation you mentioned is something temporary until the battery cools down, just like the way the track performance is limited after a short time. However, after your last message, it sounds like it is a limitation on the lifetime launches the car can perform since it was manufactured. That's a completely different story. This would affect things like the resale value of cars.
I just wanted to point out that your description has not been very clear. Especially, at the very beginning when you described this, it completely sounded like a temporary limitation based on temperature. Instead "launch limit", you could call it "lifetime launch counter" or something similar to avoid confusion.
Same here. Until I read this thread I was considering purchasing the upgrade. Knowing what I do now, I don't feel like it's worth the $9k for me. Though, I would gladly pay something like $3k to have the car use the unused battery capacity to offset degredation of my S60. I really think that should be an option because if I'm unwilling to purchase the full 75kwh upgrade now then I'm sure as hell going to be unwilling to purchase the full upgrade after I know the pack has degraded a bit.
Thanks Ingineer, great informative posts.
Since we're talking about battery capacities and launch limitations, could you also comment about launch limitation in 60/70/75 cars?
I drove a S75 and noticed that how slow was 0-60. Especially 0-30. 0-30 felt much slower than my old Bmw 630. It was like the car didn't want to move first 1-2 seconds.
Then I've tried 10-60, which really felt fast, even comparing to my P90DL, it was good. It is obvious that Tesla is limiting the power of S75 if you are doing "launch" from 0. Rolling start from 10mph is definitely much faster.
Have you got any data on that? Since lots of people have 60/75s, that maybe more interesting than P90D limitation for some people.
(Btw, in my opinion one reason that P90D is much more expensive than 90D is to cover the extra risk of drive train failure. If they are limiting launches, this is bad.)
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