Tesla tried to force a customer to pay a $4,500 ransom after the company used software to lock up 80 miles of range in his car’s battery pack. It was only after an outcry on social media that the automaker began to abandon its strategy of extracting $4,500 from customers.
Tesla has sold Model S’s with software-locked battery packs. e.g. Electrek’s Seth Weintraub’s first Tesla was the Model S 40, which was actually a Model S with a 60kWh battery pack that was software locked to the 40kWh range.
It was a way to provide different range options without having to complicate production by having different battery pack sizes.
Later, Tesla began offering owners of these software-locked vehicles the option to unlock the capacity for an additional fee. Over the years, Tesla phased out this practice, but the company still uses software-locked battery packs for warranty replacements for certain capacities that are no longer in production.
This has created a situation for customers that Tesla has completely mishandled.
Jason Hughes – a Tesla hacker – revealed the situation after trying to help a customer who had purchased a used Model S 90. The vehicle in question here had been a Model S 60.
The customer reportedly went to a Tesla service center to get a computer upgrade so that his vehicle could stay connected to the Internet – the old Tesla vehicles only had 3G connectivity, which was about to disappear. After the Tesla visit, he received a call from the automaker telling him that they had found a bug in his vehicle’s configuration and that they were going to push a “fix” to his car.
The “fix” restored his configuration to the Model S 60 and locked in about 80 miles of range from his battery pack. The customer tried to explain the situation to Tesla and have them re-enable the feature, which he paid for because he bought a Model S 90, but Tesla told him he had to pay $4,500 to unlock the feature.
At this point, the customer approached Hughes, who was known to be able to enable the software locking feature inside the Tesla car. However, he was unable to get a solution that would not cause other problems. Instead, he took the issue to social media.
It was only after the topic went viral that Tesla reportedly reached out to the customer and said they would ‘take care of it right away’.
It sounds like Tesla will be restoring the capacity to a 90kWh battery pack for this customer.
