Tesla automotive tradition is filled with hacks and shortcuts, some more practical than others. One, often known as the “moist towel” trick, required the Tesla Charging division — or no matter stays of it — to publicly inform clients to knock it off.
The “moist towel” trick entails wrapping a humid, cool material round a Supercharger cable deal with as a option to presumably velocity up the charging time. The Supercharger has temperature displays that preserve it from overheating because it prices Tesla autos. Some Tesla homeowners consider that cooling down the charging deal with will trick the temperature monitor into topping off their autos sooner.
This is the issue, at the very least in Tesla’s telling: If the sensor within the charging deal with believes that the temperature is decrease than it truly is whereas it’s charging, the towel-wrapped charger can create a “danger of overheating or injury” in keeping with the corporate.
This may occasionally sound like the largest “duh” assertion in tech information historical past, but it surely’s taken greater than two months for Tesla to warn its clients to not do the “moist towel” trick on their automobiles, even after it turned a well-known “hack” on different auto information web sites and Reddit boards. The official Tesla Charging account on X posted a warning on Wednesday in response to an article from InsideEVs.com explaining the damaging automotive charging trick.
Inserting a moist material on Supercharger cable handles doesn’t improve charging charges and interferes with temperature displays creating danger of overheating or injury. Please chorus from doing this so our programs can run appropriately, and true charging points will be detected by our…
— Tesla Charging (@TeslaCharging) July 25, 2024
This sort of epic communication breakdown is what occurs when a significant automaker doesn’t have a public relations division. Tesla dissolved its total PR crew in 2020 and Elon Musk publicly refused to rent one on his X account the next 12 months saying he didn’t need to “spend cash on promoting & manipulating public opinion,” in keeping with Electrek.