Tesla Is Fined $16,000 Per Owner By Norway Court For Throttling Battery Capacity And Charging Speed

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A court in Norway has fined Tesla $16,000 per owner in the country for using a software update to throttle battery capacity and charging speed. 

The electric car maker was found guilty of causing slower charging sessions for a number of owners who updated their vehicles with Tesla’s 2019.16.1 and .2 software updates.

Many owners found issues began in 2019, when those driving Model S and Model X vehicles noticed a drop in range from between 12 to 30 miles following the update. The affected cars appeared to be those with 85kWh battery packs, which were discontinued in 2016.

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One of the Norwegian owners impacted by the software update was David Rasmussen, who told Electrek in 2019 that his 2014 Model S 85 Tesla was getting a ‘Rated Range of 247 miles until May 13’.

He explained, ‘Now after the next update, it continued to drop to now 217 miles. This is an 11% drop in five weeks.’

Rasmussen plotted the battery capacity degradation of his Model S over 100,000 miles, and found that the drop was noticeably significant following the software update.

With other owners experiencing similar issues, Tesla was hit with a series of lawsuits in different markets in an effort to seek compensation from the company, of which businessman Elon Musk is CEO.

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Following the initial reports, Tesla told Electrek that the goal of the update was to ‘protect the battery and improve battery longevity’, and that only ‘a small percentage of owners’ were experiencing a loss of range.

Per Reuters, the company also claimed to be working to mitigate the impact on range for affected owners, saying it had been ‘rolling out over-the-air updates to address this issue’.

A total of 30 Tesla owners came together for the Norwegian lawsuit, though Tesla did not respond to the legal action. As a result, the case was decided by an absence judgement, with the customers winning in the conciliation council on April 29, according to Norway’s Nettavisen.

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Tesla was sentenced to pay 136,000 kroner ($16,000) to each of the 30 customers behind the suit by May 31, however the company may choose to appeal the ruling to the Oslo Conciliation Board by June 17.

Nettavisen notes that Tesla has sold 10,000 of the cars that have been seeing issues during the period in question, meaning that if all customers in the country successfully sue the company it could have to pay out millions in compensation.

Should customers continue to win, it could set the tone for other similar lawsuits, including one in the United States. 

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