I have a model Y. I hate almost everything about it. But most germane, The "Battery meter" at the top of the display is total bunk. That's got to be "rosy" numbers. It'll display a the battery in miles, but it's at least 25% inflated.
However if you punch in a destination, you'll get exact numbers, and those are insanely reliable. It claims (and I don't believe any claims coming from tesla) that it'll factor wind, elevation, temperature, etc. But regardless of what it factors in, it's on the money.
I actually got stranded once for some hours because of the mileage indicator!
Was driving back from a campsite that I turned out to not have charging compatibility with, but thought I had plenty of margin to get to the nearest charger. As I drove through the mountains however, I began noticing that a.) my battery was depleting much faster than expected and b.) I wasn’t seeing any houses and very few motorists. I watched with increasing dread as the trip miles began converging with the battery miles, as my friends in the car got more and more quiet. We reached the inflection point, and the best I could do was hope we’d encounter somewhere with a plug that might be able to get us the rest of the way. Eventually though the milage indicator reached zero, and I pulled off the road to what I thought was a campsite but turned out to be a sort of rest stop with no power plugs in sight. To make matters worse I was in a mountain valley and had no phone signal, and hiking wasn’t an option as it was pretty hot and we had no water. We were there for hours until I was able to flag down a nice older couple and get a ride to a place with cell signal, where I was able to get a tow truck capable of transporting my car (turns out you need one that has a full bed because of the regenerative breaking, and tesla’s service doesn’t have infinite coverage) to the charger I was trying to get to.
Ironically that last part was probably the most frustrating. The charging spot was full save one spot in the back, which my tow truck guy Mel couldn’t get back to. No sweat I thought, I’ll just try asking someone to swap, but people in their cars pretended to ignore me, and one couple leaving theirs just walked away, as I asked if they could move so we could unload my dead car. Had a sudden wave of empathy for the people I usually walk away from who ask me for spare change lol. Eventually someone left and I was able to charge and resume the 6 hour road trip home. Biggest lesson learned was that slow is fast, keep it at 60 if you want the milage meter to not die as quick.
It's a very humbling experience to be ignored by so many folks, glad you reflected on that. The story about the couple just flat out walking away strikes me as obtusely anti-social, but sadly not unexpected in our day and age.
I went camping somewhere at/near Sequoia National Forest (forgot where) and was traveling to the charger at Inyokern. I think we got stuck on highway 178, about 3/4 of the way there.
Tbh though, going up a mountain is insanely more energy consuming than regular driving, so the range indicator can't possibly take this into consideration ahead of time unless you chart a specific trip. In the other direction, I've had the experience of the battery charge level continuously increasing while going down a long mountain road - infinite range!
and that should be obvious right? Let's say you're familiar with how fast your car eats gas and you drive around on flats all the time.
When you take it into the mountains, it's not surprising that your gas gauge goes down a bit faster when you're pushing that gas pedal a little further than usual.
Perhaps the takeaway is that EVs shouldn't so prominently display the range as part of the "gas" gauge the way they tend to do.
I have it show percent, not range. Tesla defaults to percent on the main display. I'm not sure about other cars. When you use navigation then Tesla will show you the expected charge at your destination and it's been pretty accurate.
I drove my wife's Model 3 on a short trip from Sacramento, CA to Santa Cruz. 3.5hrs if you factor in traffic (2.5hrs without).
When we left, estimated range was 45% on arrival. We arrived with 27% range. Granted, we did encounter a crapload of traffic, but the Nav system took that into account because the time was accurate.
I don't fully fault Tesla for the range inaccuracy; an ICE car would probably have had a similar issue. But it's not as smart as I thought it was, which is a shame.
I obviously don’t have a reason why it was so off. We regularly drive from near sac to Santa Cruz and it’s within a few percent with plenty of speeding. I commute 100 miles a day on the freeway, so maybe it knows my freeway driving habits very well.
Using the trip counter isn't the same as entering the destination in navigation. If you tell navigation your destination it will tell you if you're going to make it or not. If you start driving like a madman halfway through it will reevaluate and start navigating you to a charger. I rented one for a week and took it up into the mountains, far from a charger. It was scary, but we made it back with 17% charge once I stopped passing everyone every time there was a dotted line.
I'm aware - pretty sure they did chart the trip in autopilot though from my reading. Telling the autopilot system you are headed to a supercharger also starts pre-warming the battery.
That's a bit annoying to me to be honest. It's a cool feature, but sometimes I want to plan out a trip without having to prewarm, or I want to prewarm without having to navigate. I can imagine why it's automatic instead of manual (imagine if someone prewarmed their battery but forgot to charge or something) but it'd be a nice "advanced" thing to have.
I kinda agree. But why would you want to go to a supercharger and not pre-warm? It already doesn't pre-warm if it thinks it will prevent you from making it. I can't think of any other reason.
Wanting to prewarm without planning a trip I understand. It would be use to be able to prwarm for regular charging or non-supercharger charging too.
To be clear, I meant me hiking up a mountain. I thought I might have gotten signal up there (wasn’t too high up, just a fairly far walk), but I was also thinking of stories about people dying when they leave their cars to go for help and figured it’d be smarter to wait for someone to pass by.
My dad told a story once where he was driving out west borrowing one of his brother's cars with a broken speedometer. After he got back he said to his brother, "the car just seemed to top out at a certain point" and his brother said "yeah, that's about 85 mph" (the national speed limit was 55 mph at that time). So at 85 mph the air resistance equaled the force the engine could apply and the car wouldn't go any faster.
First, the force that is proportional to the square of the speed is the drag force, which means it's the force you need to supply just to keep the speed from dropping. Power = force * speed is a different "force" - it's the force produced by the engine.
Second, power output of an engine typically has an RPM where it peaks. Past that point, more speed means less power output, which means much less force output, because the force is the power divided by the speed. But force needed still increases as the square of speed.
It's exactly how it works and the math is not complicated.
Suppose you have a vehicle w/ 3 m^2 frontal area, drag coefficient of 0.3 and it's travelling at 30 m/s. Using this calculator https://www.symbolab.com/calculator/physics/drag-equation you can find that will require about 500 N of force (use density of 1.225). The power at that operating point is the product of speed and force, or 30 m/s * 500 N = 15 kW.
Now let's change the speed to 40 m/s. That bumps the force to about 900 N. Now we would calculate power as 40 m/s * 900 N = 36 kW.
Changing these numbers to horsepower we get 20 hp and 48 hp.
The force goes with the square, the power goes with cube. There are assumptions here - for example, if you have a headwind this statement is no longer true because the speed in the drag equation is the air speed of the vehicle (goes up with headwind / down with tailwind) but the third speed factor is the ground speed of the vehicle (because that's based on the physics "work is equal to force times distance" and power is the rate of work).
The graph of an internal combustion engine's power at wide-open throttle vs. engine speed is irrelevant, unless you are trying to figure out which gear ratios would let the engine make enough power to drive the vehicle under those conditions.
Either that or you're limited by revs - in other words, there's enough net torque that, in the highest gear, the engine is running at redline before wind resistance stops you accelerating.
You don't see that much these days, though, as having your highest gear that short is just leaving fuel economy on the table on the highway. If you can pick up speed going uphill without changing down at least one gear, you're wasting fuel to pumping losses on flats/downhill.
Slight nitpick: Using heat won't affect gas consumption of an ICE car. The heat is waste heat that otherwise would be dissipated through the radiator at the front of the car. Turning on the heat diverts coolant to a heat exchanger (tiny radiator) in the ventilation system that warms the air in the cabin.
However note that sometimes the A/C will be on at the same time as the heater in order to dry out the air.
This is one of those stupid facts that lives rent-free in my head. "If you want 'dry' hot air you need to dry it before sending it to the heater. The primary purpose of the A/C is to dry the air(this also happens to cool it), there is already an A/C unit in the ductwork, profit" But I decided to fact check myself and was not able to find much information. I did find one page that said this mainly occurs on the "defrost" setting, which makes sense as this is what is used when you don't want your windows to fog.
Regarding conditioning/drying the air instead of cooling it: the first modern air conditioners were invented primarily to dry the air, cooling was a side effect. The term "air conditioner" itself originally referred to moisture content as I understand it.
Does heating in internal combustion engine cars really affect fuel consumption? My assumption was that most cabin heat was waste heat from the engine, that would otherwise be vented out? Given the dismal efficiency of ICE, shouldn't it be enough to keep a cabin warm even in quite cold climates?
The engine by itself produces a lot of waste heat. But modern engines are more efficient and take a while to warm up (especially diesels, but small turbos like Honda 1.5 too) so cars sometimes implement resistive heating to heat the cabin quicker.
Also some cars have independent heating that can be used to heat up the car up without running an engine. Not sure how exactly it works but I think it uses special battery.
Which ICE cars use resistive heating? I've never seen an alternator large enough on an ICE car to do it. (I'm also skeptical of how well that'd work on a 12v electrical system)
See this https://shops.audi.com/en_GB/web/zubehoer/p/retrofit-solutio... for example. I can only assume it's resistive, since it doesn't start the engine - but it might be a system for running the AC heatpump without engine, maybe. Also now that I think of it, window defrost is resistive.
I would guess system like this would be rare in US, because you are allowed to have remote start on your cars.
Electric window defrosters are really low wattage - because its just trying to raise the temperature of the surface of the glass by a few degrees. Generally IIRC no more than 25-30a - which is a fair bit on a car with a 100a alternator - but less than for example the blower for the air conditioner.
I never thought I'd see the return of the gasoline heater. I wonder if its offered in the states.
Hybrids will commonly have them so they can run climate control independent of the engine (at least until the HV battery gets too low) and also bring coolant temp up faster. It seems like they are usually called the PTC heater or supplemental heater.
Ford also seems to offer them as an option (e.g. as part of the cold weather package)for a number of their straight ICE vehicles like the Bronco sport, Escape, or F-150.
Block heaters can be used to heat the engine coolant (and afterwards the cabin) with or without running the engine. I doubt any cars have special batteries for these (even a drive battery of a non-plugin hybrid is somewhat small to be useful); block heaters that don't require external electricity simply use the car's fuel in an auxiliary burner.
The heat pump in the Tesla Model Y definitely uses electricity, but it is somewhat efficient. Much much more efficient than early model Nissan Leafs for a night and day comparison.
More so that ICE has really bad efficiency at city driving due to lack of regen braking and engine idling.
EVs (and hybrids) with regen braking remove this lost efficiency in city driving, leaving you with an energy usage curve that scales more directly with aerodynamic drag due to speed.
EVs are more efficient at low and high speeds than ICE, they just have small “gas tanks” so the high speed losses are more noticeable.
ICE engines have an efficiency map of output torque/RPM and (up to a point) higher torque usually means more efficient use of fuel. In most ICE vehicles the engine efficiency gains balance with the drag efficiency losses between 40 and 50 mph.
There's quite a lot of energy needed to just turn the engine over in an ICE car so if you are driving a 5L car at 20mph most of the fuel use is just turning the engine rather than driving the car. Faster, more goes to driving the car.
> able to get a tow truck capable of transporting my car (turns out you need one that has a full bed because of the regenerative breaking
Sounds incredibly short-sighted that the regenerative braking can't be temporarily disabled by the driver... two people can push a "regular" car to a nearby gas station in a pinch. Even one person can push a smaller car around a parking lot if necessary.
That said, they often send out full/flat bed tow trucks these days for almost any reason.
It's common for cars with AWD systems where the rear drivetrain can't be disconnected by a clutch to require flatbed towing, less because the car can't physically be moved with the power off and more because spinning the wheels at a sustained high speed will cause damage to the drivetrain and potentially the engine. E.g. my moldy old Subaru requires flatbed towing, because spinning the rear wheels while the fronts are immobile will destroy the limited-slip center diff, but it's totally possible to push it along with all four wheels on the ground.
I think AWD Teslas have an independent motor and drivetrain for the rear wheels. Naively, one would expect that if you unload the rear axle motor/generator you could just tow the car with little resistance and no damage, but in practice the picture is probably more complicated. I would love to hear from an expert.
You can push a tesla in most typical push situations. Sure its heavy, but its in the ballpark of pushing any large sedan or SUV, not just electric ones. You can enable free-rolling wheels in the car and push away, especially if you have luxury of two people pushing.
The weight of a Tesla is not some unprecedented figure for a passenger car - a model 3 is no heavier than many BMW 5 series configurations etc.
The far bigger problem for pushing EVs in my experience is blown pyro-fuses that lock the axle after crashes preventing the wheels from turning - a common issue after an EV shunt. This is why you will often see EVs "dragged" out of shunts by the recovery vehicle until they can get the locked wheels onto dollies. This is only an issue if the EV being pushed has been in an impact generally, but the bar for a pyrofuse blow seems to be low too - it will trip even if airbags haven't deployed. The wheels on many EV motor axles wont turn again until the pyrofuse is replaced.
I think the earlier example that required a full recovery truck - that sounds exactly like a blown pyrofuse, which is by far the most common reason an EV ends up requiring a full lift/dollies rather than a simple tow on its own axles.
This is also why you generally always smell burning in the cabin after a tesla shunt too - nothing to do with a battery fire, its the smell of the pyrofuse burning out under the rear passenger seat.
> You can enable free-roling wheels in the car and push away
Is that possible when the car is persumed dead? Or why would you be trying to push it otherwise? If you can enable free-rolling wheels, why not just drive away?
Right - pyrofuse blow has prevented this in my experience. That's why I've specifically called out shunts. If there is no impact, you would be pretty unlucky to not be able to do it.
I'm racking my brain on this. Why is this not just called exactly what it is, "Neutral"?
I just read about this feature which is advertised purely for car washes, and can be gotten into with a wierd combination of actions or "putting the car into neutral".
Is it...not just going into neutral via disconecting a drive shaft?
> Is it...not just going into neutral via disconnecting a drive shaft?
Conceptually you are correct its like neutral, but almost no EV from any manufacturer has disconnecting drive shafts. Every Tesla model except the original roadster is locked in a single gear transmission that never disconnects - one of the big reasons EV drivetrains can be built so reliable with virtually no maintenance requirements (there is no service items on most EV drivetrains until a quick coolant flush in ~10th year of car's life span).
The Model 3/Y just dump the output of the rotor into a permanently locked 9:1 trans. There is no need for a reverse gear either as unlike a gas engine the electric motor can easily rotate in both directions.
An electric motor cant "stall" like a gas engine and generally never has to change gear, so there is usually no real benefit to fitting the cost and complexity of clutching driveshafts you typically need when you have a gearbox or gas engine.
Someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but to best of my memory the only "mainstream" EV with a gearbox on sale today is the Porche Taycan/Audi E-Tron GT (they are both the same chasis/drivetrain underneath) with its pretty unusual 2-speed setup. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the next generation of that car eliminates the gearbox.
If the drivetrain never disengages, how does “freewheeling mode” (neutral) work? Spinning the wheels manually makes them a generator, and that causes resistance from the magnetic flux (hence regenerative braking). How do cars disable that?
> Is it...not just going into neutral via disconecting a drive shaft?
Very good point and although IDK how it's done I completely agree with you regarding the terminology. In other words, I don't see new internal combustion cars renaming neutral to be "car wash mode"... lol.
Cars should have neutral. And, if yours does then it should be named as such.
Making sure I've got "car was mode" is not what I want to do when I'm in the market for a new car. Nor do I want to start reading through the owners manual should I have to push my car onto the shoulder of the road in an emergency.
Perhaps my age and crotchety grumpiness is starting to show.
I'd need to do some quick math to double-check but very rough ballpark estimates still make me think Teslas can be pushed by a single person. After all, a single strongman can pull a passenger airliner, and any car is nearly impossible to push uphill -- you have to really get some momentum built up first to let them coast up driveways/etc.
It's not about weight or incline, it's the mechanical gearing in the "transmission" that can't turn the wheels without 100 percent power from the engine. You'll be able to push it and think it's really heavy, but it's just the transmission fighting you.
standards and automatic trans have neutral that disconnects driveshaft from engine, removing any resistance from the engaged gear. Most EVs either don't have neutral or a poor implementation of it, because of single gear transmission/direct drive.
> Most EVs either don't have neutral or a poor implementation of it,
I'm sorry, do you mean that neutral and "car wash/freeroll mode" are not 100% equivalent?
This really confounds me... if my car has a problem while driving down the road, I'd really like to have a chance of pushing it onto the shoulder if necessary.
A car that you can't do this with sounds very poorly designed to me.
They aren’t equivalent. Most EVs have a free roll mode, where you can push the car or take it through a car wash. You are still spinning the electric motors though.
This is fine for low speeds and short distances but is not advised for towing, like with tow trucks that leave two of the car’s wheels on the ground.
>To make matters worse I was in a mountain valley and had no phone signal
I read the above as an indication that they were in a valley where mountains were blocking any chance of a signal. Going further "downhill" wouldn't help in that case.
Fair enough, I was thinking back to the time something similar happened to me "mid-mountain".
This Tesla must've been in one heck of a stop where "hiking wasn’t an option as it was pretty hot and we had no water", lol. Does Tesla make a motocross bike?
Lack of cell signal is still a problem in some parts of the U.S. I can think of a few places within a couple hundred miles where I can drive 45 minutes or so without any signal. It's also an area where triple digit temperatures are common in the summer.
Most cars have one or more clutches to put the car in neutral. This is required so the engine can idle while the car stands still, among other reasons. Electric cars don't need to idle and therefore don't have any clutches in the drivetrain. Adding clutches just for allowing the user to push around the car seems needlessly complicated and over optimizing for a scenario that will not occur for the majority of cars.
I would have thought regenerative braking could be disabled by simply electrically isolating the motors. You still have the mechanical resistance of turning the rotor, but I would also think that is easier than turning over an IC engine.
Others have mentioned that there is indeed a "free roll" mode and I'm prone to think your hypothesis regarding the implementation may be correct. The specifics, however, do not matter to me.
What I'm wondering now is, if "free roll" mode is activated while I'm at a red light... is there a chance I start rolling as I do in my manual when I take my foot off the brake?
Maybe I should just reach out to Tesla at this point though (-:
>> You still have the mechanical resistance of turning the rotor,
Isn't this exactly what regenerative braking is? There's no mechanical disconnect between the wheels and the motor (i.e. a clutch) so pushing the car essentially turns it into a generator.
Your second sentence is correct, but it takes a lot more torque to turn a generator at a given speed when it is driving current through a load, than it does when it is open-circuit.
Inside the motor/generator, what happens is that if there's current flowing in the windings as a result of the EMF induced by turning the rotor, then, loosely speaking, it creates a magnetic field which opposes the rotation - but if it is not connected to some load (or a short-circuit) there's no current, even though there is still an induced EMF.
It's a standard case of the conservation of energy - if it were not the case, you could put an arbitrary number of generators on the same shaft, all supplying power to external loads, and then use the output of a couple of them to power a motor spinning the assembly...
If you are turning a motor/generator slowly, then the difference in torque is not much, but I am responding to the implication that the motor would have to be mechanically disengaged in order to disable the braking effect.
Correct me if I'm wrong but, if I understand things correctly... at this point we're wondering if manual locking hubs are a better (or worse) solution than electrically isolating the motor(s). Right?
And, off the top of my head I'm going to say the manual locking hubs will be better overall. Better from an energy efficiency perspective as well as overall convenience and simplicity of design. They might be worse for Tesla's P&L though since anyone with a tire jack and a standard parts dealer nearby could work on the car.
Then again, besides the fact that I'm a cynic... what the heck do I really know!??!
I don't think it would be useful for me to speculate about that. I'm just attempting to clear up some apparent misunderstandings about regenerative braking.
Yes and no. Spinning the motor will generate a voltage but if it's not connected to anything there's no current flow and so the only resistance is friction. For it to act as a brake, something has to use the current - for example, charging the battery or more simply just shorting the motor (try turning an efficient DC motor with the wires open and the wires shorted - even with a stepper motor, you'll find a huge difference).
"a scenario that will not occur for the majority of cars" isn't the standard, otherwise there would be no need to require most safety features, as the majority of cars never get into a major crash.
If a car runs out of charge or malfunctions, it would help everyone if it is easier to move it so it doesn't block traffic. It might be wise to make this a requirement. Seems to me that a clutch that simply switches between connected and neutral and that only operates when the car isn't moving would be far simpler and cheaper than a clutch that handles shifting between different gears while the engine is turning.
That's exactly what a clutch does. They show up in all sorts of places besides the third pedal "clutch" drivers of standard transmissions are familiar with, e.g. in part-time AWD systems, traditional automatic transmissions with planetary gears, torque converters and hybrid transmissions with lockup clutches for efficient cruising, and so on.
Locking (wheel) hubs could certainly be used to disconnect the wheels from whatever drivetrain trouble lurks within, but they come with a whole lot of compromises: cost, weight, complexity, space, etc. Standard industry practice for vehicles that can't be towed with only two wheels immobilized is (and has been for decades iiuc) to flatbed tow them, so Tesla isn't really going against the grain here. I think it's a fine choice.
> Adding clutches just for allowing the user to push around the car seems needlessly complicated and over optimizing for a scenario that will not occur for the majority of cars.
The ability and need to push a car is incredibly common, especially for emergency or non-optimal scenarios. Cars often stop working, be it dead battery, out of gas, malfunction, broken axle(which teslas have).
Yeah, that's a fair point but isn't it true that a mostly discharged battery will still have enough charge to perform some limited functions. E.g. even in a normal car I think a dead battery can power the lights even though the starter only "clicks".
Nonetheless, I'm a rather conservative type of person and see your point so in my "dream car" I might want a way to manually put the car in neutral (or free-roll mode, whatever you want to call it). That's why locking hubs came to my mind in a prior reply.
Yeah when I lived in South Africa, I saw people towing each other all the time with just a rope. Sure it was one of those flat threaded ropes, but it works.
On a highway my hood latch broke (old car) and it flew up at 50 mph and crushed my windshield. I had no service (but knew the other carrier would have full bars) and spent over an hour waving at every car trying to get someone to stop to let me call my parents (I was 18 and not exactly intimidating). It was a crazy experience as I'd obviously had an accident. Nobody would help. Finally I just stood in the road like a crazy person and a nice family stopped and one of their kids was on the carrier I needed. It was far enough from a nearby town to be at least a few hours walk and not before nightfall.
FWIW, I was stranded due to a bug in the fuel level indicator and mileage remaining estimate on my 2017 Subaru Outback. Subaru knows about the issue but you have to bring it to their attention if you want a fix. Not giving Tesla a pass here, just mentioning that it's not unique to them.
>Subaru knows about the issue but you have to bring it to their attention if you want a fix.
This seems incredibly irresponsible when people could die from being stranded when the meter lies about being able to get home like the other commenter described.
I never got that notice. There is also a firmware bug related to undercharging the battery(shutting the charger off too early) which was also not communicated to me and resulting in getting stranded with a dead battery. Fortunately the car was in a retail parking lot that time and not in the middle of nowhere on the 5 freeway in central CA like when we ran out of gas.
Some other things to keep in mind regarding any phones in your group if you end up stranded:
If you're in an emergency and your phone says you have no signal, call 911 anyway. It'll attempt to reach any network in range that the phone is compatible with, not just the network you're subscribed to. Some phones nowadays will show "Emergency calls only" when this is the case, but it doesn't appear to be 100% consistent, so again, call anyway.
Also turn on battery saver and when you're not actively trying to call, keep the phone in airplane mode. If you don't it'll repeatedly try to reach a tower which will drain your battery quickly. Don't power it off unless you don't plan to use it for the rest of the day, because booting up uses a lot of energy.
This a hundred times. Years ago, on a hot summer day, my girlfriend and I were stranded on the highway after a big truck overturned blocking the entire driveway. We were on my then motorcycle, but couldn't drive in any directions as the next exit was way beyond the overturned truck and it was blocked cars everywhere. We were extremely lucky I brought a couple frozen water plastic bottles in the bags, so although we had to wait until dark (6-7 hours) before they could eventually free the highway, we never went out of water. Since that episode, I always took at least one plastic bottle of frozen water when doing motorcycle trips.
Slightly off topic, but how come you were going on a multi-hour drive anywhere with no water, let alone into a remote mountainous area on a hot day?
I'm uncomfortably aware how quickly vehicles take me to inconvenient, if not dangerous, distances. 10 miles away is a short distance to drive but three hours to walk. Even fifteen minutes on a bike is a tedious walking distance back if it breaks down. For how easy it is to put or keep some bottled water in a car, why not do that all the time?
You need vastly different amounts of water for going on a road trip vs hiking, so reading charitably I assume GP didn't have enough water, especially for a hike of unknown length.
Did you have your destination entered into the navigation? I find the estimates to be fairly accurate when you tell it exactly where you are going, at least within 5% or so. I always enter my full trip into the planner before I start, and it hasn’t failed me so far.
There's an app called PlugShare where people have flagged locations with regular 120V and 240V plugs as well as off the beaten path chargers. There's even some people with home chargers that have left a way to contact them in an emergency and they'll let you charge if you ask nicely. Haven't used any of the latter but they exist.
You can say this about pretty much any car that isn't super basic like a Corolla. The uniquely Tesla thing used to be driving incredibly distracted due to the giant iPad in the cockpit, but other cars have that too now.
>> (turns out you need one that has a full bed because of the regenerative breaking, and tesla’s service doesn’t have infinite coverage)
Is there a service for "On demand battery charging". A mini truck carrying a generator that can be called to the location. Could charge premium from the EVs that are too tired to move.
I get that you just need a little juice to get to a real charger, but you'd probably need several 10's of kilowatts to get a decent charge in 10-20 minutes, and that's getting into fairly heavy equipment. No reason it wouldn't be somewhat feasible though.
> people in their cars pretended to ignore me, and one couple leaving theirs just walked away, as I asked if they could move so we could unload my dead car
I wonder if they would have started responding if you motioned the tow truck driver to unload your car directly behind them, in a position that would obviously seriously inconvenience the other driver(s) or prevent them from leaving entirely...of course, also mentioning that was your plan to them loudly so you're sure they can hear.
Another option - although that depends on availability - would be roadside assistance, that can ironically bring a diesel generator to your car to give it some charge.
This really is an extreme and specific example, but risks like this are why most people want lots (lots) of range and why gas/diesel cars won't die out any time soon.
The sheer ease of mind that comes with having densely packed energy that can be replenished at a moment's notice practically anywhere should not be disregarded easily. Maybe battery tech can get there some day, but it's certainly not today.
I have a very old petrol car (>35y) with a terrible fuel-indicator. I bring a spare 5L tank with petrol under the backseat always.
An EV could achieve the same with a small portable powerbank, not?
My current tank can hold some 50+L; this gives my old T3 a range of ~430km¹. When we lived in Botswana ('83, other car) we had an extra 150L spare fuel-tank instead of back-seats. We could do some 1500km in this old 4wd on full tanks. Which was needed as gas-pumps were easily 300km apart and often out of gas.
An EV could achieve the same with the back-seats replaced by additional battery-packs, not? I'd presume this might be too heavy or not allowed due to regulations, but technically just adding ridiculous amounts of batteries would solve this. Like adding ridiculous tanks for gas would.
Sure, the amount of joules you can pack in a KG of fuel is far more than in a KG of batteries. But to me the solution then is easy: just add more KGs.
¹yup, the mileage is terrible, a VW T3 is basically an underpowered, 1500kg brick
> I bring a spare 5L tank with petrol under the backseat always.
Not too safe of an idea...
> An EV could achieve the same with a small portable powerbank, not?
Say that tank gets you 70km. You'd need 15 kilowatt-hours or 54 megajoules of battery, or about 56kg and about 25L of volume to do the same.
> An EV could achieve the same with the back-seats replaced by additional battery-packs, not? I'd presume this might be too heavy or not allowed due to regulations, but technically just adding ridiculous amounts of batteries would solve this.
Maybe, but it's also ridiculous amounts of money. Also, really increasing the mass of the vehicle is enough to hurt efficiency, so...
I would love to see some kind of standardized way of supplementing an electric car's battery. Most people don't need massive EV range all of the time, just when going on long trips. Being able to buy or rent an extra battery pack and throw it in the trunk, frunk, or back seats to add more range seems ideal for those cases.
I've thought it would be great if there were rentable battery trailers that had an extra full charge or two built in, plus maybe some extra storage.
uHaul could make a killing off of them for people who want to take their EV on a road trip. If you could get 600 miles off of a single combined full charge you would be in the range of reasonable American road trip distance, and you could make the choice to stop and eat and occupy two chargers to get another 480 miles or so out of a 30 minute stop.
I usually clock about 900-1100 miles a day when I'm doing a destination road trip, so I would still chafe at that limit, but it would beat the heck out of sub-300 mile limits between long breaks for me.
But of course uHaul can’t do this without the full cooperation of the electric vehicle manufacturers. As a first order approximation of course there is nothing tricky about suplementing the power of a running EV, but on a practical level I would expect the firmware to throw a hissy fit if it does not expects this.
Also, why a battery trailer? Why not a gas tank plus generator trailer?
Even with a smaller trailer, though, I'd expect a 33% or so range penalty-- it's just not too much of a win. You don't make it anywhere near twice as far.
Even so, assuming there were a nationwide network of them, you could pull in, swap trailers, and be on your way in 15 minutes.
Of course, this is in an ideal world where everything goes my way. I wonder if the penalty would be as high as 33%. Seems like it would be simple to make a maximally aerodynamic battery trailer since human comfort doesn't have to be considered. Then you're only adding the weight and drag of a few hundred lbs of trailer and battery.
I would think the penalty would be in the high single digits or at most in the very low double digits which could be offset by having 1.5x or 2x normal battery capacity in the trailer.
*Ninja edit, I decided to look this up. The Model Y's battery is 1700 lbs, so you are absolutely right that there would be a significant distance penalty adding that much weight to the vehicle plus the trailer weight and the battery armor as well if that isn't included in the weight.
Curb weight of the Model Y is also 4400 lbs, so having to tow a 2500 lb trailer would be a significant hassle.
Perhaps that could be offset by making the trailer smart and adding motors to it that the main brain could control through the power link. If it could push its own weight and it had a 1.5x battery, and if it also had regenerative braking, then it could get close to doubling the distance.
Then again, each trailer would cost right about the same as a full vehicle, and would require an entire factory to be spun up to make them, and it would be an incredibly valuable product and therefore ripe for theft.
Lots of negatives, not a lot of positives.
It would be better all in all to be able to hot swap the batteries then. With standardized batteries put onto an integrated sled system, a robot at the fuel pump could pull the discharged battery and put it on a battery tester/charger and insert a fresh charged battery in its place.
I guess that would be more like an oil change or system flush, but the advantages would be manifold. Batteries wouldn't be the weak spot in the system any longer. The likelihood of people keeping batteries until they degraded would be significantly reduced, problematic batteries could be identified and repaired or recycled before they erupted, and assuming that the system was in wide usage it could enable road trippers to stay on the road longer quicker and waste less daylight.
Plus, for manufacturers, fuel stations, and mechanics, it would be an opportunity to make more money off of vehicle owners while providing safer, longer lasting vehicles to customers.
It's probably still a post-scarcity pipe dream though.
> It would be better all in all to be able to hot swap the batteries then. With standardized batteries put onto an integrated sled system, a robot at the fuel pump could pull the discharged battery and put it on a battery tester/charger and insert a fresh charged battery in its place.
This has been discussed/proposed/Tesla said they were going to do this long ago.
The big downside is that no one wants to exchange their battery for someone else's. Pretty soon all the batteries end up in crappy shape.
The only way you could really do this is by having the swap stations own the batteries--- but this is so capital intensive that it's really a non-starter. Not to mention that it is a bit mechanically fraught.
The big upside is that we could use a lot more solar/daytime power for charging.
There's also the safety issue, since 1700 lbs of lithium is dangerous if mishandled.
If the glass pack batteries make it to market, with their 2x capacity boost and lack of dangerous chemicals, it might make more sense, but purportedly they also work better with quick charge and can handle more charge cycles, so it may be a moot point anyway.
A Jackery 1000 is already 20+ lbs and over $1000, and it wouldn't get an EV far. Spare power packs would have to be large and very expensive.
Better idea would be a mobile fast charging truck. Ironically that truck would have to be a diesel to make sure it had the range to support distant stranded vehicles, and not be insanely heavy and expensive itself.
That's just a UI trick, isn't it? Make 5% display as 0%, and add a solemn-looking toggle switch to select the reserve battery.
(According to a random source on the web, a Model Y battery weighs 1,770 pounds, so a perfectly efficient 5%-size physical battery would add another 88 pounds to the cargo.)
My car has a spare tank built in. I just carry a spare- spare jerry-can because the indicator is just too unreliable and the milage on the built-in spare tank rather meh.
You know, I don't think I've seen this idea before. I've seen discussion of "can we swap the whole battery pack at a station", "can we make the cells pourable", people carrying generators, etc., but I've not seen the idea of a removable part of power pack for limp-home situations. A modern equivalent of the Jerry can.
I got an i3 with a range extender and a 2 gallon gas tank. The gas tank range can't exceed the battery range and still be an EV. I use the battery almost all the time but knowing I can gas and go 80 miles is great. I drove 1,400 miles to Florida and back. It wasn't noticeably worse experience than an ICE.
It depends on the model year/battery size. That was a US only implementation and as you know there is a work around. The other European feature that should be available in the USA is the ability to set when the REX starts to kick in.
The USA requires the REX to kick in at 6% charge. The problem at that level is that the battery can't compensate during short high power drawls. There is a cheat code that enables the REX to kick in a 25% charge remaining. This seems to provide more on demand amperage but I'm not sure what is happening. Hills and wind have a larger effect on speed when off the REX. The REX is just a tiny motor that maintains the battery level but doesn't connect directly to the electric drive train.
Precisely. Gas cars have had their scandals and crises, I dont have to worry about the manufacturer juicing the fuel gauge for marketing purposes. I have been car-free for the past 12 years, but when it'll be time to move to the suburbs, I'll go with what works and is predictable.
Subaru did exactly this in their Outback 6 years ago and had to issue a recall. I got stranded in mine because the "low fuel" light came on when the tank was empty, not when there was a couple gallons left
If you drive your tank dry on the side of the road in a valley with no cell service, the fact that gas stations are plentiful won't help you and you're in exactly this same situation.
That's not true. You won't need to be towed, for one (I know that many tow services now are equipping their vehicle with a charger). No specialized equipment required, just someone with or willing to give you a ride to buy a $10 gas can and a gallon of gas, which should be enough.
Sounds more like Bay Area specifically. Realized whenever I traveled outside that normal people actually make eye contact or otherwise acknowledge your presence, and now I'm living happily elsewhere in CA (though not just for that reason). Like a stereotypical old mother, I blame tech addiction.
Battery meter at the top is EPA range - ie. the official range measurement method, in basically ideal conditions.
The routefinder 'learns' from your previous driving habits. Driving style easily has a 50% impact on range between "drives 50 mph slipstreaming behind a truck" and "drives 90 mph and brakes aggressively at every corner".
No reason it has to show the EPA range. My family’s Subaru has “learned” that it lives in the mountains and the range estimates reflect that. And I’m pretty sure it’s a simply looking at what kind of gas mileage it got recently. When we have kayaks on top of the car, it readjusts the mileage estimates down pretty quickly.
All these comments about ICE vehicles being the same ignore that when ICE vehicles have estimates to empty, they take basic steps to try to get the estimate correct.
My BMW even calculates "alternates". When I have under 50 miles of range it checks the internal (no Internet service needed) database and offers a route to the nearest known gas station.
With your system, if I live somewhere flat and I go to the mountains, I will be out of juice during the climb. Tesla has a battery indicator in percentage and the navigation which is pretty accurate. Your ICE car has a gauge for the tank and an estimation of range.
Tesla should probably not allow you to show the battery as range as it will always be inaccurate and people will complain. But if they only show percentages, people complain as well.
"Battery meter at the top is EPA range - ie. the official range measurement method, in basically ideal conditions."
I guess I'm flabbergasted by this, as that's not how my Chevy Volt (and I presume many other BEVs) work. The range value ('guessimeter' people call it) on my Volt takes something like a rolling average of your last few drives and that's what it shows you. So if it's winter, it shows you less range because your last few drives had less efficiency. It's not always accurate (if there's, say, major temp fluctuations), but it's way more useful than what you're describing.
To me, what you're describing is borderline dishonest marketing, and technically unnecessary.
What I'd like to see is two numbers: estimated range as I've described, and beside it a kWh # (which I can guesstimate from the battery % gauge visual, but not precise).
EDIT: Not sure why car manufacturers in general hide the kWh remaining-capacity of the battery so much. They seem to think consumers are too stupid to understand such technical terms? But they're clearly aware of it every time they use a public charger, and it's the closest equivalent to litres/gallons in an ICE.
There's no reason why Tesla can't calculate the accurate range in both places, is there? My 2022 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid has a "distance to empty" number that "learns" based on your driving habits and typical mileage. It's not perfect, for example going on a road trip can throw it off (the hybrid gets significantly lower highway MPG than around town), but most of the time it's very accurate.
Yeah, there's no reason they couldn't do that, and most other BEVs do that. The fact that Tesla doesn't is I'd say, disappointing? and likely to give EVs a bad name in the long run.
But could also reflect that this is a California company where they don't really have weather.
They do have a range estimate based on recent driving, it’s just in a separate Energy page.
“Accurate range” is difficult. It could be accurate based on recent driving, but that number could be very inaccurate if there is a change in weather or you are taking a different kind of drive than your last one.
The only way to show the most accurate estimate is to know where the driver is going, and many drivers don't always input their destination.
It can also vary dramatically based on how you drive, and in fact, if you do have a destination, it will give hints if relevant (e.g. "keep speed below 70 mph to reach destination").
You can switch the EPA-rated miles for a battery percentage indicator by just tapping it in the UI.
Let's say you live in a state with a 55mph speed limit.
The car has a lifetime average of 0.300 kWh/mi over 4 years of driving.
It's December, ambient temperature is 20F and it is snowing.
Your last 10 drives consumption rate was 0.400 kWh/mi because its cold out.
There's A LOT of smarter things the car can do than use its factory set 0.250 kWh/mi consumption to spit out the range on dashboard.
Erring on the side of caution would also always be better, whereas it is erring on the side of showing the absolute best state that I as an individual never experienced in 4 years of ownership.
It's not erring on the side of the absolute best state. The EPA-rated miles represent a standardized mix of highway and city miles.
The best state would be over 600 miles [1].
It's erring on the side of consistency, as it's also representing the battery's state of charge. It would only serve to confuse users to try and guess whether the current trip is a highway or city drive, will end in the next minute or two hours from now, which way the wind will be blowing and whether or not you're driving uphill, etc. It'd just be a useless guess, instead of an at least consistent one.
If you tell it where you're going, it already gives you a great estimate, as it doe stake into account all of those factors.
Look, I get it, some people love these cars and will stand no criticism, fine. I had one, they are lovely. We are allowed to want things we like to be better.
But all the "just use nav estimate" arguments miss that some people drive more than one place?
If I am driving out an hour to do some shopping, visit my parents, and then drive back.. it may be a total of 90mi but the first leg is 30mi. Do I need to pre-enter my round trip as multiple waypoints to get an accurate view of whether I will make it home or not?
Seems silly.
Just guesstimate a more accurate dashboard view range like you do in other place sin the UI.
I get it, too. I've seen some people that resort to ad hominems online. We are allowed to evaluate suggestions critically.
The other places in the UI are either based on either the destination you've entered or the last 5, 15, or X miles driven. They only make sense in that context: Just using one of those numbers on the dashboard would be misleading and inconsistent.
Guessing based on the Wh/m of your last ten drives might be a closer estimate, but would be wrong if your next drive isn't like your last ten. It might even be more accurate when guessing your last nine drives, so then you learn to trust it, but those were city miles, and for the next drive, it's highway miles. And now the estimate is way off.
It's just meaningless. We'd quickly learn that the number given is a bad estimate that can't be trusted and needs to be adjusted based on the way you'll actually be driving and other real world conditions... and that's where we already are. The only difference is that currently it's at least consistent, both between trips in the same car and from one car to another. This additional guesstimate would just add more confusion.
Look I don't really care about Teslas so I don't really have any idea, but the article says that Tesla does NOT use the standardized EPA-mix, but instead does their own testing and gets those tests EPA approved. The EPA spokesperson said they were following the rules, but only technically. Do you have alternate information showing that it actually is the standardized mix to produce the estimate?
The data alone should tell you that Tesla is up to something.
Almost every real world range test shows that Tesla systematically underperforms in the real world relative to spec, worse than substantially all other carmakers.
It's a shame too because Tesla are towards the top of the the real world range pack, so they don't really have to lie.. but it's like a compulsion for some people.
What is mind boggling and hilarious is that there's a Porsche rated EPA 225mi and a Tesla rated EPA 348mi and they both end up achieving 280mi.
Notably the Model 3/Y seem to have a wider EPA-to-reality delta than the Model S in the 75mph test.
This seems to align with my 4 year ownership experience. Tesla Model 3 LR rated 310mi but only hits 200mi with C&D. It's interesting how much the 3/Y range seems to drop from 70 to 75mph.
Most accurate by what standard? Range depends on a bunch of factors. The range you got going to the store yesterday is not the range you will get driving to your friend’s house tomorrow.
The car doesn’t know where you are going, whether it is city or highway driving, whether or not there is an elevation change, unless you tell it by navigating somewhere.
It could take a guess, but that guess still has plenty of chances to be wrong if your next X miles of driving is not going to be similar to your previous X miles of driving.
Why should the car use an average .250 kWh/mi hardcoded rate on a car I have owned for 4 years when it knows my lifetime average is 0.300 kWh/mi?
There's plenty of smarter things it can do by default other than "its hard, meh".
They are gonna figure out how to do coast to coast self driving this year but can't project a reasonable battery range estimate given temperature/driver history/weather? Do they need more GPUs?
That might be a useful metric but it won’t always be the most accurate.
If you mostly drive around town, that estimate will be way off when you get on a highway to go to Grandma’s house.
There’s probably a better way to do it, but Tesla seems to be optimizing for avoiding the “why does the website say 300mi but my car shows 200mi fully charged” support question, in exchange for a different set of support questions.
I think ideally the car would give a best guess estimate, along with a clear breakdown of why this is more or less than the rated range. I just don’t think that’s clearly the “most accurate” option. Most accurate requires knowing where you are going.
So make it a menu option - range estimator: best/worst/spec.
It feels like one of those Muskisms where one bending of the truth requires more and more stuff down the line.
If they weren't over optimizing for the EPA test to give almost unachievable range, then they wouldn't need to have the car range meter lie as well. But if you fib once, you need to keep fibbing and keep the fib straight.
It really does not learn. I have driven the same route to and from Richmond, VA as a range test over and over again since 2018.
My range is approx. 180 miles, in favorable conditions (summer, AC off). If it was actually accurate, as soon as you hit 70-80mph you would see your range half. Clearly that doesn't happen, so the estimator is off by ~40% for highway conditions, i.e. complete bullshit.
Yeah I think that Tesla of all the EV makers uses the most optimistic EPA range for ads and display.
I got 260mi range max on my 310mi rated car. If it was winter or a road trip in which I could truly go fast, it easily got below 200mi.
For a 310mi car, going to visit my parents or in-laws only 75mi away for Christmas should not have made me worry about making the round trip on one charge, but it frequently drained the battery below 20 or even 10%.
Are you talking about the battery meter? That is just EPA range * battery percentage.
The precise estimate is in the navigation system, when you navigate to a destination and it says you will arrive with X% left. This takes into account speed, traffic, elevation, temperature, wind, etc. and is usually pretty accurate for me.
Ah I see. I will check on that but you would think that as soon as you get on the highway that estimator would change. It is also the first place someone would look for range, not inside navigation so I would call that false advertising…
I leave the battery meter set to percentage, the “miles” option is really just percentage dumbly mapped to miles.
The golden number in a Tesla Is absolutely the navigation route estimate. While navigating you can open the Energy app as well to see more detail, how you are doing compared to the estimate, and specific factors affecting consumption.
I also use percentage. It's not something that I usually think about. I just know that my "real range" is 180 miles at highway speeds. That's not something they tell you when you buy a Tesla.
I also just don't use navigation if I've been somewhere more than once. Just navigate with my head..
Tesla advertises EPA range which is a mix of city and highway driving with an average speed way below normal interstate highway speeds.
I use the navigation all the time,
even when I know the way, because it knows about traffic jams and so I can get a good range estimate for longer trips. It even gives you a round-trip estimate back to your starting point.
Percentage seems to be the general consensus amongst Tesla owners. The real numbers are in the navigation. We've been looking at percentage based range on gas cars forever. I would argue that gas cars with "mile" range estimates are not that accurate either. At least, that's my experience.
>This takes into account speed, traffic, elevation, temperature, wind, etc
Can you expand on this? You say etc, what else is included? Where is it documented that this calculation is actually happening, versus something far simpler?
“The calculation that predicts how much energy you will use is an estimate based on driving style (predicted speed, etc.) and environmental factors (elevation changes, wind speed and direction, ambient and forecasted temperatures, air density and humidity, etc.). As you drive, Model 3 continuously learns how much energy it uses, resulting in improved accuracy over time. It is important to note that Model 3 predicts energy usage based on the driving style of the individual vehicle. For example, if you drive aggressively for a period of time, future range predictions will assume higher consumption.”
Also if you open the Energy app in the car it will show you which of these factor(s) are contributing to higher or lower consumption than the navigation’s estimated range as you go.
EPA range is a mix of city and highway range. City range is > highway range, thus EPA range will over estimate highway range and underestimate city range.
>The routefinder 'learns' from your previous driving habits.
I'd like to see evidence of this, but I'm skeptical. Sounds like something Tesla fans claim is happening, like when you report an error at an intersection it gets fixed manually. And, even if true, I'm not sure how useful it'd be.
I have a model 3. I recently took a trip of 196 miles but lost almost 270 miles in battery. I wasn’t driving like a maniac, I was on 65 mph cruise control the entire time with no traffic.
How were the Tires inflated? are they stock tires? are the rims the aero dynamic ones? were you using climate control, was their wind? Hills? Any roof cargo? All these have a big effects.
Wind can easy be a 3mpg hit for my car, that’s about 10%. Not all the difference but a couple stacked effects could get yours
Annoying all these things matter when range is constrained. Next gen batteries can’t come soon enough.
>How were the Tires inflated? are they stock tires? are the rims the aero dynamic ones? were you using climate control, was their wind? Hills? Any roof cargo? All these have a big effects.
True. But none of this should matter if your Tesla actually "learns", as other comments claim, right?
I think it's basically some PM taking a stand at Tesla with the fact that there's just no good estimate possible without knowing the route, so they will always show EPA estimate.
Any sane a Tesla driver changes that to show percent battery instead of range.
As others have said the trip planner is excellent, within a percent or two even in winter conditions driving over passes etc..
Note that range changes a lot more due to elevation, speed, cold etc, compared to gas cars because electrics are so much more efficient.
My initial thought is that it's a mitigation to litigation. Maybe the thought was as long as you show the "legal" mileage calculation, you can't be held responsible for anything bad that happens? I don't think we apply that to ICE but I could see where a lawyer thinks it's necessary.
I think you need to give consumers some vague idea of how much range you'll get in the car, and EPA-rated miles is at least a clear standard by which all EVs can be compared.
A percentage indicator is fine for a car you already have, but not useful for comparing between cars. It could show kWh, but that isn't good, either. What consumers actually care about is range, and whether that comes from more kWh, better aerodynamics, or a lighter car, the range is the bottom-line number. We wouldn't want consumers buying a car with a bigger battery just because it has more kWh if it doesn't get better range.
I think EPA-rated miles is the best of available options--it just needs to be understood by consumers. And I think cases where it isn't are a bit overstated. I suspect very few consumers genuinely believe they'll get the same range in miles regardless of their driving speed, headwinds, or whether they're going uphill or downhill.
The article says it was a mandate from Elon Musk. Not sure I believe the claim, but I'd also be surprised if he wasn't aware just how optimistic the EPA estimate is.
When you say “learns” is it actually factoring in the route or is it just using the historical average miles per… what, kWh, and multiplying it across the distance
Haven't seen the code, so I don't know how it works. It certainly looks at the route though, because different destinations both 100 miles away give different estimated power usages.
When you use the navigation system in a Tesla, the estimated energy usage for that trip takes into account the specific route, your projected speed, elevation changes, traffic, temperature, wind, and adjusts based on what speeds you actually end up going.
What? How did you arrive at that conclusion. Even if the laws of thermodynamics and entropy took a holiday, and you recovered 100% of the energy when you brake, at best you would break even and not hurt your range (vs not braking aggressively).
Regen breaking increases range over no regen braking, but braking aggressively will always be worse than not braking aggressively.
No? Accelerating and decelerating are both lossy, and for the brief intervals when you're going faster you're also taking additional wind friction loss.
Most EVs (including Tesla) do have regenerative braking, so some of your energy is converted back into electricity when you brake, but nowhere close to all of it, so people who have a smoother, less aggressive profile will get more range.
Also if you brake really aggressively, you're dissipating more energy than can be successfully harvested and the rest is converted to heat, losing the energy you paid for and also increasing maintenance costs.
Braking doesn't increase range. Rather the natural foot off pedal regen braking increases range. If you physically slam on brakes, I'm sure that doesn't help range.
I'm sure that if you "slam on the brakes" (per GP), your car will take region to the max and the apply the real friction brakes, causing lots of kinetic energy to be converted to heat and "wasting" energy...
(Also, Tesla cars do have blended braking between region & friction...)
That is an accurate meter, it is not a Tesla problem. My PHEV works the same way, but that fact isn’t really relevant.
The meter is presenting you the regeneration “rate” but what you’re thinking of is the regen rate integrated over time, I.e the amount of charge recovered during the process of stopping, which the meter is not showing you.
Maybe, I don't really care about regenerative rate, I just notice my meter going to max when braking hard. I only use the battery for city driving and hard acceleration on the motorway anyway. It's great for merging onto the Spanish motorways.
I make EVs at a different company, and I'm not a fan of Tesla's range indicator. It's misleading because miles don't map directly onto battery charge. The range that that indicates is miles on flat level ground with no wind at 55mph which you will never experience in real life. At 80mph you're going to get 2/3 of that range every time. At 35mph you can get significantly higher range, but no one is ever going to drive 300+ miles at 35mph. If you just tap on the range icon it will change to percent, which is less misleading. ICE vehicles have all the same problems, but most ICE vehicles always just show gas level, rather than range.
My PHEV VW car shows range which is estimated based on the petrol level and the battery charge. I learned this the hard way because I noticed my petrol tank was very very close to empty driving on the motorway. I simply engaged fully electric mode, which turns off the petrol engine, and that way made it to the fueling station.
It sort of learns based on the immediately previous drive what the driving style is, and therefore what the range is.
Not defending Tesla but battery range is really hard without context. Kinetic energy is velocity^2, which means moving twice the speed takes 4X the energy. They probably can get the right estimate for a destination because it knows the speed limit for the route and using that as your velocity can give you a better answer.
"...moving twice the speed takes 4X the energy..."
That's not quite right. The power required to maintain a constant velocity v against a constant drag force of F is P = Fv. With air drag on a car moving at highway speeds, the drag force F actually depends on v: it's proportional to the square of v, i.e. F ~ v^2. All together then:
P ~ v^3
So doubling the speed will increase the required power by a factor of eight.
You are correct that power lost to aerodynamic drag increases with the cube of velocity. However, if you increase speed, the time spent is reduced. As a result, the total energy grows with velocity squared.
>They probably can get the right estimate for a destination because it knows the speed limit
Even this is a massive over-simplification. Driving the same speed with a 20 mph headwind is going to take lot more energy than with a 20 mph tailwind for example. There's lots of other variables and they may be certainly tracking some (like A/C current draw) but I doubt they track others (like rolling friction or road conditions).
Edit: I found this article [1] and it claims they track an impressive amount of weather and traffic data for the calculation. I'd be curious if this is based on car sensors (probably not?) or local weather stations.
The mileage you and your dad got was probably pretty significantly different based on driving style, location etc. Just accelerating quickly off stops can end up having a noticeable effect on overall mileage. You were just willing to accept a much less accurate and imprecise number as “pretty accurate” and when the fuel went down too much you filled it anyways.
I’ve never driven a car to empty ever. I wouldn’t with a Tesla either.
Of course. YMMV (literally), I suppose. My ICE Nissan seems highly variable while my SO's Ford seems pretty accurate. Maybe it's just the difference in driving habits :-)
It’s more relevant how much you need to accelerate, not just your velocity. A satellite in orbit uses very little energy even though it’s going very fast.
A satellite in orbit uses the energy imparted by the gravitational force of the Earth to stay in orbit (and very little to no drag depending on the altitude).
Gravity doesn’t add energy to satellites in orbit. It changes the direction of motion but not the velocity. In effect it’s no different than rotating a solid object where electromagnetism keeps all the atoms in the same relative position.
Having owned a Tesla and non-Tesla EV the approach to range is entirely different.
Tesla - I literally never achieved the advertised range once.
BMW - I exceed the advertised range during low-speed highway cruises in ideal summer conditions.
Tesla - the range it shows me in car (not in nav) is the never-achievable EPA range.
BMW - the range it shows me in car (not in nav) adjusts ride to ride based on efficiency on most recent trips. So in the depths of winter it's showing me something 20% lower than in the peak of summer. This means it's factoring in driver behavior, drive mode used, speed, and temperature effectively.
It is reasonable to assume that your range on a trip is most similar to the range in your recent trips.
I can get in my BMW, look at the range meter, guesstimate the range on arrival and be correct to within 1% 9 times out of 10.
In my Tesla, I would constantly be doing mental math to discount the range it was showing me, to what I typically got, the weather, to see how big a delta it would be.
Sure, the nav range in Tesla got smarter over time and factored things in.. but this doesn't help on long round trips. It might tell me that I'm going to reach my destination with X% left, but I now have to do mental math to figure out if I am going to make it back or not.
With Tesla, I can't simply get in the car, see 300mi range on dash.. know I am making a trip 100mi each way so I'll be fine.
Instead it's like - 300mi range, NAV says I'll have 58% remaining at destination.. OK so that means it's estimating X burn rate, which means I will make it home with... 17% instead of 33%.
Exactly. Doing all this math when the main estimator says X is exhausting. Obviously I use percentage now but there is a problem with that estimate and a lot of people just want to pretend everything is fine.
Right, make it a toggle in menu - dashboard range estimator: [spec/pessimistic/optimistic].
Include weather, recent trips, lifetime consumption rates, type of road currently driving, etc.
Do anything other than the absolute simplest, laziest, most optimistic estimation which is "hey I bet you'll get the almost impossible-to-meet spec consumption rate!".
Its not false advertising, perhaps you could make a case of inaccurate ... but that's just advertising? You are not giving the car the context to provide an accurate estimate. Also you driving style might affect the estimate?
I don't use navigation, almost ever, after the first place I go somewhere. Therefore, the main battery estimator is just wrong. If it actually worked, as soon as you got to highway speeds you would see it half. Hiding the real estimation behind the navigation tool is cowardly
In my ICE car, if I drive around the town getting 28mpg, the "range" trends downwards to reflect the poor efficiency, while if I drive a certain route where I get 42mpg, the "range" meter will reflect that. It uses a quite long rolling average
Tesla COULD do that, but they don't on the main display because basing it on real data instead of garbage EPA data would produce a more conservative number and that would be harder to sell.
In my ICE car, all the places I can see range remaining have the same exact number, because doing anything else would be stupid and confusing.
The distance left in the tank is closer to the Tesla's more accurate estimate because it's constantly adjusting based on both your current gas level as well as your current energy efficiency. It may not accurately convey the distance available at the start of a trip but you're going to know well ahead of time if you're burn rate is too high. If the non-navigation distance estimate in a Tesla is always padded you could find out well after it's too late to make it to your destination or a charging station.
I wonder if anyone has actually objectively measured accuracy of various car models under various driving patterns. It seems plausible to me that everyone just thinks their ICE car is more accurate because 1) gas stations are literally everywhere so there is never “range anxiety” and 2) no one routinely lets their gas car get close to empty anyway.
> The distance left in the tank is closer to the Tesla's more accurate estimate
because it's constantly adjusting based on both your current gas level
How is that different from what Tesla does.
>> as well as your current energy efficiency.
How is that different from what Tesla does.
It shows you current battery percentage, it shows you live on the default screen what its discharge rate is, it also tells you in a side screen what driving habits are consuming extra energy from baseline and percentages from doing things like driving over 70 mpg, air conditioning, altitude changes.
So what exactly is an ICE car doing better.
Last time I checked, my fuel gauge wasn't telling me about the 15% drop in engine efficiency from going to high altitude areas. Funnily enough, the Tesla showed a large increase in energy use due to going up a slop, but otherwise is not affected by the drop in air density.
KE is not 4x the energy continuously used though that's 4x the energy spent getting to that speed. Air resistance does also square with velocity and that is an amount that's constantly required to be spent to maintain that speed.
Bummer to hear you all don’t like it. I drove a RWD Long Range Model 3 for 4.5 years. Absolutely loved everything about it. But the range was no where near 310 miles like stated. But I couldn’t have really cared less once I knew that fact. The few times a year I needed more than 200 miles, I used superchargers on my route just like I would if I had 250-300 and had to wait an extra 2 minutes at the charger. I averaged ~300-325 wh/m going 80-90mph on the highway (wind speed/direction obviously makes a big difference). 75kwh battery. 230 mile range. Every other day was charge to 80%, incredibly convenient to never think about it or gas and have more torque, speed than any other car you’re around. And low to no maintenance.
I now own a Long Range Model X. It is MUCH closer to the EPA mileage. I average ~330wh/m but I have a 100kwh battery, so much closer to a legitimate 300 mile range. Once again, doesn’t really make a different unless you happen to have an exact 275 mile trip. Either way, you’ll be stopping at a halfway supercharger to stay in optimal charge range (15-85%).
For what it's worth, I have a Nissan standard petrol car and it's pretty much the same. Every time I fill it up, it says I have 400 miles of range, then by the time I've driven about 300 miles, I've only got a few miles of range left.
Interestingly the accuracy seems to get a lot better by the time I'm down to half a tank. I don't know if it's a sensor issue, or maybe my driving habits just change a lot when I have a full tank versus when I'm running low.
The type of driving and time I'm driving can also make a huge difference to my trip MPG - some trips I average about 10MPG, others closer to 40MPG. Generally speaking, low speed but clear rural roads get the best, followed by motorway, followed by pootering around the city. The absolute worst mileage is during the winter, when I might only be driving lots of short trips around town on a very cold engine, with the headlights on, in the rain. In that case, I might only get around 200 miles out of a tank.
Anyway, my point is that knowing the specifics of this trip's fuel consumption is a much easier problem than knowing how many miles it'll be until you next need to refuel.
Yes, my Mazda does the same. It will happily report a 450 mile (725 km) range on my 13.2 gallon / 50 L tank, when I have never gotten more than 380 miles. Sometimes much less. To be fair, if you cruised slightly above the speed limit on the highway in fair conditions and drove it to truly empty, I think you would actually get that. But the gauge reads empty when there is easily 1.5 gal / 5.7 L in the tank, so in practice there is no way you're going to get the stated range.
However, the key difference is that my gas car can be filled up anywhere, and worst case I'd need to get a gas can. Running out of charge is a flatbed tow, that's a huge hassle. The range being accurate is a big deal on an electric!
Here there are some vehicle recovery services where they can dispatch a van with a giant battery in it to charge your stranded EV enough to get to the next proper charger.
Still more of a pain than a petrol can but better than a flatbed!
We rented one on a trip recently, super annoying to realize the dozen or so chargers in this beach town were actually incompatible or just too slow for real life.
On the way back to the drop off autopilot tried to slam us into the Bentley next us! It had been traveling the same direction as us for like 20 minutes and when we passed through an intersection it just jerked hard left and I had to correct it manually. Possible injuries notwithstanding I’m sure that would have surpassed my insurance coverage, which I’ve intentionally gone way above minimums on.
> It had been traveling the same direction as us for like 20 minutes and when we passed through an intersection it just jerked hard left and I had to correct it manually.
Even if this and many other stories are just anecdotes, I could never imagine myself even testing this "auto-but-not-really-pilot" feature outside of a testing environment.
How do you folks dare to even try to use it? The risk is so big and the reward so tiny...
With hands still on the wheel so I knew it couldn’t override me. Until that moment it just felt like the car drove “video game straight” with it on, instead of me making never ending micro corrections to account for things like the road, wind, tires.
> We rented one on a trip recently, super annoying to realize the dozen or so chargers in this beach town were actually incompatible or just too slow for real life.
Where were you that has a dozen chargers but no superchargers?
New Smyrna Beach, I drove to Daytona to charge. Not a terrible distance but an annoying for sure.
One other thing, for days on end the navigation would never “engage” just stuck on something like “Starting route.” So it never started conditioning the battery on the drive (and even chastised me for not doing so!?)
Finally, one morning all miles measurements were replaced with kilometers and it took watching a youtube video to figure out how to change it back.
IMHO comments like this are much more valuable with some numbers.
The linked figure[0] and associated paper report that efficiency peaks for EVs at around 20mph and then the cost per mile increases roughly linearly, by about 25 watt-hours when the speed increases by 10mph.
I just finished a long drive for summer vacation. Driving through Denmark (completely flat) at 130 km/h would absolutely wipe the battery, would be surprised if I managed even 350 km on a full charge. Driving over the mountains in Norway however, from 0m elevation to over 1000m and down again, at slower mountain roads (max 80 km/h), yielded almost 500 km on single charge.
I did not expect flat+high speed vs hill-climbing+low speed would be that dramatically different.
And it is true of petrol cars as well. In my old clunker going from 110 km/h to 120km/h is a 9% speed increase but nets about 15% extra fuel consumption.
I have a 2022 Nissan Leaf with 220 miles EPA range. I've found that this number is reasonably close to correct if one is driving under 60mph on country roads under moderate climate conditions. We live in Ohio and so I have actually done long drives like that to go to remote places to go camping. (There are, surprisingly, both L2 and fast chargers around in rural Ohio but you definitely need an app and need to check ahead of time.)
Speed matters because air resistance increases exponentially with speed, not linearly. Driving 60+, lots of stop and go, or using HVAC a lot will bring it down the range to as low as 180, but that seems like the worst range I've seen. That was driving ~75mph with HVAC on.
> Speed matters because air resistance increases exponentially with speed
No, drag is somewhere between linear and quadratic as a function of speed, not exponential. (Although it gets weird around the speed of doing.)
Heuristically, if you’re pushing through a cloud of particles, the number of particles you hit per unit time is linear with speed, and the impulse per particle is also linear with speed (because it’s the difference between your velocity and the particle’s initial velocity, times the particle’s mass, times a constant that’s around two for an elastic collision).
The rated range combines city and highway driving, and EVs get better city mileage due to the lower average speeds. So it would be expected that actual highway range (70+ mph) would be less than the rated combined range.
I had a Tesla Model 3 which was very optimistic with the range. My BMW iX3 however is quite conservative and I can usually drive longer than the display states.
We don’t have the iX3 in the US (yet?). I was looking at the x5 plug in hybrid with ~40 miles electric range and the normal b58 straight 6 motor. My wife has the X7, we have 3 kids and hobbies so I’m not sure if even an i5 would work. The new X5 headlights are not my favorite.
The X5 hybrid is a wonderful car to drive, but as an EV it's... not good. You get less than 1/10th the range of a full Tesla Model Y (< 30 miles), using a battery that's 1/3rd the capacity. I assume some of the lost efficiency is due to the X5's higher curb weight, but it's only about ~1200lbs heavier (4,416 vs. 5,646 pounds) which doesn't seem to justify a 3x efficiency difference.
The BMW also includes a tiny 16A charger, whereas the old i3 had a 32A charger. This limits charging to ~3 range-miles per hour, making public chargers basically pointless (again compare to the LR Tesla Model Y which has a 48A charger and can add 40+ range-miles in an hour.) In gas-only hybrid mode, the mileage is ~19 MPG, which is actually kind of offensive for a hybrid car.
I don’t have towing needs or any real desire for a pickup truck, but the F150 Lightning is what I would buy if I could even slightly justify it. My beef with the X5 is that it’s the opposite of an engineering triumph: its efficiency and EV charging rate are so unnecessarily terrible that I no longer take BMW seriously as a firm that operates in the EV/hybrid space. (And more critically: I am worried that if/when they do become serious about EVs they will toss the whole X5 eDrive drivetrain design in the trash, making it expensive to repair once it leaves warranty.) But if you’re able to make it work for your specific needs, it’s still fun to drive and very comfortable.
I have the 330e Hybrid Plug in. The electric range on a full charge varies from about 28km to 44km (17-27 miles). When I do my usual around town driving, I never need to go off all-electric, so this range works perfectly for me. The range shown on the dash is slightly conservative. For example, I can get from suburban Vancouver to SFU (on top of Burnaby mountain), a distance of 24km with a couple of kilometres still showing, but I can get back home using only about 50% of the reported range. The up-hill portion of the drive versus the down-hill return journey makes a big difference.
When I recharge at home (using Level 2), the reported "full" values range from 28km to 44km. I cannot figure out why there is such a big range.
I have the BMW i4, and I would echo the same comment. BMW is extremely conservative with range estimates and would almost certainly meet or beat their range estimates.
My EV6 reports a range that it also a loose estimate, but it seems based on recent driving behavior (ie, I was driving free and loose recently, so I may end up getting way more miles than it says, and vice versa)
I know someone who bought an early Leaf to get to work and back. The stated range was 107 miles and their commute was 35 miles each way. The problem was that there was >2000 feet of elevation change.
I don't quite get this. It was a round-trip thing right, like the overall net elevation change at the end of the day was 0, right? All that energy was stored as potential energy, they'd get it back rolling down the mountain. To my understanding a round-trip it shouldn't have made that much of an impact.
Regen braking is not 100% efficient, closer to 70-80%. So climbing a mountain and then going down the other side does cost more net energy than driving the same distance on flat ground.
Also if the elevation change is such that you don’t have enough to get to the top, the amount you would regen on the way down doesn’t matter.
> climbing a mountain and then going down the other side does cost more net energy than driving the same distance on flat ground.
You say this, but your reasoning is regen braking? What if you never had to brake the entire way? Where did all the energy going going up the hill go? If I carry a sack of sand up a hill and drop it, the amount of energy it has falling is equal to the amount of energy lifting it up the hill. Why does this then magically change when that sack of sand is now a car?
A car will tend to gain speed on a steep descent. It is undesirable and illegal to drive down the mountain at 200mph, so you must reduce your speed.
Mechanical brakes do this by converting that energy to heat and brake dust.
Regen brakes do that by converting around 70% of that energy into battery storage to be used later.
Your sack likely does not roll down the hill with zero losses to friction along the way. The sack has the same energy as it did before you moved it, but it does not mean the journey consumed net zero energy.
Without any resistance or breaking you are correct, but in real life you do have to break. Non constant speed also makes it worse because resistance is not linear.
Resistance is the same as on flat ground. It shouldn't be making an impact in the whole going up and down the mountain. The amount of resistance you get going 10mi at 60mph is the same going up as going down as going flat. So we're still at you spent some extra energy going up, and now you have that extra energy going down.
I do get if you're needing to ride the brakes a lot you'll get a pretty big impact on range, but a lot of grades wouldn't require that.
At the same speed, but if you don't break you likely won't have a constant speed. There's also motor efficiency, but that has less of an impact on electric vehicles because they are efficient over a high range.
It's very easy to see how favorably or unfavorably Tesla's claimed range compares to competitors based on independent tests of multiple EVs in the same conditions:
> Spoiler alert: Tesla models fare about as well, if not better, than their EV cousins, hitting around 80% of the stated range in the wild.
This is not true according to the very article we're discussing here, which across many analysis learned that three Tesla vehicles were the least-accurate (most-optimistic or most-deceptive, depending on your point of view).
While there are things to hate on with Tesla cars, range is not one of them. I have a Model Y and for the most part I like it. I plug it in when it needs charging. What's so hard about that? I've been on several 6000+ mile journeys across the country and never had a problem, even out west where charging is more sparse.
The thing I hate most about my car is that I spent $10K on "Full Self Driving" and rarely use it. It totally sucks and is definitely the worst $10K I've ever spent on anything. That money could have gone to a nice vacation somewhere and I would be happy about that. But no, every time I try out the FSD, I come away disappointed.
I thought it would be cool. I didn't consider the fact I don't actually like it when someone else is driving. I don't like being a passenger even if a person I trust is driving, so why would an AI be different? Apparently I like to drive more than I thought I did.
Also, I didn't realize how many restrictions there would be. You have to keep your hands applying constant tension on the steering wheel, and there's actually a camera that watches your eyes now. So you can't even eat a sandwich without the car freaking out and punishing you for looking at your food too long.
Waited for 2 years for the new long range Tesla Model X and sold it within 3 months for exactly this reason. The range was a total fabrication - actual range for city driving was closer to 180 miles, not the claimed 300+. Complete sham.
Not owning a car only using rentals, I still think Tesla has the best and most intuitive UI. I can find everything easily, whereas in a SUVs from Skoda/VW/Audi/BMW/Renault/... it's hard to find things - at least for me.
What I do hate about the Model Ys we rented is the noise! Wind/wheel noise is as loud at 100km/h as a BMW at 150km/h - I guess they do this to safe weight and increase range, but it makes the trips very unpleasant.
Also how it randomly breaks in self driving (at least on a German Autobahn).
Plus consistency. The last time I drove a friend's tesla we spent a stupid amount of time sitting in the driveway trying to make a simple adjustment. The UX had changed and neither of us could find the option in the touchscreen menus. Even pulling out my phone and searching Tesla's documentation didn't work because it was out of date and wrong.
I disagree. Because we seldom have the same car twice, I always need to decipher some strange icons to find out what something does. Or how to operate the wipers. It might work better if you know it b/c of tactile feedback, but it's in no way intuitive.
It's what drives me nuts about "300 miles is more than enough".
Consider:
- batteries lose, best case, about 10-20% of max range over a typical car ownership period
- not charging to the max is very often important to not getting bad degradation, so take another 10% off
- winter can take 10-20% range off
- driving at typical speed as opposed to the alleged ratings is probably another 10-20% reduced range
- headwinds, air conditioning/heating, and other factors can remove another 10-20%.
So suddenly, some 300 mile rated range is actually 150 miles of real world range. So here in the midwest, with underinvested charging infrastructure and biiiiiiggggg states and rural density, a 400 mile range really is pretty much required for any functional long distance driving.
This is not a hard concept, and it’s rather surprising that this of all things is what you have issue with.
The battery icon is Miles of rated range, where “rated” means flat windless road at 60MPH and 70 degrees. Call it “standard” range if you will. The car has no idea where you’re going so it uses the standard calculation.
When you set a destination it can now (and does) factor in elevation change, speed on given roads, wind speed, wind direction, temperature along the route, etc etc etc and is more accurate.
So your least favorite feature is one you openly admit to not using properly? If you want laser precise range estimation set a destination ffs. Or, if you’re like most drivers you start every day with 200-300mi of range and unless you’re going out of state you don’t even think about range.
I also prefer the battery meter to show percentage simply to reduce range anxiety. Even if the mileage estimate was accurate, I’d rather not constantly be calculating how many miles I think I might need to drive before the next charge.
There is a reason why the mileage estimate on EVS are called GOMS (guess o meters). They are like laptops, totally unreliable. They should really just stick to percentages. I don't think anyone really relies on the mileage left in gas cars, that mentality should be carried over to EVs. The number is really the fault of the EPA which uses a synthetic tests and allows manufacturers to just run with that.
This is my experience too. If you plan your trip, it’s really good about predicting the % battery remaining. I never put it on miles display anymore; that’s evidently going to be inaccurate because it doesn’t take into account many other factors. But if I enter in a route, now it actually has something to go on and can do a good job.
I find the range numbers on my Model Y to be fairly accurate, when I choose and am able to drive at optimal speeds on level ground (which is the situation on some trips). 60-65 MPH is the commonly sighted range for the dual motor Model Y. The range does attempt to factor in heat pump usage, and I am unclear how accurate those adjustments are.
It's the same problem as displaying the battery percentage on your phone. you're more inclined to look at it, and will be more anxious when that number drops.
I wish Tesla would allow you to hide the battery percentage entirely (unless it drops below a threshold).
I would recommend a Tesla to anyone, but not the FSD option. Don't waste your money on the FSD option, and you're fine. It's an expensive car that's super cheap to drive. The motors are basically zero maintenance. The battery will likely last the rest of my life. The interior is not too luxurious but decent. The seats are surprisingly durable and comfortable. No reason to sell it ever, unless you just get bored easily.
It is true that it's very accurate. I was on a trip that predicted 22% battery on arrival, and I had 21%. The last 5-10km were mostly descending down a valley, so lot of regeneration. Thus, when I arrived, 22%, as predicted.
I recommend tapping the battery meter to put it into percent instead of EPA miles (useless, misleading) and only estimate range using the trip planner, which is usually quite good.
Shenanigans like that is how you end up with regulations on what car can display in terms of range. This is similar to how we ended up with strict rules on MPG when purchasing.
This has been my experience as well. When there's a disparity, the Energy app gives additional details why the estimate was wrong (driving speed, climate control, etc).
We have a decade old Mazda 2 that gives you an estimated range for your tank based on the average of the last several miles you drove. With all the data Tesla has available, it not being able to give anything other than EPA range is pathetic. A simple calculation based on your last trip range and your current trip range would get you way closer that 20-25% off and Tesla can’t be bothered, or intentionally doesn’t use, something so basic. Not to mention that Tesla should be able to learn that you commute Monday through Friday in stop and go, and take a couple highway trips on most weekends, and calculate a close to dead accurate range, but decided it looks better to give a range estimate that is basically a lie.
You have it backwards. The car serves you. You should not have to serve the car (beyond universal, traditional things, like the need to maintain, insure, etc.).
It’s reasonable to ask for a range estimate that’s not naively optimistic.
Consider sprint estimates and story points. We have those discussions regularly here too and the HN community is very sympathetic to the line that those estimates can’t be accurate and involve too many unknowns and externalities. Why should this be different?
And did anyone ever scrutinize gas vehicle tank estimates closely? I think one of the issues is the absolute lower range of EVs. You can feel it more when a 250 mile range is off than when a 400 mile range is off.
That said, I road trip in my Y all the time. Still hasn’t really bothered me. And I usually drive at 80 mph.
That’s never been the case. Drive down moderately steep grades and shift to a low gear to spare you breaks, for example. It’s the same argument. We don’t drive black boxes. Anecdote, a relative drove trucks in the Korean War and after, his vehicles lasted much longer per miles driven without maintenance due to how he drove.
Would you expect manufacturers to publish maintenance schedules assuming everyone drives like your relative, or based on maybe the 25th percentile of how people actually drive?
IMO product designers should not assume that the typical customer is a hyper-optimizer.
What is that number though? Do you just assume every driver just mats the go pedal and slams the brakes at every stoplight? Battery life is a bit non deterministic. Yes you can track driving habits but I don’t know that I always drive the same way depending on how much of a rush I’m in and other factors.
As the article (or another poster) points out, you get a different algorithm when you look at the dash on a random day vs. when the Tesla knows you are going on a trip. That's even more damning to me.
Edit: Also a different algorithm when below 50% charged. As some of the replies point out, a destination does supply more information. The current charge level does not.
When going on a road trip Tesla calculates the time based on the route you put into navigation.
Obviously it will give a different estimate than stop and go traffic and starting the vehicle without pre-conditioning the battery.
Tesla does a great job with their scheduling functionality that lets you pre-condition battery before you leave and even when you near a supercharger to maximize charging efficiency of the battery.
That makes sense. But if Tesla is going to do that, surely their less informed estimation shouldn't be so naive and use historic data. Why would Tesla guess I'm in stop and go traffic when it knows I spend 80% of my time on a highway. Shouldn't it aim for either the most accurate or most conservative naive number?
As the article points out, it also switches to a significantly more accurate estimation once the battery is half discharged.
Are you implying its strange that the Tesla can calculate a more accurate range estimate when you literally tell it where you want to go to its computer which can use map data to calculate energy usage, versus you just driving around in circles in a arbitrary area and the computer only can assume based on EPA average usage?
It is clear from the discussion that it isn’t basing it on that at all. Would be overjoyed if it was based on average efficiency for the last 50 miles I drove. It isn’t.
It doesn’t use average usage to calculate the remaining range, it uses EPA numbers which are 200 Wh/mi or less. Which, interestingly, is less than the consumption shown on the Monroney sticker. How they can show two contradictory numbers on the same official document is fascinating to me.
That’s how it’s supposed to work. EVs, to a fault (some may argue), are so efficient that any change in driving condition can have a major impact on range.
Eg. Having a window down, slope, number of passengers, etc.
They’ve never hidden that the range displayed on the screen is assuming the EPA estimate for the car? The actual range depends on what the route is going to look like, and adjusts based on how much your usage so far has been.
Like, this is painfully clear to the drivers of this car vs what this article is suggesting.
Upvoted because many people don't know this: when driving EVs and hybrids, you're supposed to lightly "ride" the brakes when decelerating to get the optimal regeneration.
And “you’re holding it wrong” is equally wrong in this case.
Funny how somehow the millions who were “holding it wrong” were not holding the previous model wrong nor were holding the next model wrong.
And while all you’re saying about the driving range being affected by those factors is correct, if the car cannot accurately predict the range for this particular driver using some pretty simple historical data it should have then the Tesla’s shouldn’t display miles remaining.
Rented a MY a couple months ago and was surprised how much I, and more surprisingly, my wife, hated it. Now, I despise Elon and the risky safety decisions of Tesla engineers, so I'm biased, but I wanted to give them a shot.
Range was horrible. We drove about 100 miles and spent a couple hours over several sessions at superchargers. The handling and turning radius sucked. The controls were frighteningly distracting and confusing. Sound in the cabin seemed very weird, probably due to the glass roof and noise cancelling system. Finally, for a dual motor, I expected a lot more acceleration. I drove a Chevy Bolt for a year and was surprised how heavy and sluggish the MY felt.
> We drove about 100 miles and spent a couple hours over several sessions at superchargers
Honestly I don't believe this. Requiring two hours sessions in 100 miles is an absolutely extraordinary claim, requiring something to be extremely wrong with the car in some way that didnt brick it entirely.
Exactly. Nope, no towing. Drove about half those miles and spent about 45 minutes at a supercharger, then drove another 35 or so and spent a little over an hour at another one. In the second case I was trying to get to 90% so I could return the car above the 72% I picked it up at.
We ran the A/C most of the time. I was driving pretty conservatively with about 50/50 highway/city streets. I did try to show off the acceleration abilities once but didn't fully floor it. It's possible that, being a rental(although fairly new) the battery had taken some charging abuse.
1h45m at supercharger, depending on charging curve, should result in 200-300 miles. So maybe you were just queueing at supercharger or something else doesn't check out at all.
Assuming rather low 50kW charge rate thats at least 87.5kWh of energy. Thats 500km of highway range. Assuming more average 75kW rate - 130kwh or almost 900kms. And you are claiming you done this in one day?
It was a 5 day trip. Hertz didn't deliver the car until late on the second day, so that's 4 days. I think I charged on the second and fourth days? I don't know, believe it or don't. I'm not going to put in effort to convince you.
That doesn’t seem right. I rented a Y LR off Turo recently. The range is nowhere near the claimed 300+ but I’d get 200-250 and I’m a pretty aggressive driver.
As a Tesla owner, I think the source of the confusion is the EPA range displayed in the HUD on the Tesla. We toggled ours to show the battery percentage, which is much more useful to us.
We've never owned a gas vehicle that met it's EPA range and the Tesla is no different. No one takes EPA MPG * GALLONS of gas and expects it to be a real life estimate of range.
Wind resistance increases EXPONENTIALLY with speed. Drive a little over the speeds the EPA used to determine range, and the observed range will drop significantly as a percentage when compared to the EPA range for any vehicle.
If you do have a Tesla, you'll quickly find out that the trip computer is very accurate. The worst I've seen is a cold January day in Wisconsin (-10F) while on a road trip with a head wind. In that scenario, the trip computer was off by 7% mostly due to the head wind. In the summer, it is spot on usually within 1 - 2%.
FWIW Our Audis (Q5, A6 allroad) have significantly better MPGs than the advertised ones
The Q5 advertises 28mlg on the highway but i consistently hit 30+ here
And the wagon hits 35mpg on the highway very often even though it only advertises 26. It actually turns off 2 of the 6 cylinders when it senses that it can.
Both cars I've owned have had better efficiency and thus range than advertised (a Honda and a Subaru). I'm often shocked at how I can get 38-40mpg + on a car that is supposed to be getting 29mpg.
Same here. I've come to the conclusion that most drivers (or most drivers that complain about EPA mileage ratings anyway) have insane driving habits. Every car I have ever owned (And I've run the gamut from sedans to light pickups of both American an Japanese make) has met or exceeded the EPA rated mileage.
The only oddity that I have observed is in my current car, a Lexus hybrid crossover just barely meets its city rating in town while easily beating the city rating (which is higher since it's a hybrid) on the highway. Not that I'm complaining, but it's not what I expected from my first hybrid vehicle.
> We've never owned a gas vehicle that met it's EPA range and the Tesla is no different. No one takes EPA MPG * GALLONS of gas and expects it to be a real life estimate of range.
Because gas stations are still far more common than fast chargers. We'll get there with EV charging, but right now range does matter, especially if you routinely see half of what was advertised.
I had a similar thought before we purchased our Tesla. Our actual experience has been much better than expected. Here's why:
1) Everyday Driving / Commuting: Much like an ICE vehicle where one thinks about 1/2 tank, 1/4 tank, etc... we think about percentages. For us, a round-trip to the in-laws is 50% in the summer and 60% in the winter, for example. Commuting round trip is ~15% in the winter, and ~12% in the summer. This combined with the fact that the car starts every morning charged to 80% means that we really don't ever worry about super charging in our day-to-day life.
2) Road Trips: The navigation software on the tesla automatically add charging stops where needed, and critically, it is very accurate when predicting range as a percentage when it knows your destination. We typically charge until it say we'll reach our destination/charging stops with 10%. That reserve has always been more than enough even on 1000 - 2000 mile road trips.
My general advice to anyone with a Tesla who has range anxiety:
1) Put the round trip into the trip computer. (e.g. Home => Place I Want To Go To => Home)
2) Always make sure you'll get to your next charging stop with 10 - 15% left according to the trip computer.
3) Relax and enjoy the auto-pilot :)
I agree generally, I've never really had a range anxiety problem on either of my Teslas. And 100% agree on the daily charging, too.
But I do think we're not to the point where we can just nonchalantly hit the road without really thinking about charging. It is part of the planning in more detail than I'd usually spend with a gas car. Totally manageable, but still.
Right now it varies a lot where in the world you are. I don’t have exact numbers but I have a feeling there’s more fast charging locations around me than gas stations. (There may be more gas pumps but it doesn’t matter because most EV owners here don’t use fast charging as their main method of charging)
I guess this is only true in like 2-3 countries in the world right now. But it’s changing very rapidly.
> We've never owned a gas vehicle that met it's EPA range and the Tesla is no different. No one takes EPA MPG * GALLONS of gas and expects it to be a real life estimate of range.
Why is this exactly? It's been true - MPG is lower than estimated - of every vehicle I've owned too except for my most recent, a '23 MX-5 (i.e. a sports car, which I tend to drive at higher RPMs and in lower gears.) I'm getting spot-on or a little above the EPA estimated on the car I'd least expect it.
Consider yourself lucky. Off the top of my head both Ford and Subaru were subject to lawsuits about vehicles not meeting EPA range expectations. When I had an outback I was very lucky to get 17MPG and the EPA range on the window sticker was 27 which felt really deceptive.
FWIW, one of my vehicles which _does not_ get the EPA estimated is a 2017 Ford Fusion 2.0L AWD. EPA estimate is 20/29/23 (city/highway/combined.)
I normally get 21mpg combined, which is really not so far off. Lots of highway driving usually gets the average up to 23.5mpg. With that worst-case number, across a full tank of gas (16.5 gallons x 2 mpg), I'm shorted about 33 miles, or 8%.
Is that pretty comparable to what Tesla users see? The article claims it's much higher:
> Tesla was fined earlier this year by South Korean regulators who found the cars delivered as little as half their advertised range in cold weather. Another recent study found that three Tesla models averaged 26% below their advertised ranges.
I’m surprised you’re getting such good economy. I was getting 13mpg in my 2013 in stop and go traffic. Which is all I drove in at the time, and a contributing factor in selling it.
My 2021 Honda CR-V doesn’t get close to EPA MPG but the range calculator is still accurate to within maybe 15%. I’ve tested it a few times driving from Oakland to LA which is right around the full range of the car and it gets pretty close- even with a whole mountain range to drive over north of LA. It doesn’t appear to use EPA MPG for its estimates and it makes for a better experience.
I think this is a problem because a lot of what people use to shop an EV is the headline range number, which you are declaring is not accurate. This is false advertising.
If the EPA rating is consistent in it's overestimation, it would still be a perfectly functional system to comparison shop range. Putting that KNOWN overestimating number as the headline "range" estimation is wrong. My ICE car does not use the EPA combined estimate for my range because that would be inaccurate and make the number useless. The knowledge on how to build a useful "Range" value in a car has been constant since at least 2000, and yet Tesla, and ONLY tesla, seems to have it wrong. Meanwhile, as others tell, the navigation display shows a very accurate estimation, so why the disconnect? There's no requirement for a battery display showing the EPA range, they CHOSE to do that.
My EPA highway mile rating is lower than I see in actual driving in my ICE. City is about accurate unless I’ve been in a lot of traffic’s with its look back range for live mpg estimates. Lots of owners of other EV brands and the article itself said they’re much better than Tesla’s estimate as well. It’s difficult to see how the issue is anything but specific to Tesla and its method of presenting info to consumers. They were even force to lower their previously stated range, per the linked article.
Neither v^2 nor v^3 is exponential. They are polynomial functions. Exponential would be if wind resistance or power or fuel consumption were c^x for some constant c.
It seems to have become fashionable to say "exponentially" or even "EXPONENTIALLY" when you mean it's a rapidly increasing function, but to the technically-minded, whom I would hope to find on HN, there is still a clear-cut difference between exponential and polynomial.
I think the fact that polynomials contain an exponent forgives that particular degradation of precision in the vernacular. I corrected the OP by adding context so onlookers could know just how fast the power requirements grow without poo-pooing their choice of words. In a programming context, extacting language precision is beneficial. Shooting the shit in an Internet forum I think we can tolerate imprecision in others without causing a dust up. Now tell me how do you feel when someone says “it’s pretty unique”
I drove a Tesla for over a month and it was a relief to go back to my Honda Civic. The range (both miles and %) was wildly inaccurate. If I had to drive anywhere that wasn’t a few miles within the city, I was under constant anxiety. No thank you.
It’s a wonder to me that anyone would ever trust anything Elon Musk ever says about anything. He’s a proven liar and creates an openly hostile, negative culture wherever he goes. I feel sorry for people who are caught up in his lies, either customers or employees or people who work closely with him and have to suffer his tantrums. There was a point I admired him, but that is long past.
I can’t credit myself with the observation, it was someone else on HN, but it ran something like this:
For years Tesla made cars that were disproportionately appealing to people with concerns about the environment, a population that skews liberal/progressive. Those on the other side of the political world view might like the cars too- especially technophiles— but there certainly a large contingent that are skeptical to anything with a primary appeal of being “environmentally friendly”. Then comes the current culture-war driven political ecosystem, and all musk has to do is tweet some controversial things that might resonate with some contingents on the political right and all of a sudden those individuals may feel more comfortable buying cars from a guy who speaks their language.
I certainly don’t know if that was Musk’s deliberate strategy though, but it wouldn’t shock me if his actions in that way are partly “him” and partly him leaning into a role of social prominence that resonates with a consumer population previously less likely to buy his cars.
It would be interesting if I could fine surveys of automobile brand customer bases broken down by political affiliation, and if it’s shifted Tesla’s at all in recent years.
You can see his conversations leaked by court docs and understand his politics clearly. No need to contort yourself into seeing him in some other light than the one that’s readily apparent
The article says that Tesla knowingly overestimated their numbers. Tesla even switches the range algorithm to be more accurate when mileage gets to 50%.
I think the difference is that a gas-powered car will keep driving when the gas indicator hits zero. You can still get a couple dozen miles at that points, and those are so important. Tesla is really doing you a disservice by not considering that.
I've had problems with the passenger side airbag not enabling, and turn signal not working. Both scary issues. Made appointments with the support. Both were cancelled outright by them (!). They tried to convince me that there was no problem, and it was all due to the way I use the car. They seemed to try everything to get out of appointments. My wife had to use the back seat for a month while I argued with them.
Eventually both problems were resolved by software updates, proving that the problems were indeed on their side.
Is the back seat safer than the front seat, even if the front seat airbag doesn't deploy? I know recent tests show the back seat is a good bit less safe, and I think it's primarily due to most manufacturers not using the same seat belt technology as they do in the front, but maybe some of that is the lack of a front airbag.
I thought it was just me! Trying to control turn signals is beyond infuriating in a Model Y. You would think that this should be part of the functionality that is largely free of bugs..
A lot of comments are discussing the difficulty in estimating range accurately or how all EPA estimates are inflated. But the article claims Tesla knowingly uses an algorithm with inflated numbers and swaps the rost estimate out for a more accurate estimate at 50% charge. That's different than a good faith attempt at estimating range and a dark pattern.
I was trying to interpret what that means. I'm guessing they aren't factoring current conditions above 50% and instead rely on average conditions. I'd be surprised if this is actually worse than what the EPA views as average given the truth-in-advertising requirements they put on Tesla.
This isn't entirely unreasonable. Most people whose battery is at 80% aren't going to be depleting it in the next few hours, so say factoring the present cold morning might produce overly pessimistic guesses.
They are being aggressive for sure, but this article strikes me as pretty biased against Tesla. The article concedes that most of these customers have no range problems -- they are probably driving in cold at 80 MPH blasting their heat to 70 degrees wondering why their range is so poor -- even though it is entirely expected behavior.
> This isn't entirely unreasonable… factoring the present cold morning might produce overly pessimistic guesses
It’s always unreasonable in something like this to present knowingly inaccurate data when accurate data is available. As others have pointed out, Teslas do seem perfectly capable of doing this based on their performance when estimating a particular route. It’s also something other brands do better, so even if there was an argument to be made that Tesla didn’t have the data, it would still be the case that they should have it.
It is also not pessimistic to give an estimate in the conditions you outline: It’s accurate. Whether you’re going to be driving that long is irrelevant because Tesla should not be defaulting to some probabilistic behavior guess prior to even starting the car or entering a route. It should default to “hey, I see you’re driving your car. If you keep driving this is your range”. It shouldn’t default to “I don’t know how long you’ll be driving so I’ll just give a range estimate that assumed you’ll drive for a short time now and then more later and maybe later the conditions will provide better range, so let’s use that number”
I’m not sure why Tesla would be defended in this point by anyone when other EV’s do this more accurately and consistently. If it was a general problem and no one could do it any better then by all means it would be unreasonable to complain about Tesla, it would simply be a limit of the technology. But it’s not.
That's a pretty damning article and it looks like there are more and more of those coming.
Tesla still somehow benefits from its innovators / clean company reputation, but at this pace it won't be long before agencies start to act on what's become much more than just 'optimistic marketing'.
I think that reputation already died in the last 2-3 years.
It's now pretty common in my circle to hear people say they'll pay a premium to not own a Tesla. Primarily because of lots of bad experiences with build quality/repairs, but also because there are now lots of high quality alternatives. Namely Rivian and Lucid, but also the legacy automakers (two friends bought mach-es recently and there's a smattering of F-150 lightnings.)
The fact that Musk has adopted the public persona of a crazy uncle who doesn't get Thanksgiving invites -- and is heavily associated with the Tesla brand -- doesn't help either.
Musk is pretty much the whole reason. People have a much easier time remembering sleazy business practices when there's a celebrity CEO whose personality matches the crime.
If you think about the CEOs of major corporations, the only ones who are personally memorable for the public are founders. How many exceptions can you think of, memorable personalities that were hired as CEOs or rose to become CEO of established companies? Lee Iacocca is one, barely. Carly Fiorina manages to be forgettable even though she ran for president. I'm sure there are more exceptions, but not enough to invalidate the rule.
So why can flamboyant or quirky people like Musk or Zuckerberg not get hired as CEOs of huge corporations? At least part of the reason is that being bland and forgettable is part of the job requirements. It makes it that much harder for the public to remember the sleazy things they learn about a company. A crime committed by a faceless company is like a natural disaster. A crime committed by Tesla is easier to see as human evil, because we can see how Musk revels in his unaccountability. There's a story: evil person did evil thing. And an obvious corollary: evil person must be prevented from doing more evil! If Tesla had replaced Musk with a faceless professional CEO, there would be no story, just "bad thing happened for inscrutable reasons."
Our caravan has been a pile of shit, which I’m sure anyone who’s ever had a caravan can attest to.
Anyway. We are looking for reliability and imagine my surprise when Kia, of all brands, came out king of generally affordable reliability. Plus their EV reviews reasonably well.
A lot has changed in 10 years for vehicles I guess…
Kia is always a mixed bag. On the most important fundamentals they produce a good value vehicle. But they are able to reduce prices by cheaping out a bit on drivetrain components. E.g. axles and CV boots that wear quicker, just slightly cheaper parts. If you watch the Munro Live videos when they tear down an analyze the engineering, they often concur with this.
And it's all fine if you drive your vehicle for <150,000km (100,000miles) and then sell or move on, but my experience with them is that after that they start to have mechanical parts issues. Which makes sense because they've effectively optimized for the most common consumer vehicle ownership pattern. But.
I've never heard a good story about a caravan, period! I do sometimes wonder if caravans are particularly crap vehicles for intrinsic reasons, or if targeting families means you have to cut costs which reduces quality (kids are $$$$$$), or if perhaps the driving habits of young families (lots of short trips) are particularly rough on vehicles of that type. Maybe all three conspiring.
IDK about Kia, except that they're doing pretty well on the EV front compared to other legacies. But in general, 10 years is at least one product cycle, so I guess it's not that surprising that reputations-vs-reality mismatches appear on that time frame. It is weird though.
Depends on the model year. The one we bought in 2003 only needed regular oil changes and a new set of tires every few years. We did have to get a rebuilt transmission just before its warranty ran out, but didn't pay a dime for that ("Not a dime? Really?" Yeah, well, I was a trial lawyer before going into tech). The 2013 is still running and other than normal maintenance the only problems we've had are with the sliding door coming off its track and one of the stow-away seats getting stuck. In both cases YouTube saved the day. Don't get me wrong, I really hate the look of that car. It definitely is not an identity statement. But given the astronomical prices of new (and used) vehicles right now, we're probably going to keep it for a while longer. Here's hoping that changes. Soon.
The problems that were unique to Kia cars were predominantly in the engine and transmission, so it's not exactly a big surprise that removing those two parts means they make better cars.
I don't know much about Lucid, but Rivian in its current form is not sustainable. Their cars are incredibly overweight and overengineered, their COGS/BOM is out of control, and with the end of ZIRP I'm not sure they have the time and financing to fix these problems at the burn rate they are at. Don't get me started on their "environmentalist adventure vehicle" marketing that's putting 7000-pound cars on mountain trails.
I'm a lot more excited about Hyundai/Kia and Ford.
I agree, and drive begrudgingly in any case. I'm merely observing that "Tesla" used to be a signal brand and it's now somewhere in-between "cheap plastic brand" and "anti-signal brand".
> Don't get me started on their "environmentalist adventure vehicle" marketing that's putting 7000-pound cars on mountain trails.
Car adventuring as an ends unto itself is something I just don't get, and since I can't really say anything constructive or nice about the entire activity/scene the EV component of it is a bit of a red herring.
AFAICT, R1T is a decent e-F150 alternative if you need to tow. Buy, yeah, driving through wilderness for no particular reason is kind of idiotic.
Do those people who say they will pay a premium to not own a Tesla already own a Tesla? Because all the people I know who own a Tesla say it's the best car they've every owned to the extent that they wouldn't consider any other car.
Are they also in the market for an electric car? I said I would pay a premium not to own a Tesla, largely because of Musk. And then it came time to buy an EV: and there just isn't a vehicle under $100,000 that performs better under 100mph. And range? The Kia EV6 GT, which costs $5k more than the Model 3 Performance (or $12,500 because it doesn't qualify for the tax credit), is slower 0-60, has only 200 mile range. The Model 3 could have 26% lower range than advertised and still have 10% more range. So .5 second faster 0-60, 10% longer range, for $12,500 less.
> Because all the people I know who own a Tesla say it's the best car they've every owned
I only know three people who own Teslas, but all three have little positive to say about them, and one of them will tell you at length about how he regrets buying his if you let him.
It's for that reason, not my dislike of Musk, that if I were in the market for an EV I wouldn't even consider a Tesla.
Basically everything coming out of Detroit is sub-100K. Even the tippy top trim of the e-F150 MSRPs just below 100K. Sedans and mid-size SUVS tend to be priced comparably to Tesla's offerings.
Lucid are expensive, but their entire product line is basically a Model X competitor and prices are comparable.
If their stock price is anything to go on, they channel perfect futuristic cars out of a time void and will bring about a utopian post-scarcity society.
I don't think you need more data. Tesla had a team of people "managing" this issue to relieve demand on their service centres. What more data do you think would be useful to clarify Tesla's actions?
That statement alone sounds good to me... If there is no repair action that can fix the range issue on these cars, then it is a waste of everyone's time to go to a service center only to have a service tech poke the battery and realise it's fine. What are you expecting them to do when you arrive? They certainly won't be taking out battery cells and putting them under an electron microscope... And measuring battery voltages and currents is already done automatically by the computer.
There is very little you will diagnose on a modern car that the onboard computer isn't already aware of.
Therefore... the idea of a team of remote diagnosis people to fix most issues without a service appointment makes perfect sense.
As does the idea of having the analysis done automatically beforehand so the human doesn't have to wait.
Except they did not fix anything. The battery readout was lying as so ordered by Musk. This caused people to complain, wanting it fixed. Instead of fixing it (in a service centre or remotely) they lied some more. What's so hard to parse here?
I think the 'fix' was mostly checking that the car was working as designed, then calling people like this hn commenter[1], and educating them that slow gentle driving is how to get the estimated range, not aggressively braking and driving 90 mph with the AC on max, windows down, and the trunk loaded with 2000 lbs of junk.
> [one customer] ultimately concluded there is nothing wrong with his car. The problem, he said, was that Tesla is overstating its performance
As I read this, either his car was defective or he was lied to to convince him to make a $XX,000 purchase. It seems that Tesla should be facing some form of fraud-based lawsuit over the lies selling the car or treating it under warranty, right?
Most normal Tesla owners I'm familiar with just come to accept that the website range claim is complete horseshit. They go on with their lives and just don't worry about it. For around town, it'll get somewhat close to rated range anyway, and road trips aren't that common for most people. The supercharger network is pretty good, and if you have to stop every 200 miles instead of the rated 358, then so be it.
Personally I think the EPA should revamp the rating system. I want to see every manufacturer forced to admit what range to expect if we use 90% of the battery capacity, at 70 mph, in 32F ambient temperature with climate control set to 68F. The only time people really care deeply about range is on the interstate, so the range numbers really ought to reflect that.
No. Sorry. Making the claim that most tesla owners do X is in my opinion horseshit. Tesla should be ashamed of themselves and should be sued into oblivion for false advertising. This is not a +/- 5%. This is a massive lie and a coverup.
Those seem orthogonal, and not related. I assert that yes, most Tesla owners just deal with it. But yes, it's unacceptable and Tesla should be held to account for it. Both can be true.
Sort of. The official process comes in a couple different flavors, and there are absolutely ways to game it. It's not like EPA is running the tests themselves, they just write the rules. Also, AFAICT there is no penalty for sandbagging (see also Porsche). Tesla could give realistic numbers but instead ran the tests in the most optimistic way possible and chose the best numbers they could plausibly claim to be EPA formula.
The EPA recommended system is pretty accurate and conservative, according to the article. Mercedes is supposed to use it and has more accurate estimates. Tesla is still using their own math from before the EPA had a plan.
Meanwhile, what difference does it make if most Tesla customers do X? Tesla now has enough customers that hurting 10% of them is a major impact.
EPA should also add multiple range estimates say at 70mph, 80mph. Lots of people drive 80mph+ on the highway.
And buyers should be made aware they will be using only 70% (10 to 80) of the battery between highway charger stops. Charging gets really slow after 80%.
I agree on both counts. More data would be better. And for fun they could just mandate it across-the-board. It would be halfway interesting to see the impact of heating/cooling and speed on ICE vehicles too.
Tesla advertises the EPA rated range. The car not actually achieving that range in real world conditions (which are more varied than the test conditions) is not necessarily defective or false advertising.
Now I do think that the EPA ratings are inadequate and inconsistent. Those could use some improvement to better reflect real world driving conditions.
There is a way to act against that too: "whatever is decided in court, if anything deviates from the spirit of this contract's full enforcement for any reason within either party's control, both parties are fully liable for undoing every part of their performance, including refunding all the products and services."
I have an S so I'm biased but this feels like a hit piece.
Range is of course always going to be an estimate. Marketing is always going to be a battle of who has the bigger number. Having people schedule an appointment to fix their "broken" cars that can only go 470 instead of 500km is of course going to be a waste of time and money.
I'm part of a facebook group for tesla owners and literally every day this week there has been a post that goes something like "I left my house with 500km, drove 1km and now it says 497km. Should I schedule an appointment?" With the common advice being to switch to % instead of distance and remember that it's an estimate.
While I think Tesla (and most manufacturers) could do a better job at education, and of course having empathy for people who have spent a lot of money on something and worried it's defective, I don't think anything in this article is as damning as it sounds.
> He expected to get something close to the electric sport sedan’s advertised driving range: 353 miles on a fully charged battery.
> He soon realized he was sometimes getting less than half that much range
We’re not talking about a couple of miles here or there.
And if Tesla discovered that range issues (even if entirely based around customer perception) were a widespread enough issue to set up a team specifically to address it, that team said nothing publicly and instead cancelled service appointments without explanation… that’s absolutely newsworthy, whether you consider it a “hit piece” or not.
> Inside the Nevada team’s office, some employees celebrated canceling service appointments by putting their phones on mute and striking a metal xylophone, triggering applause from coworkers who sometimes stood on desks. The team often closed hundreds of cases a week and staffers were tracked on their average number of diverted appointments per day.
In statistical terminology, I would prefer an "unbiased estimator with low skewness", such that it's as likely to overestimate as underestimate, even if occasionally the estimates are quite far off.
But as discussed, manufacturers of course have a strong incentive to make these predictions very biased to overestimate the range.
> > He soon realized he was sometimes getting less than half that much range
Either he has VERY BAD driving habits, or he's driving in some extreme scenarios.
I have a Model 3 Performance that's estimated to have a 299 mile range, IIRC. I've driven at 75 mph in 30F weather, and it reduced my range to about 230 miles. That's just shy of 25%, which while is certainly a significant reduction, is not the >50% the guy was dealing with.
Do people think they'll get the full EPA range at 70+ mph with the heat or A/C on? I always assumed EPA ranges were done on flat terrain at 60 mph with climate controls off and expected any deviation from that to reduce my range.
That all said, getting over 50% less than estimate range is pretty bad, and unless they're driving fast in super cold weather up hill, it really points to a potentially faulty battery that Tesla is trying to get out of replacing.
> Do people think they'll get the full EPA range at 70+ mph with the heat or A/C on?
That likely depends partly on what car they are coming from. Some manufacturers overstate EPA range, others understate it. If they're coming from a Ford EcoBoost or a 15 year old Hyundai, they probably don't expect to achieve EPA ratings at all. If they're coming from a Toyota or a VW, then yes, they probably do think they'll get the full EPA range at 70+ mph with hvac on.
My old Toyota ICE will happily meet the EPA ratings at 70mph with the AC running full blast. If I slow down to 65mph and turn off the AC, I can easily get 10% more range than the EPA estimates would suggest.
I'd have to see more to believe that people are seriously getting less than half the estimated range. Not one person "sometimes" having an issue. (Moot point anyway cause I'm probably never gonna buy a Tesla.)
I've owned EVs from different brands, including Tesla. In my experience so far, only Tesla uses the naive and wildly optimistic EPA number for the range display. My wife drives a Bolt and it uses your moving average to calculate the range estimate, and it's pretty much dead-on accurate.
Tesla -could- do it but chooses not to. Put it in trip mode and it's pretty close to dead-on. Look at the consumption page and it's pretty accurate there too. Tesla elects not to use this already available information, because it would consistently show people a lower number than what the web page did when they ordered the car.
You should have higher expectations of your vehicle.
My 2016 ICE car's "miles left" meter is accurate to +/- 2 miles from the moment I top up the tank (80% highway driving, 20% hilly city and rolling country roads).
IMO, accurately telling the vehicle operator how many miles of juice you have left is a KPI, as it informs when you'll need to plan for refueling.
Having driven an EV for a few weeks in identical conditions, this inaccuracy is probably the major contributor to "range anxiety". I have no idea whether I'll need to recharge in 60 miles or in 25 miles, and that's totally unacceptable in most parts of the US (where there aren't available chargers every 5 miles of your trip).
> My 2016 ICE car's "miles left" meter is accurate to +/- 2 miles from the moment I top up the tank (80% highway driving, 20% hilly city and rolling country roads).
No way. That’d be accurate to under 1% - well within the variation you’ll get just from different air densities (temperature, pressure, humidity). Forget about A/C on or off, tire pressure, etc.
We regularly do road trips of 200+ miles, and we get 350 miles on a full tank of gas. At the beginning of the trip, the GPS will say something like "250 miles to your destination" and the car will say "180 miles left"
I regularly pull off the highway to fill up with around "20 miles" left, when there are ~90 miles left in the trip (e.g. it was dead-on accurate for the last 160 miles), according to the GPS. I agree that it's spooky.
I think, when making estimates for "miles left", our car must be doing some calculation like (rolling estimate of mpg) * (gallons left).
It's also possible that it keeps a buffer of ~1 gallon of gas that it never tells us about, when quoting the total range, and it eats into this buffer without telling us. There's certainly a bunch of tricks they could be pulling off.
The point is, from a driver's point of view, I have a trustworthy number. If they need to pull off some tricks to achieve that trustworthiness (e.g. low-balling total range), that's OK with me.
With EVs, "total range" is a marketing term, so they have a strong incentives to fib about it. Unfortunately, this makes the vehicles worse to operate.
“It's also possible that it keeps a buffer of ~1 gallon of gas that it never tells us about, when quoting the total range, and it eats into this buffer without telling us.”
I am fairly confident that something similar is happening with my Honda. I thought I was going to run it dry, but then it just sat at 10 miles remaining for at least another 15-20 miles before I reached a station.
Most Honda models have a ridiculous reserve, something like 3.5 gallons. I still regret informing my mother of this fact...she never ran out of gas until I did.
> It's also possible that it keeps a buffer of ~1 gallon of gas that it never tells us about, when quoting the total range, and it eats into this buffer without telling us.
This is quite likely. My car supposedly has an 11-gallon gas tank, and if I refuel right when I hit 0 miles remaining then it only takes 10 gallons of fuel to fill the tank.
Fun thing about a car: They have computers that measure all those factors! Your engine knows the air density, air temperature, the rough gravity vector (used for things like hill start assist), lots of info on tire performance, speed, fuel flow, etc etc etc, with more modern cars getting things like GPS details. The estimate they use for range is based on the average fuel economy you get, not some fake model made by the EPA that doesn't represent reality.
This has been true in Toyotas since at least 2004, so I would hope it could be true for a "Luxury" car from a "tech" company.
It doesn't have to. It measures them in real time, and can integrate over time.
Astronomers also don't see into the future but some basic calculations can let them make very accurate predictions about where the planets will be in a month.
Okay, so if I give you all the data from my car, and say it has 10.3 gallons of gas, you’re telling me you can predict how many miles it will go to within a percent?
No, you can’t. Because I might go uphill or downhill. It might rain. It might be hot or cold.
The car is doing something tricky (aka lying) as discussed above.
I think if you gave us a hidden buffer of 1 gallon (i.e. we actually have 11.3 gallons, but I report that you have 10.3 gallons, and selectively burn some of that buffer without reporting it), and you drive in conditions that fit within the footprint of your prior 3000 miles of driving history, yeah we probably could guess within a percent.
To the best of my understanding, this is what most modern ICE cars do when they give you the "miles remaining" metric. I don't know how else they could be so outwardly accurate.
This falls under the category of "trick", but it's actually a trick that helps me by allowing me to plan my trips better.
Giving the "current estimate of actual miles remaining", as a multi-variate function of all the things you mention, is actually less helpful and more stress-inducing – even while it's technically providing more information, it's information that isn't very helpful.
A Tesla has exactly what you describe in the Energy app, and it is very accurate, always within 1-2% in my experience. The newest version also has a breakdown of which systems are drawing power.
But that’s off topic; this article is about the car not meeting its EPA range, because the EPA test is very synthetic[1] and doesn’t match most people’s driving habits. I find InsideEVs’ “70 mph range test”[2] series to be far closer to my personal experience.
The difficulty is because of the difference in operating regimes of the power trains.
An old ICE has to run within an RPM range, so the top end on MPG is set below infinite, and the bottom end is limited by the time to ramp the engine to its max consumption.
Electric vehicles have neither of these issues. On a downhill run that is long enough you could in theory fully recharge your battery, and you can always send full power (and resultant fuel consumption) to the engine.
On top of this EVs are operating at much higher efficiencies so the effective size of the tank is smaller.
This is not to say range estimation couldn’t be improved, only that it is a much more challenging model with EVs.
It refers to the anxiety people have about not having enough "range" left in their car to reach their target destination. The symptom is looking at your "% battery remaining" every 5 seconds, and cursing your car when it drops "3 miles" of range in 1 mile of idealized highway travel. Unfortunately, it's a well-founded anxiety.
You're right, by characterizing the problem with a focus on the person (with anxiety) instead of the (misleading) vehicle, it serves the manufacturer more than the consumer.
Hmm, seems my suspicion about the origin of the term was right:
> The term "range anxiety" was first reported in the press on September 1, 1997, in the San Diego Business Journal by Richard Acello referring to worries of GM EV1 electric car drivers. On July 6, 2010, General Motors filed to trademark the term, stating it was for the purpose of "promoting public awareness of electric vehicle capabilities"
Can't think of any other product where the user gets blamed like this. I really do have "MPG anxiety" in my ICE car, always checking the gauge, but nobody calls it that.
This isn't a hit piece. As someone that formerly owned a Tesla, all of this rings true and I was so glad to finally ditch the vehicle back to the second hand market.
You are extremely biased. I have both owned a Tesla and non Tesla EV. Non Tesla EVs are way more conservative in their range estimates and you can actually beat their estimates. People routinely beat BMWs advertised EPA range - something you will never hear for a Tesla
For sure, I was using an extreme example for my anecdote(s) but also how many people get 50% of their estimated range? This specific example might be someone with a bad battery that tesla is trying to sweep under the rug BUT the article positions this as it's basically everyone.
"This 1 guy gets 50% of the estimated range and the problem is so wide spread tesla started a team to address it!"
is really different from
"Many customers are surprised they get less range than it says on the site and for a very extreme example, one guy gets 50% less (under uncertain circumstances)"
“In March, Alexandre Ponsin set out on a family road trip from Colorado to California in his newly purchased Tesla, a used 2021 Model 3. He expected to get something close to the electric sport sedan’s advertised driving range: 353 miles on a fully charged battery.
He soon realized he was sometimes getting less than half that much range, particularly in cold weather – such severe underperformance that he was convinced the car had a serious defect.”
He simply does not understand how batteries and power delivery work. Driving through the Rocky mountains will reduce mpg significantly for an internal combustion engine as well. Colder temperatures require a heater and less efficient for batteries due to increased viscosity of electrolyte fluid. All a perfect storm for poor EV performance.
Sure, but the system continues to make extremely optimistic (and unrealistic) estimates about your range until you hit 50% battery, at which point it tries to be more realistic so that it doesn't strand you in the middle of nowhere.
It should be giving you the more realistic estimate as soon as possible, so that you can plan better, rather than misleading you for half your trip.
> Driving through the Rocky mountains will reduce mpg significantly for an internal combustion engine as well.
Do you mean it will reduce the mpg because of reduced air density, or because of temperature as well? I thought the efficiency of an ICE was dependent on the difference in temperature it creates between the combustion and the coldest part of the cycle. It seems efficiency would improve in cold temperatures because less energy would be wasted cooling the engine since the incoming air is doing that.
EV batteries are less efficient cold weather and hot weather too. Yes, ICE would be more efficient in cold due to cooler/more combustable air entering the combustion chamber as evidenced by the use of intercoolers in turbos to cool the hot compressed air from the turbo mechanism.
They come up w/ the range under absolute perfect driving conditions that don't actually exist. The driving conditions should reflect normal driving conditions.
The problem is what are normal driving conditions? Another poster mentioned having efficiency numbers by the grade of the road, which would provide more information to buyers.
1. The range is set by the EPA. They are the ones that do the testing and validate the claims. The EPA should fix their range guidelines for EVs. Maybe a summer and winter range would be more appropriate?
2. Tesla should have a better UI for range, but really they should just show the percentage. Acting like it is a conspiracy is a bit extreme. They are just doing EPA Range * SOC. Without knowing all of the variables of a drive, the estimated range is going to be wrong no matter what you do. People think that their way of being wrong is better than Tesla's. Maybe they're right but the best estimate is still when navigating to a destination, and this estimate Tesla does quite well.
3. Tesla is cancelling the service appointments because there is nothing they can do to "fix" it. So why waste the time with a service appointment? They are just going to run the same diagnostics they ran remotely. Their software does a fantastic job explaining where your range is going. (https://www.teslaoracle.com/2022/09/26/tesla-new-energy-cons...)
The EPA tests are poorly implemented, and there are two flavors of tests and the maker chooses which to run.
Has to do with the number of "cycles".
One of these tests tends to return fairly optimistic results, and is the one Tesla chooses for the EPA to run.
Further, EPA only tests at default settings.
Some makers (ahem Tesla) default everything to the most range maximizing settings.
Next, car makers can market UP TO the EPA range, but can also market below.
Tesla clearly advertises every mile they can, while the Germans undersell their range.
You can see this across the board in the real-world range tests by InsideEVs, etc.
Holistically I think having a single EPA range number is wrong given how different highway & city range is for EVs.
Just like ICE cars report highway & city MPG, EVs should report range in these 2 buckets.
Since the only real use of the EPA range is to make relative comparisons between cars, and since it will be very wrong for any car outside of the specific speed, geography, and season the EPA tests in, the EPA should choose some arbitrary number that is not miles. Then no one will feel misled when they buy electric, and we'll still be able to make range comparisons between cars.
General range barely ever matters anyway. ICE drivers thinking of going electric always ask about range, but over a certain minimum level of range what really matters is the estimation accuracy for a specific drive and the confidence that a planned charging location will be working as expected. If both of these are very good, the GPS travel time estimates will always be accurate and you don't really need to think about anything, which is how most people approach driving these days anyway: just follow the GPS.
The next thing that matters are the distance of chargers from the average route (we need more at interstate rest stops!) and the availability of 220V chargers at any place you will spend the night. The latter is the weakest right now, IMHO, but it's improving as more people go electric.
I have two Teslas. On both of them, I get close to the EPA range in city driving and lose 15%-20% on highway driving at 70-80 mph, on typical daytime temperatures for my area, which rarely drop below 40F in the winter or exceed 100F in the summer. On highways I always use autopilot, which keeps speed much more constant than I would -- it brakes and accelerates much less frequently. The estimates for battery use on trips are always accurate. I consider driving a high-risk chore, so I'm not an aggressive driver.
Yes. At the moment, I think Teslas are the best vehicles available for purchase on the market, electric or otherwise: They have great performance, great reliability, long-lasting materials (my oldest Tesla still feels new!), decent service, and amazing charging infrastructure (at least in the US).
In 1-2 years, I'm hopeful other automakers, including MB, BMW, and Audi, will come out with new EVs that are truly competitive on all these fronts vs Tesla.
Teslas absolute don't have long-lasting materials or great reliability or great performance. There have been hundreds of thousands of articles and experience about poor materials, build quality, reliability etc. I have owned both a Model S and Model 3, and I did own them because I wanted to support an EV maker, but they are by far some of the worst made cars I have owned. I switched back to a BMW EV and its like night and day.
Not my experience. Let me add that at first, I thought the materials and build of my first Tesla felt "cheap" and "plasticky." Over time, however, I've been pleasantly surprised at how well they've held up.
My oldest Tesla is now three years old, and it still looks and feels new. I could never say that about the BMWs, MBs, and Porsches I've owned over the years.
Consumer Reports and others have found that most of the "issues" reported with EVs in these rankings are software glitches, often solvable with a reboot or an over-the-air software update: https://www.greencars.com/expert-insights/are-electric-cars-...
“The organization also found that Tesla, which is often lauded for its sophisticated technology, was not a paragon of reliability, ranking dead-last among brands”
That's just a re-stating of the same ridiculous source data that declares any issue, no matter how trivial, to be of equal weight. It's also effectively punishing the carmakers who acknowledge and fix problems.
This really shouldn’t be read as a defense of EV companies, but I think there is just a learning curve for EVs which people really haven’t grappled with yet.
Here is a minor list of things which will reduce range pretty significantly:
- Driving over 50 MPH
- Using the AC
- Using the heat
- Driving in extreme cold or extreme heat
- Driving in an area with a lot of hills. (From what I can tell regenerative braking makes up less than it loses for a given hill. If anyone can correct me here, let me know)
- Accelerating more than necessary
- Not making full use of regenerative braking
- Driving on the highway rather than around town (see the 50 MPH comment)
Are these concessions OK? Is it just a matter of better education and more honest marketing? That’s sort of for everyone to decide collectively. One thing that is for sure is that EVs have a totally different set of quirks and limitations than ICE vehicles, and that will have to be adjusted for one way or another. It’s also worth noting that most of the things listed above _also_ adversely affect ICE vehicles, however not necessarily as much, or it’s not felt directly because getting gas is very convenient.
It also strikes me that anything which adversely affects MPG in an ICE vehicle can also be said to “reduce range.” You’re losing miles off your current tank of gas. Presumably because the range is so small, and recharge opportunities are so limited, this affects people in EVs more strongly than in ICE vehicles. Perhaps if both were improved (battery capacity and charging infrastructure) then these concerns would evaporate.
Who says that they're not? Seems all the attention is on Tesla because of a certain someone... In any case telling customers EPA numbers shouldn't be considered a lie.
> - Driving on the highway rather than around town (see the 50 MPH comment)
That would greatly depend on the town one is picturing. In pretty much any neighborhood in LA, there's no way you're going to sustain a speed of 50 mph for any reasonable period of time without frequently stopping at intersections, your usual traffic congestion, pedestrians wandering into the street, other drivers making idiotic maneuvers, etc. No way is your mileage going to be better on surface streets even if you do your best to reach 50 mph but not exceed it. Frequently braking and accelerating requires more gas than will be eaten up by driving at a constant speed of 65 mph.
What you say about the reduced range makes sense but I don't fully trust the decision on what range to show to have all the right motives in this case when many other manufcaturers (also in ICE vehicles) adjust their shown range based on recent drives.
Tesla does do this if you plan a route so they are certainly capable but unlike the mentioned toyotas, bmw's, etc they choose to use the unchanging unrealistic estimate that gets a lot of people in trouble. Given that they also stonewall when its about issues that people can't affect with their driving style or can be a matter of opinion I don't feel inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and say maybe people should adjust their behaviour and expectations.
If they are given more accurate mileage by default then it's after all much easier for them to make those considerations and realisations about what affects it.
Actually, gas cars have the best range on highways because the engine can stay at peak efficiency, electric cars are best in the city because they only use energy when moving and can recover energy from slowing (i.e. stop and go). And others mentioned that heating is free in gas cars (in fact it might improve your cooling and thus efficiency).
Giving optimistic estimates based on generalized vehicle information, then giving more precise estimates after the 50% mark—and after having collected usage information based on the user’s actual environment—sounds to me like a decent algorithmic solution to a hard problem.
It sounds like a terrible solution to an easy problem. And calling it an "algorithmic solution" is being generous, considering that our dead simple decade old Mazda 2 gives us a closer than 25% range estimate just based on the mpg for the previous X number of miles driven. That's not an algorithm, that is a simple math calculation with only two inputs; gas consumption rate and miles driven. Tesla, with thousands of data points on previous usage and driver behavior, could give you an almost dead accurate estimate, but chooses to give a basically useless estimate because it looks better. Then people come around and make ridiculous excuses for it and why its actually a “decent solution” (it isn’t) to a “hard problem” (its not).
Tesla vehicles do provide an accurate estimate. The estimates provided when you navigate to your destination are usually within 1-2% of correct, and take into account road speed, elevation changes, regenerative braking, wind direction, etc.
Like many EVs, the "fuel gauge" number is based on the EPA estimate and the navigation range is based on accurate predictions. It's like this in the Polestar too.
That only makes sense if there's strong correlation between the first 50% of a charge and the second 50% of a charge, but NOT an equally strong correlation between the previous charge cycle and the current charge cycle.
That can be the case (eg on road trips) but usually isn't.
Why not just always give the more precise estimates?
Because then you get people complaining it doesn't meet the range as specified in the marketing material which is based on the EPA (or equivalent) test.
I'll literally repeat myself, since I think the point was abundantly clear:
>> That only makes sense if there's strong correlation between the first 50% of a charge and the second 50% of a charge, but NOT an equally strong correlation between the previous charge cycle and the current charge cycle.
But "That", I mean using optimistic estimates at the beginning of a charge cycle but a model based on historical driving about half way through a charge cycle.
There's no reason, prime facie, that future discharge rate should be better-correlated intra-charge than inter-charge, especially for recent charges, and especially if you have lots of historical charge/discharge cycle data for both the machine, the geographic area, and the individual driver.
The question is not "why not be perfect". The question is "why not do inter-charge forecasting the same way you do intra-charge forecasting".
Yes the sensors on the car are now time machines that can figure out what the cars future conditions are going to be.
Why would you want your previous driving habits to affect the base level estimation? Your driving today could be vastly different, and then you would be here complaining about how wrong it was and the range anxiety you got when the car vastly underestimated your range because it assumed you were in 40 mph traffic when today you were late and speeding 80 mpg down the highway.
>Why would you want your previous driving habits to affect the base level estimation?
Because I could still just look at how much charge I had, the same way I look at how much gas I have left in the tank of my car. My old Mazda 2 gives estimated miles left in the tank based on a dead simple math calculation of average mpg for the previous X number of miles driven with only two inputs; gas consumption rate and miles driven. No time machine needed because it is an estimate and I am an adult with a functioning brain. I already know how big my gas tank is. I already know what my "EPA" mileage is. Telling me those things is not giving me an estimate, its just reminding me of what's printed in the owners manual. It is pathetic that my old cheap car gives me an actual estimate using actual data from my actual car and Tesla doesn't...until its under 50% and then suddenly its ok.
Funny, my ICE car doesn't have to look into the future to know that I've been driving like a grandma for the past 100 miles and I have four gallons of gas left so I can probably go another hundred miles at my driving style.
Which is how it calculates it's range, and also how my 2004 toyota calculated range. The maximum range figures consistently lowered over the course of time I owned it as the engine got old and less efficient! It went from consistently having a max range of 420ish miles to consistently having a max range of 380 miles over twenty years!
Funny that old stuffy mid 2000s toyota could manage that on a car that cost $25k, but legendary tech luxury car maker Tesla can't
Navigation data may include altitude changes. Weather data along the route gives you temperature. The driver’s history tells you how likely they are to speed versus drive the speed limit.
Hum... ICE vehicles have given their range in litters for decades, and nobody every had a problem with it.
They recently stated giving estimates in distance, but it's clearly marked as an unreliable estimation.
Looks like Tesla has another huge communications and UX issue, and not a mechanics (electric?) one. They have to get their designers in a room, fire the management, and ask them to actually design stuff for humans.
That's because, even today, gas stations are far more ubiquitous than charging stations. People who own IC cars don't pay that much attention to range because there's rarely a question that they'll find a gas station within their last remaining gallon. With electric, that's a bit of a different story, especially when you're driving a long distance, and to somewhere that's not a major metropolitan city with thousands of Tesla owners.
I pay way more attention to the range of my ICE car over my EV, because I need to actually go someplace out of my way to recharge it while my EV practically always has more range than I need every day.
I spend more of my time recharging my ICE than I do my EV. It's way less convenient and I never know what the cost will be tomorrow. Meanwhile my electricity is on a fixed rate contract measured in years.
People who are worried about range on EVs are not worried about a usecase that looks like this, obviously.
Home/work plug-in is amazing, and an underrated QOL improvement over ICE, but it’s just not relevant to most of the concern around EV range.
Range concern comes from either not having a charger available as a matter of daily business (street parking) or from frequently going on very long drives.
If that's true, then it may be a matter of lingering perception. As an ICE car owner who lives in LA, I see plenty of charging stations, but not necessarily when I go on drives of hundreds of miles outside the city. Of course, I may be biased given that I don't need to pay active attention to vehicle chargers. But, for me, it would be a deal breaker if I couldn't be confident that my car could still be fuelled up in Bumf*k, Nowhere.
They're there if you need them - not always extremely visible though if you're not driving to one (can see the map here: https://www.tesla.com/supercharger).
If you got a Tesla you'd get a better sense for how many superchargers there are.
What you're saying is relevant though and why until recently I didn't really consider non-Tesla EVs an option to recommend if it was your only car (though now that Tesla has pivoted to opening up the superchargers to other car companies this is less of an issue).
That's very impressive. I was totally unaware to the extent of where chargers have been placed. There's even a supercharger located in Green River, UT, which was exactly the kind of place I was picturing in my head.
Yeah - it's pretty wild, Tesla really committed to this a decade ago and has been chipping away at it since, the investment paid off.
Even better, strategically Tesla created the "NACS" or North American Charging Standard which is a clever name for their far superior Tesla charger. They also pivoted from the superchargers being an exclusive reason to buy a Tesla to licensing them for other EVs - now Ford is onboard, Electrify America is switching to NACS, GM too.
They pulled off this switch perfectly in a way most companies fail to do (ex: blackberry bbm) and as a result their investment in these will remain dominant and everyone will be unified around a superior standard (the EU charging standard CCS plug is a committee designed monster that's worse categorically). They're also continuing to expand.
I love manual transmission sports cars, but EVs today are just superior for regular use and Teslas are the best option for most people (especially when considering their lower cost), putting subjective opinions about their mercurial leader aside. There's a reason the Model Y was the best selling car in 2023 Q1 across all categories globally [0].
HN has historically been poor at objectively evaluating this sort of thing especially about Tesla.
Can you explain why other manufacturers switching to NACS is advantageous to Tesla?
Are they collecting fees or is there some reason bp or Shell or Exxon couldn’t just add NACS chargers to all their real estate and steal share from Superchargers?
I have yet to see any explanation as to how the switch to NACS is actually good for Tesla, other than testimony to the standard design being better than CCS?
It's good for Tesla customers because it means NACS charging infrastructure will be more widely available from more companies. Tesla will have reason (and economic motive) to add more Supercharger sites and make them larger than they'd otherwise be.
It's good for Tesla because it costs them a lot less to have everyone else shift to NACS than for them to redeploy ten thousand Supercharger stalls with CCS1.
Honestly the only losers in the continental shift to NACS are those with significant existing CCS1 investments, like Electrify America. And I don't see why they deserve any sympathy from the likes of Ford and GM. The poor reliability of many CCS1 networks has been an albatross around the neck of Tesla's competitors.
Right so they were backed into a corner by everyone else starting to build out infrastructure and they had to cede access to their previously privileged network to pull it off.
I agree, I have no sympathy for CCS1 investments etc, NACS seems superior and it looks like consumers writ large will win etc etc., I'm just wondering how any of this adds up to a bullish case for Tesla and I'm afraid your comment doesn't clarify that. It just illustrates that the alternative would've been more bearish than this one (which I agree).
It’s bullish for Tesla that their extremely costly NACS investments will be proved correct, they now have increased economic value, and a future risk is eliminated. Having long calls proven right is bullish. This level of influence over the North American automotive sector is bullish.
It also plays into the perception that Tesla are technology leaders the EV sector. Which is a big deal if EV technology is the future of the the automotive sector.
It’s licensed access iirc so they’re getting some payment for it (which they deserve for their investment in building it out despite the odds).
They also charge a higher rate to non-Tesla EVs.
The other benefit is if they continued to refuse access they could have ended up like blackberry. The other companies would have adopted the CCS standard and (eventually) would have a competitive network. Then what was once a Tesla advantage would become more of a liability as the transition to EVs gets more complete.
Few companies make this strategic shift at the right time imo and I think Tesla did. By leveraging their advantage now it’s a win win.
The licensing discussion I heard between Ben Thompson and John Gruber on their Dithering podcast (not sure the details).
Even ignoring that, I think it's still a good outcome for Tesla - they effectively own and control a large percentage of all charging infrastructure in the world. Every other car company adopting their standard means they have a lot of customers that will pay them to charge at their stations (even independent of the licensing).
That plus avoiding a future where without making this transition they could end up isolated with an obscure and incompatible charger that would eventually become a liability rather than an advantage.
Got it! I've been meaning to check out Dithering anyway so I'll give that a listen.
> they effectively own and control a large percentage of all charging infrastructure in the world. Every other car company adopting their standard means they have a lot of customers that will pay them to charge at their stations (even independent of the licensing).
This is the argument I find interesting... IMO if everything does centralize on NACS, nothing (AFAICT) is stopping the really big players like bp, Shell, Exxon, etc from just outfitting their already-existing real estate, already-existing infrastructure with NACS. The petro-companies are ludicrously well capitalized, very sophisticated, and have tons of baked-in advantages. Memes aside, they're also already the biggest players in the energy transition anyway. Basically if I were investing in Tesla, I'd be curious why this doesn't just create a great opening for the huge huge players to mop the floor.
Again, consumers (and the environment, probably) win here, so I'm happy about it!
P.S. Also thank you for entertaining a thoughtful convo. Usually this question just attracts zealots and it doesn't get me closer to an answer. You did -- so thank you!
No worries - trying to engage in thoughtful conversation despite the internet incentivizing craziness is my goal!
Fair point about existing players, I just tend to discount old large companies being able to execute for the same reasons startups tend to eat their lunch. Why haven’t they done it already? Why haven’t they started even now?
Why did it require Tesla to build EVs? Why did existing car companies ignore Tesla for 20 years until they were way behind?
Probably the innovators dilemma - it’s rare existing providers are much of a threat.
Anyone who thinks the utility of an EV is identical to an ICE car in the US is deluding themselves or never gets out of town.
I’ll probably take 10 long car trips a year often for camping but sometimes visiting friends. I know that most of the areas I’m driving through when I go east do not have the infrastructure at all and even if they do they’re still a hassle to use and add a bunch of time to a long drive. My mom had an EV so I have experience with range anxiety and the inconveniences of not running the AC, etc.
It’s a bad purchase in my opinion much better to get a hybrid
Or they just don't road trip when they get out of town, or "getting out of town" to them is within 100mi or so, or the corridors where they do tend to travel is well served with chargers, etc.
I don't know about you, but I don't usually tend to pack my car with me when I go on an airplane. Maybe you do?
The majority of people never fuel in Bumf*k, Nowhere though, and that's my point.
I definitely understand though that EVs don't currently cover everyone's use cases, and I'm not entirely certain they'll cover everyone's needs in the end. But most people are pretty bad about actually thinking about what they actually need, and many car buyers aren't buying based on their realistic uses.
Right but most people buy cars for the totality of the driving they have to do, not just the majority. I bought a car specifically because I was tired of the awful rental experience, so "just rent when you need to go on a longer drive" is not a viable solution.
As mentioned, I spend more time and deal with more of an overall hassle recharging my ICE than my EV despite going on more road trips and putting more miles on my EV than my ICE. And my EV is about the worst range option of the model line I bought and doesn't charge as fast as other options on the market today, so it's arguably not that great of a road trip EV.
Having an EV can absolutely be a viable choice for these people.
Are you really arguing the average car frequently makes 500mi+ road trips?
Either way, your NYC <-> Raliegh trip would be like 26 minutes of charging on an 8 hour road trip. Do you really not stop for somewhat that kind of time for an 8 hour road trip? You don't stop to eat for a minute, you race through the gas station as fast as possible, etc? I know for me I'd probably want to stop a couple of times sitting for eight hours.
You're really arguing the average driver frequently makes nearly non-stop eight hour road trips?
I'm definitely not talking about which car is the most luxurious or comfortable. There's a lot of subjectivity to styling. I'm not really a fan of the Tesla style, but it's not like all EVs are Tesla's and they definitely don't all cost $90k.
I made no claims whatsoever as to what "the average car" does?
I said that "most of your driving doesn't happen on road trips" is not a super convincing response to "I don't want to buy an EV because it'll make road trips a pain in the ass." Because, as I said, people buy cars for the totality of their driving.
The NYC <> Raleigh trip would add 26 minutes in a Hyundai Ioniq 6, which I'll note does in fact surprise me in a positive direction (and also thank you for sharing the cool website!)
In a Model S it'd add an hour, which yes I do find to be an unacceptable cost, and a wildly unacceptable one for the price and comfort difference.
The car question obviously contains many many dimensions. Adding 26 minutes of time is pretty acceptable IMO, but doing so for another $6k of car purchase price and downgrading from a super comfortable SUV to a tiny, tiny sedan... it becomes less acceptable again.
A Volvo XC40, which is pretty close comfort level to the Acura RDX, for example, would add 1.5 hours while keeping price roughly constant.
P.S. to level-set, I actively tried to buy an EV or hybrid. I loved having a plug-in hybrid when all my driving was around town and parked at home in the evening. I agree far, far more people can and should be driving EVs than currently do, but I'm pointing out that the multidimensional problem of car selection is not as simple as "there are lots of chargers now" or "just rent something else for road trips."
A recent Model S would do the trip in a half hour of charging. Maybe whatever generation you had and the chargers at the time weren't the same, but in the EV space you can't assume things stay the same even quarter to quarter much less year to year.
And I do agree, not everyone's needs are fully solved by EVs now and may not in the future. But so many people hear about range being an issue that they assume it is for them, when in reality an absolutely massive chunk of not the majority of passenger cars on the roads can easily be swapped for an with zero negative to the owner's life. But people often actually think they've got to have a car that can go 1,000mi in a single charge otherwise it's just a massive inconvenience even though they may drivea 500mi trip once a year if even that.
I have owned a Model Y for a bit more than 2 1/2 years, having driven a Nissan Leaf for 8 1/2 years prior. Factoring away the obvious battery capacity difference, I have found the Tesla range estimates to be far more accurate and consistent when compared to the Leaf. While I found the "secret team" headline to be comedic, given my experience with electric cars, I do have other serious concerns (phantom braking #1). Estimating vehicle range using map data is not a simple problem, even if Tesla is utilizing high-resolution GIS data and/or on board accelerometers in their estimating. Weight of passengers, cargo weight, trailer utilization (I just completed a trip through the Cascades pulling a trailer on my Model Y) all factor in, and have larger effects as road grades increase. I think that mileage estimating is a case where Tesla has actually provided reasonable value, but these cars are fallible and far from all-knowing. I recommend developing a cautious range intuition when driving electric cars which may take some time to develop. Honest empathy to those who have been stranded in them.
Since cars have integrated phone-home diagnostic software, why would the government even allow automakers to advertise 'estimated' ranges for specific car models and not simply show actual averages?
I had an uber driver that said his 3 had less than half the range when temperatures got over 100F (38C). I imagine that is just the increased load from the cooling system. My Y sounds like a combustion car the ac runs so loud the past couple months. I leave the display on battery percentage because the range counts down very quickly in this heat. But it doesn't when it is nice out. Cold decreases the range because the battery heater has to work hard.
My point is that it isn't as simple as an average due to the massive temperature sensitivity. It applies to ICE cars too, but it certainly isn't as noticeable as the engine allows a wider range of temperatures. Ironically the EV is proposed as something to battle climate change, but it is much more susceptible to it's effects.
Personally my ICE goes from ~22-23mpg to ~19 when it's like 100F outside. That's a 17% drop in mileage. My EV has had a bit of a hit but not nearly as much, <10%. I can even offset that a bit more by ensuring I plug in and precondition before I leave, meanwhile my ICE will always burn it's gas to cool down even if I had remote start.
Heating is usually "free" energy-wise though since the gas motor is just leaking massive amounts of heat all the time.
17% is about what you would expect when the temperature goes from 72F to 100F. Inlet temperature is also a major contributor to fuel efficiency. Hot air isn't as dense so the ECU will add more fuel and retard timing to compensate to help cool the cylinder and avoid pre-detonation.
It knows about how much power is in the battery and it can measure the distance, and power use so why not an estimate based on a windowed average of the last two - three days of actual distance/power?
It ought to quickly adapt to weather pattern changes quickly enough while not being too "jumpy".
My ICE car can display MPG and distance to empty it seems to do something like that instead of displaying some random preconfigured metric.
Everything coming out of the battery is a huge thing. In cold temperatures, the heating is just waste heat from the ICE. In EVs, you are using the battery to heat the interior and the battery performance is itself low from the cold, so you get a double whammy.
That gets affected by the kind of people driving the car, and just because I buy a certain car doesn't mean I'm like the other people who bought it. Also, too easy to hack that.
Why do they call it a 'secret team'? Why do they call it 'complaints'?
As said in the article, these are not complaints, but service appointments. Creating a team to handle these unnecessary appointments is completely normal. There's nothing secret about this team.
I was confused too. Title and first part suggested they were trying to suppress discussion about range issues. Then the rest was about cancelling service appointments. I'm pretty sure this is just a hit piece.
Don’t you think if there was an intentional conspiracy to do this they would make it a little less obvious by not activating battery self destruct the day after the warranty ended? I’d have made it wait at least a month afterwards…
You'd absolutely think so, but imagine how many times we might say that about Tesla & Co the last ~3 years :/
You've got to admit that a car that mostly sat idle for years (like a literal Sunday driver) had a sudden and catastrophic failure upon entry is bizarre and hard to justify. And of course my only option is to pay Tesla directly or junk the car (only worth about $20k now if the battery is fixed!)
Yup. Quite blatant fraud, false advertising, deliberate falsifying of car data at Elon's request.
But why not? They get away with it for at least a decade+, if not forever. so far, after many years of fraud, all they get is a few bad press reports with a relevance half-life measured in hours. Maybe some prosecution team or class action firm will eventually go after them, resulting in a fine or settlement, another decade later, that won't even approach the scale of their gains from the fraud.
This is the system Elon is good at hacking, not technology.
Thats the crux of the complaint tho, if the number requires education the number should not be used without context and something more realistic should be used. If on average the car does 250 miles it should not be advertised as 400. Either a range or a disclaimer should be present.
I think the "number decreasing" complaint seems to be related to the fact that you would drive 10 miles and lose 30 on the dash. The article also claims the number becomes more realistic when it crosses bellow 50% charge so I expect this difference to be noticeable.
The car is probably warm by the time it goes below 50%.
Such number is a difficult problem. The Tesla number doesn’t represent anything meaningful. I personally have the state of charge set in % and not distance.
I used to have a BMW that was guessing the range based on the last driving conditions. It was very bad too. Driving downhill in a warm day was producing big range numbers the next day. Driving uphill in a snow storm would make you want to have the car checked for battery degradation.
My 3LR gets about 260 miles of usable range on a summer road trip, first leg. 200 miles per charge after that (assuming 10% to 80% charges). This is for temperate summer trips getting 260 Wh/mi. If it's hot, make that 280 Wh/mi because of air conditioning. If it's winter, make that 320 Wh/mi.
The car is rated at 358 miles of range. I knew that was bunk when I bought it, just going off the numbers on the window sticker suggests hitting 358 is a pipe dream. You can do it, but only on back roads at slower speeds.
For road trips you're better off just driving like a bat out of hell and charging only to 60% if you can, you will spend less clock time overall that way.
As others have noted, you should switch the battery display to percentage to be less irritated by the lies. The car knows your average and could use it, but instad just uses the unrealistic EPA estimate for that display. My wife drives a Bolt and sometimes shows less than EPA rated range when full, but OTOH it's always dead-on.
Inside the Nevada team’s office, some employees celebrated canceling service appointments by putting their phones on mute and striking a metal xylophone, triggering applause from coworkers who sometimes stood on desks.
That's a fairly amazing display of corporate customer contempt. Shareholders couldn't have shown more disdain for their consumers.
I think it's also an opportunity for each of us to appreciate the frailness of the human condition. In particular, how plastic our minds our, how susceptible to "narrative" and social pressure (particularly when connected to income) we are. I imagine those employees are pretty normal people, and they were just responding to incentives. They didn't feel they were harming anyone, and in fact were doing a good job according to their bosses. They work at a famous, respected company and surely if the bosses were wrong that would not be the case, right?
This is the utility of the cynic, the questioner, the doubter, the non-conformist. It is an uncomfortable position, at all times, but you need people among you who constantly fear being inadvertently, mindlessly immoral. Because it's a constant threat and more of a threat, I daresay, than overt evil.
If I bought a used phone, I'd not expect the same battery life or screen time as the brand new counterpart. In fact I never buy a used phone for this reason no matter how sweet the deal is.
Advertising the same range on a used Tesla as a brand new one is fraudulent practice, and people who fall for it are naive.
Ah yes, and when you factor in that EV's use 4x the materials to construct them as ICE cars, and we don't have the grid capacity yet for a full transition, I think we need another solution.
Sure EV's are a part of it, but it's not the silver bullet the marketing would suggest.
I have a 2019 Model 3 dual motors long range. I would not expect to get more than 180 miles on a good day. If it’s raining or snowing, even less than that.
I still like the car and use it for city driving and even road trips with proper planning. Do not trust Tesla numbers.
That's good info. However, I can clarify by saying "advertised range" I didn't mean the range touted in marketing materials, but the range remaining shown on the dashboard
I frequently drive a Skoda Enyaq. The 'official range' figure is 330 miles, but we actually get 250-290 miles in real life usage depending on temperature. When you turn the car on with a full battery, the range estimate for us reflects actual distance not 'official' distance and seems extremely accurate and trustworthy.
When I used own a Model S, it nearly left me stranded in a mountainous highway, in winter with its optimistic range meter. Ultimately, I had to drift behind a truck, drive at 45 mph, and reach the Supercharger with 2% charge remaining.
spoiler: Of the 6 cars they tested, Tesla Model Y had the best performance in terms of miles per kWh and total range. But it still clocked in at only 81% of claimed range.
I rented one for a week and it showed battery percentage not miles. It seems pretty stupid on Tesla's part to show the very inaccurate EPA range rather just battery percentage. And it looks like they doubled down on the stupid with these tactics.
I used to own a high hp gasoline car, and its mileage estimate would regularly be off by 50% when I drove it like I stole it. The difference is that ther
However if you punch in a destination, you'll get exact numbers, and those are insanely reliable. It claims (and I don't believe any claims coming from tesla) that it'll factor wind, elevation, temperature, etc. But regardless of what it factors in, it's on the money.