[car fanatics]

Source
Photo credit: Tesla Motors
February 27, 2012
By: CF staff

Tesla Motors on Friday criticized a tech blogger for spreading an "irrational fear" that the batteries in the company's electric cars can be ruined by leaving the vehicles unplugged for relatively short periods of time.

On Friday, Tesla posted a detailed response on the Palo Alto company's blog, saying that the batteries are harder to kill than DeGusta wrote. If left unplugged, the battery on Tesla's original roadster would take more than two months to completely discharge, assuming it started with a 50 percent charge.

The company's new Model S sedan, scheduled to hit the market this year, will have a more advanced battery pack that can hold its charge longer. A Model S parked with a 50 percent charge on its battery and left unplugged will take about 12 months to discharge, according to the company. And the battery will recharge normally if the car is plugged back in within 30 days.

[BasiliskSt]

Last I checked a $40,000 lost times the probability of at least 4 (known to the blogger) out of about 2100 sold is an actuarially fair premium (risk of loss) of $76 per owner, yet Tesla isn't covering it as a warranty claim. Hence the incidence of the loss is 100% on the owner. What the manual doesn't make clear is that the parasitic drain will brick the battery. A typical reader could read the manual and fully understand that you can't drive it to exhaustion, and yet still not understand that parking with a partial charge without being connected to an adequate charger will also kill the battery. One of the cars bricked was even plugged in but on a long extension chord that charged slower than the parasitic drain. Tesla will lose this lawsuit by affected owners as "maintaining adequate charge" doesn't disclose the fight against parasitic drain when the car is parked or the rate of parasitic drain. Tesla is trying to kill the messenger. The affected customers are harmed whether anyone else knows about it or not. Tesla just wants to keep their customer service quality suppressed and secret. Blaming the blogger for sharing the story is the wrong response.