Tesla can disable seat motors for excessive use

Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y electric cars have recently been equipped with new seat motors that allow fine adjustment of the seat. Anyone who plays around with them for too long risks locking the motors, as a Twitter user has now found out.

Tesla seat motors: lockout after two minutes

Anyone who calls a Tesla Model 3 or Model Y their own or is planning to buy one should avoid messing around with the seat motors in the electric cars for too long, if possible. As The Verge reports, citing Twitter user @greentheonly, the new seats inside the cars have motors that can be easily locked by a new firmware update if you fiddle with the settings too much.

If the seat setting is pressed for 90 seconds within five minutes, the Tesla electric cars will issue an initial warning that “excessive use of the seat motor has been detected”. If one ignores this first hint and fiddles with the seat for another 30 seconds, the seat motor can be locked. Only after five minutes is it then possible to adjust the seat again.

While this function could be quite useful, especially for children who like to fiddle with the seats, the purpose of the lock function for the seat motors inside Tesla cars is more than questionable.

Of course, in most cases, the time window is more than sufficient to adjust the seat appropriately from a completely uncomfortable position to a comfortable one. However, why it is necessary to lock the engine is highly questionable.

Possible reasons for locking seat motors

However, we can only speculate about the motives and reasons for such a locking function. Twitter user @greentheonly believes that said seat motors could be among the parts that are particularly plagued by failures in Tesla vehicles. A restriction in the setting could thus extend the life of the seat motors.

However, this is rather questionable with regard to the total two-minute time window, because this is likely to be only extremely rarely fully utilized in practice.

Another theory of the user is that Tesla uses weaker motors for the newly installed seats, which are produced directly in-house at Tesla compared to the models previously manufactured in Yangfeng, China. The restriction could therefore be a precautionary measure to counteract a possible overload.

So the motives behind Tesla adding a seat motor lock function to the Model 3 and Model Y are unclear. However, there must have been problems with these motors at some point in the past, otherwise the firmware would not be delivered with a corresponding function.