Elongate

We’re split at Nerpa as to whether he’s the lord and saviour of humanity, or just a greedy capitalist, exploiting his workers before he fucks off to Mars. Whatever your thoughts on him we can all agree it’s nice when disgustingly rich people get told off for being pricks. And that is exactly what has happened to Tesla in Norway. Those sensible Scandinavians who bloody love their EVs (Norway has the highest number of electric vehicles per capita of any nation on Earth) found Tesla guilty of reducing charging speeds as well as battery capacity as a result of a recent software update for their cars. This update effectively dropped the car’s range by 11% in 5 weeks, something that definitely has the odour of fish about it.

It’s long been known that tech companies will often mess about with older versions of their wares once newer flashier models are released, we’re talking about you Apple! But it seems this is the first time that such a ruling has been made against a vehicle manufacturer.

Unless Tesla decides to appeal the ruling, which given their massive amount of money and no doubt thousands of highly paid lawyers they probably will, they will be forced to pay the equivalent of $16,000 USD to thousands of owners in Norway.

A handful of other countries are now looking to file similar court cases against Tesla, who are claiming that this update was implemented to protect the overall life of the battery and prolong usage. Which seems reasonable enough, but clearly not too reasonable to just straight up tell your customers about? Hopefully, cases like these will scare other manufacturers from trying such crafty things in the future, but at Nerpa we’re not counting our collective chickens that they won’t find another way to cut corners.

Check out electrek’s article for more info.