Tesla responded today with a long blog post that tried to answer Mr. DeGusta’s accusations point by point. “If ever the battery in your Tesla runs low, the car is designed to let you know with repeated visual and audible warnings…. Starting with Roadster 2.0, owners can also elect for their car to contact Tesla headquarters once the state of charge falls below a specified level, and we can then contact the owner.”

Mr. DeGusta has his own spin on what Tesla describes as their exemplary service. “In at least one case, Tesla went even further. The Tesla service manager admitted that, unable to contact an owner by phone, Tesla remotely activated a dying vehicle’s GPS to determine its location and then dispatched Tesla staff to go there. It is not clear if Tesla had obtained this owner’s consent to allow this tracking, or if the owner is even aware that his vehicle had been tracked. Further, the service manager acknowledged that this use of tracking was not something they generally tell customers about. Going to these lengths could be seen as customer service, but it would also seem to fit with an internal awareness at Tesla of the gravity of the “bricking” problem, and the potentially disastrous public relations and sales fallout that could result from it becoming more broadly known.”

DeGusta wants to have things both ways. Tesla is intentionally playing down the issue and trying to keep customers from knowing about the danger. When they do go above and beyond to ensure that their customers don’t lose a battery, its an invasion of privacy and a cover up to keep the problem from being widely known.

The truth is that any electrical vehicle needs to be treated with a certain amount of care. As Sam Jaffe explains at the Clean Energy Blog:

Another error on the part of the blogger is the claim that if the cars discharge fully, the battery packs will be damaged. This is blatantly false.The battery management system of the Tesla Roadster keeps the battery from being discharged to a damagingly low state of charge under normal driving conditions. It’s true that a full discharge to zero percent state of charge can potentially be damaging to a battery. However the battery management system of the Roadster won’t allow the car to reach that low level of charge. There is a fundamental problem when any rechargeable battery is discharged and then left to sit for months. Any boat owner understands that that’s why you plug in a trickle charger when the craft is put into storage. The same should be done for any electric vehicle. However, to imply that the Tesla Roadster has a fundamental design flaw because of the nature of electrochemistry is like saying that Chrysler has a fundamental design flaw because its engines will be damaged if you drain all the oil out and then drive cross-country.

DeGusta claims to have found five instances of Tesla vehicles that were bricked. He doesn’t have any names or links to support this claim. It would be very interesting to hear from those owners directly, since DeGusta himself doesn’t own a Tesla (he’s on the waiting list).

Jaffe over at Clean Energy has a response to this as well:

Here’s the primary fact that the blogger in question doesn’t understand: the Tesla battery pack is not a battery. It’s a collection of more than 8,000 individual batteries. Each of those cells is independently managed. So there’s only two ways for the entire battery pack to fail. The first is if all 8,000 cells individually fail (highly unlikely except in the case of something catastrophic like a fire). The second failure mechanism is if the battery management system tells the pack to shut down because it has detected a dangerous situation, such as an extremely low depth of discharge. If that’s the case, all that needs to be done is to tow the vehicle to a charger, recharge the batteries and then reboot the battery management system. This is the most likely explanation for the five “bricks” that the blogger claims to have heard about. They probably aren’t actually bricks, but cars in need of servicing.

At this point the claims from DeGusta directly contradict what Tesla and an independent blogger have said. We’ll keep you updated if anyone else weighs in or fresh details emerge. So far, Tesla hasn’t said anything about adding an option for insurance on the battery, which was DeGusta’s biggest complaint in terms of the company’s failure to protect its customers.

Image from Flickr user randychiu

Tesla Roadsters lined up outside of the Model S Beta Customer event

Blogger and entrepreneur Michael DeGusta wrote a long piece on his blog The Understatement on Tuesday about several Tesla (s TSLA) Roadsters that have been left without a charge for an extended period of time (weeks and months) and have turned into “bricks,” or basically have completely discharged their batteries and destroyed them. I haven’t confirmed the details behind this story — like the length of time that the batteries were left uncharged, or how Tesla has dealt with these potential problems — but it is true that after a really long period of time without a charge early Tesla Roadster batteries can go dead.

Tesla tells me that:

All automobiles require some level of owner care. For example, combustion vehicles require regular oil changes or the engine will be destroyed. Electric vehicles should be plugged in and charging when not in use for maximum performance. All batteries are subject to damage if the charge is kept at zero for long periods of time. However,  Tesla avoids this problem in virtually all instances with numerous counter-measures. Tesla batteries can remain unplugged for weeks (even months), without reaching zero state of charge. Owners of Roadster 2.0 and all subsequent Tesla products can request that their vehicle alert Tesla if SOC falls to a low level. All Tesla vehicles emit various visual and audible warnings if the battery pack falls below 5 percent SOC. Tesla provides extensive maintenance recommendations as part of the customer experience.

Tesla’s Roadster was the first electric sports car on the market and the company learned quite a bit from those early cars. What will be most important is using those learnings for the Model S, its second car, an electric sedan, that will start shipping this Summer. Electric car owners are also learning how to take proper care of their cars, given the very early market.

Tesla’s stock was briefly down in morning trading but is moving back up.

If you own a Tesla and want to turn your shiniest toy into a useless brick, all you have to do is park it.

As soon as the battery is fully discharged, you have a useless, albeit pricey, hunk of metal on your hands, and Tesla will charge you $40,000 to get it up and running again — almost as much as the full cost of a new Tesla Model S.

UPDATE: Tesla has responded to the matter with a boilerplate statement, which we’ve included in full below.

Occasional blogger Michael DeGusta is on the waiting list for a Tesla Model X. In doing research on the cars, he found that if any Tesla car’s battery is fully drained, the owner will be unable to recharge it or even push it. The owner will eventually have to pay the aforementioned $40,000 to get a new battery from Tesla.

The battery can be fully drained simply by parking the vehicle too long without charging it because of the vehicles’ always-on systems running quietly in the background and using minuscule amounts of power over the hours and days. For a Tesla Roadster, this can happen over the course of 11 weeks, less if the battery is not fully charged when the car is parked.

“Either these issues will be resolved by the time it’s ready, Tesla will be gone by then, or I’ll most likely give up my spot and get a refund,” he wrote this morning on his blog.

DeGusta found five examples of bricked Tesla Roadsters so far, all of which were related to him by a Tesla service manager. In one case, a customer shipped his Roadster to Japan, where incompatible voltages and dwindling time quickly reduced him to a brick with no real options for economically advisable reanimation.

The kicker is that the owner’s warranty is voided in these scenarios due to the owner’s “failure to maintain the Battery at a proper charge level at all times.” Normal insurance policies don’t cover this situation, and payment plans are not available, DeGusta was told.

Mostly, though, DeGusta was perturbed that Tesla isn’t emphasizing the risks of battery drainage to prospective owners. On its website for the Model S, for example, the company states, “The Tesla battery is optimized for nightly charging… The Model S battery will not lose a significant amount of charge when parked for long periods of time.

“For example, Model S owners can park at the airport for extended vacations without plugging in.”

Unless you park it on a less-than-fully-charged battery then go on a month-long honeymoon or hiking expedition or missions trip, to counter Tesla’s example with a few rather common ones we can think of off the top of our heads. That kind of scenario might leave the hapless owner with a bricked car and little recourse.

Here’s Tesla’s statement, which was sent to VentureBeat via email; we’re still prodding the company for more information and specifics:

All automobiles require some level of owner care. For example, combustion vehicles require regular oil changes or the engine will be destroyed. Electric vehicles should be plugged in and charging when not in use for maximum performance. All batteries are subject to damage if the charge is kept at zero for long periods of time. However, Tesla avoids this problem in virtually all instances with numerous counter-measures. Tesla batteries can remain unplugged for weeks (even months), without reaching zero state of charge. Owners of Roadster 2.0 and all subsequent Tesla products can request that their vehicle alert Tesla if SOC (state of charge) falls to a low level. All Tesla vehicles emit various visual and audible warnings if the battery pack falls below 5 percent SOC. Tesla provides extensive maintenance recommendations as part of the customer experience.

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With the record industry in an indisputable state of decline since the early 2000s, most journalistic attention has focused on the negatives of its slow demise rather than the promising new directions that musicians and independent record labels are exploring.

Journalists’ pessimistic outlooks are largely understandable; the situation looks bleak. Since the advent of the web 2.0 era, many have speculated that we as a society are witnessing a patent decline in the appreciation for excellent music. Among these dissenters is renowned author and public speaker Andrew Keen, who informs us in his book, The Cult of the Amateur, that in the last decade over 1,000 music stores have been shut down due to declining revenue. Moreover, illegal downloading has siphoned considerable funds from the Record Industry. Keen estimates that, in 2005 alone, over 20 billion songs were illegally downloaded. The result is an approximate loss of 1.1 billion dollars to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

According to an article by Brian Hiatt and Evan Serpick of Rolling Stone, roughly 5,000 record label employees have been laid off since 2000, many as a result of the necessitated merger of Sony Music Entertainment and BMG Entertainment in 2004. And it’s probable that another period of mass layoffs will accompany EMI and Warner Music Group’s pending merger. Peter Paterno, representative of Metallica and Dr. Dre, cautions, “Here we have a business that’s dying; there won’t be any major labels pretty soon.”

Still, some view statements like Paterno’s and reply, “Good riddance.” They view the decline of the record industry not as an indicator of immorality or lack of musical appreciation, but as a sign of progress. And this progress is two-part: (1) Technological advancement is rapidly eliminating the record industry’s primary sources of revenue, and (2) societal development is resulting in the democratization of the music industry, shifting power away from immense multi-billion dollar companies—i.e. Universal Music Group, BMG/Sony Entertainment, and Warner Music Group—to many smaller, independent corporations.

The first area of progress is reflected by the format in which consumers purchase music. Since the beginning of recorded sound, many have actively sought better means in which to distribute it. In the last forty years alone, the popular format has shifted five times: from 8-track tapes to vinyl, vinyl to audio cassettes, audio cassettes to compact discs, and finally compact discs to digital. That’s not to say that technological advancement has wholly eliminated preceding formats or that the creation of a format has always coincided with its being the most popular. In fact, despite the invention of the record preceeding that of the 8-track, more records are being pressed today than ever before while 8-tracks were completely phased out of retail by 1982. However, the format which is most profitable has changed, and vinyls now account for very little of the industry’s revenue.

With the public approval of each new technology, consumers were encouraged to repurchase old media in a new format. Statistician Michael DeGusta graphs this phenomenon in his article “The Real Death of the Music Industry,” which illustrates how, in past decades, the popularization of a new format would result in a significant rise in sales. One such sales spike is evident in the mid 70s, when the cassette became a widely utilized medium. And sales trended upwards once again in the late 80s as the compact disc became a popular format. Hence, revenue loss has partially resulted from the end of the temporary increase in sales that came about as consumers replaced older formats with CDs. A key difference, however, is that the technology to move music from one format to another is now commonly available. Personal computers allow individuals to make digital copies of music purchased on a CD. As a result, the industry cannot expect another sales spike in the near future or, perhaps, ever again.

The popularization of the digital format has other implications as well. Physical mediums allowed record companies to bundle materials together in an effort to increase their value. For example, it was once common for singles released on vinyl records to include an A-side and a B-side track. The A-side would contain a featured song—something that the producer thought would be a hit and would encourage people to buy the record. The B-side would have a secondary song, one that wasn’t expected to garner much attention and usually wouldn’t even appear on the artist’s LP. This convention was essentially a means of justifying steep increases in the cost of vinyl records.

Bundled materials, in the form of albums, have consistently accounted for about 90% of the music industry’s total revenue in the past 40 years. Whereas before, one had to pay for 10 or 12 songs in order to have access to the few on an album that they wanted to listen to, digital media now allows people to easily purchase the music they want without paying for the music that they don’t. This approach is, of course, much less profitable for record companies.

As previously mentioned, the second area of progress has to do with the democratization of the music industry. In the past century, the logistics of music distribution had made it practically impossible for artists to make their music available to buy without the assistance of a major record label; the required costs and infrastructure of the physical world were simply too daunting for any individual artist, regardless of their musical talent, to contend in the market. Due to their stranglehold on the means of distribution, large record labels achieved a unique and privileged position of power. More than a source of profit, this position afforded record labels the capacity to act as cultural gatekeepers, selecting which artists were heard and would ultimately become popular.

In the last decade, however, the need for artists to sign with major record labels has significantly diminished. Because The Internet has created numerous new media outlets and provided global access at an affordable price, the immense costs of producing and distributing music have been all but eliminated. Social networking sites, streaming radio stations, YouTube, and music blogs provide artists with limitless—and mostly free—circulation of their work while also granting consumers the ability to form communities centered on their music. The democratization of the music industry means that not only can each artist act as their own promoter—successfully distributing their music to tens of millions of people—but each of their fans can do the same. With the restrictions of the physical world removed and The Internet readily available, major record labels are simply obsolete.

But the death of major record labels (progress) does not necessarily signify the death of the music industry; and, indeed, that isn’t the case. A recent Harvard study concluded that more music is being produced today than ever before, and the amount of money being paid in support of music is at an all time high. The failure of some individuals to distinguish the music industry from the profit margins of major record labels is why those like Andrew Keen, Peter Paterno, and so many journalists that report on the industry are so convinced of its inevitable demise.

Focus should be directed away from the failing practices of antiquated institutions and towards the promising new business models of individual artists and independent record labels. In order to remain competitive in today’s economic climate, sales tactics must be adapted to work with new technologies and to capture the attention of the file sharing community.

Many independent artists who are currently flourishing have embraced file sharing as a means of publicity, and they generate revenue by connecting with fans on a personal level—what techdirt contributor Mike Masnick calls the “Connect with Fans (CwF) + Reason to Buy (RtB) business model. By encouraging file sharing rather than condemning it—as the RIAA did when it levied numerous lawsuits against file sharers in the early 2000s—artists avoid forming adversarial relationships with their fans.

An example of the successful implementation of this business model is Trent Reznor of the band Nine Inch Nails. Reznor goes to great lengths in order to facilitate the building of an active community of fans. He releases everything he records for free download; encourages fans to communicate through his website forums, chat rooms, and free iPhone app; and asks fans to generate content to be displayed on his website. As a result, Reznor’s fan base is devoted and eager to buy when he makes items available for purchase. When Reznor released a number of limited edition packages of music and memorabilia ranging in price from $10 to $300, all 2,500 sets sold within thirty hours, netting Reznor a profit of roughly $750,000.

And the model is not only successful for artists who have already achieved a great deal of fame. Corey Smith, a high school teacher who moonlighted as an amateur musician at open mic nights, made an effort to connect with fans by releasing his music for free online and offering $5 pre-sale tickets to many of his shows. Despite regularly selling tickets at a severely reduced cost and offering his music to fans at no charge, Smith’s live shows generated nearly $4 million in 2008.

After witnessing its success, Independent record labels have begun to adopt this model as well. Oskar Humlebo’s label, ‘Songs I Wish I Had Written,’ often releases artists’ work on The Pirate Bay before offering it through other outlets. That’s because Humlebo and the artists he represents wish to encourage remixing and the sharing of their music in other creative ways. The same is true of Terry McBride’s label ‘Nettwerk.’ Shortly before the 2009 album release of hip-hop artist K-OS, Nettwerk released all of the song stems that appeared on his album and encouraged fans to create their own mixes. The most popular fan mixes were compiled and released simultaneously with K-OS’s. That year, both the professional and fan-made albums took spots inCanada’s ‘top-50’ charts.

In each of these examples, artists and labels made a significant profit without complex licensing agreements, stringent copyright restrictions, or by charging for each individual transaction—all the old methods of the record industry. Instead, fans purchased a product that they wanted at a price that they were glad to pay. While old models continue to see diminishing profits, here we have one that works:  one that is profitable today and will only become more lucrative as technology and society progress.