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Comment by natch | Hacker News Reader

Bloomberg seems to have it in for Tesla so I take their reporting on this with a grain of salt.

They can easily choose to have a bad experience if they so desire by going to slow stations and avoiding superchargers. Or by using superchargers incorrectly such as by trying to fully top off at every charge, a typical newbie mistake, or choosing shared stations when non-shared ones are open (this guy was in a rental... possibly a newbie).

Also the supercharger network is continuing to be built out rapidly so anything they say here will be outdated in a matter of months if not weeks.

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> supercharger network is continuing to be built out rapidly

I'm pretty sure this has been the case for a while now, years perhaps, and yet the author seemed to have problems none the less.

You say the reporting should be taken "with a grain of salt", but what did they do to make their lives harder than they could have been?

> Or by using superchargers incorrectly such as by trying to fully top off at every charge

I have a petrol car that I fill up completely whenever I am at a petrol station, why should someone not do this for an electric car?

> or choosing shared stations when non-shared ones are open

What does this mean? I read the article but couldn't see anything that to me sounded like it matched this statement, but that's likely just my lack of experience.

I get that you might have more experience than me, or the author, but you've not really explained how this was the authors fault, and how the experience could have been made better.

If I buy a Tesla then try to drive from the North of England to Seville, am I going to have the same issues the author had? What knowledge do you posses that would allow me to do the journey more easily than they did?

In the Tesla, you have the time required till your next step on a long trip.

So, you don't charge until you're fully loaded at 100% but if you're following the instructions, you'll get at your next stop with around 20% left for best charging conditions. You even get the info on your mobile as a notification so you can know you can go back on the road.

I really mean it's a pleasure to drive.

What do you do when you get to the supercharger/other brand station and it's not working and you're at 20%?

What do you do when you get to a petrol station and it's not working? I've had to use my breakdown assistance for this very reason.

Go to another, usually very close, petrol station. In the UK there are lots of them, they are not as someone else said of Tesla Superchargers spread "about half a charge apart".

> I have a petrol car that I fill up completely whenever I am at a petrol station, why should someone not do this for an electric car?

Because of the time requirements? Plenty of users don't always fill their petrol cars due to time or budget constraints.

Importantly, ICE cars also have eccentricities not all users know about, such as running low on gas often prevents the fuel pump from adequate cooling.

And the 80% rule is true of mobile phones as well.

> Plenty of users don't always fill their petrol cars due to time or budget constraints.

I don't think the "some people have time or budget constraints" is really a good reason for me to not fill up my car past 80%

The answer to "Why should I not charge my car past 80%?" doesn't seem to be "users don't always fill their petrol cars due to time or budget constraints"

> Importantly, ICE cars also have eccentricities not all users know about, such as running low on gas often prevents the fuel pump from adequate cooling.

It's not something that ever seems to have been a problem in any of the cars I've owned.

> And the 80% rule is true of mobile phones as well.

I feel like this might have been the case a long time ago, but surely modern phones with their integrated battery electronics will handle this. Sure, when I charge/discharge my gigantic LIPO batteries (robotics stuff) I have to take levels into account, but I'd expect my iPhone to just work.

> I feel like this might have been the case a long time ago, but surely modern phones with their integrated battery electronics will handle this.

Nope. This is still the case, chemistry hasn't changed; Quick Charge, Rapid charge both charge from 20-80% with much more power than 80%-100%. This is also why they don't advertise "fill up", but instead, go from 0-15% or get a half a days charge (from x%) in 15 minutes)

Accubattery analytics also show that modern cell phones w/ a charge limit maintain more battery capacity over time.

Better electronics and charge patterns DO make the top off (90-100%) better by fudging the numbers and trickle charging off an on.

Sorry, I thought by the 80% rule you were talking about minimum safe discharge levels.

> and yet the author seemed to have problems none the less.

Based on what other commenters are saying, it sounds like the author purposefully ran into problems so they would have a story to write.

My questioning was mostly to find out how the author could have made their life better. At the time of my response most comments were of the form "The author made her life harder" but didn't really include any details about how she could have made her life easier.

>what did they do to make their lives harder than they could have been?

The big issue for me is not following the directions for charging in the manual and battery screen for the car. The navigation has an option to find Superchargers and yet the author used Google Maps to find chargers instead. This means that they got "destination chargers" instead of Superchargers. Additionally, the car tells you not to make quick charging stops and not to wait until the battery is low to charge as it handles all that automatically. The author could have made this trip in 2 stops that would have taken a total of 40 minutes of charging if they had just used the navigation built into the car. They went out of their way to make sure the "range anxiety" lasted for as long as possible.

Why would a charger off the highway in the middle of nowhere be a destination charger? Also, isn't this a mode that could be configured, with the charger supplying more juice if requested? Even if its a destination charger I wouldn't be happy to hang out for 2 hours if I could be done in 30 minutes if its more than a few minutes walk to my apartment/hotel.

Destination chargers are typically non-Tesla chargers that are available for use with an adapter that's included with the Tesla charger. A Supercharger can charge a vehicle to 100% of daily capacity in 20-25 minutes while a destination charger will typically take overnight to fully charge.

> I have a petrol car that I fill up completely whenever I am at a petrol station, why should someone not do this for an electric car?

Because batteries asymptotically charge. The closer you are to 100% the slower they charge. The optimum way to drive is to stop frequently for short stops (5-10 minutes or so) and rapidly refill the battery while grabbing a snack or using your phone, and then continue.

Well you are biased too, arent you :)

Ofcourse things are improving, but he just said the current situation with electric cars on roadtrips. And what he said is you currently have to plan more and yeah, you get more trouble as a newbie. Everyone is a newbie until they are not.

Disclaimer: I would like to have an electric car.

The author's a she, btw.

If she would have followed the beta-trip planning navigation on-board, then I'm sure she would have made it with ease. I already made that trip a few times and it's simple with a Tesla.

So all those hundreds of thousands of new Tesla owners are having this same bad experience, hate the brand, and tell everyone that?

Oh, wait, Tesla has extremely high ratings from owners.

If you'd like to have an electric car, you owe it to yourself to gather information from more than a single Bloomberg reporter.

You're the only one who mentioned "hate the brand", and the experience wasn't that bad. (Although she did skip one of her destinations.)

You appear to have missed my point: different people evaluate "the situation with cars on roadtrips" differently, and this Bloomberg reporter is one data point. The person I replied to appears to be over-interpreting one data point, and brand loyalty points to a different average opinion.

If you're attempting to make the point that this one data point isn't even that bad, that's a fine point to make, but it's confusing how that relates to this sub-thread.

> ... as by trying to fully top off at every charge, a typical newbie mistake, ...

Hmm, in what way? Throwing my usual home trip (~980km) from Switzerland into Tesla charger route calculator shows me that I'd have to stop twice and coast to each charger at less than 12% of battery left. Those are also only chargers on the route, what's the alternative here? Do a 1300km trip and stop three times?

There are usually more superchargers than the route planner shows you. That’s just one possible plan. Cancel the route temporarily (for others reading, it’s two taps to get it back) and just look at all the superchargers and you’ll see ones that were not shown in the route planner.

slow charging overnight at a hotel or 1 of your meal location; which would be part of your trip planning any way; because biology is going to make you stop more than twice.

You're assuming the place they stop has an outlet available and they give them permission to use it.

Besides, a regular outlet will charge it very slowly. A 30 min food stop charging on 220V/12A is only 2.6kWh. Since the author said it had a 215 mi range I'll assume it had the smallest 75kWh pack. That's only a 3.4% charge (7.3 miles)! In the US it would be about half that since we have 120V outlets.

Most of Europe use 230V and typical socket is 16A, so it's a bit more.

Thanks for the correction. So it's 230V * 12.8A = 2.9kWh. 12.8A because you should always leave 20% headroom on continuous draws.

So I need to prolong my usually 10 hour trip (with stops) to an overnight one? :/

No. But you might choose your stops to be at supercharging stations, where you can also eat, use the restroom, etc. and your trip might be an hour or two longer overall if your original stops were very short.

> trying to fully top off at every charge, a typical newbie mistake

A quick Google didn't give me anything clear here - why is that a mistake?

My numbers may not be perfectly accurate, but the sentiment is. Tesla cars at supercharger stations charge to roughly 80% charge in 30 minutes, then take another 30 minutes to finish topping off to 100%. For that reason, they are typically placed at intervals of about half a battery range, so that you don't need a full charge to reach the next station with plenty of charge to spare. Typically, a well planned long road trip will involve rapidly charging the car from 20% to 70%, then driving 100-200 miles until another supercharger, where you repeat the process. In this way, you need to charge for much less time than if you tried to charge from 50% to 100%

Are there enough superchargers in Europe (inc. UK) fo this to be feasible?

What do you do if (as seemed to happen to the author) a supercharger station is out of action and you are on 20% battery with the next station half a charge away?

abetterrouteplanner.com finds a round-trip route for her journey that requires 2.5 total hours of charging, while never dipping below 10% charge or above 61% (subject to assumptions about what exact model vehicle she had). The screen in the Tesla will show you in real-time which stations are open, and even how many spots are free, although I don't know how well they indicate future closures. Tesla's navigation interface will also do automatic routing through superchargers, but I personally like the web interface better.

Everyone seems to link these route planners while ignoring that the article author actually used the one in Tesla and had issues with nonfunctional or closed superchargers. Why didn't you read the text? :(

I did, she did not.

The UK is bad because Tesla didn't space out the chargers as evenly as they are in France and Germany. Instead there are more around London, Midlands, and Manchester but very few in the south west and north east, almost none in Wales, etc. Visiting friends in Bridlington about this time last year was only practical because I could charge at their house.

Generally I aim to get to the next charger with about 30% so that I have a good margin for unexpected detours (road works, an unexpected bit of sight seeing, etc.) Was very handy last summer when the road from Oslo to Trondheim (Rv 3) was closed and I hadn't noticed, had to drive an extra 50 km over the mountains to get to the other road (E6).

That seems awfully annoying (having to plan a road trip rathe than just driving). Cars should be meant for driving, not planning.

Takes about 5 seconds though.

To clarify: The planning, I mean. Takes about 5 seconds because you start typing in your destination, choose it from the displayed options, and the car makes the plan. In the meantime you are starting your drive already.

rally purists would disagree.

> Cars should be meant for driving, not planning

If you take this attitude for a road trip anywhere outside of major suburbia in the U.S.; Good luck. From the Florida turnpike, Alabama/Mississippi, Texas, Route 56, the Rockies, the Smokies, or almost any coastal highway, if you wait until empty you're going to have a bad day.

If you wait until empty, but I wait until I'm at 100 miles left and fill up - this has always been within 20 miles leaving me plenty of comfort space just in case.

Sorry, there are parts of the USA and Canada where that can lead to your death.

True, but those are areas that few people go anyway. I would expect signs alerting me to the fact that gas is not available ahead - and I also expect I would never actually travel those roads.

Either you plan your route, as you normally would (look at what roads you're taking and what's around, etc) or you would just follow your nav and do no planning at all.

The only difference with EV is that the nav will also tell you where to charge.

Even more annoying is having to stop to refuel your car several times a month despite the fact that you're not taking any long trips.

The point is, that owners of traditional cars don't have to "plan" road trips unless they just like doing that sort of thing. I know when I have to make a 300+ mile drive I don't plan it at all, I just set off knowing that I can stop anywhere when I need gasoline. I normally don't stop for food and try to hold bathroom breaks to coincide with gas stops, which generally take no more than 10 minutes. The last thing I want to do when I'm trying to get somewhere is stop for an hour for a leisurely meal.

Having t break up trips into 100-200 mile segments based on limited recharging sites might be acceptable for some, but for many I think it will be viewed as a step backwards.

That's not really true but, admittedly, it depends on where you're going. There are plenty of places in the US where you can go 50+ miles on the freeway without hitting a gas station. There are even signs on the freeways that will tell you "Last fuel stop for x miles" in some parts of the country. Also, considering that Teslas have a starting range of 250 miles, you're stopping just as much as you would be in a gas car, just for a longer period of time (30 minutes max).

And Canada too, the moment I go driving in northern Ontario to somewhere I have not been before I need to note where gas stations are and often refill my tank when I am still have over half a tank of gas left just because I don't know when the next gas station will come along.

When driving through Germany on the highway, it's not unusual for gas stations to be 50km apart. Tesla has a supercharger roughly every ~100km in all of western Europe (much closer in dense areas), meaning you'll be on average 50km away from one at any point. Not much of a difference in how far ahead you need to plan.

https://www.tesla.com/findus?v=2&search=France&bounds=58.954...

It's only thanks to GPS that we don't have to plan long trips anymore. Before GPS, it wasn't all that uncommon to plan your trip. (It's possible my dad went a bit overboard, though.)

I expect that in the future, every parking spot will have its own charger. At that point, EV drivers won't have to plan anymore either.

miles per minute (range per wait-time) goes drastically down after about 80% of charging because of the so-called 'Stadium effect'.

In simple terms 0-80 takes 30 minutes but the rest of the 20 percent will take 30 minutes too. So it is better to make two stops if you have to and get 80 + 80.

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