Maybe one day you'll be able to chahge ya cah in Hahvihd Yahd

"dense, highly populated areas" or, in other words, parts of the city that should be pedestrian only zones.

When the last person gets their pre-ordered Model 3, they'll have wireless charging by then!

There's an enlightening story in The Washington Post about how Tesla sent a wireless software update to some of its cars as Hurricane Irma was threatening Florida. The software change gave those cars additional battery life, to help their owners evacuate and escape the storm.

The Model S and Model X vehicles updated Saturday were all built with a 75-kilowatt-hour battery. At full capacity, that’s enough for a Model S to travel about 250 miles. When those cars were first sold, Tesla gave customers the option of a lower-capacity battery at a more affordable price, and some decided to take the savings rather than purchase the full 75-kWh battery.

But downsizing didn’t mean replacing the big battery with a physically smaller one; it just meant using a bit of computer code to restrict how much of the battery the car could access. If the customers wanted, they could later have Tesla lift the software lock by paying an additional fee, which can run into the thousands of dollars.

Over the weekend Tesla temporarily lifted that software lock at no cost to owners, after receiving requests for help from customers whose cars were stuck in Irma-related traffic.

It would have been irresponsible for Tesla not to temporarily unlock the batteries in a life-treatening situation such as a hurricane, so I'll give them credit for that. But crippling the batteries on those cars in the first place, for no other reason than to extract thousands of dollars of extra profit, is rather shameful.

Even if you don't buy a Tesla, it affects everyone else. Deliberately crippling the batteries also deliberately lessens the vehicle's environmental benefits. More charging stations have to be installed to support the cars that need to be recharged more frequently, inevitably taking away parking spaces for other drivers.

Tesla charges customers to use these stations — more than half the cost of an equivalent amount of gasoline energy, so it's another significant source of revenue. The whole scheme sounds like a really sleazy way to make extra profit.