I'm a reservation holder for a 40kwh for about a couple months. I am pleased by this news obviously. I get the option to enable more range and the supercharger if I wanted. I didn't need either of these because I don't plan on taking long road trips with it (I have a 2nd vehicle for that). There might be some 60 owners upset by this but they knew what they were ordering and are getting it. Perhaps they wanted 60 speed but not range? People that ordered the 60,85 models are spending a lot of money and are likely Tesla enthusiasts. I don't think they are going to get angry over something that is beneficial to the company's bottom line. It's in every Tesla owners best interest for this company to be around for several years to come. I was predicting they would scrap the 40kwh battery and somehow not lose that low price point Tesla keeps advertsing. I based this on the fact they never shipped one, Europe doesn't even have that option for Model S orders and the Model X doesn't have a 40kwh option.
They should be. What is the point of supporting and paying a premium for green, if you are going to carry dead weight around in the car? Given that we are told that carrying a spare wheel around is significant, unused battery capacity must also be a problem.
I also assume tesla went to some trouble to reduce the weight of the car too. With makes unused battery capacity even more nuts.
If you are going green, you do not want un-utilised or dead weight. End of. There is literally no argument there.
So "Actual customers", who presumably know something of the subject, should be interested and question this set up.
Or is this the knee jerk we love Musk thread there no one is allowed to point out potential flaws or silliness, and if any one does say anything critical, then any old excuse will do? Must we really exaggerate with words like "disturbed"?
What should we be mad at him for? There are well listed and reasonable pros to maintaining the smaller price point and artificially limiting the battery capacity. The only half decent con anyone can list is dead weight. Which, and I haven't done the math myself but, the consensus seems to be that it's very much negligible (Anyone got some math to back me up by chance, I seem to have forgotten my capacity + weight = range formulas.)
So yeah, I can't say I see what the giant fuss is about, and for the record, you may see everyone here as Musk "lovers" incapable of seeing his selfishness and wastefulness (i think?), while some would say you seem a Musk "hater" incapable of letting reason invade your opinion of the man. But you know, to each his own.
It's not 'unused'. It's extra capacity to extend the functioning life of the 40kw operating window.
It's exactly like how solid state hard drives are labeled 256GB but are actually 240GB if you account for the space reserved for wear leveling.
If anything Telsa is in fact more honest than the SSD market.
The extra capacity would help spreading out the thermal loads with charging / discharging so it should also beable to charge in a shorter amount of time.
Model S is a nice car, comparable to a BMW 5 series. I think this is why people are buying it added with the fact it's an EV with one moving part. If green and unused weight was a customers primary concern then they would get a motorcycle or Nissan Leaf and not a sedan that can go do 0-60 in 4.4 seconds. My point is, I don't think they will be upset based on that reasoning. Maybe someone that already got a 60kwh might be upset and would have opted for the gimped range if it saved him $10k. As a 40kwh reserve holder, I am thrilled to be getting a 60kwh, I'm not concerned about the extra weight.
What I would expect is that 4% of their customers will be reminded that their car is artificially limited whenever they need to travel more than 160 miles (260 km) and have to pull over early to recharge a battery that is actually capable of 230 miles (370 km).
It is. While the pricing model makes sense from a rational perspective, it just doesn't fit well with most people's emotions about fairness.
When you get to the end of the charge on your 40kwh model, you know that the car is capable of 50% more - but you are not allowed to because you haven't paid Tesla an extra $10k.
It's similar to airline pricing. It makes rational sense to sell early seats at lower cost, and increase prices as the plane gets closer to selling out, effectively auctioning off seats. But people hate it. The guy sitting next to you is getting the exact same service as you, but might have paid 3x less.
