Real-world ranges for Teslas 50-60% of EPA Range

Getting 50 or 60% of the expected mileage seems impossible. Maybe driving 80 mph constantly speeding and slowing up in below zero Fahrenheit weather? My s is 8.5 years old.

I'm getting way better than the article does.

I am always suspicious of that number - whenever I start to drive the efficiency of the drive is more along 200-230 W/km. I assume its climate controls. Sentry also chews into battery a bit.

I'm much happier with the screen reporting % state of charge instead of EPA miles remaining.

I don't know what this article is talking about either. It's the Brand People Love to Hate.

If anything, my dashboard range is overly conservative. I normally arrive at superchargers with ~5% more range than estimated, and I don't drive slow either. Typically 75-80mph on road trips.

The one point I'll give them is that when its below freezing, my range suffers (400wh/mi or so, which is still not much worse than the EPA estimate).

  - 278 wh/mi for 28K mi total. 104% of EPA.
  - 259 wh/mi for the last 6K mi. 112% of EPA.

It matters because in recent history VW is mostly famous for making the car report erroneous data about their "clean diesel".

I don't doubt you're potentially sharing a real "truth" here, but software can lie through it's teeth.

It was designed to emulate the median highway mile traveled for the purposes of gasoline consumption estimates, not to guess at what customers understand "a highway" to be, semantically. And it actually does a pretty good job. To first approximation, the kind of open-freeway-wind-in-your-hair kind of travel is noise. Most "highway" miles are on urban commutes.

The data in the article could easily be cherry-picked.

Then, when the battery fell below 50% of its maximum charge, the algorithm would show drivers more realistic projections for their remaining driving range, this person said. To prevent drivers from getting stranded as their predicted range started declining more quickly, Teslas were designed with a “safety buffer,” allowing about 15 miles (24 km) of additional range even after the dash readout showed an empty battery, the source said.

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.”

There are two test formats. Tesla chooses the 5-cycle one which is more favorable due to including and weighting more low speed tests. Other companies use the 2-cycle which weights highway driving more (which is what you do when going long range). Turns out the 2-cycle is more representative of driving where range matters.

“… Tesla, meanwhile, pursues an impressive figure for its window stickers, and ends up returning real-world results that are on average two times as far off the label value as most EVs.”

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-ba...

“One of the experts, Gregory Pannone, co-authored a study of 21 different brands of electric vehicles, published in April by SAE International, an engineering organization. The research found that, on average, the cars fell short of their advertised ranges by 12.5% in highway driving.

The study did not name the brands tested, but Pannone told Reuters that three Tesla models posted the worst performance, falling short of their advertised ranges by an average of 26%.“

Also the part where customers with range complaints were prevented from booking service appointments and a special team was formed to cancel range-related service appointments that lied claiming remote diagnostics showed no problems when they did not run remote diagnostics at all.

You know, the sort of behavior that fine upstanding companies that are not trying to hide problems do.

Frankly I think you're overreacting and should go skiing in a Tesla a few times.

If Toyota can manage do it, I'm pretty sure that Tesla can. I'm just not sure that they want to.

TBH, other cars tend to do some mystical formula that is some approximation of the above. There's a reason that they get called guess-o-meters.

I 100% understand that quite a few people prefer that, but it does come with some interesting downsides too.

You’d want to know if you can drive home or to a charger on the current battery level. So you’d only care about miles.

Whereas electronics it’s different because outlets are everywhere. So it’s mostly interesting and mildly anxiety inducing.

It can make a huge difference. I noticed articles this year talking about how bad EV range is in very hot weather (>95F).

At first, I thought this was implausible. Then I looked at the data on some days where I had a lot of short trips interspersed with lots of cabin overheat protection and preconditioning. If I extrapolated from that, I'd have horrible range! I never noticed, because range never matters on days like that.

On a road trip in the same conditions, range has been pretty good.

The two graphs also show that Tesla pretty much uses the exact EPA estimated mileage for the dashboard estimate, regardless of temperature - it's a straight line. While the two graphs at the bottom show that the Mach-E and Bolt have much more intelligent dashboard estimates that account for temperature.

But in the real world, most Tesla drivers get within a reasonable error rate of the EPA rated range, and if they don't, they can understand why using the car's very detailed consumption app (e.g., driving fast, lots of quick accelerating, temperature).

Articles like this seem engineered to entice people predisposed with anti-EV or anti-Tesla bias.

"Every other automaker has a different approach to sharing those estimates, but it often tends to be closer to reality than Tesla’s approach."

It's not clear how much that information affects whether or not someone buys a Tesla vs other EVs.