Going the distance: driving the Tesla Model S in the real world

"The particular Model S I flew to Los Angeles to sample last week was a Signature Performance model." I'm going to call Tesla's bluff. If you want to convince customers who live in climates with cold winters that the Model S is winter-capable (perhaps for taking the family road trip to somewhere warm from somewhere cold during the winter), then set up the journalist test drives in cold weather locations. Based on the Tesla Motors Club forum discussion of a recent review of the Model S

http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/showthread.php/13633-NYT-arti...

(kindly shared here on HN by another participant), I'm gravely doubtful that the Model S will ever be a practical car for the parts of the United States that are generally called "the north," rather than just for California.

The review submitted here is very detailed and well worth reading in full. The Model S has some interesting design trade-offs, and the writer is frank about what he likes and what he doesn't like about the car.

It seems weird to talk about "range anxiety" while at the same time pushing the car to the absolute limit of its estimated range without taking into account any of the variables that the car can't possibly know about (e.g. hilliness).

Maybe they need to get some psychologists in. I heard that some weather apps intentionally mis-predict the chance of rain, because no matter how accurate your prediction, people will feel annoyed if they make the call to go out and then get caught in the rain. So you need to lie to them.

Of course then you've got one (larger) figure for the actual estimated range, and another (lower) figure for the range you can actually tell people without them doing something stupid with that information.