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.
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.
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.
