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, often called the “moist towel” trick, required the Tesla Charging division — or whatever remains of it — to publicly inform clients to knock it off.

The “moist towel” trick entails wrapping a moist, cool material round a Supercharger cable deal with as a technique to presumably velocity up the charging time. The Supercharger has temperature displays that hold it from overheating because it fees Tesla autos. Some Tesla homeowners consider that cooling down the charging deal with will trick the temperature monitor into topping off their autos sooner.

This is the issue, not less than in Tesla’s telling: If the sensor within the charging deal with believes that the temperature is decrease than it truly is whereas it’s charging, the towel-wrapped charger can create a “threat of overheating or injury” based on the corporate.

This will sound like the largest “duh” assertion in tech information historical past but it surely’s taken greater than two months for Tesla to warn its clients to not do the “moist towel” trick on their vehicles, even after it grew to become 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 need to “spend cash on promoting & manipulating public opinion,” based on Electrek.