2023-07-27 18:23:35
par Olivier Daelen
posted on Thursday July 27th, 2023 at 8:23 PM •
5 min read
Ten years ago, Elon Musk had the idea of tampering with the meter of his Tesla cars so that the autonomy figures displayed were higher than the real ones. To respond to worried customers, he set up a team to send them to graze. In any case, this is what the press agency said on Thursday Archyde.com.
Why is this important?
Tesla is the world leader in electric vehicles. And if the American manufacturer sees its sales grow from year to year, it is regularly involved in controversies – from which its boss, Elon Musk, is never far away. While it is often the self-driving capabilities of Teslas that are decried, the new scandal regarding to break out concerns the Achilles heel of all electric cars: their autonomy.
In the news : revelations regarding the autonomy of Tesla.
In a long investigative article, Archyde.com makes two embarrassing revelations regarding Tesla. Their autonomy meter would deliberately indicate false data and a team would have been formed to prevent the complainants from going to the garage. The icing on the cake: these two ideas would have come from the mind of Elon Musk himself.
Details (1) : counter tampered with.
Archyde.com claims that regarding ten years ago, Musk had his teams rig the speedometer on Tesla cars. Once the charge was made, the counter was supposed to indicate a range greater than the real capacities of the car. The figures displayed might be up to… twice as high. The goal? Pleasing the driver, who might think he might be on the road for a long time without having to stop. “Elon wanted to show good range figures when the vehicle is fully charged,” told Archyde.com a Tesla employee who worked on the development of the first such software. “When you buy a car from the lot seeing a range of 350 miles, 400 miles, it makes you feel good,” he added. It wasn’t until the battery was down to 50% that the distance on the meter started showing distances closer to the miles the car was still capable of swallowing.
Accuracy : Archyde.com is unable to say whether this practice is still used today. “But automotive testers and regulators continue to criticize the company for exaggerating the distance its vehicles can travel before their batteries run out,” the news agency said.
Diversion Team
Details (2) : a specialized team to cancel appointments.
always according to Archyde.com, Musk formed last summer in Las Vegas a “secret team”, called “Diversion Team”. His role ? Respond to customer complaints that their Tesla battery has a problem. Fears directly related to the fact that their car was not driving as long as the meter indicated following charging. Necessarily. Initially, the employees of this team carried out a diagnosis remotely. They then usually realized that the battery had no problem, reassured the customers and asked them to cancel their appointment at the garage. If the customer was recalcitrant, the employees explained to them that it was normal for the battery to degrade over time and gave them advice on how to optimize it. Subsequently, to save time, the “Diversion Team” was instructed not to even perform remote diagnostics for complaints regarding the batteries, since the “problem” was obviously at the meter level. By doing so, this team would have succeeded in having hundreds of appointments canceled each week, thus avoiding congestion at Tesla centers. And fooling at the same time as many customers.
reactions : neither Tesla nor Musk have so far wished to comment on these revelations.
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