this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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Tesla
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About Tesla
Tesla Inc. (formerly Tesla Motors) is an energy + technology company originally from California and currently headquartered in Austin, Texas.
They produce electric vehicles (with a heavy focus on autonomy), batteries, and energy/solar products for the grid.
Tesla’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.
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Apparently all software. Fuck these guys it's just greed. They can sell the exact same but software limited cars for 10k$ less so everyone is getting scammed.
TIL saving $10k is a scam.
You're paying for exactly the same car with software limiting the full potential of it, seems scammy to me
...and you're saving $10k.
What's the problem?
The problem is that the company obviously is capable of making a performance machine that falls under the sale price. Then artificially limits capacity or use, unless you pay more.
Clear?
You aren’t gonna get through to this guy
Thanks Poopoo 🤡
I mean the company is "capable" of selling these at literally half the price. Maybe one day UNICEF will get into the car production business, but until then you have to buy them from for-profit companies.
Obviously it would cost them more money to engineer a new battery and manufacturing process, and without this software lock they couldn't produce a car at this price.
As an ancillary bonus, you can charge this car to 100%, 100% of the time without ever worrying about degradation.
But they can produce this car that sell this price though, that's my point. The technology is installed and fabricated, it's just artificially locked to fake some loss in value. This is just a disguised way to say they've been asking 10k more for the same product beforehand. That's where the scam is, you are either paying 10k too much or are fucked out of a full product. Nothing do do with unicef it's just a blatant example of Tesla (the company) being shit again and I wanted to point it out.
Edit; And that also creates a huge problem on the second hand market where Tesla can take those car and unlock them to inflate the sale value afterwards. Actively shafting the previous owner out of massive resale value which everybody should consider. Cars are not investments, they are money pits. The more money you can recoup the better and this here example literally cucks you out of any resale value.
Very few things in life are priced as “cost plus” pricing where the item is sold at the fabrication cost plus some fixed margin.
Just look at software. Microsoft arbitrarily removes features for non-enterprise versions of its OS.
People just get upset for some reason when the same principle is applied to a physical good.
How about computer processors? If there isn’t enough demand for higher end procs, manufacturers will sometimes reduce/lock their clock speeds and sell them at a lower price. If nobody wants to pay for the higher end performance, should they be forced to give it away for the same price as a lower end processor? Should they be forced to just throw them away or keep them in inventory until they’re obsolete?
How about wine? If there isn’t demand for a good vintage, a winery will often sell the extra wholesale to Charles Shaw to be mixed with other wines and sold at Trader Joe’s for cheap. That way they can maintain the high price (and image) of the wine they do sell to consumers. Artificial scarcity.
I would say anyone for some reason upset that they got a reduced capability vehicle for a reduced price should remember three things in this specific case:
(1) You can “upgrade” the vehicle later. You may never personally do this, but the capability will be reflected in the resale value.
(2) Because you’re only using a portion of the battery, using 100% of the range you have available will not wear the battery as much as it would if you used 100% of an equivalent battery.
(3) Similarly, you can supercharge at higher speed for a larger portion of the available battery.
Probably the only arguments I’d have against it are a) it’s a bit of a waste of resources to make batteries that largely stay dormant (less relevant if the vehicle lives long enough to wear out the battery and 2) the vehicle is slightly heavier, so it takes more energy to move.
Besides, any vehicle purchased at a traditional dealership will cost as much as the sales agent can get you to pay regardless of what it cost to make.
It seems we agree on the fact that there's a lot of "artificial value" added in many different fields. Aren't you concerned about that? Don't you take that into consideration as a consumer? That's what I'm talking about here.
Anyway yes, if a product cannot sell at full price, they should lower the price not the product like what's happening here. And yes wineries are full of shit anyway.
Also, people won't be "able to upgrade" they will only be able to unlock what they already bought.
Modern pricing structures allow companies to maximize their profit, but they also allow consumers to maximize the reach of their dollar.
It just so happens that it can be cheaper to manufacture one version of a product and change the features in software than it is to try to exactly predict consumer demand and minimize waste.
Would you feel better if Tesla charged the customer $1k in engineering time to pay a guy to rip out the extra batteries and button the car back up for them? What is the point of that? The end result is the same. Less range for fewer dollars. Isn't it cheaper to just switch the batteries off in software?
The misconception is that not adding the larger battery etc. would save costs for Tesla which they would pass on to the consumer. Unfortunately, capitalism dictates they would not, thus from a consumer's perspective there is no price disadvantage. For sure, you overpay - but in the end, you are still buying.
Doesn’t capitalism dictate that the company needs to offer the most compelling price in order to beat the competition?
Like, nobody has to buy a Tesla. Also, nobody has to buy a software limited version of a Tesla. “Capitalism” is driving people to do both of those things however because people find that the car has a greater value for what they can afford than what other companies offer. How is that bad?
Like…what exactly do you think the motivation behind essentially giving away batteries for free that nobody can use?
They arent giving away free batteries, they are wasting batteries by putting them in a situation where they are unusable. Its waste.
I agree. I would argue that the batteries are valuable enough that they will eventually be utilized at some point (like secondary market or if the vehicle happens to last long enough to fully wear out the batteries), but they could certainly be put to better use now. In fact, I'd argue that most 200+ mile range EVs are a waste of batteries, because many consumers don't realize that they could get by with much cheaper, lighter 100 mile range vehicles. That's not really the fault of the manufacturer though. I put the blame on consumers who don't realize that the use case of an EV that you charge at home daily is different than a gasoline vehicle that must be refueled at a station.
All that aside, this conversation was about how Tesla is greedy for software locking batteries. I'm arguing that giving away unusable batteries is hardly an act of greed.
That's not how this works. There's a concept called "economies of scale". The sale of the $100k model supplements the cost of the $80k model.
There's also no official documentation to show that it is indeed software-locked. These could be binned or B-grade cells.
The article specifies that Tesla confirmed it's a soft lock.
No it doesn't. What it says is:
You haven't read the article then, you just took the sentence that fitted your point. At the end there is an update saying that Tesla did in fact confirm it was the same battery pack that was software locked.
Mmk well that was added later. Regardless their source is Tesla "advisors" who are notorious for talking out of their ass.