Electric car maker Tesla is more heavily reliant on software updates than any other company in its industry. When it needed to mitigate the risk of damage to the battery while driving at highway speeds, it sent out a software update. Self-driving features? That's a software update. However, some model S owners are being asked to pony up cash for the latest update, which unlocks extra capacity that was secretly built into their batteries. Yes, Tesla has invended car DLC.
The affected consumers are those who bought a Model S 70 in the last month or so. The 70kWh batteries in their cars are actually 75kWh batteries. They've just been software limited to only charge to 70kWh. For the low, low price of $3,000, Tesla will send an OTA update to your vehicle that unlocks the extra 5kWh of capacity. That's equivalent to about 19 miles of additional driving. Future purchases of the car will be able to pay $3,250 for the same upgrade.
It doesn't really seem like a substantial improvement for a few thousand dollars, especially when you paid at least $71,000 for the car in the first place. In the realm of video game DLC, this would be like paying $7.99 for content that didn't add any new areas to the game, but instead included a few moderately interesting side-quests. Is it worth it? Eh, maybe if you really love the game.
According to Tesla, the new 75kWh batteries are the only ones they'll be producing for the S 70 variant. It's just cheaper to make one battery and sell the OTA update to the larger capacity. The company will still make 90kWh batteries that are different on the hardware level.
This is not technically the first time Tesla has sold an OTA. Owners of the old 40kWh Model S were offered the option of paying $8,500 to upgrade that cell to 60kWh. However, that only happened after the S 40 was discontinued and the range increase was substantial. This one feels more like a marketing decision.
Source: Tesla Model S 70 is the first car to have premium DLC
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