The Charges Are Flying Over a Test of Tesla’s Charging Network
wheels.blogs.nytimes.com
wheels.blogs.nytimes.com
I imagine the reporter's article would have rubbed Musk the wrong way a lot less if the reporter had made it more clear what was going on and that some of the things that happened were the results of mistakes made (whether or not you might expect consumers to make the same mistakes).
For example: if the reporter had explained that he was intentionally trying to simulate "normal use" by not plugging in the car at night. If the article had said, "The owner's manual said to plug in overnight, repeatedly, but I chose not to in order to see what might happen if a less educated consumer were driving the car," I imagine the article would have gotten more sympathy. The article, as I read it, didn't really get into that, and seemed to simply imply a failure on Tesla's part.
It sure would have been nice when it got -20°F so I could have plugged in the head-bolt heater, but my Kia Rio started fine.
[edit 2] Handy tip, turn on the lights for about 15 seconds, turn off lights, then start the car. Warms the battery a bit.
He also states that Elon told him the supercharging stations should actually be closer to 140 miles apart in that area rather than 200 miles.
I'm very surprised that no tesla employee tried the test first. The difficulty of the 200 mile spacing would have been apparent (and niggling about 2 miles seems petty).
The author tries to put a nice spin on it here by saying he understood that start-stop driving would be more efficient but I don't really buy that.
edit: A downvote for this? Really? Could somebody explain what's wrong with it?
Clearly that is absurd advice, but that is what he says he is told. Given that advice, and not knowing any better himself, he thought start-stop driving would be more efficient.
In a Porsche Panamera S, start-stop driving and idling for an hour in traffic going from Secaucus NJ to Manhattan through the lincoln tunnel a month ago (had to install a new server in NY4), I used approximately 2 gallons of gas (less than 10% of capacity). It's certainly not trivial, but it's nowhere near the drain that Musk is effectively claiming.
That, combined with the fact that engaging in stop and start driving was a natural conclusion of the advice that Tesla gave him while he was driving (regenerative braking), really seems to suggest that Tesla gave poor advice (and you can't blame the author for following poor advice).
When you're stopped with an ICE, it's still using fuel to keep the engine idling. When you're stopped with an electric car on a flat surface, the motor isn't using any energy at all. The only energy you're using in the electric car is the power for the radio and any climate control.
Regenerative breaking also helps the electric car, because it recaptures some of the energy lost in accelerating the car.
Playing around with this(scroll down a bit):
http://www.teslamotors.com/goelectric#range
Shows that in most conditions, the difference between city and highway mileage is pretty slight.
That runs at odds with a claim made on Tesla's site: "The Model S battery will not lose a significant amount of charge when parked for long periods of time. For example, Model S owners can park at the airport without plugging in." (http://www.teslamotors.com/models/facts)
Either Tesla is lying when it claims that it won't lose a significant amount of charge, or Tesla is not lying (which would imply that not charging overnight doesn't really matter)
But this also doesn't say that you can expect to lose 65 mile range in the cold if it's not plugged in. This is very good information to know and not at all what's implied by the link you provide, but it would have been good if the article had discussed all this in full context.
* http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/blog_attachme...
"... The Tesla battery is optimized for nightly charging: topping off frequently enhances the longevity of your battery."
So though I agree that the author has a good argument he should have mentioned that Tesla does advise nightly charging albeit for battery maintenance rather than to guard against charge loss.
In this respect, he sounds like a political candidate, and, to be fair, many other CEOs behave like this.
There's no need for that -- Musk has the car's logs, which describe the miles driven, the speeds, and the battery's state of charge. Under the circumstances, this is not a case of "he said, she said" -- i's a matter of unambiguous computer records.
If the computer records contradict what Musk said, he's in big trouble, but I doubt it will come out that way. And consider the consequences if Musk reported something different than the records show -- and Musk knows this. Why would he knowingly sabotage his own company?
Wouldn't a privileged DBA be able to make the data look like just about anything? Also, the location logging system as a whole isn't necessarily infallible.
Plus being publicly traded, I believe the SEC might have words on the subject.
The SEC would only get involved in the event of an IPO, an insider-trading scandal, or some other market-related event, not a dispute about accurate media reporting.
Unless the car is under a wet forest canopy, the GPS position will be more accurate than the other ways of determining position.
No, city GPS readings tend to be either plausible or nonexistent. Most receivers are able to detect absurd apparent positions created by building reflections (they do it by comparing different combinations of satellites and accepting the majority result).
Wet forest and country road, yes -- big problem for GPS. City driving, no, no really. And cloud cover doesn't significantly affect GPS performance:
Since the story blew up, the NYT has had time to get their graphics department to draw a nice infographic (that was up last night) and now a written defence by the original author of the story.
If Tesla's logs are such irrefutable evidence of fakery, why's it taking so long to post it online?
In any case, for Tesla to present an analysis without also giving the raw logs removes any ability for the public to fact check the analysis.
As a simplistic example, just because the journalist agreed to let Tesla collect the logs from his trip doesn't mean that the journalist agreed to let the precise details about his driving habits get released to the public. And there could be more than just privacy concerns. Maybe the logs contain data related to Tesla trade secrets.
In the same way we shouldn't take NYT's story at its word, we should not take Tesla at their word.
But look at the posts in the threads related to this story. There's plenty of paranoia going around, with the automatic presumption that the NYT had some axe to grind with the original story or financial incentives to embellish the story.
I just think that any claims that Tesla makes deserves the same level of scrutiny that people here have been giving the NYT article.
However, given the visibility of this I would expect that they would make releasing appropriately annotated logs a priority.
But when you are basically screaming out "You're lying, and I have proof of it" and then take your time delivering the proof, it doesn't look very good in the court of public opinion.
If Musk really did reach out to Broder on Friday, then Tesla should have had a skeleton press release ready to go on Monday, pointing out the major mistakes that Broder made, and pointing out that they're planning on getting out more supercharging stations, so this experience won't be repeated. It should have been a neutral response to the criticism, and it would have highlighted the infrastructure work that Tesla is doing.
Instead, Musk has claimed that the Times' account was "fake", which is a huge accusation to make, because that's a personal attack on Broder and the Times, and, let's face it, the NYT is probably much better at CYA and public perception management than Tesla or Musk are.
That doesn't excuse it, but you'll notice in his subsequent interviews that the language he uses is much more tempered, probably because he got a few nervous phone calls from his legal team.
The reporter actually touched on this in his rebuttal. He claims that no one ever told him to set the charge mode to max range, instead of "normal," so the car stopped charging when it got to 90%. However, he stops short of actually saying that he wasn't aware of the existence of "max charge" mode.
He also says that nobody told him to have the car charge while he was sleeping. Personally, I see this as complaining that your interior is wet because Ford didn't tell you roll the windows up before driving through the car wash--it ought to be common sense. Maybe it can be forgiven in a new and unfamiliar car, but it sure seems like the author didn't go out of his way to figure out how to operate it.
In the HN thread about the original story, someone noted that he only mentioned he speed after Tesla told him to slow down. It seems that that was a rather prescient comment in light of the recent claims by Musk that the author was driving well in excess of the speed limit and driving briskly.
You ask if the review is "faked." I don't think "faked" is quite the right word, but there were certainly some omissions in the original write-up. By omitting certain facts, I think the author presented the story in a way that isn't the shining pinnacle of honesty. The Model S may very well not be capable of successfully making the trip the author wanted to make. However, if that is the case, the author shouldn't need hide behind technicalities and loaded language in his review.
From what I can tell the author 1) only partially charged the battery 2) didn't plug it in overnight 3) pushed the car to it's limit for a bit 4) took a detour through the city
Probably through the combination of all those factors he essentially sabotaged the test and then wrote a damaging review in the New York Times.
I also understand the author in that he was 'just pretending to be your average Joe' but given that this is a special car that needs to be handled with special care that comparison just doesn't hold up.
edit: Could whomever is downvoting these comments please explain me what part of this is not constructive discussion?
With regards to only partially charging the battery:
When I first charged the car, which was equipped with
the highest-capacity battery available, of 85 kilowatt-
hours, at the Tesla Supercharger station in Newark,
Del., I left it connected to the cable for 49 minutes
until the dash display read “Charging Complete.” The
battery meter read 90 percent full, with a range of 242
miles.
As for not plugging it in overnight, well, it's not always going to be possible to plug in the vehicle overnight, especially if you're out on a road trip. Sure, it'd be optimal if every owner could plug in their Model S every night, but the world isn't optimal and the Model S has to be robust enough to go a night without being plugged in if it has a hope of being a practical vehicle rather than a $101,000 toy.
I also understand the author in that he was 'just pretending to be your average Joe' but given that this is a special car that needs to be handled with special care that comparison just doesn't hold up.
Except that's not what Tesla's marketing claims. They claim that, unlike the Roadster, for example, the Model S is a practical car that can be used without owners paying obsessive attention to battery management and charging infrastructure.
There are factors that made this a tough (some will say "realistic") test, particularly the low temperature. But the correspondent's ignorance might have been the biggest obstacle: "... I was under the impression that stop-and-go driving at low speeds in the city would help, not hurt, my mileage." Really? Repeated acceleration and deceleration will help the overall mileage? The fact that the car has regenerative braking can only reduce the losses created by stop-and-go driving, not eliminate them entirely (the best regenerative braking schemes can only recover a fraction of the energy lost in braking).
Musk's reaction to this account is understandable -- this technology is in its infancy, and public perceptions, accurate or not, could make or break Tesla.
Two miles is "gratuitous"? That's a rounding error, even on my bicycle!
and he exceeded the speed limit as Musk claimed
Does Tesla expect drivers to adhere to posted speed limits even when prevailing speeds are much higher (as they are on I-95)?
edit: CamperBob2 wrote "Apparently the reporter was averaging 81 MPH, going by an earlier comment."
As far as I can tell, that figure is based on a Reddit post from yesterday (http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/18c15x/tesla_ceo...) which in turn is assuming that the times and mileage on the travel map were exact. It could be. But then again, those times could be estimates (note that 7 out of 9 time stamps appear rounded to the nearest 5 minute mark). I guess we'll know when Tesla releases the logs.
To average 81 MPH in traffic, you are going to need to spend a fair amount of time north of 90 MPH. If the charging station intervals were based on expected speeds closer to 55-65 MPH, then the idea that the trip could be made at 80+ was questionable from the outset.
So, yeah, there's adhering to posted speed limits for best fuel economy, there's driving with the traffic for maximum safety, and then there's full-blown Mad Max mode, which is apparently what you do when you want to make the car you're testing look bad.
Expected or not, I've flown past Model Xs, doing 65 MPH myself, on the odd stretch of highway where I suspected the Tesla driver might have some 20-30 miles to go before finding a home port. If you're cruising on, erm, fumes, you'll baby your speed to increase mileage.
Even in a gasoline-powered automobile, I've noted (and adapted to) highly variable range depending on driving conditions and speed, of up to 150 miles' delta per tank. Not inconsiderable, particularly if operating in areas where services are infrequent (also a possibility for conventionally fueled vehicles).
As I commented here on the prior article on HN, http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5203654
Musk is trying to get ahead of the story. Instead of the headlines being, "driver stranded in the cold" it was "NYT faked article".
Musk/Tesla is yet to show any data, the jury is still out. But given, it's taken them this long, it seems to me, Tesla got the effect they wanted and will most likely not publish anything that will drastically contradict NYT's reporter.
How does someone this unaware of how transportation works end up in a position to be reviewing cars in a professional setting?
This isn't out of the question, you would assume that the Tesla's regenerative breaking would help it in the city.
Edit: Further, Tesla's own blog states the following, which could probably influence many to infer what Broder did:
In contrast slower city driving speeds are more efficient and electric vehicles have a unique benefit in stop and go, low-speed driving due to regenerative braking
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/model-s-efficiency-and-range
It's probably possible to design a car so aerodynamically inefficient at 35+ mph that stop and go is preferable to cruising at even moderate speeds.
http://news.fiu.edu/2010/04/new-york-times-political-corresp...
After covering the 2008 presidential campaign, Broder took over coverage of energy and environment in Washington. He is responsible for following domestic legislative issues, advances and energy technology and international climate-change negotiations.
It's also not completely insane: Energy requirements for driving go up approximately as the square of the velocity. This would normally make city driving exceptionally efficient.
The reason it's not efficient is because of all the energy lost due to idling and from being dissipated in the brakes. If the Tesla is able to idle at a much lower energy than a gas-powered car (which should be true) and if it can reclaim energy from braking by using regeneration then it could very well use less energy to "take a shortcut" through Manhattan.
Whatever gains he might have obtained were eliminated by the extra distance though (and it's not even clear there were gains to be had). The right answer is even simpler (albeit frustrating): Drive slower.
She said to shut off the cruise control to take advantage of battery regeneration from occasional braking and slowing down.
I can pick fights on the internet about evolution, but that does not have any bearing on the reality of the situation. If these cars got 5k miles to the charge I could still start "discussion" about the range, but that wouldn't show that range is still an issue.
The fact that anything is "being discussed" means nothing at all. You have to analyze the validity of the points being raised in that discussion.
Sure there would be, but it would be a positive discussion.
Allow me to be more specific since you want to nitpick my choice of words. The simple fact that there are questions regarding the range of this vehicle shows there is an issue.
If this vehicle had a similar range to that of the majority of vehicles no one would be arguing about the range, because no one would care. If anything everyone would be raving about this car because it would literally be the future of the car industry.
Not at all, I could start a conversation with any tone I wished.
I'm not trying to nitpick words, I just don't think that you can make any conclusions about reality just by noting that people are discussing something, in a positive manner or otherwise. There just isn't any relationship between reality and what people discuss.
Will it work for most people most of the time - I think that answer is yes. How often do you drive >200mi/day? Remember you start off every morning with a "full tank."
I live just outside of Toronto (there's a Tesla store here), and while it's not as cold as Calgary or Winnipeg, it can get pretty damned cold. Power outlets aren't widely available in all parking lots.
I know people who make ~75 mile round trips commuting from the burbs. After reading the NYT article, I'd be a little nervous to make the trip home if I had to leave my car out in the blistering cold for a full work day where there was no charging station even if I did charge the battery fully the night before.
--edit-- I also read somewhere that there are no Supercharger stations in Canada... yet.
Some, for sure, but not many and not enough to dampen demand. The majority of electric car owners aren't going to undertake this trip at all (vs fly) or would use a second car to do so. Better to have said "We're still 18 months away from having enough charging stations and batter life to tackle this type of trip" and shrugging as you cash checks from people who'll do a 13 mile commute on the 101 or 95.
Well, there's a Tesla store in Toronto.
Toronto gets pretty cold in the winter, and traffic is pretty nightmarish getting in and out of the city during rush hour. And there's no way you're going to sit in this traffic without a heater on.
There are lots of affluent people who live in the burbs outside of Toronto who make 120+km round trips (~75 miles) who will get stuck in really bad traffic to and from work, and probably leave their car parked in a spot that doesn't have access to an outlet during the work day.
If the battery charge is going to drop that significantly on a cold day, I think it would make some people think twice about a Tesla (for the homeward leg of a winter commute) if they didn't already have a winter car or backup plan.
The first question is: is that what Tesla proposed, and was the proposal based on a cold-weather long-distance round-trip journey using only Superchargers?
If so, then Tesla bit off more than it could chew. If no, then Broder is misrepresenting Tesla's Supercharger service -- is it a waypoint recharge to extend driving range reasonably in conjunction with normal overnight charging as would ordinarily be practiced, or is it a service on which long-distance travelers can rely on exclusively?
My suspicion is the former (in which case Broder is at fault). This still leaves Tesla with a serious image problem (and a ruffled, if still understanding reviewer at The New York Times). For all the attractions and upsides of EVs, range, and cold-weather range degredation, remain significant issues.
But in this case, Musk's reliance on log data doesn't seem entirely relevant: it's operator behavior and compliance which need to be addressed.
http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger
and yet my wife and I can use our bicycles year-round in our cold-weather but bicycle-friendly city,
http://www.bicycling.com/news/featured-stories/1-bike-city-m...
so we can be even more environmentally friendly than the buyers of the big, heavy, expensive Tesla Model S by using our bicycles.
As the New York Times reporter follows up,
"Virtually everyone says that I should have plugged in the car overnight in Connecticut, particularly given the cold temperature. But the test that Tesla offered was of the Supercharger, not of the Model S, which we already know is a much-praised car. This evaluation was intended to demonstrate its practicality as a 'normal use,' no-compromise car, as Tesla markets it. Now that Tesla is striving to be a mass-market automaker, it cannot realistically expect all 20,000 buyers a year (the Model S sales goal) to be electric-car acolytes who will plug in at every Walmart stop.
"Knowing then what I know now about the car, its sensitivity to cold and additional ways to maximize range, I certainly would have treated the test differently. But the conclusion might not have been any better for Tesla."
P.S. I see from the pattern of votes so far on this comment that some fellow participant here is not amused by my suggestion that a bicycle is a more environmentally friendly form of alternative vehicle for someone living in snowy Minnesota than a Tesla Model S. But I am serious. There is NO WAY I would sink so much of my family's budget into buying a car like that when I can obtain more reliable transportation at a much lower price. That's the tough squeeze that Tesla Motors is in. There was an extensive, and on the whole more favorable, review of the Model S from The Verge
http://www.theverge.com/2013/2/12/3969260/going-the-distance...
submitted to HN earlier today (most participants missed the discussion on that article)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5208154
and the author of that report takes care to mention, "Tesla hopes for its first quarter of black ink this year after a decade of operation, but make no mistake, it’s still in the throes of startupdom. Much of its working capital has come from nearly half a billion dollars in low-interest rate government loans. It has just a few dozen dealers around the world." I'm not going to be lining up to buy the first Tesla car for sale in Minnesota unless both the charging network and the car's cold-weather performance are massively improved.
P.P.S. While I still have my edit window, I should mention that one blogger on business writes "Why Tesla's Elon Musk Should Consult The Communications Playbook,"
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathansalembaskin/2013/02/12/d...
and a Forbes staff writer on the global auto industry writes, "Fake Or Not, New York Times' Tesla Review Speaks Truth About Electric Cars,"
http://www.forbes.com/sites/joannmuller/2013/02/11/fake-or-n...
suggesting that not all business writers have been impressed by Elon Musk's response to the first New York Times report so far.
Who cares?
Why does everyone want to voice their opinion so loudly on a product that doesn't even meet their needs?
It is that you can't accept some status-symbol high-tech gadget wasn't made with you in mind?
Of course the Telsa is not for everyone, it's new and cutting-edge and trying to re-define something common-place, which will likely take years or even decades.
I'm not buying a Ford F-150, or a Porsche, or a freaking smart phone either, but all of those are products that many customers are buying and finding a very good use for. Good for them. I'm going to keep my mouth shut about those products, because they are not for me.
Yes, it is.
I try to keep my consumption in check, and I'm shocked people can be so offended when the next big thing doesn't fit their needs. People are actually upset they can't spend their money on it. Unreal.
It's a reflection of HN karma and sorting system: if anyone else posted the remark (and indeed, there are multiple people doing so), it would have seen the normal trajectory down the page. The current algorithm seems to favor remarks from certain people even if they aren't the highest voted remarks.
Comments like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5209213 (and the ensuing discussion) would find themselves at the top
Tesla is absolutely not an economic choice at present, though neither are the vehicles it competes with (higher-end BMW and Mercedes models). The purchase decision is one of social status signaling and a vote of faith in the underlying technology, which is generally considered practical but not yet economical. If you're not ready to drop $50-$100k on the car, I can completely understand, as I'm not either. That said, I'm keeping an eye on Tesla, and still think I may have already bought my last 100% conventionally fueled vehicle.
I wonder by how much?
And between range and recharge times, I really can't see all-electric cars taking off among that group. Something like the Chevy Volt's "range extender" ICE seems the only way to reach anyone who's worried about road-trip-style range.
Even if the supercharger network was 100% in-place, those people are going to turn up their nose at a 30-60 minute recharge stop.
I mean, I normally drive (much) less than 200 miles per day, and I'm sure that 99% of my driving would be fine with a 200 mile range electric vehicle.
But when I do want to go farther, well... I mean... I actually want to go farther. I want to go skiing sometimes, and there is no skiing within 200 miles of me. I don't particularly want to spend even 30 minutes recharging along the way, either -- it's a long day without additional delays.
When I went down to visit my sister when she was in LA, and again when she was up in Eureka, or my family in Mendocino, those are important trips to me. They aren't my usual use profile, but a significant part of the value of the cars I get is that they CAN meet my less usual needs as well as my more usual ones.
Now, all that said, the Tesla Model S is a $50,000 to $100,000 car. Its owners have options. Probably well over 95% of Model S's sold are to multi-car households. And at the very least, its owners are clearly wealthy enough to do something like "go to Enterprise and rent a SUV for their ski-trips, without worrying about a few hundred dollars a few times a year."
On the other hand, I don't think that most of the interest around the Model S is driven by the S per se. I think a lot of people are using it as a proxy for "a future, less expensive car that has similar range." And then we're back to people who can't necessarily buy their hypothetical future EV as a second car, retaining a household gas car for their road trips, or renting one with their large disposable income.
Now, I'm in one of the more sparsely populated states in the union, so my views and needs are colored by long distances it takes to get anywhere here.
It's specifically about the people who don't do an objective analysis of how often the edge cases happen, whether alternatives are sufficient, etc.
An electric car would be fine for me, even with a range of just 100 miles (in a Minnesota winter, with the heater on). The 265 miles that the Model S can get would be questionable for my parents, though, given the frequency of long trips they take. They would need charging stations in the same order of magnitude as gas stations to avoid range anxiety.
I don't think it was ever possible to go straight from the Roadster to a car that was, say, $30,000. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'd have liked it as well.
That's just dumb for a story you are setting up in the media.
There's either a fundamental misunderstanding here or Tesla just owned physics. Braking is never, ever a good idea for power preservation. (Slowing down is another story, but if "occasional braking" was actually in the advice, that's abysmal).
either they are atreets abead of Toyota and GM or are the other car manufacturers simply letting Tesla take all the knocks as consumers get used to the new ideas?
So Tesla is protecting their ongoing consulting relationship/tech share with this as well.
http://designapplause.com/wp-content/xG58hlz9/2012/06/teslas...
Having such an easily replaceable battery would be nice, but it's not infinitely nice such that any tradeoff is necessarily worth it.
The Tesla battery weighs 990 pounds and is built into the car. There are proposals like yours for other electric cars, cars that may be designed to simplify battery removal, but in the long term, I think improvements in battery technology will eventually make them more reliable and longer-lasting.