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Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

Musk doesn't address the big drop in estimated range overnight, which actually seems confirmed (at mile 400) in his charge/range graphs. I'm curious if temperature alone can explain this, or some other bug or drain-left-on overnight must be at play.

It does appear the reviewer wanted to trigger a car-stop scenario. Curiosity about what happens when a driver messes up, or perhaps range estimates fail because of unpredictable terrain/traffic is legitimate. So, I don't blame the reviewer for the circles near the charging station. But ignoring the range estimate and recharge opportunities, in order to require a tow and then report it as if it were a car failure, seems indefensible.

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That is why when conducting a review and not just a blog post , you should have a protocol - what were you testing, how, why.

After all - see how detailed the testing methodology for some hardware sites is. For a world class media like the times it is inexcusable. So it is very sloppy to have times making reviews of expensive products that are worse than these of 300$ video card.

I pushed the car to the limits is a viable test, just notice it.

An excellent point. It's also probably worth mentioning that for this kind of review, a single data point/drive is more of an anecdote than a test. At the very least they should do a "round trip" there and back test.

>Musk doesn't address the big drop in estimated range overnight, which actually seems confirmed (at mile 400) in his charge/range graphs.

That's true. It looks like the car lost about 5% of capacity overnight, and that could have been a problem if he had stayed two nights. It looks like he used about 40% of capacity to get to Groton from the Supercharger. If he had let the car finish a standard (not even max range) charge at Milford, he would have had 90%-40%-5%-40% = 5% of battery remaining when he returned to the Supercharger at Milford the next day. That's an uncomfortably thin margin, but quite different from needing a flatbed.

My understanding is that the battery mustn't get too cold so a heating element is automatically turned on during cold nights (you can't leave your iPhone or laptop in your car during freezing weather either). This explains part of the loss in range. The second part is that the charge level is less accurate when the battery is cold, so only after driving for a bit you see your "real" range. Either way Tesla recommends you always plug in your car at night.

Or the driver left the lights on overnight.

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