Tesla warns against wet towel charging trick two months too late

Tesla car culture is full of hacks and shortcuts, some more effective than others. One, known as the “wet towel” trick, required the Tesla Charging department — or whatever remains of it — to publicly tell customers to knock it off.

The “wet towel” trick involves wrapping a damp, cool cloth around a Supercharger cable handle as a way to presumably speed up the charging time. The Supercharger has temperature monitors that keep it from overheating as it charges Tesla vehicles. Some Tesla owners believe that cooling down the charging handle will trick the temperature monitor into topping off their vehicles faster.

Here's the problem, at least in Tesla's telling: If the sensor in the charging handle believes that the temperature is lower than it actually is while it’s charging, the towel-wrapped charger can create a "risk of overheating or damage" according to the company.

This may sound like the biggest “duh” statement in tech news history, but it’s taken more than two months for Tesla to warn its customers not to do the “wet towel” trick on their cars, even after it became a well known “hack” on other 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 dangerous car charging trick.

Placing a wet cloth on Supercharger cable handles does not increase charging rates and interferes with temperature monitors creating risk of overheating or damage. Please refrain from doing this so our systems can run correctly, and true charging issues can be detected by our…

— Tesla Charging (@TeslaCharging) July 25, 2024

This kind of epic communication breakdown is what happens when a major automaker doesn’t have a public relations department. Tesla dissolved its entire PR team in 2020 and Elon Musk publicly refused to hire one on his X account the following year saying he didn’t want to “spend money on advertising & manipulating public opinion,” according to Electrek.