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)"
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.