Model S Long Range Plus: Building the First 400-Mile Electric Vehicle | Hacker News Reader

Model S Long Range Plus: Building the First 400-Mile Electric Vehicle

tesla.com

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I've been following a multi-month discussion over in the r/electricvehicles subreddit about EPA range. There's a growing consensus that something is very wrong with it.

Here are a couple of the articles that got some discussion in that sub:

https://insideevs.com/news/407807/eletric-car-real-world-ran...

https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a30874032/porsche-tayca...

As someone who has owned both a Tesla Model X and one of the other EVs on the list from the first article, I can also provide my own anecdata that at freeway speeds Tesla routinely underperforms their EPA range rating, and by quite a large margin. Meanwhile at freeway speeds my non-Tesla EV routinely exceeds its EPA rating.

That's not to say that Tesla hasn't done an amazing job at maximizing efficiency in their cars. They have. Just maybe not to the degree that the EPA test would suggest.

I make an app (called Nikola, not the truck company) for Tesla owners that has seen over 5 MM miles driven on it. I did some quick queries to validate actual range vs. EPA range for those curious.

My general takeaway is to see the EPA range as a useful, albeit unrealistic, indicator. Essentially nobody gets the EPA range, either because they choose not to go the speed limit, they accelerate harder than the EPA test factored in, or the vehicles drain some juice while parked.

The data: For the hundreds of Nikola trips with an average speed of 60 mph, the actual MPGe was about 102. Once you get up to a 75 MPH average trip speed, the MPGe drops to 94. And by 80 MPH the MPGe drops to 77. (avg over all Tesla types)

As a bit of "anecdata", I've driven trips where I hit my range on the nose, just to show I could, but the driving is less fun and I was going slower than traffic. I don't drive that way anymore.

What's most striking to me as someone who has heard over and over again about how air resistance is a X^2 property, is the extent to which short (and presumably slow) trips punch above their weight in terms of range consumed per mile. From what I can tell, the actual cost here is the fixed cost of booting up some systems and electronics, and the variable costs of running them over fewer miles can make the MPGe drop. Starting and continuing to run the AC adds up!

edit: have had some people ask. The app can be found at https://download.nikolaapp.com

I can also post data / graphs or make a blog post about that if people have more requests. Let me know what you'd like to see!

For the hundreds of Nikola trips with an average speed of 60 mph, the actual MPGe was about 102. Once you get up to an 75 MPH average trip speed, the MPGe drops to 94. And by 80 MPH the MPGe drops to 77. (avg over all Tesla types)

That makes total sense. What I think most people don’t realize is that power is force times velocity and the force you need to apply to maintain a given velocity is equal to the friction plus the drag. Unfortunately, drag increases with the square of the velocity and so when you go faster you need way more power. This translates directly into increased battery drain for an EV.

The problem may be further exacerbated by the greatly increased mass of an electric vehicle and the potential for the batteries to overheat.

This is why some governments raise speed limits. Faster traffic -> more energy required per mile -> more gas consumed -> more gas tax revenue

Or it’s because it’s politically popular to raise speed limits since they usually raise them to the speed that is almost, but still below, the speed that everybody is already driving at currently.

Also in the US the AAA heavily invests in lobbying for higher speed limits every year. The AAA isn't quite the villains in American politics that the NRA are (ETA: or at least, have become), but they are historically close. It's easy to forget that AAA was founded to fight speed limits in the first place.

Two factors.

First, if you go 10% faster, air resistance may be 21% higher, but you only take 10/11 for spending 10% more energy per mile. So higher speeds cost less than you'd naively think.

Second, at low speeds we start and stop a lot. Coming to a full stop requires actually putting physical brakes on and losing energy. The heavier your car, the more that this costs you. For slower traffic, if you look at distance traveled, number of full stops and energy, I bet that you can fit a linear model in 2 variables that fits the data better and gives you a sense of how much coming to a stop costs you.

That's incorrect. Power consumption is proportional to drag * speed, and drag is speed^2, so power is speed^3, and energy per mile is speed^2.

Or: Work = Force * Distance, so the energy spent per mile will be proportional to drag force, which is proportional to speed^2.

Either way, its 21% increase in energy consumed per mile in this case.

Ah, shoot. You are right. Energy is force times distance, momentum is force times time. I was thinking about force times time.

wipes egg off of face

True but we're interested in power consumption per distance traveled so it goes back to O(v^2).

That’s precisely what the last clause you’re responding to says. You’re agreeing but couching it as a “but”.

Starting and stopping does cost energy, but regen is pretty efficient and the lesser wind resistance of slow speeds mostly makes up for it. No, davidwhodge is right, the problem with short trips has to do with the fixed costs of "warming up" the car. Just looking at the energy graph in the car while driving it's easy to see that it's much more efficient after the car has warmed up.

Yes, but electric motor regen usually does not work all the way down to zero mph. Usually it stops somewhere around 5-10mph, and the friction brakes take over. Slow rolling traffic that fluctuates between something like 10-30mph is very efficient, but stop and go traffic fluctuating between 0-20mph is pretty inefficient.

Additionally if you drive 10% faster you spend ~9% less time on the trip which means heating/AC is working 9% less.

And there’s also some “inherent” value in spending less time traveling that is more difficult to quantify.

To balance with the inherent disadvantages of more speeding tickets and a higher risk of a collision.

I'm surprised tesla doesn't break down energy usage visually.

The nissan leaf has an energy usage display that breaks down energy into driving, climate and other systems.

http://www.nissanusa.com/vlp-assets/media/vehicles/2016/leaf...

Air, rolling and other mechanical resistances are certainly part of the equation here, but the major driver of the decreased range at higher speeds is likely battery chemistry.

When you apply a load to a cell, the voltage sags. Heavier load, bigger sag. When a battery is operated at low voltage, it loses efficiency - the total power available decreases significantly. If you ever buy batteries for, say, building your own EV, you’ll pay a lot of attention to the C values - C1 is the capacity of the cell if it is discharged in 1 hour, C100 is the capacity at 100 hours, etc. - and there is a big difference between these values - it’s non-linear, and while the difference between C100 and C10 might be a 30% loss of available power, between C1 and C10 you’re closer to 50% - a 65% loss overall between C100 and C1.

Obviously in an EV C2-C10 are probably your most relevant numbers - but the difference in available power is significant over that range, and if you’re driving harder, putting more load on the battery, your range will be lower.

The batteries have such large capacities that the C-rates are tiny. Tesla are well beyond the point where inefficiencies in battery contribute to as little as 1% of the total range.

Source: design engineer at EV company.

Even during acceleration?

The kind of acceleration that would cause it to be non-trivial is not the acceleration that you would use in normal driving unless you were very reckless.

Shower thought: It would be nice if the vehicle 'docked' to the charger at home so you could power everything up and get the climate control working before you disconnected from the grid. It's not going to make a noticable difference in mileage I'm sure, but if there is a surge at power-up I'd rather take the juice from the grid.

It kinds of does that, because if you start the climate control while plugged in, it'll start drawing from the charger even if charging has already finished.

This is most often seen if you remotely turn on the climate control to warm the car up in the morning, when the car is still plugged in after overnight charging.

And with scheduled charging you don't even have to manually do this, it just does it based on your departure time. My Model 3 is always warm and toasty by 8:30 AM M-F all winter. As someone with an unheated detached garage this is very nice. At least it was before I quit driving anywhere.

I really need to get my wall charger installed, this would be completely infeasible with the Level 1. COVID-19 sort of messed with my plans here

Another fun fact on practical drain vs. EPA drain:

While I love sentry mode and think it's a great feature, it keeps the electronics awake. In some cases this can cause double digit per day mileage drain. Tesla has clearly been working on this though, as the numbers have improved.

> What's most striking to me as someone who has heard over and over again about how air resistance is a X^2 property, is the extent to which short (and presumably slow) trips punch above their weight in terms of range consumed per mile. From what I can tell, the actual cost here is the fixed cost of booting up some systems and electronics, and the variable costs of running them over fewer miles can make the MPGe drop. Starting and continuing to run the AC adds up!

Could this be due to the battery not being at the ideal temperature on short trips? I always noticed that the efficiency of my car is lower for the first 10 miles when commuting to and from work. Since it happens in both directions, it can't be due to terrain or road type so I was guessing battery temperature.

I think there's a good chance the energy used while parked is greater than the dashboard suggests (measuring power remaining in a lithium battery is hard!). Then when you start driving, the estimate gets more accurate, and the range disappears over the next 15 minutes or so.

This would seem totally reasonable to me. It'll take more time, but I can also dig in and see the extent of the battery heater use.

My guess is it's often cold enough for the battery to need to warm up to be efficient, but not cold enough to make it worth it to turn on the battery heater. (Your point still holds in that case)

A piece of data I happen to remember, far fewer than 10% of supercharges have the battery heater on for any period of time at all.

> The data: For the hundreds of Nikola trips with an average speed of 60 mph, the actual MPGe was about 102. Once you get up to a 75 MPH average trip speed, the MPGe drops to 94. And by 80 MPH the MPGe drops to 77. (avg over all Tesla types)

My (non-Tesla) EV only gives me trip watt-hour per mile (Wh/mi)

Using an mpge to Wh/mi converter [1], 102 mgpe = about 330 Wh/mi, 94 = 385 Wh/mi and 77 = 437 Wh/mi.

My car (Ford Focus EV) gives about 275 (conservative driving) to 350 Wh/mi. It usually gives me about 80 - 130 miles range, and the stated average is 110. I get the 80 during the colder months in a warmer clime. When I was commuting into the office (pre-COVID) I was usually doing about 70-80mph.

> the vehicles drain some juice while parked

When we had a Tesla in the garage to install some aftermarket equipment on it, this parked power drain astonished me. Several miles PER DAY.

And we have the nerve to bother TV makers about a watt here and a watt there.

> I made some graphs if anyone's curious, but I can't post them here.

I’d love to see them!

Alrighty here's the first graph. Note that this is average speed, so any trips with an average speed near the right by definition have some parts of the trip faster than the average, so the actual drop at 80 mph isn't quite as severe as it looks.

https://imgur.com/a/c10NXaz

the reason for the cutoff is that because it's pretty hard to have a trip with an AVERAGE speed above 80mpg. It's very rare in my large dataset.

This is really great - thanks so much for posting! I've been hunting for a similar curve for Teslas for a while.

Can I ask:

* Which car models are included?

* You write that your methodology for this chart looks at average speed for the whole trip; if this is true, would it be feasible to apply a different methodology and divide your data up into much smaller chunks (e.g. 30 seconds) and calculate the MPGe for each chunk?

* Is there any way I could calculate a similar graph for my own car? Can I get a graph like this from your app? (I'd personally be super-interested in both being able to access my own car's curve, and also explore a 'dashboard' of the whole dataset with filters by (e.g.) model, wheel size, etc.

Cool! Can you make a graph quantifying the fixed costs of startup somehow? The startup costs do seem really high, to the point where it's pretty much impossible to hit the rated efficiency unless your trip is longer than 10-20 minutes to amortize the startup costs. I'm glad someone else has noticed this.

Cool! Thanks. Wonder what the jump from 31-40 (ish?) is about

I wonder that too. My guess is there's an outlier datapoint or two there messing with the average. I didn't pull out outliers.

(Since the data is smoothed, an outlier datapoint could influence speeds 2mph in each direction)

okay I'm on it. I'll find some way to post them

Looks like the purported range is analogous to stated phone or laptop battery life: ideal and unrealistic. This makes sense because the car is, in fact, run by a battery.

seems like an apt comparison. Something I forgot to mention here is that the temperature also plays a huge role. I've recently started collecting more temp data, but don't have a big enough sample size to say anything definitive beyond "driving in cold weather does reduce range". This is completely expected.

As a bit of anecdata here: Parking inside vs. outside seems to have a big affect. A slightly chilly garage vs. a cold soak outdoors understandably are quite different.

In my experience: I manage to roughly match the EPA rating on the freeway driving at 65mph (it depends on the road, on the temperature, on how much stuff/people are in the car, etc.), but it goes down quickly as you drive faster. This table illustrates it fairly well: https://teslike.com/

I can duplicate pretty much the same effect with cruise control in my gasoline powered car. If I go on a 5 hour freeway road trip with cruise at 65mph and spend 95% of my time in the right lane, there's definitely a 2-3 mpg improvement in fuel consumption, vs 75 mph. At that point it becomes a tradeoff in time vs money spent on extra fuel, and need to get somewhere in a hurry.

Over a 4.5 hour period if I can cruise at 75 mph, I will be 44.5 miles ahead of another car which departs at the same time, for the same destination, at 65 mph.

For ICE cars, it depends on what the mfg has optimized for. I had an Infinity years ago and I remember that it was optimized for 70mph precisely as per the owner's manual. Higher or lower speeds would be less efficient.

Interesting(ish) tangent - the UK fuel economy specs used to be published at a constant 56mph & 75mph. When the Mk3 Vauxhall Cavalier was launched in the late 1980s, it had great (theoretical) fuel economy, much better than its rivals, but a couple of noticeable flat spots under acceleration. Turned out Vauxhall had leaned the fuel maps at the exact engine revs that corresponded to 56mph and 75mph in top gear...

My old (14) Mustang had exactly the same thing: there was a very noticeable reduction in power at ~2000 RPMs. I always suspected that it was to improve highway fuel economy, as that's exactly where the engine was spinning at 74mph in sixth.

Defeat device...? Cheating...? Multi-billion pound fine?

Similarly; I used to drive a "somewhat" performance enhanced Subaru Impreza WRX. One month I tried an experiment of driving as fuel conscious as I could. It improved 1 mpg over the normal 21 mpg. However in my Model S, there is a very direct and obvious correlation between efficiency and acceleration/speed.

I don't really have a problem with my effective range being less do to my driving style as long as it's predictable (and it is).

I drive an unmodified Golf GTI. Sticking to speed limits, the difference between driving aggressively in Sport mode and driving normally in normal is about 20mpg. The difference between driving normally in Normal mode and more fuel consciously is probably another 10 mpg on top of that (on a 3 hr trip, no motorway i saw roughly 8-10 mpg driving aggressively and close to 38 when driving normally. Motorway driving is a little closer, but I live in Scotland so motorway isn't usually an option)

I'd want to hear exactly how that was achieved.

It's one thing to have the engine+drivetrain efficiency peak at 70. But for total efficiency to be worse at 60, despite massively reduced wind resistance, is pretty suspicious.

Had same experience with a Honda Accord. ICE/drivetrain efficiency is extremely complex with very little linearity across a number of variables.

If you really really care about miles per gallon, nearly any ICE car the most efficient way to drive is at or near idle in top gear, going about 25 mph. The difference is remarkable - a car which usually gets 50 mpg can easily get 100mpg with that approach, although obviously you can't practically drive like that on the public highway.

It's not that simple unfortunately. It's most efficient when it runs the most lean fuel mix and least engine vacuum (i.e. full throttle). That balanced with gearbox efficiency, other drive train loses, and wind resistance. As a real world example, Ford Fiesta 1.0 EcoBoost is most efficient running 28mph in 4. gear. closely followed by going 44mph in 5. gear.

I thought it was 35.

But the most efficient way to drive a gas car is to speed up, then turn the engine off and coast down to a slower speed, then engine on for quickly moving up to a fast speed again.

Of course, the only way you'd want to drive like that is if you are alone in the desert and need to get to a gas station.

I was pretty bummed to learn that my Model 3's "real" range was about 70% of the "rated" range depending on how the car was feeling. Tesla definitely creatively interprets range calculations.

Have you reached out to Tesla service about this? The range being that far below what is advertised is not normal unless you are operating in some cold environments, you are blasting the AC, you are a maniac when accelerating, or you leave the car in sentry mode for extended periods of time. You might have a lemon.

Make sure the tires are properly inflated and the parking brake is disengaged. Also, drive smoothly (many people drive erratically going on and off the throttle, and emphatically deny it when you, as passenger, point it out).

I find that efficiency is bad on short trips, but on trips over 20 minutes long efficiency improves a lot. Not sure if the battery just needs to warm up or what. I rarely drive that long so my lifetime efficiency is 20% worse than the EPA rating.

There's also self-discharge and other consumption when not driving, which may be an even worse problem for EV efficiency. I wonder what percentage of total EV electricity consumption is wasted while the car is off.

I've had an s for 8 years (3 and 5 years in 2 cars) and driving at freeway speeds you'll use a lot more energy accellerating. On long trips I put my car on 65-75 dep on conditions and use the cruise. I get 90% of est range at least. Are you really accelerating a lot?

InsideEVs: https://insideevs.com/news/407807/eletric-car-real-world-ran...

Car & Driver: https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a30874032/porsche-tayca...

There's a number of other tests that show that Tesla almost never lives up to its EPA range.

I can compare a leaf and a tesla, both of which I have had direct experience with.

The leaf did lots better around town, but it was a relatively small and light car. The battery was charged significantly higher and drained significantly lower than tesla batteries. There was degradation. At highway speeds it was significantly less efficient and range anxiety became a real problem. On trips usable range was much less than the specs because: you couldn't drain it all the way because logistics was a real problem. You also couldn't charge it all the way because a "fast" charger would take as much time to charge to 80% as from 80%-100%. Range was an issue and being an engineer or mathematician helped. Around town 3.5-4.5 miles/kwh was common, on the freeway you would hit 2 at 70mph.

The tesla actually had freeway speeds. Where a leaf would have you in the right hand lane trying to go as slow as possible, the tesla would have you looking out for speed traps. The battery was huge. You could plan your trips with the help of the nav computer and your battery would generally stay in 20-80% range. On long trips it was better to stay 10-60% because the battery would charge faster before it started tapering off. By tapering off, I mean 2-3x the max the leaf would charge on a good day. I will say that tesla battery size makes it possible to care for the battery. It would be uncommon (and sort of bad maintenance) to charge to 90% let alone 100%. Same for below 20%. Telsa shuts off some automatic climate features below 20%

Oh, and tesla drivers are a diverse group. Just talking to them, some will average close to 200 wh/mi, while others will be above 400wh/mi. climate and foot weight make a difference. Besides behavior, there are also several tesla settings that will increase your range. Range mode, different driving settings [chill | standard | sport | ludicrous | ludicrous+ ] depending on the vehicle.

Oh yeah, The leaf was scarey on the freeway. It would burn so much battery and was pretty loud. I try to keep it below 60MPH in which things get uncomfortable. In the city it was very compliant and very efficient. I could go through two weeks without charging my now half degraded battery. In the Tesla it loves going to about 70mph. After that you start getting wind noise. Two very different animals. But both great cars. Never going back to ICE.

I've never ridden in a Leaf or other compact electric but is it really worse than the 2002 Tauruses and 1999 Grand Caravans (or 2019 Mitsubishi Mirage for that matter) that people seem to have no problem keeping up with traffic in?

I can see it being worse than whatever people who are buying leafs are trading in but I can't see it being that bad overall.

The issue is not you can't keep up with traffic, it's if you do keep up with traffic, you use your stored energy very fast.

I was commuting with a plug in hybrid and it was very similar. If traffic was bad, I could make it nearly home on nearly all electric, but if traffic was light, the battery would be drained even if it was running in normal hybrid mode. Not a problem for me, the gas engine works fine, but it would be an issue for a leaf.

So it's a range/performance issue, not an NVH issue, correct?

I've put 20,000 miles on my Model X in the past two years, mostly at freeway speeds, and I'm within 2-3% of the EPA-rated Wh/mile.

My understanding is that the Taycan was seriously screwed by having its track modes, which are genuinely very inefficient, blended equally in to the test.

It's a bit of a shame to see so many Tesla fans point to its supposed inefficiency based on the EPA range. It feels like the tables have turned 180 since the Top Gear scripted test days; it was shitty when Tesla was attacked with FUD back then and it's shitty when the Taycan is today.

That’s really weird. Is it normal to blend in sport modes? Do you have a link to more info?

Unfortunately I'm struggling to find a source, so take it with a grain of salt. My memory is that the highway speed test for one of the modes had it running in first gear (of two).

But regardless of the reason, its EPA range proportional to WLTP and real world driving is very low compared to other EVs. It doesn't point to poor efficiency, just a corner case of EPA testing.

While extrapolated from 100 miles, this Car and Driver test [1] puts a 6% gap between the 2020 Model S and Taycan, compared to a 70% difference in EPA range. Extrapolation sucks as a method, but there's no way it would mask a true 70% range difference - the Porsche would be close to empty at the end of the test.

Considering the Tesla costs just over half as much, it's still a home run for Tesla. They're the ones to beat and by all accounts are likely to stay that way.

https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/comparison-test/a307994...

It makes sense to me, as otherwise a manufacturer could supply the car with a 50mph speed limiter (which users would instantly disable) to boost their EPA-measured range.

My memory (and I don't have a citation for this) is that if the manufacturer gives you multiple range modes (like Eco and Sport) EPA tests in both, then averages them together somehow.

Why does actual EPA range numbers matter, when we all know they aren't perfectly accurate? They aren't accurate for ICE cars either.

The point is Tesla has increased their range yet again. There is no disputing this fact. If people were buying Teslas before, they're getting even more value out of it now.

It seems most people here find this EPA discrepancy a great justification for criticising Tesla, but I highly doubt anyone owns a Tesla who is doing the criticising.

Most Tesla owners were happy to buy the Model S at 265 EPA range. Now its 400, almost 50% more. Who cares if that actually means 300 miles? That 300 miles is still awesome, and if its good enough to buy a Tesla, buy one. If not, don't.

For me, the EPA range numbers are important because I'm in the market to buy a new car later this year and I'd like a fair gauge to compare vehicles on expected milage (part of the reason is wife has mileage anxiety, which I believe a lot of non-EV people have as well).

Looking at the first article the lead commenter posted that compared "real-world" to EPA ranges, Tesla misses the EPA range by an average of 22%. Other vehicles that miss the EPA range average 4.5% off.

Of course the EPA range is as much an estimate as the testing is and conditions change between testing and real world scenarios, but what's so different with the Tesla vehicles during EPA testing compared to real-world testing to cause such a large drop-off compared to other vehicles.

We can rightly question the EPA testing methodology in the first place meaning, what are they running (or not running) that regular people would. For example, does EPA not run the A/C during the test? I'm not accusing the Tesla A/C from excessive battery draw, as it's just an example.

Yes, having a larger battery is welcome, so with an EPA range of 400 miles, then we can real-world expect 320 miles.

*Quick addendum: I'm not a big fan of these types of articles and can more then accept that the testing the article performed was "flawed" as well. But we do need better, consistent range tests.

Because ideally consumers should be allowed to make informed decisions, which is not possible if one party - willingly or not - misrepresents the numbers.

Tesla should be criticized for every number they inflate. Every time they pull some marketing crap, they should be called out on it.

If it's such a benefit as you write, why do they feel the need inflate the numbers?

What happened to honesty among engineers? Understated performance, instead of throwing around huge numbers that are technically possible but are nothing short of misleading for the consumers? I suppose it clearly works for Tesla, but my support goes to the company who claims a conservative number that I'm actually likely to exceed in reality.

Is there evidence that they are misleading or cheating? The EPA numbers (I assume) are arrived at with the same methodology for all cars. It's indepedent right? (I have no idea).

So how is Tesla at fault here, if their cars do well. Btw, you can get the EPA range if you drive around 55-60mph... So it is misleading?

It is not independent. The EPA defines the test methodology and the manufacture conducts the test themselves. There are some loopholes that manufactures can leverage to improve their score, like offering a model without A/C, tiny tires, or tall gearrs; having a "eco" mode; or having a shift light on the dashboard.

The EPA test methodology is actually pretty sound. It includes things like multiple wide-open throttle accelerations to highways speeds. The problems appear to be lack of independent testing and the existence of loopholes mentioned above. Companies like Honda seem to always beat EPA #s and Ford always seems to fall very short of the numbers.

All those things you list as 'loopholes' aren't something Tesla is doing here, besides maybe the smaller tires (which really, aren't undersized, they're just the smallest ones they offer happen to get best range).

I'm not sure what you'd expect, given that every single defined test can be gamed. 'Real world' is different for everyone. And if you drive 80mph, every single car ever will underperform compared to the stated EPA range/mpg.

There's always a lot of folks claiming to get equal to or better than the rated range on the highway, but I will add my anecdata in for however much it's worth. I have a Model 3 Performance and it does not get anywhere near rated range, regardless of weather. I more realistically get 200 miles of range, not 300.

I find in my model 3 that unless I put it on cruise control I can never get close to the rating. Cruise control gets almost right on the money and cuts down the urge pass people for fun.

But the fun... you probably drive like I do.

Around town, for sure, but on a road trip with the fam I just set turn on autopilot at 70 and leave it. My wife & kids are not nearly as appreciative of the performance as I am :).

But, even at mild temperatures cruising at steady speed on mostly level terrain, I generally see 325 Wh/mi. If I cruise at 75, it's 350 Wh/mi. The rated range can only be achieved by hitting about 250 Wh/mi.

Assuming you have the 20 inch performance wheels (and the Pilot 4S summer tires that come with them), those could be the difference between you getting 325Wh/mi and something more in line with 250-275 at 70mph.

Here's a chart with speed/efficiency measurements for most Tesla model/wheel configurations:

https://teslike.com/

Yep that's part of why I put 18" wheels on my P+ even though they don't look as nice as the 20" wheels.

That is entirely possible. When I drive out of my driveway and down the road, it sounds like the tires are ripping the asphalt off the road and flinging at the underside of the car. Sticky things.

In the winter I run snow tires, but then there's the low temperature and corresponding use of the climate control that destroys range. And in the summer I've got the performance wheels and tires installed. So I'll never see optimal range. But Tesla probably shouldn't be quoting 300+ miles of range for the Performance model, either.

Given the climate where I live is pretty mild, and snow is relatively rare and short-lived, I've given some consideration to ditching the performance tires and snow tires both and replacing with 19 inch Conti DWS to run year-round. If I got away with that on my Camaro, it would probably work on my AWD Tesla, LOL.

Sounds like they have the mix of estimated speeds wrong. EVs perform significantly better at low speeds, because there’s no extra efficiency in the EV power train at higher RPMs, and air resistance scales in a nonlinear fashion.

The trouble is you just can't trust anecdotes when it comes to driving at "freeway speeds". I had the displeasure of taking part in a two hour commute every day for a few months and the difference a few mph to your average speed makes is huge. If I travelled at 72mph average (above the national speed limit, which is the speed most seem to drive) I needed 2.5 tanks of fuel per week, but if I travelled at 68mph and made an effort to use high gears, low acceleration, engine braking over friction braking etc. I would need only two tanks.

To add to this, it's especially difficult to exercise the restraint necessary to drive economically in a fun and/or comfortable car. Before I got a comfortable car I didn't understand why BMW/Mercedes/Audi drivers drive so fast. Now I do. It doesn't really feel like you're moving very fast in those cars.

Teslas are designed to perform better (and EPA is designed to evaluate) NOT on freeways (ie, where most people drive)(mainly due to very good regenerative braking).

All cars perform better (in terms of kWh through the driveshaft per km) at lower speed, since air resistance rises quickly with speed. Tesla can't do anything to change this, although they do try to mitigate it with good aero.

Electric cars can regen brake and so recover some energy in stop/go traffic, but they're still more efficient at constant low speed than stop/go at low speed.

ICE vehicles only get better economy on the highway because they have no regen braking and their engines are more fuel efficient at highway speeds.

This is not complete true. Most combustion cars perform best around 90km/h. Below that speed air resistance is not much of an issue but gears help a lot getting the best performance out of the engine.

Yeah, that's what I meant by "their engines are more fuel efficient at highway speeds" - fuel burn is minimized under highway conditions (90km/h as you say sounds about right) since air resistance isn't crazy yet but you're in top gear and so getting the maximum distance per engine swept volume.

90 km/h or 56 mph was the speed that ICE car fuel efficiency was measured at during the 1970's onwards until recent times. If you read a car review then the mpg figure would be for 56 mph in the UK.

For this reason the target speed for efficiency had to be 56 mph. For that would be important for comparisons. Fleet buyers were important in those days so a 'rep-mobile' able to sip the fuel as it went about crossing the country at sensible A road and motorway speeds was what was wanted. If a manufacturer wanted to sell into this market then the 56 mpg figure had to be available.

I am not sure fuel efficiency was discussed in quite the same way in the U.S. market during these times and there weren't the same tax incentives to get companies buying 'rep-mobiles' so the auto-sector could be stimulated.

Europe wasn't the EU in those days with each major country having different tax regimes for cars.

Is that restating what I wrote?

My 3 can exceed its rating very easily under the correct conditions. No elevation changes, about 80 degrees out, and cruise control at a steady 60. But any variance from that and it is definitely different. I have a lot of elevation change on my daily commute, and going up those hills fast does the range no favors. But on average I am pretty darn close to the rated distance. Temperature is a huge factor, if its below 45 efficiency is like 70%. If its over 90 efficiency is under 90%. Doing 80 MPH, also pretty bad for the rating. So now do 80 MPH in 95 degree weather and you are talking maybe 80% efficiency. I feel the rating on the 3 has been spot on for me, understanding the large number of variables that go into actual real world use.

EPA range is city+highway combined, which isn't really what any most car buyers care about. Range during city driving is irrelevant beyond a point; you're never going to go more than 100 miles per charge. Then the highway test is easy; it never breaks 60 MPH and averages 48 MPH. What most people probably care about is how far you can go between charges when road-tripping, which is really a much more complicated formula involving how quickly you can charge, what the real speed limit is on your local highways, how many high speed chargers are available, etc.

If I drove my Tesla S on the freeway at 48 mph then I would easily match the EPA rating.

48mph was easily doable during moderate traffic on my commutes back home. Some days I'd be lucky to get that.

So it's a bit more honest in that regard... Those days where I got to go 80mph the entire freeway segment and get home really quickly my mpge suffered a lot.

It’s not just about speed, although speed has a lot to do with it (with efficiency dropping with the square of the increase).

It depends also on how much you use the available acceleration features.

As you will know there is quite a range of acceleration available, from barely pushing the pedal and matching normal cars, to putting the pedal about 1/4 of the way down and smoking even most fast cars, to putting the pedal down more than halfway and having a beast in your hands.

I’m sure the EPA is pretty conservative and this is where the literal meaning of ymmv comes into play.

Most evidence shows that for Tesla, they end up overestimating the EPA range, not being conservative.

There are some reviews of the Porsche Taycan where the car lost most of its range very quickly when the driver was accelerating quickly.

The Tesla Model S is one of the fastest-accelerating cars available at any price. If you drive it like a normal person and obey the speed limit (approximately), you will get close to the EPA rating depending on weather etc. If you actually use all the power it has (and you manage not to get pulled over), you will have lower range and you'll need to buy new tires every 6 months.

Yes, this is why they have these tests attempt to do this in an apples to apples fashion, and the most scientific of these tests seem to show Tesla overestimates their EV range the most of any automaker.

Just to be clear: EPA tests the cars and calculates the range, not Tesla (or any other car maker).

Therefore Tesla cannot "overestimate" EPA range.

If you think that EPA range is not accurate, then you can blame EPA.

And since you bring science, who are "they" and in what way their tests are more scientific that EPA's tests?

Depends on the model. For Model 3, they generally sandbag (underestimate). For some versions of Model S, they have inflated in the past. For this version, I don't think we outside of Tesla know yet. They have plausible reasons to go either way. YMMV.

The EPA testing methodology includes wide open throttle accelerations to highway speeds.

Maybe offtopic but I think a huge issue could be if gas cars are tested with ethanol free gasoline whereas in real life you’re mostly buying 10% ethanol.

My Tesla Model 3 SR+ tends to exceed the EPA rating on most trips, but the Model S loaners I've had have been quite a bit more thirsty and varied greatly, although I couldn't help but play with all the extra power they have. Still blows the pants off anything else as far as efficiency.

I've made a spreadsheet to compare the energy usage of my 2019 3 SR+ to my old 2014 Subaru Crosstrek Hybrid: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16JLSzoWA0154ZUU3ahJ_...

> I can also provide my own anecdata that at freeway speeds Tesla routinely underperforms their EPA range rating, and by quite a large margin. Meanwhile at freeway speeds my non-Tesla EV routinely exceeds its EPA rating.

But EPA rating is a mix, not a freeway rating. Though fueleconomy.gov has specific numbers for freeway speeds as well.

My venerable 2017 S90D is listed with 294 miles range, that's 473 Km, or 19.8 KWh/100Km. My last trips to Italy used pretty much exactly 20KWh/100Km (2500-3000 Km each time, more than 90% highway at 120-150Km/h [sorry Italy]). In the city I'm usually below that on average.

I'm surprised Tesla fans haven't crowd sourced accurate data by now.

Look at these articles. They've collected data for real-world range vs speed in various models, and how fast supercharging works in various situations.

Tesla Model 3 Performance vs RWD consumption - Real Driving Data from 233 Cars

https://forum.abetterrouteplanner.com/blogs/entry/22-tesla-m...

Model 3 Consumption and Charging

https://forum.abetterrouteplanner.com/blogs/entry/13-model-3...

Tesla Model S Consumption vs Speed

https://forum.abetterrouteplanner.com/blogs/entry/9-tesla-mo...

Faster Tesla Supercharging - How does it actually perform?

https://forum.abetterrouteplanner.com/blogs/entry/29-faster-...

There's plenty of data and test results out there. But range is very subjective. It varies hugely depending on driving style, speed, road surface, traffic, weather, temperature, tires, vehicles configuration/settings, etc.

Apart from going through r/teslamotors or Tesla Motors Club forums (plenty of personal reports on those), here is an aggregation of efficiencies for most Tesla model/wheel configurations at various speeds:

https://teslike.com/

Of course, low temperatures and rain will also tank range.

Given that Tesla track everything on every car - where they go, how they drive, when and how much they charge - they ought to have accurate data themselves apart from EPA ratings.

Could customers demand their own data from Tesla? Europeans, under the GDPR, for example? If enough people did, and released it, that ought to be accurate.

ecalc.ch (https://www.ecalc.ch/evcalc.php) is very accurate in my opinion.

Don’t single Tesla out on this. No car manages to get its official mpg/EPA rating in real-world driving conditions. Some get closer than others and some manufacturers (eg Fiat) designed their motors in a way that maximises their performance on standardised tests. The gap between how ‘hard’ the car has to work to achieve the real world driving conditions vs test conditions plays a big part in the differential. Smaller motors with forced inductions are the worst offenders. Larger motors are more honest citizens.

>Don’t single Tesla out on this. No car manages to get its official mpg/EPA rating in real-world driving conditions.

It totally depends on the vehicle. I maintain a fleet of ~10 vehicles and keep records of fuel economy (because it tells me when calipers stick before the drivers do). The vehicles get ridden decently hard and pretty much all the highway miles are in the left lane at whatever speed that may be. A 2/3 majority pretty much always exceed their EPA rating by 2-4mpg. The rest are right on the rating. None of them spend much time in the gridlock that tends to characterize upscale inner suburbs during daylight hours nor do they cruise empty rural highways.

My VW TDI consistently got better than EPA rated mileage ;)

The difference between your non tesla-ev and other's tesla evs may be nothing more than driving habits, including how you drive, road and weather conditions, etc.

Do you live somewhere flat or hilly/mountainous?

Hills shouldn't make much of a difference. The car has regenerative braking so hilly or flat, it should have similar range.

I don't think regen braking is perfect (70% efficient maybe?). And if the battery is full, regen braking is disabled/lessened.

Even with 100% efficiency of the powertrain you'll end up with less charge than you started with. Yes, with 100% you get the energy used to overcome gravity back, but you still have frictional (tyres have friction!) and aerodynamic (we have an atmosphere!) losses that need to be accounted for both uphill and downhill.

But yes, powertrain loses exacerbate the power consumption.

The question is whether flat or hill makes a difference. Surely friction and aerodynamic would be the same?

Also: friction of tyres don't make you consume energy, it's what makes the car move actually (with no tire friction you won't move at all).

The friction that makes you consume energy is within the wheels, gears, etc that are supposed to slide, also the deformation of tires makes you consume energy (which is why consumption is higher with under-inflated tires).

Disagree strongly. Hills most definitely impact mpg/mpge. If you're going near speed limit (due to flow of traffic) then your regen isn't going to recapture as much as if you let it coast.

I wouldn't be surprised by a ~10% loss in range, which could be enough to make the EPA numbers look bogus to some drivers.

Presumably there's also a subjective element, like if the driver tends to tailgate and brake late, which isn't exactly uncommon. You're not recovering any energy put into heating the brake rotors.

There are also plenty of locales where you're repeatedly braking heavily for hairpin turns like winding roads on the side of a mountain. Teslas aren't exactly light vehicles...

i highly doubt that. model 3 is THE most efficient EV. another efficient EV is the Hyundai Ioniq

Man do I love Hackernews.

Everyone is pro-innovation, pro-future, pro-forward thinking until literally anything new happens, in which case everyone shows up with a "well, ackshually", to tell you why the new idea is dumb.

It's amazing to me that Tesla continues to increase State Of The Art range and EV efficiency, at scale, for cars that already smoke the competition. I hope their fervor to improve the technology never stops, and I'm glad they're dragging the industry, kicking and screaming, into the future.

"Nobody is going to buy this thing. I commute 250 miles each way to my job, in my pickup truck. Call me back when Tesla makes a real car with real range. Anybody who buys these now is a sucker."

Because people keep saying shit like that. Tesla's range increases are a giant experiment to find out at exactly what point opposition to electric collapses.

"Nobody is going to buy this thing. I commute 250 miles each way to my job, in my pickup truck, hauling a load of lumber to a cabin 100 miles from civilization. There's no electricity out there. Call me back when Tesla makes a real car with real range. Anybody who buys these now is a sucker."

FTFY.

There's one of these in EVERY discussion of something Tesla releases :-)

To make your day I will add a post like that.

A typical weekend for me involves driving ~150 miles to leave my car in the cold and wet in the middle of nowhere for 8 to 9 hours while I wander around some mountains. Only 2 superchargers in the country and their not between where I live and where I go.

Is this unusual - absolutely (mind you plenty people here do similar things) - but range is an important factor to me. However, the main one is cost - absolutely no way will I spend more than £25K on a car.

> Is this unusual - absolutely

Often these claims are made while saying that it's a normal requirement and that everyone has the same requirement, thus nobody will buy it.

Cost is an important factor. I think a lot of people already would like to buy one, if they're way cheaper (also way cheaper than £25k). I've seen articles about new battery tech which focusses on cost quite a bit. So hopefully the cost of a new electric car will continue to go down.

There's also a "law" somewhere which states that with every significant doubling of industry the cost will go down. It has to do with gaining more experience, not the usual "economies of scale".

If someone makes an EV with 350 mile range, decent specifications and costs £25K I'll buy two.

Edit: I don't care about performance - my current car as a 1l engine and it is fine.

I was surprised to hear from a friend that he just ordered a fully electric Volkswagen Up! for 13k€. There was a huge discount plus some government subsidy that saved him 10k. It's a small car, but if only used within the city it absolutely makes sense.

You use £ so I assume UK, but there are way more than 2 super chargers in the UK... So I assume youre talking about Wales as I dont think they have many. They do have plenty of other types of chargers though.

Actually - Google seemed to get this wrong the first time I searched I'm in Scotland and there appears to be five superchargers and there are indeed other chargers. I'd say maybe half the time I go anywhere I drive through Perth - so that's not too bad.

Still, I'm not going to pay way more money for a car that makes my days in the hills even longer! The cost aspect is by far the main reason I haven't bought an EV.

I heard a similar argument when I expressed to in an online community that I was going to pre order a cyber truck.

"That thing can only two 14,000 lbs. No ones going to buy a truck that can only two that much, my F350 can tow 20,000 lbs, that's much more useful."

it's interesting to see the good old critical show:

    - cant be
    - wont work
    - will die
    - about to die
    - not as good as expected
    - door handle has a flaw <= when you reached petty daily criticism, it means you're part of the world maker now

For me it has always been at a range of 1000 kilometers. (600 miles.)

It is the same limit for me. The car should be able to go until I am tired driving it, which is around 6 to 8 hours driving at 120km/h, including breaks of 15-20 minutes each 3 hours. Then I can accept a 30-45 minute break to charge if I have to continue.

Tesla's are already very close to that right now.

I used to drive from Florida to Pennsylvania fairly often, and in my model 3 it's a rough cadence of drive for 2.5 to 3 hours, stop at a supercharger for under 30 minutes, repeat until I'm there.

And that's with the vast majority of the trip at 75mph/120km/h.

It does get worse in the winter though, I need to stop more frequently like every 2 hours, and for more like 30 minutes per stop.

If you're stopping for 15-20 mins every three hours you could probably drive for 8 hours in a Tesla Long Range 3/S right now. If you stopped at superchargers.

Most ICE vehicles do not have a 1000 km range.

A gas car can be topped up in 2 minutes, just about everywhere - which is not true of an electric. With a 1000 km range, I can go almost everywhere I want, then back, without charging, and recharge at home, if need be.

If my gas guzzler filled through a straw and took an hour to fill, I'd want 1000 km range on the gas car too.

You're significantly under estimating the time it takes to refuel. Between diverting to a station, fueling, and getting back on the road it's at least 10 min. If you're traveling such a long distance it's a good idea to take a break during a fuel stop anyway, so add at least another 10 min.

I travel a lot and tend to stop every 250mi (400km) or so, if not sooner. It times well with meals and bathroom breaks so my stops are usually at least 30 min.

Electric takes more time to recharge but on long trips the extra charge time doesn't have as a significant impact as you'd think, assuming chargers are plentiful and charge at the maximum rate your vehicle can handle.

Definitely agree with you there.

It's definitely a moving goalposts argument. It used to be the claim that there were no EV chargers so the point was dead. Now there are superchargers across the states. To me, 250 miles of REAL range is enough for most people. I've driven 1000 miles with no real issue. Running out of battery, every few hours, almost coincides with having to take a leak and buy a drink. My car is good to go after I finish all those things.

People on HN are no different than others. It's easy to be a naysayer and point out flaws, and it's an annoying trend that bogs down or even derails the conversation.

And now I have to brace for the "well actually's" to point out I am doing exactly what I complained about. A continual regression of well actually's

I am cheering on their ever increasing range for one reason.

It will force traditional manufacturers to step up. They all seem too content to deliver products whose range numbers barely make it to the mid two hundred mile range number.

This is the same complacency that would have doomed us forever to a world of sub one hundred mile range EVs when Tesla was not a factor.

They just don't want to push the numbers because the longer they drag their feet and the slower the number increases the more profit they can wring out of the market.

Second this - always surprised by the skepticism towards Tesla. As you say, they are continuing to push the limits of range and performance despite no other EVs having caught up.

As far as I'm concerned, Tesla wouldn't be selling hundreds of thousands of cars if real people weren't able to meet their real range needs with them. Plus, it only takes driving one to understand the appeal :)

Can you really blame people for skepticism?

How many articles get posted each day about some incredible new breakthrough? Then "poof" you never hear about it again. And the article said the new product would hit the market next year.

I have to admit, beside the autopilot thing, musk impresses with the breadth of his ventures. From EVs to Batteries (if Battery Day delivers).. they never stop pushing.

I wonder how much of this will translate to real world driving. Teslas have generally significantly underperformed in real world range compared to EPA. This reads very much like they're optimizing more towards a benchmark.

Well, duh. It’s a consistent test that you can benchmark.

The same thing happens with ICE cars. I drove a Cadillac that would get like 27-28 mpg highway but 10 in the city, as they used gearing and cylinder management to optimize highway mpg.

In my experience:

- teslas have a big battery, range anxiety is not a problem

- it is possible and even easy to drive inefficiently

Other electric cars have small batteries, and small motors which combine to reward frugal driving.

Tesla has big batteries but many other cars have large batteries too. Like the Jaguar ipace, the Audi étron, the Mercedes EQC, or the hyundai kona...

About the size of the motors, the Tesla one are actually not that big. Which is a good thing.

Model S is 550-830 hp, model 3 is 280-460 hp. Or are you talking dimensions?

I'm talking about the size and not the max power output indeed.

Probably fine if you can manage to slow down and not hoon.

The real world version of overfitting!

If it's possible, every car maker can "optimize towards benchmark".

So is your theory that all car makers except Tesla are dumb and cannot optimize their range for EPA tests?

That they are morally superior to Tesla and will sacrifice sales by not optimizing for EPA range but some purported "real world range"?

And in what way exactly do you optimize for EPA test?

I've seen this "explanation" for superior Tesla results many times but somehow no-one actually explains how do you make a battery or electric motor or drag coefficient of the car that is optimized for EPA test but doesn't generalize to regular driving.

I mean they could be honest and still outperform the rest of the market. If what you say is true, the EPA metric is meaningless and they should report observed efficiency for a certain traffic pattern. Why lie about it?

Other manufacturers don’t optimise for the US market, so they’re not going to optimise for the test which is used only in the US.

> If it's possible, every car maker can "optimize towards benchmark".

Like VW optimizing cars towards benchmark. Doesn't always ends great.

Not sure faking results counts as optimizing cars /shrug

They were not faked. Cars were optimized to behave in a certain way under exact test scenario.

They were not producing any fake output data from the sensors, just "optimizing" engine behavior.

They didn't output fake data, true, but their "optimization" was to only activate emissions controls during testing. That's fraud.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/10/08/446861855...

Ah interesting - I stand corrected. Thanks for explaining!

It's great that Tesla keeps increasing the range, but the EPA numbers are ridiculous. I would love to see the EPA range claims for electric vehicles re-standardized to measure:

* at the median driving speed on free-flowing US interstate highways

* during cold weather

* with some hills

* using a medium level typical of drivers of cars of the price range

A car manufacturer particularly focused on realism could publish a two range values; a lower number as described above, an upper EPA number (perfect conditions, low speed).

The EPA tests are interesting. They do simulate stop and go driving, and that’s why on a gas car the city number is worse, but the steadier highway test shows better numbers. One of the weird things with an EV is that the highway numbers are actually worse (as other posters have commented).

The tests definitely trade off realism for consistent reproducibility though. This article describes it in detail, it’s really interesting: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15388892/the-truth-ab...

I was going to write something longer and then got distracted and this thread went bonkers, so sadly your post is not going to get the attention it deserves.

I've actually toured a fuel economy lab for a Tier I/Big 3 auto manufacturer. The testing procedures described there are correct...account for as many variables as possible. The lab I toured had the dynos in temperature and humidity controlled rooms. Exhaust vents were standardized in length to ensure consistency, etc.

MPG is serious business with millions on the line.

Most interesting story I had was that they have several drivers they use for different purposes. Some are super consistent and used for repeatability tests. Others specialize in maximizing mileage. They quoted a 5% improvement by certain drivers over others on the SAME TEST. which already has incredibly precise time/speed windows that the drivers must stay in between. Every time, someone is manually controlling the throttle and brake pedal. Although they can use a computerized control for other testing.

They will run the test until they get the best possible test and then ship that to the EPA.

The test is absolutely insane and it totally makes sense why EPA estimates can vary so much from real world numbers. It would practically ignore the effects of aerodynamics and I'm not even sure weight plays a role given both of those are supposedly accounted for by a simulated drag on the rollers.

weight is inertia and aero drag is a speed dependant force...both are just forces that can be simulated really easily on a dyno.

The fundamental problem is that the EPA tests (and tests in the rest of the world) were really designed to give an estimate of efficiency, not range. For efficiency, they are actually pretty reasonable; the MPGe and watt-hours-per-kilometer actually give a reasonably good picture of typical driving, with a mix of high-speed/freeway and stop-n-go/city driving. But the range you care about in a battery EV is more about how much anxiety road trips induce, which is a much more complicated problem, involving variables like high speed charger availability.

That won't do any good, then pedantic people will complain that they can better the numbers all the time, and thus EPA numbers are ridiculous, just like you are now.

People need to accept that these kinds of measures are useful approximations, and that there can be no perfect single number, and that this is ok.

> the EPA numbers are ridiculous

If you think that, you should look at the NEDC numbers they post in Europe :-)

Okay, tried to dig those up and they've apparently switched to the WLTP standard there. That's good, because the NEDC numbers tended to be massively inflated.

Renault does that, they publish winter and summer realistic range. They're pretty spot on.

They mention "significant weight reduction" but don't mention how much weight they saved. Considering how heavy Model S's are, this seems like it could be a productive approach, though on the other hand if there were easy/obvious ways to reduce unnecessary weight, it would have been done by now. On some level it's a trade-off between being too heavy and being unsafe, though reducing the weight also means it doesn't have to be as strong.

yes and no. Older cars were far heavier and far less safe. They could make incremental safety design improvements that allow to reduce weight incrementally without compromise.

I’m not sure whether you mean older teslas or older cars generally here. Small cars in the 70s and 80s weighed just over half as much as they do now. The Golf Mk 1 was 795kg while a Mk 8 is 1255kg. Much of that increase in weight is safety equipment and they are much safer for it.

Some of the increase is safety equipment. Some is just the fact they they are bigger in just about every way. The Golf Mk1 wasn't even a particular small or lightweight car. The Mini was about 600kg, for example.

Individual models do have a tendency to grow in size over time so perhaps the current Polo is a better comparison to the Mk1 Golf and even that weighs in at 1164kg.

I was thinking older than that, of the 50s and 60s, and early 70s. But regardless of the exact timeline, it's pretty well known than engineering trumps raw weight, even if quantity is a quality all it's own, as they say. Thus comparing apples to apples (names don't matter, size and weight and features do), the same weight car today is far safer than it was in the decades you referenced, and the average weight across all models has remained relatively stable during the same period as well other than the dip in late 70s early 80s due to the oil embargo crisis.

I suspect growing up in Europe this difference is more pronounced since smaller cars were always more popular and they are the ones where structural reinforcement for crash safety has made them so much heavier.

Perfectly reasonable hypothesis.

I think cars of all eras have had a mix of heavy and light designs. With modern materials, it's possible to make safer, lighter cars but modern cars are also required to have more safety features.

A Model S is about 4500 to 5000 pounds. I used to drive around in a 1981 Mazda GLC, which is about 1800 pounds. The White Zombie, a famous electric conversion with a 0-60 time of about 1.8 seconds is based on a 70's Datsun which I believe was about 1700 pounds (after adding a couple series-wound DC motors and a trunk full of batteries it's around 2000 pounds).

If you asked some engineers to make a car under 200 pounds, they'd construct the thing using similar materials and techniques as a modern bicycle, and it might even be fast and safe at highway speeds, as long as it didn't collide with a modern car that weighs as much as five or six large pianos. So, in a sense modern cars are on average very heavy because they have to share the road with other cars that are very heavy.

Next to roads are often things like bridge pillars and those things are also very heavy and not very soft.

That is true, but designing a car to be survivable on impact with a strong, immovable object is a different kind of problem than designing it to be survivable in a collision with a moving 3,000 pound vehicle. In the former case, you just have to have enough crush zone to spread out the impact and the weight of your own vehicle doesn't matter much as long as there's cushioning and appropriate safety features (seatbelts and airbags).

In the latter case, if you're a lot lighter than the other car you get knocked around, and if you get squeezed between a heavy car and an immovable object, you get crushed.

Makes me wonder if they've reduced the overall weight at all or just compensated for bigger batteries by reducing the weight of other components.

Congratulations to the Tesla team! You deserve the success that you‘re having!

Tesla is 100% succeeding in their quest to speed up the change to renewable mobility.

Wow, they are doing brake blending now? I'd be interested to know how good their implementation is. I always assumed they refused to do it because it's so damn hard to perfect.

Tesla doesn't do any blending of the brake pedal. Pressing the brake pedal always applies the friction brakes only.

However, since a software update last year, they have had a one-pedal driving mode (Stopping mode "Hold"). In this mode, the vehicle is able to come to a complete stop without using the brake pedal, using a blend of re-gen and friction brakes to do so.

In practice, it means it uses re-gen down to a very low speed (< 5mph), then applies the friction brakes to achieve a complete stop (this also doubles as a "hill hold" - the brakes won't release until you press the accelerator again).

The Model 3 with the current software in "Normal" regen mode does apply more regen when you use the brake pedal, at least as reported by the regen indicator.

Quick question - do Teslas turn on brake lights when using one-pedal mode? Seems it can brake quite aggressively using regen.

Yes. Even in non-one-pedal ( eg standard regen braking) you get the brake lights on if the deacceleration is high enough.

Modern vehicles are required to turn on the brake lights at a given level of deceleration, regen / brakes or not!

Teslas have done that since day one w their regen/braking iirc.

Yes, any significant regen will light up the brake lights.

> Pressing the brake pedal always applies the friction brakes only

Really? That seems odd, since even my Nissan Leaf increases regen with the initial application of the brake pedal.

Yes, the Leaf and many other EVs do blend the brake pedal to various degrees.

But Teslas do not (at least not traditionally. Perhaps that has changed recently in the Model 3 if the other comment here is correct)

Quite good, in my experience. I would describe it as "seamless." I use it every day (or I did, before lockdown) in my Model 3.

It's really incredible what Tesla is doing. Haters gonna hate, but they continue to innovate and move the industry forward.

Really enjoying Tesla's 'innovation' of giving my Model 3 only 70% of the promised range.

Doesn't help that everyone on Tesla forums love to praise the company no matter what they do, so it's not like this is something easy to learn prior to using the car for some time.

There are a million variables that go into range. I could drive the same route and get 25mpg on my old Prius, or I could get 65mpg.

https://teslike.com/

This site has been linked on this thread a few times and I’ve had it bookmarked for some time. TLDR = drive more slowly and lay off the brakes.

All my ICE cars also have less than advertised performance. There is more factors at play in real world driving than in standardized testing...

Still wondering why they haven't announced a new, cheaper EV yet.

Autonomy isn't such a big issue, price is.

I know Tesla needs to develop its production scale, which means making low-quantity high-margin vehicles first.

Did Tesla deliver all the model 3 yet? I'm pretty sure that selling a vehicle that can do 150km at a lower price could still sell well.

> Still wondering why they haven't announced a new, cheaper EV yet.

They seem to be selling their current low-end cars as fast as they can make them, why should they attempt to divert their efforts to a new lower-margin car? They can leave the cheap EV announcements to other manufacturers like VW for people who want to buy an EV some time later...

> why should they attempt to divert their efforts to a new lower-margin car?

why not?

Because it makes no sense from a business perspective.

This is impressive. Almost 650 Km. Conservatively, let's say 600 Km, it's very very impressive.

My daily commute is 30 KM, I can go 20 days without charging. Back of the napkin suggests that if I charge overnight in my garage, I can go without super charger charging for more than a month and a half. This is no small feat.

If you charge overnight on your garage, you never need to visit a supercharger unless you take road trips. Last time I visited a supercharger was 4 months ago.

That's even better.

EV range as a blended efficiency using the same test cycle we use for ICEs is not a very useful metric. EVs are already insanely energy efficient so we don't really need to measure that. What people want to know is if they go on a road-trip how far can they go until they need to charge. Just testing the highway range at whatever the normal speed is in your location would be a much more useful number. It would be nice if we had a standard rating for highway range in winter/summer at a continuous 120/130/140 km/h for example. For a Model 3 this can easily be 60-70% of the rated WLTP range. When you're in the city the car is parked most of the time and may as well be connected to a charger, range on city cycles and short trips is not nearly as relevant.

402mi = 647km

The larger importance of this is that for a lot of potential ev purchasers, 400 miles is the lower limit of what they consider acceptable range. Yes, I know that is rather arbitrary and irrational, but that's how it is.

400 mile range is also important for political debates about the practicality of ev's and whether or not governments should be promoting them.

When I open the page it asks me which market I'm in. I choose Germany yet all units used in the piece are imperial.

So it used to be rated at about 335mpc (miles per charge)? And 20% yanks it up to 402? That must be an incredible mass savings something like 10% I'm guessing, on a car that is already built on an all-aluminum unibody. I hope the NHTSA crash ratings are not affected!

335, then 370, and now 402.

Now give us a truck that doesn’t resemble late 1990s video games with these long range innovations, and I would put in a reserve for a Tesla.

Right now I’m leaning towards Rivian, but they are currently unproven and would like to ideally wait out a few generations.

I'll wait for Consumer Reports or the EPA before believing any of Tesla's range claims.

E: As in from the EPA itself and validated by Consumer Report's field-testing, not Tesla claiming EPA certification and verified through easily cheat-able testing.

Teslas are known for achieving only 75-85% of EPA in the real world.

This is based on my own data, owning multiple Teslas over four years.

The issue is that short drives suffer HVAC losses and long drives are at highway speeds, which is significantly above the speed the EPA uses for their dyno. tests. Further, Tesla actually runs the tests themselves and uses their own calculations to simulate wind resistance.

Based on my own data, owning a Model X for two years, it achieves about 95% of EPA in the real world.

Plural of anecdotes etc.

The HVAC losses are much less in the Model Y due to the heat pump / octovalve, something I wish they'd update the new from the factory Model 3s with. Sandy Munroe did a full Model Y teardown and has a whole segment on how this simple invention is brilliant as it increases real-world range.

Edit: mentioned the octovalve, which has no equivalent in any existing EV (i3, taycan, and leaf included).

Other EVs have been using heat pumps for years, like the i3 and LEAF. I don’t know why they didn’t go with it for the 3, or retrofit it to the S and X.

I cover this a bit in my post about the data I've seen in the 1000+ Tesla fleet that I track with Nikola. 75-85% is about I right.

Respectfully speaking, if you read to the second sentence, you'd learn the range is an EPA rating.

I think they mean they’re waiting for the EPA to test it themselves. Tesla conducts and self-certifies their own tests, and to my knowledge the EPA has never tested one in their own lab.

> the EPA has never tested one in their own lab.

That would make Tesla's prior claims about the EPA screwing the mileage tests up a couple months ago quite odd.

https://electrek.co/2020/04/29/tesla-model-s-400-mile-range-...

> The CEO claimed that the EPA left the door open and the key inside the car when stopping during range testing, resulting in the car remaining powered up and losing 2% of battery capacity.

That's almost certainly wrong because they had blog posts talking about epa testing.

Can we have an EV for people who don't suffer from range anxiety and are willing to trade that off for cost?

I travel 5000km (3000mi) a year, longest single day use 50km (30mi). Vehicle is garaged with access to power. I just need 100km (60mi) (double to be sure :) ) range at an affordable cost.

So .. a used Nissan Leaf is good for you. 70-100 mile range. Probably < $12k

There are already plenty.

The Renault Twizy would be perfect for you

Base model 3 is the car for you then.

Here I am with a 2018 S 75D getting low 200’s. sniff

dear Tesla. I live in a city.

Inside a (properly designed) city you should not need (to own) a car at all.

I agree, but what city is properly designed? They are most often designed for cars. In Europe they were designed for walking & that's a big part of why I prefer Europe.

But there is no city where you need a 400 mile range to your car.

Perhaps not everything in life is about need.

I presume what you actually wanted to say is: you don't want other people in cities to own cars.

This is a thread about EVs and how a particular feature (range) that is worse than ICU cars is improving over time, which everyone wants, because we need cleaner cars for the environemnt. Nobody in here is taking the position of saying: Who cares? Just use ICU cars forever, there is no problem at all.

So I am argueing a specific point about cities. Because EV cars might be better, but are still objectively bad compared to public transport. So no, it's not about what I want, it's about the underliying point of the whole thread: What I (or really we/our children) need other people to do.

Owning a car in a city is dumb. For some cities.

"a new custom tire"

sounds expensive to replace when you drive over a nail

I don't think you buy a tesla for low part costs

e.g. https://www.tflcar.com/2019/06/tesla-model-3-repair-story/

It's a car that sells on average for ~100k. I don't think an expensive tire change in case of a nail will stop the target customer from purchasing this vehicle.

This is not uncommon. Many performance cars over the years have had tires custom spec'd for them. An example that comes to mind is the Bridgestone RE070, which for a while only came in exactly one size, because it was for the mid-2000s STI. It did come in another size a bit later when the GT-R started using it as the factory tire.

I want to say that the sixth generation Camaro SS 1LE also had a custom tire, though I think it comes in more sizes now.

Yes but don’t most “luxury” automobiles come with non-cheap tires to begin with that may or may not bring 2% mileage improvement with them?

I guess it depends what you mean by "luxury", but the vehicles I'm thinking of tend to come with sticky high-performance tires. these actually increase rolling friction.

Exactly so one, they don’t run very long and two they add rolling resistance (for better two wheeled traction), so both in Tesla’s favor.

You can patch a tire with up to a 1/4 inch puncture.

Some exclusions may apply. May not be available at a retailer near you.

(you can patch a tire with a quarter inch puncture as long as that puncture is further than 16 inches away from a previous repair, on a 'square' landing of the tire away from the gradual shoulder or side-wall, and the puncture must not have resulted in an internal or external layer delamination)

And those exclusions aren't considering exotic tire compounds, treads, models, or run-flat styles.

P.S. Most economy-oriented MPG-centric hybrid-car tires have a far-less square design, meaning more shoulder , meaning less repairable area. This is in order to reduce road tire-patch in the interest of reducing rolling resistance. I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla is adopting something similar.

Fair point, but this is Tesla we are talking about. They will find a way to make price competitive (possibly after failing a few times first).

The Tires are one of, if not, the least understood things on a car, so I'll believe it when I see it.

This is a good step, but 400 miles is hardly long range. Any gas powered car can get 500 miles of range with a 5 minute fill up.

Tesla’s batteries fall from their initial range in 2 yrs and to get around it they changed the display. Instead of miles they started calling it “range miles” or something like that and that is a cooked up number using some algorithm. It’s it real and is done to get around the fact that the battery holds less charge over time.

The Hyundai Nexo EV is already at 380 miles, and it’s a real SUV, not a flat-as-a-pancake Model S. It refuels in five minutes, to boot, but is only practical in California. If they increased tank volume by 5% it’d be at 400 miles EPA.

You should mention that it’s a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle if you’re going to compare apples to oranges.

For those wondering this is a Hydrogen fuel cell car, only available for sale in CA because that’s the only place you can fill it. It appears they sold about 270 units in the US last year.

> only available for sale in CA

No, you can buy it in Korea and Europe as well. Europe and China are the most important markets for EVs. Hyundai isn't making many Nexos yet though.

One parks on my street in SF. It looks pretty sweet. :)

To save people googling, the Hyundai Nexo EV is a hydrogen fuel-cell car, not battery electric.

That looks pretty sweet honestly. I know it's not a far out take, but my feeling with the established car makers that are doing fuel cells (e.g. Toyota, and in that model Hyundai), want to learn how to build cars that run on electricity, and put too many eggs into where the electricity comes from.

From the outside it looks frustrating that they are not going full tilt while Tesla does Tesla things, but I hope I see where they're coming from.

I think they realize all electric cars will not be the largest share of the market when hydrocarbon vehicles are phased out. The biggest reason for not owning an electric vehicle is the charging time and range. Toyota and Hyundai aren't going all in on all electric because they would rather focus on capturing the fuel cell market which will be as large as the hydrocarbon vehicle market is today.

As far as I know hydrogen is currently mostly derived from fossil fuels. Electrolysis would be possible but it's expensive and still less energy efficient than a pure battery-electric vehicle.

People are willing to pay a premium for electric cars because they're greener. This DOES NOT APPLY to hydrogen fuel cell cars.

Electrolysis is much cheaper than in the past. Nearly all serious hydrogen related proposals involves electrolysis.

The Bay Area H2 shortage was fun, as in schedule your refueling between 1 and 5 am to have any chance of getting a half tank, or wait an hour in line by day.

Doesn't that thing get like 50-something MPGe? The Teslas are more than twice as efficient.

Fuel cells are pretty cool. My friend has the Toyota one. They're pretty good in CA but have a ways to go before practicality. I believe you can only lease them ATM because they cost about 400k. They're definitely a viable tech though!

I'll also say that part of the Tesla ecosystem is the self-driving and performance, not just earth friendly.

Also you compared an SUV to a Sedan which is supposed to be flat as a pancake. lol. A better comparison would be the model Y.

I don't think very many people would cross-shop a hydrogen-powered Hyundai and a Tesla Model S.

The website for that car points out that it can get from San Francisco to LA on one tank but that's blatantly false unless you start and finish at the edges of those metroplexes while driving extremely efficiently, with no detours or a/c.

I'm not sure why you'd refer to this as an EV when the manufacturer doesn't.

As far as I'm concerned it's not an EV unless I can plug it into a solar panel and charge it.

and how many standards-compliant hydrogen refueling stations exist right now in the 48 states, compared to places you can charge an EV?

Another bonus of having an EV is charging in your own home. You end up with a full tank every night.

Yeah, it's silly to compare. BEV charging infrastructure is trivially expanded and piggybacked on an already ubiquitous power grid.

You still need big trucks constantly hauling liquid hydrogen around for the fuel cell option...

Unless you don't have a home...if you live in any dense area in an apartment, forget about it.

They are lying. I was in the market for a new car earlier this year, and I really wanted to get a Tesla. I also really wanted a car that could handle a trip of 295 miles that I regularly make. I will not go into the nightmare that was scheduling a test drive of the long-range Model S, but after getting conflicting answers from multiple PoCs at Tesla, I finally got the firm answer. The car cannot do even my 295 mile commute (either way) without recharging once. I gave up and bought something else, but I did reserve a "Cyber Truck" which they claim will have a 500 mile range.

I’ve driven 30k miles in my Model S (pre Raven 330 mile range 100kw dual motor) since 2018, back and forth across the US (West coast, East coast, Deep South and the Midwest), using the Supercharger network. Would stopping for a 20 minute charge on a 300 mile road trip really be a deal breaker? I find it to be just the right amount of time to hit the bathroom, grab a Monster energy drink or a coffee, and to walk a little bit to keep away the DVT. 40-50 minute range charges to 100% are rare, and I’ll time those to be when we’re leaving someplace we charged overnight (hotel with destination chargers) or at a Supercharger where I can combine the stop with a meal.

It is a deal breaker for me. I don't want to spend an extra hour detouring to the charging station, possibly waiting in line, and then getting only enough of a charge to complete my journey. I would rather do all of my charging in one of my garages.

Charge to 95% from home so you'd only have to stop for a few minutes. That is highly recommended for your safety anyway.

Consumer Reports was able to get 355 miles in the Model S Long Range at 65mph. They were able to get 418 miles at 55mph. I would expect the Long Range Plus to be about 10% better based on all of the CR data.

I am not sure where you got that information from Tesla but I trust that CR wasn’t just making shit up.

Tesla directed me to their trip planning application: https://www.tesla.com/trips. I just ran it again with the "Model S Long Range" selected, and my 295 mile trip requires a 20 minute charge in Baker, CA.

Their trip planner recommends a charge in the middle for almost any trip greater than 200 miles. I am not sure why.

It also could just be a fairly hilly drive or a drive with a high speed limit. Either way it’s pretty unfair to say Tesla is outright lying because the stated range isn’t applicable to every possible stretch of road in the world.

https://abetterrouteplanner.com is better in every aspect.

You don’t want to drain to 0 anyway. To make a 295 mile round trip without a charge I would want a weighted range of 400-450 miles.

The thing is, distance is meaningless. The energy needed to travel for A to B depends on way more than the "distance". Elevation changes, weather, wind, driving style, etc all matter. I can show you roads near me where my energy consumption is negative (yes, driving down the mountain).

Wouldn't the regenerative braking system recharge the batteries on the down slopes? I realize it's probably not 100% efficient, but if the system were reasonably efficient, it shouldn't matter how hilly or flat the trip could be.

You mean, if the starting and ending elevation is the same the hills shouldn't matter? That's not the case. AFAIK, in any vehicle (even in space) the efficiency goes down with increased acceleration. Going up a hill is accelerating more (counteracting gravity) and downhill is a negative acceleration, so you end up loosing twice.

Ken in a sibling comment claims "50%" which begs the question "compared to what". We'll never be able to reclaim _all_ the energy, but the energy that gets to the wheel is stored back in the battery at 80+% efficiency. Most of the losses are in wind resistance and friction.

I've heard numbers quoted that it's only about 50% efficient, and it would only capture the potential energy from the weight of the car. You still lose a very significant amount of energy overcoming air/rolling resistance.

The BMW i3 has had the perfect electric car design for the last 7+ years - a battery pack good for ~50-120 miles (increased with model revisions) and a gasoline generator "range extender" with a small tank for indefinite length journeys hopping between standard gas stations - which are abundant.

It improves on hybrid-car designs: the engine isn't connected to the drive train, so it's a lot less complex, and the engine is not as large because it doesn't need to power the entire car for 100k+ miles and it can use the battery for short bursts of power (acceleration, hill climbs) while charging on flats and downhills. As it's smaller and less heavily used, it only needs servicing every two years.

Given the top concerns about electric cars are range anxiety, charging time, and availability of charging points, and this design addresses all of them, why don't more electric car makers offer something like this?

Range axienty disappears as you get familiar with driving an EV with trip planning. Charging time is already short enough with version 3 of Tesla Superchargers. Availability of charging points isn't an issue when you charge at home/work. Hybrids are just adding complexity, cost and air pollution.

> Range axienty disappears as you get familiar with driving an EV with trip planning.

It's true, but in some parts of the world (e.g. eastern Europe) it has been replaced with "what charging cards or apps do I need" anxiety.

> why don't more electric car makers offer something like this?

Because nobody is buying it. Even BMW retired the rex version because it was not popular enough.

The simple explanation is that many better plug-in hybrid cars are available for those who want such a thing, many of them at a better price, with more space.

I really liked the i7, and I would have liked to stay with the BMW brand, but the poor thing had a 100 mile range. It certainly looked good, but it was even less practical than what I had.

I assume you mean the i8? A quick Google says it never had a range extender option. The i3 is very much not a competitor on performance, it's a city runabout - the earlier/USA models had complaints (and a lawsuit) that the generator was not strong enough even for that use, although Europe/more recent models don't seem to have the same complaints. Maybe the range extender concept couldn't apply to a more performance oriented car without an impractically big/heavy generator?

No one lies about EPA range.

What you didn't include are the details of your commute and why it might be atypical.

LA to Vegas.

That’s the reason, right there. There are three very long and steep grades on that trip, which suck down range considerably.

I do have to say, the Superchargers along that route are located about 45 seconds off of the highway, and are almost never full. You’d have your choice of places to stop. But if never making even a brief stop is your requirement, then you have your answer.

Government range and emissions tests can be gamed. As VW, and Tesla.

295 mi commute? how many days a week is that monster?

Less than twice a month.

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