A Reuters report says that some 10 years ago, Tesla configured vehicle dashboard range meters to indicate longer distances between charges than batteries actually supported, then created a company team last year to thwart rising service requests about the discrepancies.
Reuters, citing anonymous sources familiar with the issue, said that neither Tesla nor CEO Elon Musk returned messages seeking comment about the report.
The article gives as one example a Tesla Model 3 owner who said the car was getting less than half its advertised range of 353 miles between full charges, so he made a service appointment to look into it. He told Reuters he then got text messages indicating “remote diagnostics” showed his battery was performing well and that Tesla wanted to cancel the appointment.
Reuters says Tesla employees were told to discourage service appointments over underperforming batteries, and created a “Diversion Team” in Las Vegas to cancel them when possible. It said Tesla service centers were flooded with such complaints and that employees would celebrate when such an appointment was canceled. The report says that often, hundreds of the appointments were disposed of in a week, and that team staff were monitored daily on how many they canceled.
Most of the complaining customers’ cars didn’t need to be repaired but had simply been touted as having more range than they actually did, the report said.
