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...