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.
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.