Tesla warns in opposition to moist towel charging trick two months too late

Tesla automotive tradition is stuffed with hacks and shortcuts, some more practical than others. One, generally known as the “moist towel” trick, required the Tesla Charging division — or no matter stays of it — to publicly inform prospects to knock it off.

The “moist towel” trick entails wrapping a moist, cool fabric round a Supercharger cable deal with as a method to presumably pace up the charging time. The Supercharger has temperature displays that hold it from overheating because it expenses Tesla automobiles. Some Tesla house owners imagine that cooling down the charging deal with will trick the temperature monitor into topping off their automobiles quicker.

This is the issue, no less than in Tesla’s telling: If the sensor within the charging deal with believes that the temperature is decrease than it really is whereas it’s charging, the towel-wrapped charger can create a “danger of overheating or injury” in accordance with the corporate.

This will sound like the largest “duh” assertion in tech information historical past, nevertheless it’s taken greater than two months for Tesla to warn its prospects to not do the “moist towel” trick on their vehicles, even after it grew to become 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.

This sort of epic communication breakdown is what occurs when a serious automaker doesn’t have a public relations division. Tesla dissolved its total PR group in 2020 and Elon Musk publicly refused to rent one on his X account the next yr saying he didn’t need to “spend cash on promoting & manipulating public opinion,” in accordance with Electrek.