Hi everyone. I just got off the phone with Tesla with some disturbing news.



My car has approximately 30,000 miles on it. I regularly use CHADeMo to charge my car, with the occasional Supercharger charge on road trips. On my last road trip, I noticed that my supercharging rate was significantly reduced, usually staying between 75 kw and 90 kw. At first, I thought it was the station, but each Supercharger on my trip had the same behavior. So I bought my car in for service last week.



After the technicians went over the and presumably consulted with the mothership, it was determined that the car has now entered a permanent degraded mode where it will no longer allow fast charging to "prevent battery degradation." Read that again... that's right... if you use Superchargers or any DC Fast Charging, including CHADeMo, your car will eventually enter into a permanently degraded mode that will prevent you from charging your car at reasonably fast speeds.



I am, to say the least, livid. I am waiting for a call back from management, but presumably, they are going to explain to me that there is nothing they can do. This is akin to the Ludicrous launches being restricted, without warning or any communication from Tesla. But this... is much worse.



It's worse because it affects every Tesla vehicle. Every Tesla, not just Ludicrous mode Teslas, will permanently and irrevocably degrade their charging capabilities if you use DC Fast Charging of any kind more than the unusual rare occasion.



I'm honestly speechless at this. To the best of my knowledge, it has never been communicated from Tesla, until now, that using any kind of DCFC will permanently degrade your vehicle. Yes, we all know that charging to 100% regularly is a bad thing, but just regularly DC charging is also apparently just as bad, according to Tesla. But to make matters worse, it's not the battery that's degraded or causing the slow down, it's Tesla's charging algorithm that will slowly start to degrade your charging on each "count" of DCFC. According to the tech I talked to, there is an internal counter that increments each time you DC charge, and once that reaches certain thresholds, it starts restricting your top end charging ability. Presumably, if one keeps charging DC, over time, you will be restricted further and further.



This, ostensibly, to prevent Tesla from having to pay out to replace degraded batteries under their unlimited mile warranty. So over time, it will take longer and longer to charge your car. Already, this adds a significant amount of time to my road trips by restricting my charging from a previous high of 117 kw to ~90 kw on a good day. Road tripping in my Telsa already takes 2x as long as a gas car, but now it's taking even longer. I can't imagine wanting to take this car on any further road trips at this point.



Tesla needs to do something about this. This is not ok. It is not ok to remove critical functionality from the vehicle, every vehicle, without warning and without prior notice. I simply would not have purchased this car if I was informed that it would lose the ability to charge the battery over time, especially such a short time frame (1 year / 30k miles).

Click to expand...