Reuters is reporting about a new scandal rising around Tesla, Inc. and its electric cars. Apparently, the on-board electronics were deliberately misreporting actual remaining range, showing more kilometers than the car was actually capable of covering.
Around 10 years ago, Tesla allegedly tweaked the software to misreport the remaining range on the dashboard. When the battery was on low charge, the remaining mileage counter suddenly started dropping faster than the owners expected it to.
Reportedly, the company realized that this trick would be leading the owners to misjudge their remaining charge and fail to get to a charging station in time. As a workaround, Tesla introduced a hidden feature: the cars could still travel slightly more than 20 km (12 miles) on what they reported as ‘zero remaining charge’, but their total range was still shorter than claimed in the OEM specifications.
The investigation by Reuters claims that the idea to falsify the range readings belonged to Elon Musk himself, who apparently wanted a palpable market advantage over his competitors. It would seem that it worked, too.
Disgruntled customers kept calling Tesla’s dedicated hotline for range issues and asking for a dealership check-up, but the company reps were purportedly instructed to ‘run a remote diagnostic tool’ and report that everything seemed to be in order with the car.