Tesla warns towards moist towel charging trick two months too late

Tesla automobile tradition is stuffed with hacks and shortcuts, some more practical than others. One, referred to as the “moist towel” trick, required the Tesla Charging division — or whatever remains of it — to publicly inform prospects to knock it off.

The “moist towel” trick includes wrapping a moist, cool fabric round a Supercharger cable deal with as a approach to presumably velocity up the charging time. The Supercharger has temperature displays that hold it from overheating because it expenses Tesla autos. Some Tesla homeowners imagine that cooling down the charging deal with will trick the temperature monitor into topping off their autos 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 line with the corporate.

This may increasingly sound like the most important “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 automobiles, even after it turned a well-known “hack” on different auto news websites and Reddit forums. The official Tesla Charging account on X posted a warning on Wednesday in response to an article from InsideEVs.com explaining the harmful automobile charging trick.

This type of epic communication breakdown is what occurs when a serious automaker doesn’t have a public relations division. Tesla dissolved its entire PR team in 2020 and Elon Musk publicly refused to hire one on his X account the next 12 months saying he didn’t wish to “spend cash on promoting & manipulating public opinion,” in line with Electrek.