Tesla has been found guilty of throttling charging speed and battery capacity by a court in Norway.
The company is going to "have to pay $16,000 to each of the thousands of owners affected in the country", until it appeals, according to the pro-Tesla lot over at electrek.
Dating back to 2019,electrekhad pointed out reports that Tesla owners were seeing drops in range of 12 to 30 miles after a software update. The affected vehicles appear to only be Model S and Model X vehicles with 85 kWh battery packs.
Tesla owner David Rasmussen told the blog at the time: “My 2014 Model S 85 was getting Rated Range of 247 miles until May 13. Now after the next update, it continued to drop to now 217 miles. This is an 11% drop in 5 weeks.”
He even plotted the battery capacity of his Model S, showing the obvious dropoff in capacity around the time of the update.
Around the same time, the DC fast-charging rate at Supercharger stations had also been reduced, the blog notes, stating: "Affected owners are seeing much slower charging sessions."
Tesla, meanwhile, claimed that the update would “protect the battery and improve battery longevity”. The company claimed that range loss only happened for “a small percentage of owners.”
The controversy led to a "series of lawsuits", one of which was in Norway. When Tesla didn't respond to the lawsuit, the 30 owners"were automatically awarded 136,000 kroner (~$16,000 USD) each in compensation"unless Tesla appeals.
But the real devil could be in the forthcoming details: there could be over 10,000 other Tesla owners affected by the update in Norway alone,not to mention owners involved in similar lawsuits in other countries.
The affected update was Tesla’s 2019.16.1 and .2 update.