Electric vehicles are all the rage these days as everyone tries to jump of the ‘going green’ bandwagon and as will all first-gen technologies these vehicles are expensive and full of questions.
Premier of these electric vehicle is the Telsa of course as it has garnered much of the press, both in the technology world and the larger mainstream media press rooms. With a price tag that can make you choke, even for their base model the Telsa Model S, they aren’t something that just anyone can go out and buy.
Given the newest of the technology there is still a lot of things that we are finding out about cars, like just how easy it is to brick those expensive Telsa cars; and how expensive it can be to get them unbricked.
For those of you not familiar with the term ‘bricked’ it means performing some action on your cool gadget that basically disables the item to the point that it is totally unusable. An example of this might be doing an upgrade to your mobile phone and it becoming a dead unusable hunk of plastic – hence bricked.
When it comes to the Telsa; according the to reports floating around the web today, this ‘bricking’ is an amazingly easy thing to do – all you have to have happen is for the car’s battery to become fully discharged and suddenly you will have nothing but an expensive hunk of metal.
Apparently this can easily happen when the car is parked too long without being recharged because the car’s always-on systems run quietly in the background regardless of whether the car is running or not. With the Telsa the tipping point is around the 11 week mark.
This might be bad enough but the real pain is when you find out that fixing the problem is going to cost you another $40,000 for a new battery from Telsa.
Here is the statement that Engadget got back when they asked Telsa about the problems:
All automobiles require some level of owner care. For example, combustion vehicles require regular oil changes or the engine will be destroyed. Electric vehicles should be plugged in and charging when not in use for maximum performance. All batteries are subject to damage if the charge is kept at zero for long periods of time. However, Tesla avoids this problem in virtually all instances with numerous counter-measures. Tesla batteries can remain unplugged for weeks (even months), without reaching zero state of charge. Owners of Roadster 2.0 and all subsequent Tesla products can request that their vehicle alert Tesla if SOC falls to a low level. All Tesla vehicles emit various visual and audible warnings if the battery pack falls below 5 percent SOC. Tesla provides extensive maintenance recommendations as part of the customer experience.
And we thought we had battery problems with our cellphones.
h/t to VentureBeat
