Barring a fuel leak, your car won't run out of gas sitting in your garage while you're on a long business trip.
There's a lot of variables at play here. The fact that the battery is so expensive vs. what a consumer has become accustomed to paying for vehicle maintenance on a traditional gasoline car. The tech is new. The way the vehicles operate is fundamentally different, and require different attention to different things. But it's all noise convoluting the argument.
The root: if you neglect your vehicle -- any vehicle -- you are in store for an expensive repair bill. It could be a $2,000 transmission. It could be a $10,000 engine replacement. Or it could be a $40,000 electric car battery. Because of all the aforementioned variables, the largest of which being the cost associated, there has been a massive amount of FUD surrounding bricking your Tesla. This response from the company is attempting to bring things back down to earth. If you plug in your car, you won't brick your car.
Which should really be common sense for anything at this point. Regardless of cost, if you take care of your possessions, they will last longer.
It might be the tires (check your owner's manual!), it might be the AC (again, manual - it should be turned on from time to time), you might now notice a strange smoke due to new oil leaks inside the combustion chamber, it might make horrible noises for a couple of seconds (because the oil drained to the bottom of the engine), etc, etc.
Hell, last extended trip we went on, we had someone to start the engines (and the damn AC) for a few minutes at least every week. It is just good practice.
If indeed the battery management system on a Tesla is able to keep the batteries alive for months at 0% reported charge, then it is a non-issue. Noone is going to leave such a car unattended for months, really. Specially if it is a Roadster.
Secondly, you could leave your fuel injected car idle for months on and end without having to worry about the car slowly slurping the fuel down and then leaving you an empty.
So it is much easier to run a EV out of battery power and far more expensive to fix it when it does happen. No amount of PR spinning, FUD or wishful thinking changes that.
PS: Gas can noticeably degrade in as little as one month depending on ambient conditions. But, condensation is the largest risk for mid term storage. After 1 year you will probably have trouble starting the engine even after replacing the battery. And 3-7 years your probably looking at major repair work.
The point is simply that Tesla should give more warning and attention to the very high cost of repair when you forget to plug the vehicle in or leave it unattended for long periods of time.
Second most cars don't cost 40k, but if your talking about a say a bugatti veyron it's not that hard to do 40k of damage. If you want to compare it to the cost of the car then for an older car having a few thousand dollar repair bill can easily cost more than the car is worth.
I mean, yes. You can "destroy" your car by not charging it. You can also destroy it by accidentally running it into a brick wall. No PR spin will change that either. That the repair would be very expensive is a moot point - this is a maintenance responsibility to you as the owner. As long as you are aware that this is an issue - just plug it in. It's not like you can forget by accident when you're aware that letting it completely deplete over a couple of months will cause an incredibly expensive repair job.
So where is the problem?
Is this Tesla's fault? Not entirely. But let's be honest, a small warning in the middle of the owners manual is not good enough.
I'm sure they feel it would be stupid to advertise something that to the general public looks like a defect with the technology. But I think it would have been better for them in the long-run if they were more informative. Now they are doing damage control, and a number of people have probably been turned off due to this whole saga.
tl;dr This information needs to be common knowledge amongst owners, Tesla could have avoided this if they handled it upfront instead of waiting for it to leak out on a blog.
They definitely inform the owner that completely depleting the battery will damage it. Why does everyone seem to think they don't?
The newer Roadsters even come with a system to notify Tesla if the batteries are too low. What else could they do to educate the owners? Make them take a weekend class?
You can destroy a Tesla by running it into a brick wall too. Yet there is no warning in the manual for that. Probably because it's not a risk unique to Teslas. Leaving your car at the airport for two weeks and coming back to find it suddenly worth $40K less than when you left it is more-so unique.
Tesla seems to be somewhat downplaying the high costs involved in forgetting to plug it in or leaving it too long.
It's not reasonable to assume that ordinary people know the inherent risks in lithium ion batteries. As such, the massive risk should have extreme emphasis in the instruction manuals, be explained in detail by the sales people, exist as clear warnings in the car, and so on.
If I leave my house long enough, the roof will decay and I'll get massive water damage. Halfway-intelligent homeowners know they need to get their roof done once in a while. Bike owners know that if they leave their bike in the rain, it will rust.
Many of the trappings of modern day life require active measures to ensure they work properly, and this is no different.
Actually no, the common wisdom is that you should expect your users to be idiots when developing a product.
It's different because people are familiar with all the things you mention: roofs and rain, bikes and rust. People aren't familiar with electric automobiles. Once someone buys them, sure, they'll become familiar and the vast majority won't brick them. Tesla's problem isn't the owners, it's the people thinking about becoming owners. And those people (if they've heard the story) are now fearful of bricking their cars, where they're not at all afraid of bricking the Mercedes they were considering as an alternative to the Tesla. Now they're thinking, maybe I'll wait another few years on this electric car thing. That's Tesla's problem right now. Not bricked cars, but the fear of bricked cars. And that's why they should cover this under warranty.
If that happens in the space of 1-2 months of no maintenance, you have a very, very, very shoddy house.
I routinely drive mine until it runs out of gas (don't ask) and I haven't had any adverse problems.
There were some natural gas kits sold that would not disable the fuel pump when you switched to gas. Some owners, when running out of gasoline, would switch to the gas. The fuel pump would keep running dry and melt. Something like this: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_WafeVL7IZss/S5VP0fVNvuI/AAAAAAAAJP...
Tesla is saying that even if you drain your battery driving, it would still take 30 days of failing to charge it to brick it. While the infrastructure for just "filling up real quick" may not exist for electric cars, the infrastructure certainly exists at a person's home, otherwise, they wouldn't buy an electric car.
I think there would be a much more compelling case for this if electric cars were being mass-adopted, and the education for maintaining them was poor. Neither is the case here. Electric cars are still largely in the early adopters phase, and Tesla is telling people to not leave their car unplugged for months on end.
Much ado about nothing.
I'm sure in the early days of gas-powered vehicles, plenty of engines seized up because people were unaware they had to change the oil and keep it at a certain level. And it certainly still happens on occasion.
See my other post in this submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3630466
Assumine new vehicles, doing nothing to a Tesla for ~30 days means $40k. Changing your oil 6 month later than the service schedule in most cases means inmeasurable (by owner) reduction in overall engine lifetime.
Apparently, some fuel pumps are cooled by the fuel itself. If the level gets too low, it can't dissipate the heat fast enough and the pump fails.
It didn't "brick" right away, but it got increasingly harder to start, because the pump could no longer pressurise que fuel line fast enough.
The original story got play because it was a surprising, unknown, and frankly, sucks.
If all of my fuel-injected laptops had never been damaged when they ran out of fuel, I would be pretty shocked and disappointed when it was a problem with the Kugelfischer. Much like the Tesla owners this affected.
Tesla isn't a "cause" it's just a product. So whatever happens to Tesla one way or the other has a smaller influence on "the rise of EVs" than you can imagine. Mahalo.
And even so, Tesla (and others like Nissan) has made available a warning system just in case, and all the blogger managed to do was to point out the privacy concerns with this solution.
Comprising all Tesla owners. It's in the Owner's Manual, and I would be very surprised if new owners aren't informed of it when they purchase the car.
[1] The other: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3631295