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Comment by Lewisham | Hacker News Reader

> That does not make any sense either. Any kind of consumption will ultimately reduce the available range, you don't restore by removing joules from a pack.

I think what is happening is that he thinks the battery actually does have the charge, but the estimate is incorrect because of the cold. What he thinks is going to happen by driving is that the battery will heat up and become more efficient, and the estimated range will raise.

I do not find this an unreasonable mental model, even if it does or does not represent the actual workings of a battery-powered vehicle.

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That seems to be plausible explanation, but I don't see how you give such advice to somebody on the road. You have two potential situations:

1. Battery has lost some charge for unknown reason, and has to be recharged. 2. Battery has proper charge, but the estimate is wrong.

If you act according to true scenario, client is happy in both cases. If true scenario is 2 but you act like it's 1, the client wastes and hour to recharge (which isn't necessary) but arrives at the goal. If true scenario is 1 but you act like it's 2, the client is stuck in the middle of the road and curses you.

Clearly, you should always choose to act as if the true scenario is 1 and recommend proper recharging, and try to debug why charge indicator was potentially wrong later. If the support person gave different advice, he was setting himself and his company for the mess up, and the mess up ensued.

"If the support person gave different advice, he was setting himself and his company for the mess up, and the mess up ensued."

This is why we need the call logs. And I fully suspect Tesla records them, so the fact that it wasn't released may suggest that Broder's account was indeed correct

This is what bugs me the most about this whole thing.

If the Tesla people on the phone with the reporter had just erred on the side of caution with their advice, the whole debacle would have been avoided.

Broder complaining about a couple of extra hours charging would have just come across as a nitpick.

Why should they? They were just reps on the phone talking to a guy who was reviewing superchargers, not planning for a media battle. I don't see how they would have prepared for anything other than the standard advice and it would be surprising if they did.

> I don't see how they would have prepared for anything other than the standard advice

The point is that their standard advice should err on the side of caution, not leave motorists stranded. Regardless of whether they work for the NYT.

While the whole discussion makes me skeptical of both Broder and Tesla's customer service, I'd like to add here that Tesla most probably would need permission to do that. Even releasing GPS data is already a questionable move - IANAL, but I believe in Europe this would be pretty much unthinkable, except if he gave explicit permission on paper first (general agreement terms probably wouldn't be enough, because of the surprising nature of such a term).

This would be a more significant concern if he was driving his own car, but since it's a Tesla owned review model, I'm sure they have legal rights to it. In addition, given their past troubles with Top Gear I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla wrote it into a review agreement.

> .., but since it's a Tesla owned review model, I'm sure they have legal rights to it.

I doubt that. Say, you lend a car to your friend and let the navigation system log his/her route. The route includes compromising information about work related issues. Even the logging itself is questionable, but then releasing that information to the public - boy, I'd sure check my lawyers first.

As I understand, the 'European sensor' for privacy tingles at quite different levels than the US American one.

Ah, but you're overlooking the extremely strong possibility that the contract Broder / NYT signed as part of borrowing the test vehicle authorized Tesla to use the onboard telemetry in any way Tesla sees fit.

Furthermore, this situation is extremely dissimilar to a private individual lending a car to another private individual to do things where the borrower has a reasonable expectation of privacy.

If he was directly calling a person at Tesla it would be unlikely to be recorded. If he went through the normal customer support number - you'd expect it to have been recorded after the "This call may be recorded for training purposes etc" intro

This is very true and it's a well known customer service approach. That's why the guy taking your pizza delivery order tells you it will be 45 minutes even though it only takes 5 minutes for them to make a pizza.

While the battery does have internal coolant (heat-exchange) loops, it's position on the bottom of the car (it's the entire floorpan) means that it has a large surface area exposed to the weather, and wind-chill would rapidly draw any internal heat away. The question that I don't know the answer to is: how rapidly?

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