Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints
reuters.com
reuters.com
However if you punch in a destination, you'll get exact numbers, and those are insanely reliable. It claims (and I don't believe any claims coming from tesla) that it'll factor wind, elevation, temperature, etc. But regardless of what it factors in, it's on the money.
The routefinder 'learns' from your previous driving habits. Driving style easily has a 50% impact on range between "drives 50 mph slipstreaming behind a truck" and "drives 90 mph and brakes aggressively at every corner".
Also, its still better to arrange to not need to brake at all, than to regen, since regen is not 100% efficient.
Most EVs (including Tesla) do have regenerative braking, so some of your energy is converted back into electricity when you brake, but nowhere close to all of it, so people who have a smoother, less aggressive profile will get more range.
Also if you brake really aggressively, you're dissipating more energy than can be successfully harvested and the rest is converted to heat, losing the energy you paid for and also increasing maintenance costs.
The meter is presenting you the regeneration “rate” but what you’re thinking of is the regen rate integrated over time, I.e the amount of charge recovered during the process of stopping, which the meter is not showing you.
(Also, Tesla cars do have blended braking between region & friction...)
Regen breaking increases range over no regen braking, but braking aggressively will always be worse than not braking aggressively.
All these comments about ICE vehicles being the same ignore that when ICE vehicles have estimates to empty, they take basic steps to try to get the estimate correct.
Tesla should probably not allow you to show the battery as range as it will always be inaccurate and people will complain. But if they only show percentages, people complain as well.
I guess I'm flabbergasted by this, as that's not how my Chevy Volt (and I presume many other BEVs) work. The range value ('guessimeter' people call it) on my Volt takes something like a rolling average of your last few drives and that's what it shows you. So if it's winter, it shows you less range because your last few drives had less efficiency. It's not always accurate (if there's, say, major temp fluctuations), but it's way more useful than what you're describing.
To me, what you're describing is borderline dishonest marketing, and technically unnecessary.
What I'd like to see is two numbers: estimated range as I've described, and beside it a kWh # (which I can guesstimate from the battery % gauge visual, but not precise).
EDIT: Not sure why car manufacturers in general hide the kWh remaining-capacity of the battery so much. They seem to think consumers are too stupid to understand such technical terms? But they're clearly aware of it every time they use a public charger, and it's the closest equivalent to litres/gallons in an ICE.
I leave the dashboard meter set to percent because the “miles” option is just the dumb EPA rated range mapped to percent anyway.
The real way to predict range in a Tesla is to use the nav system which takes many factors into account and has been very accurate in my experience.
But could also reflect that this is a California company where they don't really have weather.
Many here complain about how inaccurate Tesla's range calcs are driving to Tahoe. It's not the state, it's the amoral response to incentives.
“Accurate range” is difficult. It could be accurate based on recent driving, but that number could be very inaccurate if there is a change in weather or you are taking a different kind of drive than your last one.
We are HN tech crowd here so its all fun & games hobbyist stuff.
But normies do not want to get into these types of inane subtleties.
Arguably the front & center, always-there range display should be the most accurate, not the least accurate.
The car doesn’t know where you are going, whether it is city or highway driving, whether or not there is an elevation change, unless you tell it by navigating somewhere.
It could take a guess, but that guess still has plenty of chances to be wrong if your next X miles of driving is not going to be similar to your previous X miles of driving.
There's plenty of smarter things it can do by default other than "its hard, meh".
They are gonna figure out how to do coast to coast self driving this year but can't project a reasonable battery range estimate given temperature/driver history/weather? Do they need more GPUs?
If you mostly drive around town, that estimate will be way off when you get on a highway to go to Grandma’s house.
There’s probably a better way to do it, but Tesla seems to be optimizing for avoiding the “why does the website say 300mi but my car shows 200mi fully charged” support question, in exchange for a different set of support questions.
I think ideally the car would give a best guess estimate, along with a clear breakdown of why this is more or less than the rated range. I just don’t think that’s clearly the “most accurate” option. Most accurate requires knowing where you are going.
It feels like one of those Muskisms where one bending of the truth requires more and more stuff down the line.
If they weren't over optimizing for the EPA test to give almost unachievable range, then they wouldn't need to have the car range meter lie as well. But if you fib once, you need to keep fibbing and keep the fib straight.
It can also vary dramatically based on how you drive, and in fact, if you do have a destination, it will give hints if relevant (e.g. "keep speed below 70 mph to reach destination").
You can switch the EPA-rated miles for a battery percentage indicator by just tapping it in the UI.
There's A LOT of smarter things the car can do than use its factory set 0.250 kWh/mi consumption to spit out the range on dashboard.
Erring on the side of caution would also always be better, whereas it is erring on the side of showing the absolute best state that I as an individual never experienced in 4 years of ownership.
The best state would be over 600 miles [1].
It's erring on the side of consistency, as it's also representing the battery's state of charge. It would only serve to confuse users to try and guess whether the current trip is a highway or city drive, will end in the next minute or two hours from now, which way the wind will be blowing and whether or not you're driving uphill, etc. It'd just be a useless guess, instead of an at least consistent one.
If you tell it where you're going, it already gives you a great estimate, as it doe stake into account all of those factors.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/29/17405906/tesla-model-3-hy...
But all the "just use nav estimate" arguments miss that some people drive more than one place?
If I am driving out an hour to do some shopping, visit my parents, and then drive back.. it may be a total of 90mi but the first leg is 30mi. Do I need to pre-enter my round trip as multiple waypoints to get an accurate view of whether I will make it home or not?
Seems silly.
Just guesstimate a more accurate dashboard view range like you do in other place sin the UI.
The other places in the UI are either based on either the destination you've entered or the last 5, 15, or X miles driven. They only make sense in that context: Just using one of those numbers on the dashboard would be misleading and inconsistent.
Guessing based on the Wh/m of your last ten drives might be a closer estimate, but would be wrong if your next drive isn't like your last ten. It might even be more accurate when guessing your last nine drives, so then you learn to trust it, but those were city miles, and for the next drive, it's highway miles. And now the estimate is way off.
It's just meaningless. We'd quickly learn that the number given is a bad estimate that can't be trusted and needs to be adjusted based on the way you'll actually be driving and other real world conditions... and that's where we already are. The only difference is that currently it's at least consistent, both between trips in the same car and from one car to another. This additional guesstimate would just add more confusion.
Highway 70mph - https://insideevs.com/reviews/443791/ev-range-test-results/ Highway 75mph - https://www.caranddriver.com/shopping-advice/a32603216/ev-ra... Mix - https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/electric-car-range-and-cons...
It's a shame too because Tesla are towards the top of the the real world range pack, so they don't really have to lie.. but it's like a compulsion for some people.
What is mind boggling and hilarious is that there's a Porsche rated EPA 225mi and a Tesla rated EPA 348mi and they both end up achieving 280mi.
Notably the Model 3/Y seem to have a wider EPA-to-reality delta than the Model S in the 75mph test. This seems to align with my 4 year ownership experience. Tesla Model 3 LR rated 310mi but only hits 200mi with C&D. It's interesting how much the 3/Y range seems to drop from 70 to 75mph.
How can you know this without repeatedly running your car out of fuel?
My range is approx. 180 miles, in favorable conditions (summer, AC off). If it was actually accurate, as soon as you hit 70-80mph you would see your range half. Clearly that doesn't happen, so the estimator is off by ~40% for highway conditions, i.e. complete bullshit.
The precise estimate is in the navigation system, when you navigate to a destination and it says you will arrive with X% left. This takes into account speed, traffic, elevation, temperature, wind, etc. and is usually pretty accurate for me.
The golden number in a Tesla Is absolutely the navigation route estimate. While navigating you can open the Energy app as well to see more detail, how you are doing compared to the estimate, and specific factors affecting consumption.
I also just don't use navigation if I've been somewhere more than once. Just navigate with my head..
I use the navigation all the time, even when I know the way, because it knows about traffic jams and so I can get a good range estimate for longer trips. It even gives you a round-trip estimate back to your starting point.
Can you expand on this? You say etc, what else is included? Where is it documented that this calculation is actually happening, versus something far simpler?
https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/model3/en_gb/GUID-01F1A58...
Also if you open the Energy app in the car it will show you which of these factor(s) are contributing to higher or lower consumption than the navigation’s estimated range as you go.
I got 260mi range max on my 310mi rated car. If it was winter or a road trip in which I could truly go fast, it easily got below 200mi.
For a 310mi car, going to visit my parents or in-laws only 75mi away for Christmas should not have made me worry about making the round trip on one charge, but it frequently drained the battery below 20 or even 10%.
Any sane a Tesla driver changes that to show percent battery instead of range.
As others have said the trip planner is excellent, within a percent or two even in winter conditions driving over passes etc..
Note that range changes a lot more due to elevation, speed, cold etc, compared to gas cars because electrics are so much more efficient.
A percentage indicator is fine for a car you already have, but not useful for comparing between cars. It could show kWh, but that isn't good, either. What consumers actually care about is range, and whether that comes from more kWh, better aerodynamics, or a lighter car, the range is the bottom-line number. We wouldn't want consumers buying a car with a bigger battery just because it has more kWh if it doesn't get better range.
I think EPA-rated miles is the best of available options--it just needs to be understood by consumers. And I think cases where it isn't are a bit overstated. I suspect very few consumers genuinely believe they'll get the same range in miles regardless of their driving speed, headwinds, or whether they're going uphill or downhill.
Wind can easy be a 3mpg hit for my car, that’s about 10%. Not all the difference but a couple stacked effects could get yours
Annoying all these things matter when range is constrained. Next gen batteries can’t come soon enough.
True. But none of this should matter if your Tesla actually "learns", as other comments claim, right?
I'd like to see evidence of this, but I'm skeptical. Sounds like something Tesla fans claim is happening, like when you report an error at an intersection it gets fixed manually. And, even if true, I'm not sure how useful it'd be.
Do you like the BMW electric system?
When I recharge at home (using Level 2), the reported "full" values range from 28km to 44km. I cannot figure out why there is such a big range.
The BMW also includes a tiny 16A charger, whereas the old i3 had a 32A charger. This limits charging to ~3 range-miles per hour, making public chargers basically pointless (again compare to the LR Tesla Model Y which has a 48A charger and can add 40+ range-miles in an hour.) In gas-only hybrid mode, the mileage is ~19 MPG, which is actually kind of offensive for a hybrid car.
An EV is not an option for my lifestyle at this time. Once my 3 are out of car seats and/or strollers a sedan EV might work.
There’s always a Hummer EV or even cyber truck but that’s not quite my cup of tea.
In a recent review, a Tesla did a slightly better job than most of the cars tested, as far as portion of stated range achieved.
Most people speed on the freeway. Extra speed reduces range significantly.
The linked figure[0] and associated paper report that efficiency peaks for EVs at around 20mph and then the cost per mile increases roughly linearly, by about 25 watt-hours when the speed increases by 10mph.
Please excuse the archaic units.
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/ehicle-energy-economy-at...
And it is true of petrol cars as well. In my old clunker going from 110 km/h to 120km/h is a 9% speed increase but nets about 15% extra fuel consumption.
I just finished a long drive for summer vacation. Driving through Denmark (completely flat) at 130 km/h would absolutely wipe the battery, would be surprised if I managed even 350 km on a full charge. Driving over the mountains in Norway however, from 0m elevation to over 1000m and down again, at slower mountain roads (max 80 km/h), yielded almost 500 km on single charge.
I did not expect flat+high speed vs hill-climbing+low speed would be that dramatically different.
I have a 2022 Nissan Leaf with 220 miles EPA range. I've found that this number is reasonably close to correct if one is driving under 60mph on country roads under moderate climate conditions. We live in Ohio and so I have actually done long drives like that to go to remote places to go camping. (There are, surprisingly, both L2 and fast chargers around in rural Ohio but you definitely need an app and need to check ahead of time.)
Speed matters because air resistance increases exponentially with speed, not linearly. Driving 60+, lots of stop and go, or using HVAC a lot will bring it down the range to as low as 180, but that seems like the worst range I've seen. That was driving ~75mph with HVAC on.
No, drag is somewhere between linear and quadratic as a function of speed, not exponential. (Although it gets weird around the speed of doing.)
Heuristically, if you’re pushing through a cloud of particles, the number of particles you hit per unit time is linear with speed, and the impulse per particle is also linear with speed (because it’s the difference between your velocity and the particle’s initial velocity, times the particle’s mass, times a constant that’s around two for an elastic collision).
The set-up is so dangerous but so tempting.
Also if the elevation change is such that you don’t have enough to get to the top, the amount you would regen on the way down doesn’t matter.
> climbing a mountain and then going down the other side does cost more net energy than driving the same distance on flat ground.
You say this, but your reasoning is regen braking? What if you never had to brake the entire way? Where did all the energy going going up the hill go? If I carry a sack of sand up a hill and drop it, the amount of energy it has falling is equal to the amount of energy lifting it up the hill. Why does this then magically change when that sack of sand is now a car?
I do get if you're needing to ride the brakes a lot you'll get a pretty big impact on range, but a lot of grades wouldn't require that.
At the same speed, but if you don't break you likely won't have a constant speed. There's also motor efficiency, but that has less of an impact on electric vehicles because they are efficient over a high range.
Mechanical brakes do this by converting that energy to heat and brake dust.
Regen brakes do that by converting around 70% of that energy into battery storage to be used later.
Your sack likely does not roll down the hill with zero losses to friction along the way. The sack has the same energy as it did before you moved it, but it does not mean the journey consumed net zero energy.
Tip: tap the range estimate to switch it to percent. The EPA estimate is meaningless. Yes, that should be improved.
The estimates are based on driving on a flat road at the speed limit.
Even my Lexus SUV can get 24mpg driving on 35-45mph roads vs 16-19 in the city or going to the mountains where elevation increases.
People's understanding of range is just not quite there yet whether it's for an ICE vehicle or an EV.
I know how far % will go. Very simple.
The miles is a PR stunt.
Edit: someone else pointed out if you actually navigate then it will show remaining % more accurately. Still seems like false advertising..
How is the car supposed to know how much energy you might be using in the future?
Last time I checked, no ICE car has the ability to predict the future.
How is that different from what Tesla does.
>> as well as your current energy efficiency.
How is that different from what Tesla does.
It shows you current battery percentage, it shows you live on the default screen what its discharge rate is, it also tells you in a side screen what driving habits are consuming extra energy from baseline and percentages from doing things like driving over 70 mpg, air conditioning, altitude changes.
So what exactly is an ICE car doing better.
Last time I checked, my fuel gauge wasn't telling me about the 15% drop in engine efficiency from going to high altitude areas. Funnily enough, the Tesla showed a large increase in energy use due to going up a slop, but otherwise is not affected by the drop in air density.
Tesla COULD do that, but they don't on the main display because basing it on real data instead of garbage EPA data would produce a more conservative number and that would be harder to sell.
In my ICE car, all the places I can see range remaining have the same exact number, because doing anything else would be stupid and confusing.
FTA: Musk and two local executives did so in a June 19 statement, acknowledging “false/exaggerated advertising.”
Tesla - I literally never achieved the advertised range once. BMW - I exceed the advertised range during low-speed highway cruises in ideal summer conditions.
Tesla - the range it shows me in car (not in nav) is the never-achievable EPA range. BMW - the range it shows me in car (not in nav) adjusts ride to ride based on efficiency on most recent trips. So in the depths of winter it's showing me something 20% lower than in the peak of summer. This means it's factoring in driver behavior, drive mode used, speed, and temperature effectively.
It is reasonable to assume that your range on a trip is most similar to the range in your recent trips.
I can get in my BMW, look at the range meter, guesstimate the range on arrival and be correct to within 1% 9 times out of 10.
In my Tesla, I would constantly be doing mental math to discount the range it was showing me, to what I typically got, the weather, to see how big a delta it would be.
Sure, the nav range in Tesla got smarter over time and factored things in.. but this doesn't help on long round trips. It might tell me that I'm going to reach my destination with X% left, but I now have to do mental math to figure out if I am going to make it back or not.
With Tesla, I can't simply get in the car, see 300mi range on dash.. know I am making a trip 100mi each way so I'll be fine. Instead it's like - 300mi range, NAV says I'll have 58% remaining at destination.. OK so that means it's estimating X burn rate, which means I will make it home with... 17% instead of 33%.
Include weather, recent trips, lifetime consumption rates, type of road currently driving, etc.
Do anything other than the absolute simplest, laziest, most optimistic estimation which is "hey I bet you'll get the almost impossible-to-meet spec consumption rate!".
Even this is a massive over-simplification. Driving the same speed with a 20 mph headwind is going to take lot more energy than with a 20 mph tailwind for example. There's lots of other variables and they may be certainly tracking some (like A/C current draw) but I doubt they track others (like rolling friction or road conditions).
Edit: I found this article [1] and it claims they track an impressive amount of weather and traffic data for the calculation. I'd be curious if this is based on car sensors (probably not?) or local weather stations.
[1] https://electrek.co/2022/03/16/tesla-accounts-wind-air-densi...
I’ve never driven a car to empty ever. I wouldn’t with a Tesla either.
That's not quite right. The power required to maintain a constant velocity v against a constant drag force of F is P = Fv. With air drag on a car moving at highway speeds, the drag force F actually depends on v: it's proportional to the square of v, i.e. F ~ v^2. All together then:
P ~ v^3
So doubling the speed will increase the required power by a factor of eight.
If the power is 8x higher and the speed is 2x higher then the energy per mile must be 4x higher, as he says.
You are correct that power lost to aerodynamic drag increases with the cube of velocity. However, if you increase speed, the time spent is reduced. As a result, the total energy grows with velocity squared.
Can you tell more about this? I'm curious.
I do long road trips all the time with it. Best car I’ve owned ever by a mile.
Was driving back from a campsite that I turned out to not have charging compatibility with, but thought I had plenty of margin to get to the nearest charger. As I drove through the mountains however, I began noticing that a.) my battery was depleting much faster than expected and b.) I wasn’t seeing any houses and very few motorists. I watched with increasing dread as the trip miles began converging with the battery miles, as my friends in the car got more and more quiet. We reached the inflection point, and the best I could do was hope we’d encounter somewhere with a plug that might be able to get us the rest of the way. Eventually though the milage indicator reached zero, and I pulled off the road to what I thought was a campsite but turned out to be a sort of rest stop with no power plugs in sight. To make matters worse I was in a mountain valley and had no phone signal, and hiking wasn’t an option as it was pretty hot and we had no water. We were there for hours until I was able to flag down a nice older couple and get a ride to a place with cell signal, where I was able to get a tow truck capable of transporting my car (turns out you need one that has a full bed because of the regenerative breaking, and tesla’s service doesn’t have infinite coverage) to the charger I was trying to get to.
Ironically that last part was probably the most frustrating. The charging spot was full save one spot in the back, which my tow truck guy Mel couldn’t get back to. No sweat I thought, I’ll just try asking someone to swap, but people in their cars pretended to ignore me, and one couple leaving theirs just walked away, as I asked if they could move so we could unload my dead car. Had a sudden wave of empathy for the people I usually walk away from who ask me for spare change lol. Eventually someone left and I was able to charge and resume the 6 hour road trip home. Biggest lesson learned was that slow is fast, keep it at 60 if you want the milage meter to not die as quick.
The sheer ease of mind that comes with having densely packed energy that can be replenished at a moment's notice practically anywhere should not be disregarded easily. Maybe battery tech can get there some day, but it's certainly not today.
Your car probably has a 2.4 gallon tank, but it's been electronically limited to 1.9 gallons.
The USA requires the REX to kick in at 6% charge. The problem at that level is that the battery can't compensate during short high power drawls. There is a cheat code that enables the REX to kick in a 25% charge remaining. This seems to provide more on demand amperage but I'm not sure what is happening. Hills and wind have a larger effect on speed when off the REX. The REX is just a tiny motor that maintains the battery level but doesn't connect directly to the electric drive train.
I have a very old petrol car (>35y) with a terrible fuel-indicator. I bring a spare 5L tank with petrol under the backseat always.
An EV could achieve the same with a small portable powerbank, not?
My current tank can hold some 50+L; this gives my old T3 a range of ~430km¹. When we lived in Botswana ('83, other car) we had an extra 150L spare fuel-tank instead of back-seats. We could do some 1500km in this old 4wd on full tanks. Which was needed as gas-pumps were easily 300km apart and often out of gas.
An EV could achieve the same with the back-seats replaced by additional battery-packs, not? I'd presume this might be too heavy or not allowed due to regulations, but technically just adding ridiculous amounts of batteries would solve this. Like adding ridiculous tanks for gas would.
Sure, the amount of joules you can pack in a KG of fuel is far more than in a KG of batteries. But to me the solution then is easy: just add more KGs.
¹yup, the mileage is terrible, a VW T3 is basically an underpowered, 1500kg brick
Not too safe of an idea...
> An EV could achieve the same with a small portable powerbank, not?
Say that tank gets you 70km. You'd need 15 kilowatt-hours or 54 megajoules of battery, or about 56kg and about 25L of volume to do the same.
> An EV could achieve the same with the back-seats replaced by additional battery-packs, not? I'd presume this might be too heavy or not allowed due to regulations, but technically just adding ridiculous amounts of batteries would solve this.
Maybe, but it's also ridiculous amounts of money. Also, really increasing the mass of the vehicle is enough to hurt efficiency, so...
uHaul could make a killing off of them for people who want to take their EV on a road trip. If you could get 600 miles off of a single combined full charge you would be in the range of reasonable American road trip distance, and you could make the choice to stop and eat and occupy two chargers to get another 480 miles or so out of a 30 minute stop.
I usually clock about 900-1100 miles a day when I'm doing a destination road trip, so I would still chafe at that limit, but it would beat the heck out of sub-300 mile limits between long breaks for me.
Of course, this is in an ideal world where everything goes my way. I wonder if the penalty would be as high as 33%. Seems like it would be simple to make a maximally aerodynamic battery trailer since human comfort doesn't have to be considered. Then you're only adding the weight and drag of a few hundred lbs of trailer and battery.
I would think the penalty would be in the high single digits or at most in the very low double digits which could be offset by having 1.5x or 2x normal battery capacity in the trailer.
*Ninja edit, I decided to look this up. The Model Y's battery is 1700 lbs, so you are absolutely right that there would be a significant distance penalty adding that much weight to the vehicle plus the trailer weight and the battery armor as well if that isn't included in the weight.
https://www.carparts.com/blog/how-heavy-is-a-tesla-battery/
Curb weight of the Model Y is also 4400 lbs, so having to tow a 2500 lb trailer would be a significant hassle.
Perhaps that could be offset by making the trailer smart and adding motors to it that the main brain could control through the power link. If it could push its own weight and it had a 1.5x battery, and if it also had regenerative braking, then it could get close to doubling the distance.
Then again, each trailer would cost right about the same as a full vehicle, and would require an entire factory to be spun up to make them, and it would be an incredibly valuable product and therefore ripe for theft.
Lots of negatives, not a lot of positives.
It would be better all in all to be able to hot swap the batteries then. With standardized batteries put onto an integrated sled system, a robot at the fuel pump could pull the discharged battery and put it on a battery tester/charger and insert a fresh charged battery in its place.
I guess that would be more like an oil change or system flush, but the advantages would be manifold. Batteries wouldn't be the weak spot in the system any longer. The likelihood of people keeping batteries until they degraded would be significantly reduced, problematic batteries could be identified and repaired or recycled before they erupted, and assuming that the system was in wide usage it could enable road trippers to stay on the road longer quicker and waste less daylight.
Plus, for manufacturers, fuel stations, and mechanics, it would be an opportunity to make more money off of vehicle owners while providing safer, longer lasting vehicles to customers.
It's probably still a post-scarcity pipe dream though.
This has been discussed/proposed/Tesla said they were going to do this long ago.
The big downside is that no one wants to exchange their battery for someone else's. Pretty soon all the batteries end up in crappy shape.
The only way you could really do this is by having the swap stations own the batteries--- but this is so capital intensive that it's really a non-starter. Not to mention that it is a bit mechanically fraught.
The big upside is that we could use a lot more solar/daytime power for charging.
If the glass pack batteries make it to market, with their 2x capacity boost and lack of dangerous chemicals, it might make more sense, but purportedly they also work better with quick charge and can handle more charge cycles, so it may be a moot point anyway.
Also, why a battery trailer? Why not a gas tank plus generator trailer?
But I guess if you need it once every few years as opposed to daily, it's ok.
(According to a random source on the web, a Model Y battery weighs 1,770 pounds, so a perfectly efficient 5%-size physical battery would add another 88 pounds to the cargo.)
That is already how it is done on all EVs. malwrar should have kept driving.
Playlist of tests. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIi_8OXfLeg&list=PLqKx2qnB8X...
Better idea would be a mobile fast charging truck. Ironically that truck would have to be a diesel to make sure it had the range to support distant stranded vehicles, and not be insanely heavy and expensive itself.
and the most disappointing.
This also works in petrol cars: the air resistance efficiency falloff is dramatic at higher speeds.
My dad told a story once where he was driving out west borrowing one of his brother's cars with a broken speedometer. After he got back he said to his brother, "the car just seemed to top out at a certain point" and his brother said "yeah, that's about 85 mph" (the national speed limit was 55 mph at that time). So at 85 mph the air resistance equaled the force the engine could apply and the car wouldn't go any faster.
First, the force that is proportional to the square of the speed is the drag force, which means it's the force you need to supply just to keep the speed from dropping. Power = force * speed is a different "force" - it's the force produced by the engine.
Second, power output of an engine typically has an RPM where it peaks. Past that point, more speed means less power output, which means much less force output, because the force is the power divided by the speed. But force needed still increases as the square of speed.
Suppose you have a vehicle w/ 3 m^2 frontal area, drag coefficient of 0.3 and it's travelling at 30 m/s. Using this calculator https://www.symbolab.com/calculator/physics/drag-equation you can find that will require about 500 N of force (use density of 1.225). The power at that operating point is the product of speed and force, or 30 m/s * 500 N = 15 kW.
Now let's change the speed to 40 m/s. That bumps the force to about 900 N. Now we would calculate power as 40 m/s * 900 N = 36 kW.
Changing these numbers to horsepower we get 20 hp and 48 hp.
The force goes with the square, the power goes with cube. There are assumptions here - for example, if you have a headwind this statement is no longer true because the speed in the drag equation is the air speed of the vehicle (goes up with headwind / down with tailwind) but the third speed factor is the ground speed of the vehicle (because that's based on the physics "work is equal to force times distance" and power is the rate of work).
The graph of an internal combustion engine's power at wide-open throttle vs. engine speed is irrelevant, unless you are trying to figure out which gear ratios would let the engine make enough power to drive the vehicle under those conditions.
You don't see that much these days, though, as having your highest gear that short is just leaving fuel economy on the table on the highway. If you can pick up speed going uphill without changing down at least one gear, you're wasting fuel to pumping losses on flats/downhill.
EVs (and hybrids) with regen braking remove this lost efficiency in city driving, leaving you with an energy usage curve that scales more directly with aerodynamic drag due to speed.
EVs are more efficient at low and high speeds than ICE, they just have small “gas tanks” so the high speed losses are more noticeable.
Also some cars have independent heating that can be used to heat up the car up without running an engine. Not sure how exactly it works but I think it uses special battery.
AC compressor of course takes a lot of power.
Ford also seems to offer them as an option (e.g. as part of the cold weather package)for a number of their straight ICE vehicles like the Bronco sport, Escape, or F-150.
I would guess system like this would be rare in US, because you are allowed to have remote start on your cars.
edit: never mind, it burns fuel https://www.auditech.org/acont-1427.html
I never thought I'd see the return of the gasoline heater. I wonder if its offered in the states.
This is one of those stupid facts that lives rent-free in my head. "If you want 'dry' hot air you need to dry it before sending it to the heater. The primary purpose of the A/C is to dry the air(this also happens to cool it), there is already an A/C unit in the ductwork, profit" But I decided to fact check myself and was not able to find much information. I did find one page that said this mainly occurs on the "defrost" setting, which makes sense as this is what is used when you don't want your windows to fog.
If your engine is overheating, one of the things you should do is turn the heater on max.
Just out of curiosity, where was this?
Tesla owners to other Tesla owners:
> people in their cars pretended to ignore me
Sounds incredibly short-sighted that the regenerative braking can't be temporarily disabled by the driver... two people can push a "regular" car to a nearby gas station in a pinch. Even one person can push a smaller car around a parking lot if necessary.
That said, they often send out full/flat bed tow trucks these days for almost any reason.
Edit: fixed "breaking" to "braking"
standards and automatic trans have neutral that disconnects driveshaft from engine, removing any resistance from the engaged gear. Most EVs either don't have neutral or a poor implementation of it, because of single gear transmission/direct drive.
I'm sorry, do you mean that neutral and "car wash/freeroll mode" are not 100% equivalent?
This really confounds me... if my car has a problem while driving down the road, I'd really like to have a chance of pushing it onto the shoulder if necessary.
A car that you can't do this with sounds very poorly designed to me.
This is fine for low speeds and short distances but is not advised for towing, like with tow trucks that leave two of the car’s wheels on the ground.
Wouldn't that be ok since the parent's root problem was no cell-phone signal?
Edit: of course walking is an option too :-)
I read the above as an indication that they were in a valley where mountains were blocking any chance of a signal. Going further "downhill" wouldn't help in that case.
This Tesla must've been in one heck of a stop where "hiking wasn’t an option as it was pretty hot and we had no water", lol. Does Tesla make a motocross bike?
The weight of a Tesla is not some unprecedented figure for a passenger car - a model 3 is no heavier than many BMW 5 series configurations etc.
The far bigger problem for pushing EVs in my experience is blown pyro-fuses that lock the axle after crashes preventing the wheels from turning - a common issue after an EV shunt. This is why you will often see EVs "dragged" out of shunts by the recovery vehicle until they can get the locked wheels onto dollies. This is only an issue if the EV being pushed has been in an impact generally, but the bar for a pyrofuse blow seems to be low too - it will trip even if airbags haven't deployed. The wheels on many EV motor axles wont turn again until the pyrofuse is replaced.
I think the earlier example that required a full recovery truck - that sounds exactly like a blown pyrofuse, which is by far the most common reason an EV ends up requiring a full lift/dollies rather than a simple tow on its own axles.
This is also why you generally always smell burning in the cabin after a tesla shunt too - nothing to do with a battery fire, its the smell of the pyrofuse burning out under the rear passenger seat.
> https://www.wired.com/story/evs-fire-pyroswitches-cut-risk-s...
This was mentioned a little earlier and further down in the comment tree but many thanks to you too for clearing this up.
I just read about this feature which is advertised purely for car washes, and can be gotten into with a wierd combination of actions or "putting the car into neutral".
Is it...not just going into neutral via disconecting a drive shaft?
Conceptually you are correct its like neutral, but almost no EV from any manufacturer has disconnecting drive shafts. Every Tesla model except the original roadster is locked in a single gear transmission that never disconnects - one of the big reasons EV drivetrains can be built so reliable with virtually no maintenance requirements (there is no service items on most EV drivetrains until a quick coolant flush in ~10th year of car's life span).
The Model 3/Y just dump the output of the rotor into a permanently locked 9:1 trans. There is no need for a reverse gear either as unlike a gas engine the electric motor can easily rotate in both directions.
An electric motor cant "stall" like a gas engine and generally never has to change gear, so there is usually no real benefit to fitting the cost and complexity of clutching driveshafts you typically need when you have a gearbox or gas engine.
Someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but to best of my memory the only "mainstream" EV with a gearbox on sale today is the Porche Taycan/Audi E-Tron GT (they are both the same chasis/drivetrain underneath) with its pretty unusual 2-speed setup. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the next generation of that car eliminates the gearbox.
Very good point and although IDK how it's done I completely agree with you regarding the terminology. In other words, I don't see new internal combustion cars renaming neutral to be "car wash mode"... lol.
Cars should have neutral. And, if yours does then it should be named as such.
Making sure I've got "car was mode" is not what I want to do when I'm in the market for a new car. Nor do I want to start reading through the owners manual should I have to push my car onto the shoulder of the road in an emergency.
Perhaps my age and crotchety grumpiness is starting to show.
Is that possible when the car is persumed dead? Or why would you be trying to push it otherwise? If you can enable free-rolling wheels, why not just drive away?
Wouldn't a clutch be unnecessary in this case... a complete disconnect from the drive train should suffice, no?
What I'm wondering now is, if "free roll" mode is activated while I'm at a red light... is there a chance I start rolling as I do in my manual when I take my foot off the brake?
Maybe I should just reach out to Tesla at this point though (-:
Isn't this exactly what regenerative braking is? There's no mechanical disconnect between the wheels and the motor (i.e. a clutch) so pushing the car essentially turns it into a generator.
Inside the motor/generator, what happens is that if there's current flowing in the windings as a result of the EMF induced by turning the rotor, then, loosely speaking, it creates a magnetic field which opposes the rotation - but if it is not connected to some load (or a short-circuit) there's no current, even though there is still an induced EMF.
It's a standard case of the conservation of energy - if it were not the case, you could put an arbitrary number of generators on the same shaft, all supplying power to external loads, and then use the output of a couple of them to power a motor spinning the assembly...
If you are turning a motor/generator slowly, then the difference in torque is not much, but I am responding to the implication that the motor would have to be mechanically disengaged in order to disable the braking effect.
And, off the top of my head I'm going to say the manual locking hubs will be better overall. Better from an energy efficiency perspective as well as overall convenience and simplicity of design. They might be worse for Tesla's P&L though since anyone with a tire jack and a standard parts dealer nearby could work on the car.
Then again, besides the fact that I'm a cynic... what the heck do I really know!??!
The ability and need to push a car is incredibly common, especially for emergency or non-optimal scenarios. Cars often stop working, be it dead battery, out of gas, malfunction, broken axle(which teslas have).
If a car runs out of charge or malfunctions, it would help everyone if it is easier to move it so it doesn't block traffic. It might be wise to make this a requirement. Seems to me that a clutch that simply switches between connected and neutral and that only operates when the car isn't moving would be far simpler and cheaper than a clutch that handles shifting between different gears while the engine is turning.
I think AWD Teslas have an independent motor and drivetrain for the rear wheels. Naively, one would expect that if you unload the rear axle motor/generator you could just tow the car with little resistance and no damage, but in practice the picture is probably more complicated. I would love to hear from an expert.
Controls > Service > Car Wash Mode And then "Enable Free Roll"
Nonetheless, I'm a rather conservative type of person and see your point so in my "dream car" I might want a way to manually put the car in neutral (or free-roll mode, whatever you want to call it). That's why locking hubs came to my mind in a prior reply.
Wanting to prewarm without planning a trip I understand. It would be use to be able to prwarm for regular charging or non-supercharger charging too.
If anyone know, I'd be interested in the more details and what led to that decision.
When you take it into the mountains, it's not surprising that your gas gauge goes down a bit faster when you're pushing that gas pedal a little further than usual.
Perhaps the takeaway is that EVs shouldn't so prominently display the range as part of the "gas" gauge the way they tend to do.
When we left, estimated range was 45% on arrival. We arrived with 27% range. Granted, we did encounter a crapload of traffic, but the Nav system took that into account because the time was accurate.
I don't fully fault Tesla for the range inaccuracy; an ICE car would probably have had a similar issue. But it's not as smart as I thought it was, which is a shame.
This goes to the optimistic/ exagerated calculation
Related to my other comment, it may be more difficult if it’s relying on weather station data rather than local car sensors though.
Another take-home lesson: if you're driving out of range of civilization, carry water along with your first aid supplies.
If you're in an emergency and your phone says you have no signal, call 911 anyway. It'll attempt to reach any network in range that the phone is compatible with, not just the network you're subscribed to. Some phones nowadays will show "Emergency calls only" when this is the case, but it doesn't appear to be 100% consistent, so again, call anyway.
Also turn on battery saver and when you're not actively trying to call, keep the phone in airplane mode. If you don't it'll repeatedly try to reach a tower which will drain your battery quickly. Don't power it off unless you don't plan to use it for the rest of the day, because booting up uses a lot of energy.
Is there a service for "On demand battery charging". A mini truck carrying a generator that can be called to the location. Could charge premium from the EVs that are too tired to move.
[0] https://www.motorcycleclassics.com/classic-motorcycle-tourin...
I'm uncomfortably aware how quickly vehicles take me to inconvenient, if not dangerous, distances. 10 miles away is a short distance to drive but three hours to walk. Even fifteen minutes on a bike is a tedious walking distance back if it breaks down. For how easy it is to put or keep some bottled water in a car, why not do that all the time?
This seems incredibly irresponsible when people could die from being stranded when the meter lies about being able to get home like the other commenter described.
Seems like so many Tesla owners drive like complete jerks.
Drive way too close to people (tailgating).
Drive way too fast all time, even in neighborhoods.
Drive way too aggressively.
Drive way too entitled.
I’ve seen some crazy stuff from people driving a Tesla. Driving on the shoulder when traffic backs up. Zipping around people to steal parking spots.
Tesla owners posting videos online of anyone that walks by their car.
We won’t park near a Tesla at all these days. I guess that campaign is working to their advantage.
2) male drivers
3) intelligent drivers that think rules don't apply to them (see: HACKER news)
4) affluent drivers, a lot of the BMW crowd
5) single drivers (if you have a kid, you slow down in general)
I wonder if they would have started responding if you motioned the tow truck driver to unload your car directly behind them, in a position that would obviously seriously inconvenience the other driver(s) or prevent them from leaving entirely...of course, also mentioning that was your plan to them loudly so you're sure they can hear.
Maybe the non-bed truck could've simply charged your car by pulling it :D
towing a car with regenerative braking seems like a great way to charge it! Elon needs to put somebody on this.
Sunk cost and all that
The battery icon is Miles of rated range, where “rated” means flat windless road at 60MPH and 70 degrees. Call it “standard” range if you will. The car has no idea where you’re going so it uses the standard calculation.
When you set a destination it can now (and does) factor in elevation change, speed on given roads, wind speed, wind direction, temperature along the route, etc etc etc and is more accurate.
So your least favorite feature is one you openly admit to not using properly? If you want laser precise range estimation set a destination ffs. Or, if you’re like most drivers you start every day with 200-300mi of range and unless you’re going out of state you don’t even think about range.
The thing I hate most about my car is that I spent $10K on "Full Self Driving" and rarely use it. It totally sucks and is definitely the worst $10K I've ever spent on anything. That money could have gone to a nice vacation somewhere and I would be happy about that. But no, every time I try out the FSD, I come away disappointed.
Also, I didn't realize how many restrictions there would be. You have to keep your hands applying constant tension on the steering wheel, and there's actually a camera that watches your eyes now. So you can't even eat a sandwich without the car freaking out and punishing you for looking at your food too long.
It's awesome!
ICE cars all show a percentage, and maybe additionally a mileage on newer cars. The fact that they threw that away is a little silly.
You state this as a fact, but it's completely incorrect. It has been an option since at least 2018 to change the indicator to percentage.
On the way back to the drop off autopilot tried to slam us into the Bentley next us! It had been traveling the same direction as us for like 20 minutes and when we passed through an intersection it just jerked hard left and I had to correct it manually. Possible injuries notwithstanding I’m sure that would have surpassed my insurance coverage, which I’ve intentionally gone way above minimums on.
Even if this and many other stories are just anecdotes, I could never imagine myself even testing this "auto-but-not-really-pilot" feature outside of a testing environment.
How do you folks dare to even try to use it? The risk is so big and the reward so tiny...
But after that no thanks.
Where were you that has a dozen chargers but no superchargers?
One other thing, for days on end the navigation would never “engage” just stuck on something like “Starting route.” So it never started conditioning the battery on the drive (and even chastised me for not doing so!?)
Finally, one morning all miles measurements were replaced with kilometers and it took watching a youtube video to figure out how to change it back.
Not owning a car only using rentals, I still think Tesla has the best and most intuitive UI. I can find everything easily, whereas in a SUVs from Skoda/VW/Audi/BMW/Renault/... it's hard to find things - at least for me.
What I do hate about the Model Ys we rented is the noise! Wind/wheel noise is as loud at 100km/h as a BMW at 150km/h - I guess they do this to safe weight and increase range, but it makes the trips very unpleasant.
Also how it randomly breaks in self driving (at least on a German Autobahn).
Or, you know, margins.
I think the best UI was before all the computer displays in cars. Everything operable without visual contact.
All that without the benefit of tactile feedback of knobs and switches.
Coasting on a flat surface at 35mph with a positive tailwind?
By convention, you are required to phrase this as "I love my Tesla, but..."
It sort of learns based on the immediately previous drive what the driving style is, and therefore what the range is.
but I have driven 35mph on slow city streets to make it to the next charging station when the one I was at was full with a line. (years ago)
I wish Tesla would allow you to hide the battery percentage entirely (unless it drops below a threshold).
Worth noting this is also common in ICE cars. Mine has it.
Interestingly the accuracy seems to get a lot better by the time I'm down to half a tank. I don't know if it's a sensor issue, or maybe my driving habits just change a lot when I have a full tank versus when I'm running low.
The type of driving and time I'm driving can also make a huge difference to my trip MPG - some trips I average about 10MPG, others closer to 40MPG. Generally speaking, low speed but clear rural roads get the best, followed by motorway, followed by pootering around the city. The absolute worst mileage is during the winter, when I might only be driving lots of short trips around town on a very cold engine, with the headlights on, in the rain. In that case, I might only get around 200 miles out of a tank.
Anyway, my point is that knowing the specifics of this trip's fuel consumption is a much easier problem than knowing how many miles it'll be until you next need to refuel.
However, the key difference is that my gas car can be filled up anywhere, and worst case I'd need to get a gas can. Running out of charge is a flatbed tow, that's a huge hassle. The range being accurate is a big deal on an electric!
Still more of a pain than a petrol can but better than a flatbed!
Range was horrible. We drove about 100 miles and spent a couple hours over several sessions at superchargers. The handling and turning radius sucked. The controls were frighteningly distracting and confusing. Sound in the cabin seemed very weird, probably due to the glass roof and noise cancelling system. Finally, for a dual motor, I expected a lot more acceleration. I drove a Chevy Bolt for a year and was surprised how heavy and sluggish the MY felt.
We ran the A/C most of the time. I was driving pretty conservatively with about 50/50 highway/city streets. I did try to show off the acceleration abilities once but didn't fully floor it. It's possible that, being a rental(although fairly new) the battery had taken some charging abuse.
Honestly I don't believe this. Requiring two hours sessions in 100 miles is an absolutely extraordinary claim, requiring something to be extremely wrong with the car in some way that didnt brick it entirely.
I now own a Long Range Model X. It is MUCH closer to the EPA mileage. I average ~330wh/m but I have a 100kwh battery, so much closer to a legitimate 300 mile range. Once again, doesn’t really make a different unless you happen to have an exact 275 mile trip. Either way, you’ll be stopping at a halfway supercharger to stay in optimal charge range (15-85%).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LWL90paufE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynCaTDR4rDQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFB6hsYXDiA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvwOa7TCd1E
Spoiler alert: Tesla models fare about as well, if not better, than their EV cousins, hitting around 80% of the stated range in the wild.
This is not true according to the very article we're discussing here, which across many analysis learned that three Tesla vehicles were the least-accurate (most-optimistic or most-deceptive, depending on your point of view).
Otherwise it looks to me that your rant is just for karma collecting.
Judging by this the EPA numbers it gives are accurate on average.
Consider:
- batteries lose, best case, about 10-20% of max range over a typical car ownership period
- not charging to the max is very often important to not getting bad degradation, so take another 10% off
- winter can take 10-20% range off
- driving at typical speed as opposed to the alleged ratings is probably another 10-20% reduced range
- headwinds, air conditioning/heating, and other factors can remove another 10-20%.
So suddenly, some 300 mile rated range is actually 150 miles of real world range. So here in the midwest, with underinvested charging infrastructure and biiiiiiggggg states and rural density, a 400 mile range really is pretty much required for any functional long distance driving.
We've never owned a gas vehicle that met it's EPA range and the Tesla is no different. No one takes EPA MPG * GALLONS of gas and expects it to be a real life estimate of range.
Wind resistance increases EXPONENTIALLY with speed. Drive a little over the speeds the EPA used to determine range, and the observed range will drop significantly as a percentage when compared to the EPA range for any vehicle.
If you do have a Tesla, you'll quickly find out that the trip computer is very accurate. The worst I've seen is a cold January day in Wisconsin (-10F) while on a road trip with a head wind. In that scenario, the trip computer was off by 7% mostly due to the head wind. In the summer, it is spot on usually within 1 - 2%.
Why is this exactly? It's been true - MPG is lower than estimated - of every vehicle I've owned too except for my most recent, a '23 MX-5 (i.e. a sports car, which I tend to drive at higher RPMs and in lower gears.) I'm getting spot-on or a little above the EPA estimated on the car I'd least expect it.
(edited to clarify "it's been true")
My fuel efficiency is horrid and advertised to be horrid.
I normally get 21mpg combined, which is really not so far off. Lots of highway driving usually gets the average up to 23.5mpg. With that worst-case number, across a full tank of gas (16.5 gallons x 2 mpg), I'm shorted about 33 miles, or 8%.
Is that pretty comparable to what Tesla users see? The article claims it's much higher:
> Tesla was fined earlier this year by South Korean regulators who found the cars delivered as little as half their advertised range in cold weather. Another recent study found that three Tesla models averaged 26% below their advertised ranges.
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/browseList.jsp
I have a 10 year old Mazda 3 and the MPG estimate is on target: 32 combined 28 city 39 highway estimate and I get 36 mpg. User average is 35.2.
And the power required to move against the air is the cube, not the square!
It seems to have become fashionable to say "exponentially" or even "EXPONENTIALLY" when you mean it's a rapidly increasing function, but to the technically-minded, whom I would hope to find on HN, there is still a clear-cut difference between exponential and polynomial.
Because gas stations are still far more common than fast chargers. We'll get there with EV charging, but right now range does matter, especially if you routinely see half of what was advertised.
1) Everyday Driving / Commuting: Much like an ICE vehicle where one thinks about 1/2 tank, 1/4 tank, etc... we think about percentages. For us, a round-trip to the in-laws is 50% in the summer and 60% in the winter, for example. Commuting round trip is ~15% in the winter, and ~12% in the summer. This combined with the fact that the car starts every morning charged to 80% means that we really don't ever worry about super charging in our day-to-day life.
2) Road Trips: The navigation software on the tesla automatically add charging stops where needed, and critically, it is very accurate when predicting range as a percentage when it knows your destination. We typically charge until it say we'll reach our destination/charging stops with 10%. That reserve has always been more than enough even on 1000 - 2000 mile road trips.
My general advice to anyone with a Tesla who has range anxiety: 1) Put the round trip into the trip computer. (e.g. Home => Place I Want To Go To => Home) 2) Always make sure you'll get to your next charging stop with 10 - 15% left according to the trip computer. 3) Relax and enjoy the auto-pilot :)
But I do think we're not to the point where we can just nonchalantly hit the road without really thinking about charging. It is part of the planning in more detail than I'd usually spend with a gas car. Totally manageable, but still.
Right now it varies a lot where in the world you are. I don’t have exact numbers but I have a feeling there’s more fast charging locations around me than gas stations. (There may be more gas pumps but it doesn’t matter because most EV owners here don’t use fast charging as their main method of charging)
I guess this is only true in like 2-3 countries in the world right now. But it’s changing very rapidly.
It’s a bad idea in a gas car too, my friends that have run out of gas did so because of driving on E.
Though at least with gas it’s easier to bring it to the car.
It’s a wonder to me that anyone would ever trust anything Elon Musk ever says about anything. He’s a proven liar and creates an openly hostile, negative culture wherever he goes. I feel sorry for people who are caught up in his lies, either customers or employees or people who work closely with him and have to suffer his tantrums. There was a point I admired him, but that is long past.
For years Tesla made cars that were disproportionately appealing to people with concerns about the environment, a population that skews liberal/progressive. Those on the other side of the political world view might like the cars too- especially technophiles— but there certainly a large contingent that are skeptical to anything with a primary appeal of being “environmentally friendly”. Then comes the current culture-war driven political ecosystem, and all musk has to do is tweet some controversial things that might resonate with some contingents on the political right and all of a sudden those individuals may feel more comfortable buying cars from a guy who speaks their language.
I certainly don’t know if that was Musk’s deliberate strategy though, but it wouldn’t shock me if his actions in that way are partly “him” and partly him leaning into a role of social prominence that resonates with a consumer population previously less likely to buy his cars.
It would be interesting if I could fine surveys of automobile brand customer bases broken down by political affiliation, and if it’s shifted Tesla’s at all in recent years.
The Q5 advertises 28mlg on the highway but i consistently hit 30+ here
And the wagon hits 35mpg on the highway very often even though it only advertises 26. It actually turns off 2 of the 6 cylinders when it senses that it can.
The only oddity that I have observed is in my current car, a Lexus hybrid crossover just barely meets its city rating in town while easily beating the city rating (which is higher since it's a hybrid) on the highway. Not that I'm complaining, but it's not what I expected from my first hybrid vehicle.
Car and Driver's EPA range versus real world highway tests:
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a43657072/evs-fall-short-e...
EVs are quite different to ICE when it comes to EPA range ratings.
I've had problems with the passenger side airbag not enabling, and turn signal not working. Both scary issues. Made appointments with the support. Both were cancelled outright by them (!). They tried to convince me that there was no problem, and it was all due to the way I use the car. They seemed to try everything to get out of appointments. My wife had to use the back seat for a month while I argued with them.
Eventually both problems were resolved by software updates, proving that the problems were indeed on their side.
She must have enjoyed having a chauffeur for a month...
Plenty of Luxury sedans meanwhile have terrible back seats that basically cannot be used, because it's a luxury car, not a family car.
Do they?
Is the back seat safer than the front seat, even if the front seat airbag doesn't deploy? I know recent tests show the back seat is a good bit less safe, and I think it's primarily due to most manufacturers not using the same seat belt technology as they do in the front, but maybe some of that is the lack of a front airbag.
https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/tesla/model-y-4-door-su...
Seriously, sorry you've had such a bad experience with Tesla service.
This isn't entirely unreasonable. Most people whose battery is at 80% aren't going to be depleting it in the next few hours, so say factoring the present cold morning might produce overly pessimistic guesses.
They are being aggressive for sure, but this article strikes me as pretty biased against Tesla. The article concedes that most of these customers have no range problems -- they are probably driving in cold at 80 MPH blasting their heat to 70 degrees wondering why their range is so poor -- even though it is entirely expected behavior.
It’s always unreasonable in something like this to present knowingly inaccurate data when accurate data is available. As others have pointed out, Teslas do seem perfectly capable of doing this based on their performance when estimating a particular route. It’s also something other brands do better, so even if there was an argument to be made that Tesla didn’t have the data, it would still be the case that they should have it.
It is also not pessimistic to give an estimate in the conditions you outline: It’s accurate. Whether you’re going to be driving that long is irrelevant because Tesla should not be defaulting to some probabilistic behavior guess prior to even starting the car or entering a route. It should default to “hey, I see you’re driving your car. If you keep driving this is your range”. It shouldn’t default to “I don’t know how long you’ll be driving so I’ll just give a range estimate that assumed you’ll drive for a short time now and then more later and maybe later the conditions will provide better range, so let’s use that number”
I’m not sure why Tesla would be defended in this point by anyone when other EV’s do this more accurately and consistently. If it was a general problem and no one could do it any better then by all means it would be unreasonable to complain about Tesla, it would simply be a limit of the technology. But it’s not.
Tesla still somehow benefits from its innovators / clean company reputation, but at this pace it won't be long before agencies start to act on what's become much more than just 'optimistic marketing'.
It's now pretty common in my circle to hear people say they'll pay a premium to not own a Tesla. Primarily because of lots of bad experiences with build quality/repairs, but also because there are now lots of high quality alternatives. Namely Rivian and Lucid, but also the legacy automakers (two friends bought mach-es recently and there's a smattering of F-150 lightnings.)
The fact that Musk has adopted the public persona of a crazy uncle who doesn't get Thanksgiving invites -- and is heavily associated with the Tesla brand -- doesn't help either.
Anyway. We are looking for reliability and imagine my surprise when Kia, of all brands, came out king of generally affordable reliability. Plus their EV reviews reasonably well.
A lot has changed in 10 years for vehicles I guess…
And it's all fine if you drive your vehicle for <150,000km (100,000miles) and then sell or move on, but my experience with them is that after that they start to have mechanical parts issues. Which makes sense because they've effectively optimized for the most common consumer vehicle ownership pattern. But.
IDK about Kia, except that they're doing pretty well on the EV front compared to other legacies. But in general, 10 years is at least one product cycle, so I guess it's not that surprising that reputations-vs-reality mismatches appear on that time frame. It is weird though.
If you think about the CEOs of major corporations, the only ones who are personally memorable for the public are founders. How many exceptions can you think of, memorable personalities that were hired as CEOs or rose to become CEO of established companies? Lee Iacocca is one, barely. Carly Fiorina manages to be forgettable even though she ran for president. I'm sure there are more exceptions, but not enough to invalidate the rule.
So why can flamboyant or quirky people like Musk or Zuckerberg not get hired as CEOs of huge corporations? At least part of the reason is that being bland and forgettable is part of the job requirements. It makes it that much harder for the public to remember the sleazy things they learn about a company. A crime committed by a faceless company is like a natural disaster. A crime committed by Tesla is easier to see as human evil, because we can see how Musk revels in his unaccountability. There's a story: evil person did evil thing. And an obvious corollary: evil person must be prevented from doing more evil! If Tesla had replaced Musk with a faceless professional CEO, there would be no story, just "bad thing happened for inscrutable reasons."
Lucid are expensive, but their entire product line is basically a Model X competitor and prices are comparable.
Are they also in the market for an electric car? I said I would pay a premium not to own a Tesla, largely because of Musk. And then it came time to buy an EV: and there just isn't a vehicle under $100,000 that performs better under 100mph. And range? The Kia EV6 GT, which costs $5k more than the Model 3 Performance (or $12,500 because it doesn't qualify for the tax credit), is slower 0-60, has only 200 mile range. The Model 3 could have 26% lower range than advertised and still have 10% more range. So .5 second faster 0-60, 10% longer range, for $12,500 less.
I only know three people who own Teslas, but all three have little positive to say about them, and one of them will tell you at length about how he regrets buying his if you let him.
It's for that reason, not my dislike of Musk, that if I were in the market for an EV I wouldn't even consider a Tesla.
I'm a lot more excited about Hyundai/Kia and Ford.
> Don't get me started on their "environmentalist adventure vehicle" marketing that's putting 7000-pound cars on mountain trails.
Car adventuring as an ends unto itself is something I just don't get, and since I can't really say anything constructive or nice about the entire activity/scene the EV component of it is a bit of a red herring.
AFAICT, R1T is a decent e-F150 alternative if you need to tow. Buy, yeah, driving through wilderness for no particular reason is kind of idiotic.
For example, if you get 10 tesla cars of the same model, do the ranges differ?
If you get 1 car and 10 different drivers, do some drivers get the advertised range while others don't?
If you disassemble the battery packs, do you find some bad/degraded cells in cars with reduced range, or is this a design fault?
Do drivers that have trouble have inefficient mods, like roof racks, big wheels, etc?
There is very little you will diagnose on a modern car that the onboard computer isn't already aware of.
Therefore... the idea of a team of remote diagnosis people to fix most issues without a service appointment makes perfect sense.
As does the idea of having the analysis done automatically beforehand so the human doesn't have to wait.
Uber is still a publicly traded company, despite explicitly starting up by just ignoring and bypassing existing regulation.
The US is so anti-consumer it will never relevantly punish a business making money.
> [one customer] ultimately concluded there is nothing wrong with his car. The problem, he said, was that Tesla is overstating its performance
As I read this, either his car was defective or he was lied to to convince him to make a $XX,000 purchase. It seems that Tesla should be facing some form of fraud-based lawsuit over the lies selling the car or treating it under warranty, right?
Or, more likely, when looking at that big a settlement, we can find a lawyer who works on contingency.
Now I do think that the EPA ratings are inadequate and inconsistent. Those could use some improvement to better reflect real world driving conditions.
Personally I think the EPA should revamp the rating system. I want to see every manufacturer forced to admit what range to expect if we use 90% of the battery capacity, at 70 mph, in 32F ambient temperature with climate control set to 68F. The only time people really care deeply about range is on the interstate, so the range numbers really ought to reflect that.
Meanwhile, what difference does it make if most Tesla customers do X? Tesla now has enough customers that hurting 10% of them is a major impact.
EPA process 2: Run tests and justify your numbers, essentially there to grandfather in range estimates from pre-2020
And buyers should be made aware they will be using only 70% (10 to 80) of the battery between highway charger stops. Charging gets really slow after 80%.
Range is of course always going to be an estimate. Marketing is always going to be a battle of who has the bigger number. Having people schedule an appointment to fix their "broken" cars that can only go 470 instead of 500km is of course going to be a waste of time and money.
I'm part of a facebook group for tesla owners and literally every day this week there has been a post that goes something like "I left my house with 500km, drove 1km and now it says 497km. Should I schedule an appointment?" With the common advice being to switch to % instead of distance and remember that it's an estimate.
While I think Tesla (and most manufacturers) could do a better job at education, and of course having empathy for people who have spent a lot of money on something and worried it's defective, I don't think anything in this article is as damning as it sounds.
> He expected to get something close to the electric sport sedan’s advertised driving range: 353 miles on a fully charged battery.
> He soon realized he was sometimes getting less than half that much range
We’re not talking about a couple of miles here or there.
And if Tesla discovered that range issues (even if entirely based around customer perception) were a widespread enough issue to set up a team specifically to address it, that team said nothing publicly and instead cancelled service appointments without explanation… that’s absolutely newsworthy, whether you consider it a “hit piece” or not.
> Inside the Nevada team’s office, some employees celebrated canceling service appointments by putting their phones on mute and striking a metal xylophone, triggering applause from coworkers who sometimes stood on desks. The team often closed hundreds of cases a week and staffers were tracked on their average number of diverted appointments per day.
I mean... c'mon.
If the predicted range ALWAYS decreases by 3km after driving 1km, then the prediction is bs.
But as discussed, manufacturers of course have a strong incentive to make these predictions very biased to overestimate the range.
Either he has VERY BAD driving habits, or he's driving in some extreme scenarios.
I have a Model 3 Performance that's estimated to have a 299 mile range, IIRC. I've driven at 75 mph in 30F weather, and it reduced my range to about 230 miles. That's just shy of 25%, which while is certainly a significant reduction, is not the >50% the guy was dealing with.
Do people think they'll get the full EPA range at 70+ mph with the heat or A/C on? I always assumed EPA ranges were done on flat terrain at 60 mph with climate controls off and expected any deviation from that to reduce my range.
That all said, getting over 50% less than estimate range is pretty bad, and unless they're driving fast in super cold weather up hill, it really points to a potentially faulty battery that Tesla is trying to get out of replacing.
That likely depends partly on what car they are coming from. Some manufacturers overstate EPA range, others understate it. If they're coming from a Ford EcoBoost or a 15 year old Hyundai, they probably don't expect to achieve EPA ratings at all. If they're coming from a Toyota or a VW, then yes, they probably do think they'll get the full EPA range at 70+ mph with hvac on.
My old Toyota ICE will happily meet the EPA ratings at 70mph with the AC running full blast. If I slow down to 65mph and turn off the AC, I can easily get 10% more range than the EPA estimates would suggest.
"This 1 guy gets 50% of the estimated range and the problem is so wide spread tesla started a team to address it!"
is really different from
"Many customers are surprised they get less range than it says on the site and for a very extreme example, one guy gets 50% less (under uncertain circumstances)"
My 2016 ICE car's "miles left" meter is accurate to +/- 2 miles from the moment I top up the tank (80% highway driving, 20% hilly city and rolling country roads).
IMO, accurately telling the vehicle operator how many miles of juice you have left is a KPI, as it informs when you'll need to plan for refueling.
Having driven an EV for a few weeks in identical conditions, this inaccuracy is probably the major contributor to "range anxiety". I have no idea whether I'll need to recharge in 60 miles or in 25 miles, and that's totally unacceptable in most parts of the US (where there aren't available chargers every 5 miles of your trip).
No way. That’d be accurate to under 1% - well within the variation you’ll get just from different air densities (temperature, pressure, humidity). Forget about A/C on or off, tire pressure, etc.
It’s gotta be tricking you somehow.
I regularly pull off the highway to fill up with around "20 miles" left, when there are ~90 miles left in the trip (e.g. it was dead-on accurate for the last 160 miles), according to the GPS. I agree that it's spooky.
I think, when making estimates for "miles left", our car must be doing some calculation like (rolling estimate of mpg) * (gallons left).
It's also possible that it keeps a buffer of ~1 gallon of gas that it never tells us about, when quoting the total range, and it eats into this buffer without telling us. There's certainly a bunch of tricks they could be pulling off.
The point is, from a driver's point of view, I have a trustworthy number. If they need to pull off some tricks to achieve that trustworthiness (e.g. low-balling total range), that's OK with me.
With EVs, "total range" is a marketing term, so they have a strong incentives to fib about it. Unfortunately, this makes the vehicles worse to operate.
I am fairly confident that something similar is happening with my Honda. I thought I was going to run it dry, but then it just sat at 10 miles remaining for at least another 15-20 miles before I reached a station.
This is quite likely. My car supposedly has an 11-gallon gas tank, and if I refuel right when I hit 0 miles remaining then it only takes 10 gallons of fuel to fill the tank.
This has been true in Toyotas since at least 2004, so I would hope it could be true for a "Luxury" car from a "tech" company.
Astronomers also don't see into the future but some basic calculations can let them make very accurate predictions about where the planets will be in a month.
What the heck is your point?
No, you can’t. Because I might go uphill or downhill. It might rain. It might be hot or cold.
The car is doing something tricky (aka lying) as discussed above.
To the best of my understanding, this is what most modern ICE cars do when they give you the "miles remaining" metric. I don't know how else they could be so outwardly accurate.
This falls under the category of "trick", but it's actually a trick that helps me by allowing me to plan my trips better.
Giving the "current estimate of actual miles remaining", as a multi-variate function of all the things you mention, is actually less helpful and more stress-inducing – even while it's technically providing more information, it's information that isn't very helpful.
But that’s off topic; this article is about the car not meeting its EPA range, because the EPA test is very synthetic[1] and doesn’t match most people’s driving habits. I find InsideEVs’ “70 mph range test”[2] series to be far closer to my personal experience.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/testing-national-vehicle-a...
[2] https://cdn.motor1.com/images/custom/bev-ievs-70mph-range-te...
An old ICE has to run within an RPM range, so the top end on MPG is set below infinite, and the bottom end is limited by the time to ramp the engine to its max consumption.
Electric vehicles have neither of these issues. On a downhill run that is long enough you could in theory fully recharge your battery, and you can always send full power (and resultant fuel consumption) to the engine.
On top of this EVs are operating at much higher efficiencies so the effective size of the tank is smaller.
This is not to say range estimation couldn’t be improved, only that it is a much more challenging model with EVs.
Such a road would by identifiable by the car's GPS.
Btw, this "range anxiety" term, is it designed to make people seem crazy for wanting a long-range car?
It refers to the anxiety people have about not having enough "range" left in their car to reach their target destination. The symptom is looking at your "% battery remaining" every 5 seconds, and cursing your car when it drops "3 miles" of range in 1 mile of idealized highway travel. Unfortunately, it's a well-founded anxiety.
You're right, by characterizing the problem with a focus on the person (with anxiety) instead of the (misleading) vehicle, it serves the manufacturer more than the consumer.
> The term "range anxiety" was first reported in the press on September 1, 1997, in the San Diego Business Journal by Richard Acello referring to worries of GM EV1 electric car drivers. On July 6, 2010, General Motors filed to trademark the term, stating it was for the purpose of "promoting public awareness of electric vehicle capabilities"
Can't think of any other product where the user gets blamed like this. I really do have "MPG anxiety" in my ICE car, always checking the gauge, but nobody calls it that.
Tesla -could- do it but chooses not to. Put it in trip mode and it's pretty close to dead-on. Look at the consumption page and it's pretty accurate there too. Tesla elects not to use this already available information, because it would consistently show people a lower number than what the web page did when they ordered the car.
He soon realized he was sometimes getting less than half that much range, particularly in cold weather – such severe underperformance that he was convinced the car had a serious defect.”
He simply does not understand how batteries and power delivery work. Driving through the Rocky mountains will reduce mpg significantly for an internal combustion engine as well. Colder temperatures require a heater and less efficient for batteries due to increased viscosity of electrolyte fluid. All a perfect storm for poor EV performance.
Much like MPG is denoted as city vs highway.
Do you mean it will reduce the mpg because of reduced air density, or because of temperature as well? I thought the efficiency of an ICE was dependent on the difference in temperature it creates between the combustion and the coldest part of the cycle. It seems efficiency would improve in cold temperatures because less energy would be wasted cooling the engine since the incoming air is doing that.
It should be giving you the more realistic estimate as soon as possible, so that you can plan better, rather than misleading you for half your trip.
1. The range is set by the EPA. They are the ones that do the testing and validate the claims. The EPA should fix their range guidelines for EVs. Maybe a summer and winter range would be more appropriate?
2. Tesla should have a better UI for range, but really they should just show the percentage. Acting like it is a conspiracy is a bit extreme. They are just doing EPA Range * SOC. Without knowing all of the variables of a drive, the estimated range is going to be wrong no matter what you do. People think that their way of being wrong is better than Tesla's. Maybe they're right but the best estimate is still when navigating to a destination, and this estimate Tesla does quite well.
3. Tesla is cancelling the service appointments because there is nothing they can do to "fix" it. So why waste the time with a service appointment? They are just going to run the same diagnostics they ran remotely. Their software does a fantastic job explaining where your range is going. (https://www.teslaoracle.com/2022/09/26/tesla-new-energy-cons...)
From the third paragraph
I'm confused how anyone thinks it should do otherwise.
Further, EPA only tests at default settings. Some makers (ahem Tesla) default everything to the most range maximizing settings.
Next, car makers can market UP TO the EPA range, but can also market below. Tesla clearly advertises every mile they can, while the Germans undersell their range. You can see this across the board in the real-world range tests by InsideEVs, etc.
Holistically I think having a single EPA range number is wrong given how different highway & city range is for EVs. Just like ICE cars report highway & city MPG, EVs should report range in these 2 buckets.
General range barely ever matters anyway. ICE drivers thinking of going electric always ask about range, but over a certain minimum level of range what really matters is the estimation accuracy for a specific drive and the confidence that a planned charging location will be working as expected. If both of these are very good, the GPS travel time estimates will always be accurate and you don't really need to think about anything, which is how most people approach driving these days anyway: just follow the GPS.
The next thing that matters are the distance of chargers from the average route (we need more at interstate rest stops!) and the availability of 220V chargers at any place you will spend the night. The latter is the weakest right now, IMHO, but it's improving as more people go electric.
YMMV.
In 1-2 years, I'm hopeful other automakers, including MB, BMW, and Audi, will come out with new EVs that are truly competitive on all these fronts vs Tesla.
My oldest Tesla is now three years old, and it still looks and feels new. I could never say that about the BMWs, MBs, and Porsches I've owned over the years.
Only Ford/Lincoln, Audi, and Land Rover are worse—all notoriously unreliable brands.
Those findings are consistent with my experience.
Consistent with my experience.
Here is a minor list of things which will reduce range pretty significantly:
- Driving over 50 MPH
- Using the AC
- Using the heat
- Driving in extreme cold or extreme heat
- Driving in an area with a lot of hills. (From what I can tell regenerative braking makes up less than it loses for a given hill. If anyone can correct me here, let me know)
- Accelerating more than necessary
- Not making full use of regenerative braking
- Driving on the highway rather than around town (see the 50 MPH comment)
Are these concessions OK? Is it just a matter of better education and more honest marketing? That’s sort of for everyone to decide collectively. One thing that is for sure is that EVs have a totally different set of quirks and limitations than ICE vehicles, and that will have to be adjusted for one way or another. It’s also worth noting that most of the things listed above _also_ adversely affect ICE vehicles, however not necessarily as much, or it’s not felt directly because getting gas is very convenient.
It also strikes me that anything which adversely affects MPG in an ICE vehicle can also be said to “reduce range.” You’re losing miles off your current tank of gas. Presumably because the range is so small, and recharge opportunities are so limited, this affects people in EVs more strongly than in ICE vehicles. Perhaps if both were improved (battery capacity and charging infrastructure) then these concerns would evaporate.
When 80% of your energy goes to waste than all the incidentals like AC and especially heating just does not surface as a contributing factor.
When however 80-90% of energy goes to driving, then speed and all the accessories start having a real impact.
It also shows how energy dense gasoline/diesel are that a 50kg tank will outperform 400kg batteries even with the 4-5x efficiency difference.
Running the AC a lot in an ICE car can definitely impact efficiency. I get like a 17% difference in mileage if I don't have to run my AC.
Bit of a sarcastic take: apparently also use of indicators.
That would greatly depend on the town one is picturing. In pretty much any neighborhood in LA, there's no way you're going to sustain a speed of 50 mph for any reasonable period of time without frequently stopping at intersections, your usual traffic congestion, pedestrians wandering into the street, other drivers making idiotic maneuvers, etc. No way is your mileage going to be better on surface streets even if you do your best to reach 50 mph but not exceed it. Frequently braking and accelerating requires more gas than will be eaten up by driving at a constant speed of 65 mph.
That can be the case (eg on road trips) but usually isn't.
Why not just always give the more precise estimates?
Why would you want your previous driving habits to affect the base level estimation? Your driving today could be vastly different, and then you would be here complaining about how wrong it was and the range anxiety you got when the car vastly underestimated your range because it assumed you were in 40 mph traffic when today you were late and speeding 80 mpg down the highway.
Because I could still just look at how much charge I had, the same way I look at how much gas I have left in the tank of my car. My old Mazda 2 gives estimated miles left in the tank based on a dead simple math calculation of average mpg for the previous X number of miles driven with only two inputs; gas consumption rate and miles driven. No time machine needed because it is an estimate and I am an adult with a functioning brain. I already know how big my gas tank is. I already know what my "EPA" mileage is. Telling me those things is not giving me an estimate, its just reminding me of what's printed in the owners manual. It is pathetic that my old cheap car gives me an actual estimate using actual data from my actual car and Tesla doesn't...until its under 50% and then suddenly its ok.
Which is how it calculates it's range, and also how my 2004 toyota calculated range. The maximum range figures consistently lowered over the course of time I owned it as the engine got old and less efficient! It went from consistently having a max range of 420ish miles to consistently having a max range of 380 miles over twenty years!
Funny that old stuffy mid 2000s toyota could manage that on a car that cost $25k, but legendary tech luxury car maker Tesla can't
>> That only makes sense if there's strong correlation between the first 50% of a charge and the second 50% of a charge, but NOT an equally strong correlation between the previous charge cycle and the current charge cycle.
But "That", I mean using optimistic estimates at the beginning of a charge cycle but a model based on historical driving about half way through a charge cycle.
There's no reason, prime facie, that future discharge rate should be better-correlated intra-charge than inter-charge, especially for recent charges, and especially if you have lots of historical charge/discharge cycle data for both the machine, the geographic area, and the individual driver.
The question is not "why not be perfect". The question is "why not do inter-charge forecasting the same way you do intra-charge forecasting".
Like many EVs, the "fuel gauge" number is based on the EPA estimate and the navigation range is based on accurate predictions. It's like this in the Polestar too.
They recently stated giving estimates in distance, but it's clearly marked as an unreliable estimation.
Looks like Tesla has another huge communications and UX issue, and not a mechanics (electric?) one. They have to get their designers in a room, fire the management, and ask them to actually design stuff for humans.
With the superchargers, range doesn’t really have a material effect anymore and most of the time the network isn’t necessary anyway.
It’s not a real issue.
It’s been this way for a couple years, really not something necessary to think about.
Add in at home or destination charging and it’s even less relevant since you need fewer stations near areas where people live.
I spend more of my time recharging my ICE than I do my EV. It's way less convenient and I never know what the cost will be tomorrow. Meanwhile my electricity is on a fixed rate contract measured in years.
Home/work plug-in is amazing, and an underrated QOL improvement over ICE, but it’s just not relevant to most of the concern around EV range.
Range concern comes from either not having a charger available as a matter of daily business (street parking) or from frequently going on very long drives.
But this use case covers the majority of drivers in the US.
The vast majority of people I've personally talked to concerned about range could absolutely charge at home and rarely drove more than even 100 miles.
I definitely understand though that EVs don't currently cover everyone's use cases, and I'm not entirely certain they'll cover everyone's needs in the end. But most people are pretty bad about actually thinking about what they actually need, and many car buyers aren't buying based on their realistic uses.
If you got a Tesla you'd get a better sense for how many superchargers there are.
What you're saying is relevant though and why until recently I didn't really consider non-Tesla EVs an option to recommend if it was your only car (though now that Tesla has pivoted to opening up the superchargers to other car companies this is less of an issue).
https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/electricity_locations.html#/an...
Even better, strategically Tesla created the "NACS" or North American Charging Standard which is a clever name for their far superior Tesla charger. They also pivoted from the superchargers being an exclusive reason to buy a Tesla to licensing them for other EVs - now Ford is onboard, Electrify America is switching to NACS, GM too.
They pulled off this switch perfectly in a way most companies fail to do (ex: blackberry bbm) and as a result their investment in these will remain dominant and everyone will be unified around a superior standard (the EU charging standard CCS plug is a committee designed monster that's worse categorically). They're also continuing to expand.
I love manual transmission sports cars, but EVs today are just superior for regular use and Teslas are the best option for most people (especially when considering their lower cost), putting subjective opinions about their mercurial leader aside. There's a reason the Model Y was the best selling car in 2023 Q1 across all categories globally [0].
HN has historically been poor at objectively evaluating this sort of thing especially about Tesla.
[0]: https://cleantechnica.com/2023/05/31/best-selling-car-worldw....
Are they collecting fees or is there some reason bp or Shell or Exxon couldn’t just add NACS chargers to all their real estate and steal share from Superchargers?
I have yet to see any explanation as to how the switch to NACS is actually good for Tesla, other than testimony to the standard design being better than CCS?
They also charge a higher rate to non-Tesla EVs.
The other benefit is if they continued to refuse access they could have ended up like blackberry. The other companies would have adopted the CCS standard and (eventually) would have a competitive network. Then what was once a Tesla advantage would become more of a liability as the transition to EVs gets more complete.
Few companies make this strategic shift at the right time imo and I think Tesla did. By leveraging their advantage now it’s a win win.
I agree that the alternative was worse, but that doesn't make this a particularly good outcome?
Even ignoring that, I think it's still a good outcome for Tesla - they effectively own and control a large percentage of all charging infrastructure in the world. Every other car company adopting their standard means they have a lot of customers that will pay them to charge at their stations (even independent of the licensing).
That plus avoiding a future where without making this transition they could end up isolated with an obscure and incompatible charger that would eventually become a liability rather than an advantage.
> they effectively own and control a large percentage of all charging infrastructure in the world. Every other car company adopting their standard means they have a lot of customers that will pay them to charge at their stations (even independent of the licensing).
This is the argument I find interesting... IMO if everything does centralize on NACS, nothing (AFAICT) is stopping the really big players like bp, Shell, Exxon, etc from just outfitting their already-existing real estate, already-existing infrastructure with NACS. The petro-companies are ludicrously well capitalized, very sophisticated, and have tons of baked-in advantages. Memes aside, they're also already the biggest players in the energy transition anyway. Basically if I were investing in Tesla, I'd be curious why this doesn't just create a great opening for the huge huge players to mop the floor.
Again, consumers (and the environment, probably) win here, so I'm happy about it!
P.S. Also thank you for entertaining a thoughtful convo. Usually this question just attracts zealots and it doesn't get me closer to an answer. You did -- so thank you!
Fair point about existing players, I just tend to discount old large companies being able to execute for the same reasons startups tend to eat their lunch. Why haven’t they done it already? Why haven’t they started even now?
Why did it require Tesla to build EVs? Why did existing car companies ignore Tesla for 20 years until they were way behind?
Probably the innovators dilemma - it’s rare existing providers are much of a threat.
It's good for Tesla because it costs them a lot less to have everyone else shift to NACS than for them to redeploy ten thousand Supercharger stalls with CCS1.
Honestly the only losers in the continental shift to NACS are those with significant existing CCS1 investments, like Electrify America. And I don't see why they deserve any sympathy from the likes of Ford and GM. The poor reliability of many CCS1 networks has been an albatross around the neck of Tesla's competitors.
I agree, I have no sympathy for CCS1 investments etc, NACS seems superior and it looks like consumers writ large will win etc etc., I'm just wondering how any of this adds up to a bullish case for Tesla and I'm afraid your comment doesn't clarify that. It just illustrates that the alternative would've been more bearish than this one (which I agree).
It also plays into the perception that Tesla are technology leaders the EV sector. Which is a big deal if EV technology is the future of the the automotive sector.
I’ll probably take 10 long car trips a year often for camping but sometimes visiting friends. I know that most of the areas I’m driving through when I go east do not have the infrastructure at all and even if they do they’re still a hassle to use and add a bunch of time to a long drive. My mom had an EV so I have experience with range anxiety and the inconveniences of not running the AC, etc.
It’s a bad purchase in my opinion much better to get a hybrid
Or they just don't road trip when they get out of town, or "getting out of town" to them is within 100mi or so, or the corridors where they do tend to travel is well served with chargers, etc.
I don't know about you, but I don't usually tend to pack my car with me when I go on an airplane. Maybe you do?
Having an EV can absolutely be a viable choice for these people.
There is a 0% chance you'll convince me that the Tesla is the superior experience. It's not even remotely close.
Granted Teslas aren't really the "nice" EVs these days anyway and not all of the badness of the Tesla experience was due to range/charging issues.
Either way, your NYC <-> Raliegh trip would be like 26 minutes of charging on an 8 hour road trip. Do you really not stop for somewhat that kind of time for an 8 hour road trip? You don't stop to eat for a minute, you race through the gas station as fast as possible, etc? I know for me I'd probably want to stop a couple of times sitting for eight hours.
You're really arguing the average driver frequently makes nearly non-stop eight hour road trips?
https://abetterrouteplanner.com/?plan_uuid=34769a63-3845-47a...
I'm definitely not talking about which car is the most luxurious or comfortable. There's a lot of subjectivity to styling. I'm not really a fan of the Tesla style, but it's not like all EVs are Tesla's and they definitely don't all cost $90k.
I said that "most of your driving doesn't happen on road trips" is not a super convincing response to "I don't want to buy an EV because it'll make road trips a pain in the ass." Because, as I said, people buy cars for the totality of their driving.
The NYC <> Raleigh trip would add 26 minutes in a Hyundai Ioniq 6, which I'll note does in fact surprise me in a positive direction (and also thank you for sharing the cool website!)
In a Model S it'd add an hour, which yes I do find to be an unacceptable cost, and a wildly unacceptable one for the price and comfort difference.
The car question obviously contains many many dimensions. Adding 26 minutes of time is pretty acceptable IMO, but doing so for another $6k of car purchase price and downgrading from a super comfortable SUV to a tiny, tiny sedan... it becomes less acceptable again.
A Volvo XC40, which is pretty close comfort level to the Acura RDX, for example, would add 1.5 hours while keeping price roughly constant.
P.S. to level-set, I actively tried to buy an EV or hybrid. I loved having a plug-in hybrid when all my driving was around town and parked at home in the evening. I agree far, far more people can and should be driving EVs than currently do, but I'm pointing out that the multidimensional problem of car selection is not as simple as "there are lots of chargers now" or "just rent something else for road trips."
https://abetterrouteplanner.com/?plan_uuid=abfe9af0-a19f-466...
And I do agree, not everyone's needs are fully solved by EVs now and may not in the future. But so many people hear about range being an issue that they assume it is for them, when in reality an absolutely massive chunk of not the majority of passenger cars on the roads can easily be swapped for an with zero negative to the owner's life. But people often actually think they've got to have a car that can go 1,000mi in a single charge otherwise it's just a massive inconvenience even though they may drivea 500mi trip once a year if even that.
+1, I was worried about range before I bought a Model Y, but charging at home and trip planner I never even think about range anxiety at all.
My point is that it isn't as simple as an average due to the massive temperature sensitivity. It applies to ICE cars too, but it certainly isn't as noticeable as the engine allows a wider range of temperatures. Ironically the EV is proposed as something to battle climate change, but it is much more susceptible to it's effects.
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/hotweather.shtml
Personally my ICE goes from ~22-23mpg to ~19 when it's like 100F outside. That's a 17% drop in mileage. My EV has had a bit of a hit but not nearly as much, <10%. I can even offset that a bit more by ensuring I plug in and precondition before I leave, meanwhile my ICE will always burn it's gas to cool down even if I had remote start.
Heating is usually "free" energy-wise though since the gas motor is just leaking massive amounts of heat all the time.
It ought to quickly adapt to weather pattern changes quickly enough while not being too "jumpy".
My ICE car can display MPG and distance to empty it seems to do something like that instead of displaying some random preconfigured metric.
As said in the article, these are not complaints, but service appointments. Creating a team to handle these unnecessary appointments is completely normal. There's nothing secret about this team.
$15k to have them out in another refurbished, 8yo battery. And they kept mine to resell to someone else for $15k.
Any other company I'd say it's a coincidence. But I suspect it was suppressing errors during the warranty period :/
You've got to admit that a car that mostly sat idle for years (like a literal Sunday driver) had a sudden and catastrophic failure upon entry is bizarre and hard to justify. And of course my only option is to pay Tesla directly or junk the car (only worth about $20k now if the battery is fixed!)
But why not? They get away with it for at least a decade+, if not forever. so far, after many years of fraud, all they get is a few bad press reports with a relevance half-life measured in hours. Maybe some prosecution team or class action firm will eventually go after them, resulting in a fine or settlement, another decade later, that won't even approach the scale of their gains from the fraud.
This is the system Elon is good at hacking, not technology.
Well, I’m not sure what the range meter is supposed to do? Freeze when an eye tracker detects the driver looks at it?
Or maybe he was idling the car in cold weather. Even without the heater running, the battery cools down and that can reduce the range.
Electric vehicles aren’t perfect and some little education can prevent a lot of frustration.
I think the "number decreasing" complaint seems to be related to the fact that you would drive 10 miles and lose 30 on the dash. The article also claims the number becomes more realistic when it crosses bellow 50% charge so I expect this difference to be noticeable.
Such number is a difficult problem. The Tesla number doesn’t represent anything meaningful. I personally have the state of charge set in % and not distance.
I used to have a BMW that was guessing the range based on the last driving conditions. It was very bad too. Driving downhill in a warm day was producing big range numbers the next day. Driving uphill in a snow storm would make you want to have the car checked for battery degradation.
The car is rated at 358 miles of range. I knew that was bunk when I bought it, just going off the numbers on the window sticker suggests hitting 358 is a pipe dream. You can do it, but only on back roads at slower speeds.
For road trips you're better off just driving like a bat out of hell and charging only to 60% if you can, you will spend less clock time overall that way.
As others have noted, you should switch the battery display to percentage to be less irritated by the lies. The car knows your average and could use it, but instad just uses the unrealistic EPA estimate for that display. My wife drives a Bolt and sometimes shows less than EPA rated range when full, but OTOH it's always dead-on.
That's a fairly amazing display of corporate customer contempt. Shareholders couldn't have shown more disdain for their consumers.
This is the utility of the cynic, the questioner, the doubter, the non-conformist. It is an uncomfortable position, at all times, but you need people among you who constantly fear being inadvertently, mindlessly immoral. Because it's a constant threat and more of a threat, I daresay, than overt evil.
Advertising the same range on a used Tesla as a brand new one is fraudulent practice, and people who fall for it are naive.
Sure EV's are a part of it, but it's not the silver bullet the marketing would suggest.
I still like the car and use it for city driving and even road trips with proper planning. Do not trust Tesla numbers.
edit: "advertised" I mean the range shown on the dash. I.e. the range communicated by the car itself, as relevant to this article.
This is better as it shows the claimed range, and the actual range: https://insideevs.com/reviews/443791/ev-range-test-results/
Here is a Norwegian winter test in real conditions: https://nye.naf.no/elbil/bruke-elbil/test-rekkevidde-vinter-...
You can use a translator (Google, DeepL, chatGPT…) but the Arabic numbers are easy to spot.
Read the article. This is covered in depth and it's quite informative.
spoiler: Of the 6 cars they tested, Tesla Model Y had the best performance in terms of miles per kWh and total range. But it still clocked in at only 81% of claimed range.
I used to own a high hp gasoline car, and its mileage estimate would regularly be off by 50% when I drove it like I stole it. The difference is that there are gas stations everywhere.
When I drove the Tesla aggressively, it pretty quickly told me I needed to turn around and go charge some more - there were no superchargers ahead of me. You might say I was lucky that I was using navigation for my route, so that it could figure an accurate battery usage. But I wasn't lucky. Of course I put the route into the navigation system. What was the outcome? I didn't go charge it, and instead I stopped driving like a c**t. I made it to my destination and back with 17% charge left.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LWL90paufE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynCaTDR4rDQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFB6hsYXDiA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvwOa7TCd1E
Spoiler alert: Tesla models fare about as well, if not better, than their EV cousins, hitting around 80% of the stated range in the wild.
No matter how much you guys say you hate Tesla, it doesn't change the fact what the best selling car in the world is.
I wonder if the reason is focusing on a specific range, rather than a fuel capacity. Gallons is a pretty intuitive quantity that people are comfortable understanding. Maybe we need to focus away from range for EVs and instead focus on kWh capacity of the batteries. This is apparently less useful, since I really care about actual range - but it’s more accurate and allows me to use my human understanding to think about whether I have enough relative to my driving circumstances. Just like with gallons of gas.
Also the worst wear comes from charging while cold. If a charger is plugged in it can heat the batteries before charging them.
If only they didn't have a secret team to suppress the kind of things you would really want your research to turn up.
Complaints on lack of research into a product skew product interest. A company's job is to create an image and maintain it.
My personal best is 17 miles, but I can only do that if I ride a certain way and have my board configured in a certain way.
As the battery level dips, it gets increasingly difficult to stay foiling or to restart.
And no brand, none of them actually live up to their marketed ride times because it's so highly variate.
I get the need for alternative fuel sources, but I really don't want to have to figure these dynamics out in an automobile and am staying away from full electric cars for now.
https://insideevs.com/reviews/443791/ev-range-test-results/
Some cars like the Porsche Taycan outperform their EPA range, other cars like the Tesla Model S underperform their EPA range.
Think: batteries not fully charging or depleting for longevity concerns. Having to stop at chargers before range is out due to there not being another one coming up, extra headwinds, extra heat or AC, simply ending up at a broken or crowded charger and needing it to a different one, pulling a load, etc, etc.
Furthermore battery technology is actually improving and the trajectory seems to indicate that there will be cars that will be able to hit the 1000km range within the next 5 years for those who would need it.
For those of us who do, the small number that do road trips can easily get by with one ICE and one EV.
Most people’s EV need to get to the grocery store or to work and back.
I don't want to have to buy two cars to fulfill the role of one car.
But I fully agree with you: "Twice the time it takes to refuel an ICE" would mean a roughly 10 minute charge time.
I never got 300 miles of range on it.
Now, to their credit... Did I need that much range? No. But it would be nice to not be lied to.
But screw that guy. I don't think we'll be buying another one.
It's time for a class action lawsuit and to be rid of him.
IOW, you ain’t getting $20K out of small claims court.
Still, even 10k is better than 0k. And many small claims courts forbit compelled discovery. I paid $100, had no lawyer, wrote 2 pages of "what happened", served the paperwork by hand (and went back to the court and gave an affidavit to that effect), and ...
The other side "big corp" had a law firm, and several lawyers. I paid $100 and spent a few hours. The paid 50k to their lawyers, and we just talked on front of a judge.
In terms of "stick em in the eye" it's the way to go.
It is now 35k in BC/SK/ON and 15k in MB/QC/NB.
Alberta is the outlier as usual. They're raising the limit to 100k next week.
Interesting: no lawyers in U. S. small claims court. That probably has something to do with the lower dollar limits in the U. S., but IANAL nor spend much time in court.
So the playing field is level, a lawyer as a lawyer doesn't happen, and so it is amusing to see Big Corp pay out of their nose.
Oh, and they must have a representative "standing by" which often means in person.
Consumer Reports is falling down in this regard.
All that being said, having driven both, it’s no competition a Tesla is far better in every conceivable way. The Model 3 is more efficient with its energy as well.
> The directive to present the optimistic range estimates came from Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, this person said. “Elon wanted to show good range numbers when fully charged,” the person said, adding: “When you buy a car off the lot seeing 350-mile, 400-mile range, it makes you feel good.”
> ... Korean regulators required Tesla to publicly admit it had misled consumers. Musk and two local executives did so in a June 19 statement, acknowledging “false/exaggerated advertising.”
"“Elon wanted to show good range numbers when fully charged,” the person said, adding: “When you buy a car off the lot seeing 350-mile, 400-mile range, it makes you feel good.”"
Yep, the great Technoking's narcissism manifesting itself in critical technology decisions. Hopefully the ongoing stories of severe mismanagement at Tesla will show people that severe personality flaws matter, especially in technology.
At least a dealer flash will take many months to be deployed and show up these deceptive practices.
Working Title:
"Now I Am Become Musk, the Destroyer of Brands"
I've said it before and I'll say it again. The reporters are really missing a zinger on this one.
Instead it should read, "When contacted about the range of Tesla's cars, Elon described it as the [poop emoji].".
It’s weird how this sentence was probably supposed to surprise the reader, but I really just reflected on how the fans conduct themselves regularly and thought “yup, sounds about on par”.
Wait? That wasn’t Tesla? Okay, I guess there’s a level below “fraudulent to the very core”
https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/17/tesla-engineer-testifies-t...
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/09/nikola-admits-prototype...
Reminds me of that youtube video (by a fan) almost having an accident on autopilot and his first reaction was "we're gonna have to cut that out".
Time estimates are an incredible challenge because you're effectively trying to predict entropy.
Many consumers wrongly believe that they need a lot more range than they actually do, and you can't really convince them otherwise because it's an emotional issue rather than a pragmatic one. What Tesla did was immoral but I get why they did it.
Tesla doesn't let you get you stranded on the side of the road. You'll still get directed to a Supercharger if you are unable to reach your destination. But you don't get an accurate range estimate when your car is fully charged, and this has been known for a long time.
> Tesla doesn't let you get you stranded on the side of the road
Unless you don't use their nav, the conditions are bad, or you need to take a detour. To drive 40mi, I want 60mi range to cover my bases, considering the consequences of getting stuck vs just charging a little longer.