I've driven 20k miles in a Tesla LR Y, it's rated at 250 Wh/mi, and my lifetime average is 275 Wh/mi - easily visible in the navigation section of the car.
What Wh/mi number is this article even claiming? It's nowhere to be found. Obviously cold weather affects range, but the article is also claiming the warm weather range is also diminished?
The Tesla trip planner aside from being ridiculously accurate, has an option to show your energy usage versus the rated 250 Wh/mi, as well as the consumption graph has a 'rating' line. So you're aware while driving how your car is performing compared to what it's rated at. It's not like Tesla is trying to hide these numbers at all.
Other people here want to give their lifetime miles and average Wh/mi number? Since this article doesn't.
Just to pile on, I have a 2017 Model X 100D that I've driven nearly 50K miles. EPA rating is 390wh/mi, and my lifetime average is 340wh/mi.
If anything, my dashboard range is overly conservative. I normally arrive at superchargers with ~5% more range than estimated, and I don't drive slow either. Typically 75-80mph on road trips.
The one point I'll give them is that when its below freezing, my range suffers (400wh/mi or so, which is still not much worse than the EPA estimate).
I haven't done quite as well. Over 25k miles Teslamate shows 311 Wh/mi average. The car's in the PNW and we put snow tires on it over the winters and have taken more than a few road trips with a box top and/or bike rack. And yeah, we get 80% of rated, which isn't surprising to me. You can look at individual drives and see it do much better (e.g. a steady 50 mph on a rural road at 70F does quite a bit better than average, and that corresponds pretty closely to the EPA test conditions), and a few hilly trips in cold rain which are efficiency disasters.
I don't know what this article is talking about either. It's the Brand People Love to Hate.
My 2021 Model Y LR says 297 Wh/mi over 42.7k miles.
* I live in southern Wisconsin (temps swing from -20F in February to 100F in August)
* Gemini snow tires November through April, Inductor wheels otherwise
* Source: The odometer matches Trip B, never reset.
I'm much happier with the screen reporting % state of charge instead of EPA miles remaining.
Mine is 318wh/mi over my last 5,700 miles, mostly on the freeway. Is there a lifetime number displayed, I see only trip a/b numbers.
Getting 50 or 60% of the expected mileage seems impossible. Maybe driving 80 mph constantly speeding and slowing up in below zero Fahrenheit weather? My s is 8.5 years old.
That's a SR Y right? My lifetime is 155 W/km which is about 249 W/mi. Same with my mates. We are in NZ so battery is LFP and pretty suited for mild climate.
I am always suspicious of that number - whenever I start to drive the efficiency of the drive is more along 200-230 W/km. I assume its climate controls. Sentry also chews into battery a bit.
Since there’s lots of confusion here I believe two things are true at the same time, 1. Tesla has a great estimate of the battery Wh/mi when navigating or driving, 2. I think what is shown as Wh/mi is misleading if you only track power dissipation -while driving-. A parked Tesla is not consuming 0 W… and I believe this is the point. The article appears to show that reduction from idle power consumption when the car is parked is substantial. If you expect to use all the battery Wh for driving off a single charge, the article claims you can only really get a total value of 50-60 percent of that in typical drive scenarios (eg commute for 1hr, park, drive home, etc until end of range).
Light e-mobility is the future. E-bikes are already 2X the "regular" bike market in the US. E-bikes put lower density areas within bikeable range. That's still only 5% the size of the car market, but it is rapidly growing, while car sales are stable or declining.
I think the problem here is squarely with the EPA. Their setup is downright silly (never exceeding 60 miles an hour? I live very close to a highway with an 85 mph speed limit), but I think more to the point they should publish more than one estimate, maybe a "low", "middle" and "high" range. The problem now is that they really only publish the high range, not even the "middle" range.
Better yet, the range display in every car should display as a spectrum of values that adjusts in real time to driving style and conditions. Ironically, many ICE cars designed during the 1970s oil crisis had an analog dial that did this (probably just geared to the tachometer).
The Tesla has a really cool range vs battery graph that includes an accurate range prediction.
Tesla has a several ways to display accurate battery ranges for current driving conditions. It's useful to be able to compare expected range to the nominal range. Removing the nominal range would be a disservice to customers.
> Their setup is downright silly (never exceeding 60 miles an hour? I live very close to a highway with an 85 mph speed limit)
It was designed to emulate the median highway mile traveled for the purposes of gasoline consumption estimates, not to guess at what customers understand "a highway" to be, semantically. And it actually does a pretty good job. To first approximation, the kind of open-freeway-wind-in-your-hair kind of travel is noise. Most "highway" miles are on urban commutes.
It's a horrible metric for EVs. I own an EV (not a Tesla) and probably average 75% of the stated range, and much less than that when I'm in situations where it matters.
Most importantly, the "wind-in-your-hair kind of travel" that you call "noise" is exactly the kind of travel where EV owners care most about accurate range estimates.
It may be, but I repeat that it's not "silly" for a metric concerned with aggregate consumption to reflect driving conditions that match aggregate reality and not vacation travel. Should there be a metric for EV owners to yell about that measure "Road Trip Range"? Maybe! But that's not what the existing efficiency measures were designed to do.
Even just having the gas car "city" and "highway" ranges would be a huge step up! Most EVs get much higher than their rated range in the city and lower on the highway, but most drivers are only concerned with highway range.
Possibly interesting data point: I own a VW ID.4 in Europe. I found the range that the car displays to be quite accurate, regardless of the season. I was also surprised to find that I'm often getting kWh/100km numbers that are better than the manufacturer's numbers, especially in city driving.
This was weird, because I got used to gasoline-powered car numbers being wildly unrealistic.
I don't know how they did it, but the range estimate on any recent VW group EV is really super accurate, especially if you set a destination in the navigation. It's very impressive. It really helps with road tripping because it's so consistent. In both my e-tron and my Taycan (which have the same infotainment software), I'd know that I'd beat the destination charge estimate by about 5% on a full charge with my driving style.
I've found the ID.4 range to also be pretty accurate, even in winter driving. I definitely notice that it takes recent driving style into consideration, but haven't noticed if it takes ambient temperature into consideration, though.
> It is even more complicated for a Tesla owner because the range displayed on the dashboard does not factor in the effects of temperature, driving efficiency or post-sale modifications. It is only when driver requests directions to a destination that the vehicle begins accounting for temperature and driving conditions.
That would be ludicrous. Of course we expect anything from a Musk-led company nowadays, but for some reason I still doubt it. ICE vehicles have been using historical data in their mileage estimates for tens of years (my parents' 2000s lower middle class car has it) and the point of Tesla during the Model S era was to be uniquely good. I can not believe that they would have intentionally included a woefully inaccurate range indicator in a time in which "range anxiety" was still a thing. No way.
Keep in mind that this "article" is pretty much entirely an ad to perpetuate the company's founding premise that EVs' range estimates are bad and you need them to help.
Yeah agreed. I'm a bit doubtful of the data presented in the article mostly because the company/CEO has a conflict of interest with objective analysis. They earn money from producing 'EV battery and range' reports.
The data in the article could easily be cherry-picked.
From an incentives perspective, it would make sense that manufacturers would try and inflate their ranges because it helps sell their vehicles; range is very high up on customers list when cross shopping EVs. It's unclear to me why Tesla is so unique in this aspect, where they advertise a range that is much higher than what can be achieved, compared to other manufacturers that advertise much more realistic ranges.
Is this a facet of the EPA test? I've heard that manufacturers have the option of "self reporting" but don't know what that practically means. I really wish this was more standardized, because it makes comparing cars a pain.
There are two test formats. Tesla chooses the 5-cycle one which is more favorable due to including and weighting more low speed tests. Other companies use the 2-cycle which weights highway driving more (which is what you do when going long range). Turns out the 2-cycle is more representative of driving where range matters.
Then, when the battery fell below 50% of its maximum charge, the algorithm would show drivers more realistic projections for their remaining driving range, this person said. To prevent drivers from getting stranded as their predicted range started declining more quickly, Teslas were designed with a “safety buffer,” allowing about 15 miles (24 km) of additional range even after the dash readout showed an empty battery, the source said.
The directive to present the optimistic range estimates came from Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, this person said.
“Elon wanted to show good range numbers when fully charged,” the person said, adding: “When you buy a car off the lot seeing 350-mile, 400-mile range, it makes you feel good.”
Isn't that the EPA's fault not Tesla's fault? It's just a metric for comparison really.
My expectation is that other manufacturer's vehicles that generally have shorter ranges would have a real-world deviation from real world ranges. Unless Tesla is unique in having ranges well below the EPA rating, then we really shouldn't be pointing the finger at Tesla, but the EPA system.
“… Tesla, meanwhile, pursues an impressive figure for its window stickers, and ends up returning real-world results that are on average two times as far off the label value as most EVs.”
“One of the experts, Gregory Pannone, co-authored a study of 21 different brands of electric vehicles, published in April by SAE International, an engineering organization. The research found that, on average, the cars fell short of their advertised ranges by 12.5% in highway driving.
The study did not name the brands tested, but Pannone told Reuters that three Tesla models posted the worst performance, falling short of their advertised ranges by an average of 26%.“
Also the part where customers with range complaints were prevented from booking service appointments and a special team was formed to cancel range-related service appointments that lied claiming remote diagnostics showed no problems when they did not run remote diagnostics at all.
You know, the sort of behavior that fine upstanding companies that are not trying to hide problems do.
The cold weather performance is significantly worse, and as somebody who lives in a region with snowy winters I'm tired of the way environmental activists and car manufacturers both seem to be on the same page about pretending this isn't a problem. It also masks a big part of the cost of ownership, since in winter you need to charge a lot more often to drive the same distance as in warmer months. People can plan for shorter range, but they need to know what to realistically expect so they don't end up stranded on the side of the road in winter (this has happened to people I know). I plan to keep at least one ICE vehicle for longer trips and winter use until they are outlawed or we see a revolution in energy tech that makes this a non-issue.
Cold effects on range is more an issue of battery thermal management than efficiency. Cold reduces the cell voltage of the battery, it doesn't "steal" any energy. It's still in the battery, you just have to warm it up to get it out. Teslas in particular (ones built in the last 4 years or so) have pretty effective heat pumps to do this. Mine has taken me skiing more times than I can count, and while for sure range is a little lower (like, 15-20% or so) it's not "buy a separate car" lower.
Frankly I think you're overreacting and should go skiing in a Tesla a few times.
Yeah, and this isn’t free. You also have to constantly heat the battery even when the vehicle isn’t being operated, which leads to vampire drain and/or runaway electric bills in cold garages.
Had a family member sell his Model 3 purely due to vampire drain in his unheated garage. His electric bill was getting run up $100-$200 a month in excess of normal just to keep the Model 3 alive.
Question: did you just vacation with an EV for a few days at your ski destination? Or have you actually lived (not vacationed) in a cold climate with an EV in an unheated garage? This issue is pretty significant for people actually living up north.
I think you're confused about your family member's anecdote. I'm telling you straight up that cold weather operation is a minor impact, 10-20% or so per the Teslamate data from 25k miles of travel in my Model Y. I don't know what to tell you except that you are simply wrong.
FWIW, "vampire drain" is a term from years ago, and indeed there were bugs at various times with various subsystems that led to faster-than-expected drain. No, the Tesla doesn't cost $200/month to heat a battery in the cold (which is like 1900W continuous at my rates, please be real).
So you have a different car, in a different climate, with only 25k miles degradation, in a different energy market, but it didn’t happen to you so it’s not real. Tesla stans really are devoted to defending their purchases.
Anyways, my family member had a pre-heat pump Model 3 in very-cold-weather location with expensive energy. It absolutely did run him $100-$200 to keep the battery alive. Happy that Tesla has figured things out with your Y.
You jumped into a thread where I pointed out in my first sentence that "Cold effects on range is more an issue of battery thermal management than efficiency" (verbatim).
Then you offered an anecdote about an older model of Tesla that lacked that feature, essentially agreeing with me on issues of technical fact, but pretended that this was somehow an issue with the entire product line. Then when I called you out on this nonsense (which remains untrue) you retreated to "but it was an older car without battery thermal management", conveniently forgetting that I'd pointed that out myself already and pretending that somehow this was an argument with me.
Then you called me a "stan" for good measure. Which one of us is arguing in good faith, do you think?
You called me a liar because a major issue with EVs wasn't happening with your particular car. Want me to share the energy bills? EVs have major range and thermal management issues in the cold. Most consumers won't buy an EV with < 200 miles of range, and many EVs on the market will get less than 200 miles range with average use in subfreezing temps (including the base Model 3 and Y).
You're a stan. I like EVs btw, but I'm not deranged about their shortcomings.
“Over the past year, we’ve been collecting Tesla data with a new methodology, using distance between charging sessions and local temperatures, instead of the top-line dashboard range displayed to drivers. With over 360,000 charging cycles from over 12,000 Teslas on the road, and with feedback from thousands of our active Tesla drivers, we’re ready to pull back the curtain on Tesla’s range performance in hot and cold weather. “
I’d like to hear more about this methodology. Tesla drivers are fanatical about keeping batteries between 20 and 80% charge, but how their analysis deals with this isn’t clear. There’s the other issue of the percent charge not being as accurate 1 to 1 with range miles. Are they calculating kWh/mi and using some reference usable battery capacity?
> It is even more complicated for a Tesla owner because the range displayed on the dashboard does not factor in the effects of temperature, driving efficiency or post-sale modifications. It is only when driver requests directions to a destination that the vehicle begins accounting for temperature and driving conditions.
I can kind of understand why? But I also don't believe that it would be impossible to use a better estimate even when you don't have a destination set.
My Toyota RAV4 Hybrid provides a distance to empty number that "learns" based on your driving habits (probably just averaging your MPG over the last 3-4 tanks, or something like that) and IME at least it's usually extremely accurate. Several times I've driven the car down to just 5-6 miles left on the DTE. When I did that it took almost exactly 12.5 gallons to fill up, and the car has a 14.5 gallon tank with 2 gallons held in reserve.
If Toyota can manage do it, I'm pretty sure that Tesla can. I'm just not sure that they want to.
Is that actually true? Even the 2014 i3 estimates range based on past driving data. I don’t think Tesla would just program in a magic number and leave it at that.
Define better? Should it be the last 15 miles of downhill driving into Baker, CA? The last 20 miles of 85+ along a high speed interstate? The last 20 miles of city driving?
TBH, other cars tend to do some mystical formula that is some approximation of the above. There's a reason that they get called guess-o-meters.
I 100% understand that quite a few people prefer that, but it does come with some interesting downsides too.
I consistently beat every energy estimate given by navigation; maybe I just drive more efficiently than average? It also adjusts in real-time based on your actual driving.
Honestly, I don't understand why they don't just switch the battery to percentage by default for Teslas. The trip meter using the built in GPS is extremely accurate for getting to actual % remaining based on the route traveled. No confusion, no hassle. Percentage just means percentage. Just like on a cars gas meter.
Most ICE cars show remaining fuel as a distance now, in addition to the fuel gauge (although some now hide the gauge behind several digital menus). No GPS required though, just a tachometer and fuel-burn sensor, and they're required to be accurate to within 2% by law.
FWIW, even if your main battery display (on the top row of the screen) is set to range (e.g. 181mi), the nav system always displays the battery charge at the destination points as a percentage.
Do the Tesla range estimates not adapt to recent driving?
I drive a Chevy Volt, and it "learns" from recent drives and will estimate range partly based on that, so it'll adapt to weather effects and to highway vs city driving patterns. It feels like there's both a short-term adjustment (updating range during a drive) and a more medium-term adjustment (estimating how far it can go on a full charge the next day), but they may be the same thing in practice.
There's a lot of "people have too much range anxiety, you'll want to stop every 2 hours anyway", but if you get ~50% of EPA range in the winter (per graph in TFA) and on road trips you only recharge 70% of that range (10% back to 80%), you're now down to 35% of the promised ~330mi range = 110miles. Bleh.
Yes Tesla's do adapt to conditions and recent driving. Both the navigation and the energy graph display very accurate predictions of range. They also display a nominal number doesn't vary for conditions. This nominal number is useful for comparison
Since there’s lots of confusion here I believe two things are true at the same time, 1. Tesla has a great estimate of the battery Wh/mi when navigating or driving, 2. I think what is shown as Wh/mi is misleading if you only track power dissipation -while driving-. A parked Tesla is not consuming 0 W… and I believe this is the point. The article appears to show that reduction from idle power consumption when the car is parked is substantial. If you expect to use all the battery Wh for driving off a single charge, the article claims you can only really get a total value of 50-60 percent of that in typical drive scenarios (eg commute for 1hr, park, drive home, etc until end of range).
There is a sodium battery being put in a new Chinese EV which won’t suffer from temperature swings. Preconditioning the battery will usually help, it’s unclear how many owners actually precondition the battery on cold days.
I live in the twin cities and have routinely made it to Duluth with 50% left (153mi)in the MY LR. The thing that’s not mentioned that has a dramatic effect is air resistance-the difference between 65mph and 75mph is startlingly and not shown in this data. I’ve also gone from duluth out to the middle of red lake in -20 F flying around 80. let me tell you, that was extremely poor efficiency!
the full picture never seems as news worthy as cherry picking sensational data. is narrow analysis intentional? i always wonder.
We have both a Model Y (late-2020) and Model 3 (2022), and the 50-60% estimate definitely reflects my experience with the MY. Not so much the M3.
I chalk it up to doing most of my driving (90%) on California freeways going 70+ mph most of the time. Understandable that the range is reduced since the batteries are being expended more, but this issue is definitely the biggest complaint I have with our Teslas so I'm tracking this story closely.
They should do the same with gas (hybrid) cars - since to be fair there’s a hit there with temperature differences and it would be neat to see the differences.
I also noticed this data is generated from aggregated user data. I wonder how a prolonged ride can affect the range. Could long rides heat the battery enough to offset the issues in cool temps?
ICE cars do not suffer from this class of user experience problem. Yes they burn more gas if you need to use the defogger, but this does not really impact your daily planning because it only means you fill up sooner, which you can do anywhere in one minute.
We worry far more about range in our gasoline vehicle than in our EV. Our EV starts with a full battery every morning. But our gas vehicle might have 50 or 350 miles of range depending on when it was filled up last, and the extra 10 minutes it takes to stop and fill might make us late for wherever we're going.
Filling up in 10 minutes instead of hours is worse because... it's so convenient and quick that you may forget to fill up the previous day? This is not a very good argument.
You can solve this by leaving the house ten minutes later, which you should do anyway in case something happens.
The idea with an electric car is you just plug it in every night automatically in your garage – if you're lucky enough to live in a house - every morning it's ready to go. You never have to think about it. Trip driving is different. Tesla made it easy where you can basically drive virtually anywhere in the US and they'll be a supercharger or two along the way. If you live in an apartment or a condo with no electricity then it's harder. You're also stuck with idiots saying you can't add an electric line because it'll burn the place down or something.
I thought the selling point of Tesla was the super fast charging? How long would it take to charge to make up the difference in reported range? Quick Google says a supercharger is up to 200 miles in 15 minutes.
They should fix the reporting though. Ideally let the user put in observed range to calibrate.
It has a noticeable impact when your car is fairly efficient. I notice a roughly 10% increase in fuel consumption in the winter and I live in a mild Pacific coast climate where winter barely even happens.
Do you have electric heaters too? I have an older car, basically zero difference with long drives, but the car doesnt heat at all until the engine gets warm.
There is a slightly higher fuel consumption in city driving, because it takes longer for the engine to heat up, and the idle rotations are usually higher when the engine is still below optimal temperature.
> I wonder how a prolonged ride can affect the range.
It can make a huge difference. I noticed articles this year talking about how bad EV range is in very hot weather (>95F).
At first, I thought this was implausible. Then I looked at the data on some days where I had a lot of short trips interspersed with lots of cabin overheat protection and preconditioning. If I extrapolated from that, I'd have horrible range! I never noticed, because range never matters on days like that.
On a road trip in the same conditions, range has been pretty good.
Precisely. If there was any universe where the headline were accurate (half the EPA range!), this would absolutely not be the first we've heard of it.
But in the real world, most Tesla drivers get within a reasonable error rate of the EPA rated range, and if they don't, they can understand why using the car's very detailed consumption app (e.g., driving fast, lots of quick accelerating, temperature).
Articles like this seem engineered to entice people predisposed with anti-EV or anti-Tesla bias.
The headline is based entirely on the two graphs in the center of the article, which show that in most temperatures, observed range in Tesla S/Y is only 50-60% of the dashboard estimate.
The two graphs also show that Tesla pretty much uses the exact EPA estimated mileage for the dashboard estimate, regardless of temperature - it's a straight line. While the two graphs at the bottom show that the Mach-E and Bolt have much more intelligent dashboard estimates that account for temperature.
The way you used to have to sign up for these tesla monitoring things is you give them your car account (Tesla acct) name and password and then they can hit the Tesla API back end, you have to opt into this monitoring. I'm not willing to do that because that means they can track my location too.
There are two more charts at the bottom: looks like both Ford and Chevrolet are overestimating in cool temperatures. But during higher ones they match EPA.
Everybody advertises the EPA numbers, and that's generally what people use when buying new vehicles. This article isn't about the EPA numbers, it's about what number is displayed as the range on the dashboard. And on non-Tesla's that number varies based on driving conditions, so it'd be a poor number to base buying decisions on.
To be fair, the EPA's rules have basically left the door open for them to do it. In addition, their customers tend to be very tolerant of their product quality issues. Other automakers don't enjoy such latitude.
What Wh/mi number is this article even claiming? It's nowhere to be found. Obviously cold weather affects range, but the article is also claiming the warm weather range is also diminished?
The Tesla trip planner aside from being ridiculously accurate, has an option to show your energy usage versus the rated 250 Wh/mi, as well as the consumption graph has a 'rating' line. So you're aware while driving how your car is performing compared to what it's rated at. It's not like Tesla is trying to hide these numbers at all.
Other people here want to give their lifetime miles and average Wh/mi number? Since this article doesn't.