I love this: Musk has promised to respond publicly to the negative NY Times review WITH DATA FROM THE CAR directly contradicting the assertions in the review. From now on, reviewers will be extremely careful about exaggerating the negatives of, or lying about, Tesla vehicles.
The reporter claims the car informed him that "charging complete". That is not the same thing as "you have full range". He also clearly states he was in contact with Tesla throughout the drive and they provided advice, sometimes wrong.
Plus the real negative part of the article that Musk is glossing over is, having to turn off heat in a vehicle just to get somewhere, got to be loads of fun in the summer too.
So what we have is possible confusion on part of the reporter or bad UI design. Either way it only points out that a 100k electric car is not a road trip car. Its a trip for suburbanites or similar. Sure you "can" do a long trip but you don't have the range of alternative a normally fueled vehicle has.
battery powered cars are an interesting technology, I am not quite in agreement they are ready for prime time. Considering the range limits of the top of the line I doubt many would be satisfied with the entry level model.
The big automakers are investigating many different fuel systems simply because they know any replacement to truly take hold has to be simple enough for anyone. It just has too work, there is no place for a list of "buts"
> It just has too work, there is no place for a list of "buts"
Of course there is! Here are some example buts for ICEs:
Gasoline is a dense energy source, but...
it stinks.
it's toxic.
it's too noisy.
its price is too determined by foreign politics.
it puts high stress and heat on the car, requiring constant maintenance.
it's not shelf stable.
its performance is dependent on altitude.
All but two of these things have ceased to be a problem for many years. Gasoline cars of today are extremely reliable and generally very quiet. The primary source of wear is road abuse on the chassis, given you keep up on oil, and any engine requires lubrication. The primary source of noise on the freeway is wind and road noise.
Many of the other issues with gasoline- smell, toxicity, stability- have been largely addressed by the distribution infrastructure.
Oh, by the way, gasoline isn't all that toxic. It is more hazardous for its volatility rather than any poisonous properties for humans.
Last thought- one of the two things that are still an obstacle (performance at extreme altitude) is firstly always going to be an obstacle for any type of combustion engine and secondly addressable with a turbocharger if you care enough.
I'm sorry, but your view on "extremely reliable and incredibly quiet" is idiotic. Gasoline cars are extremely reliable and incredibly quiet compared to OLDER GASOLINE CARS! Compared to Afghanistan, Iraq is an incredibly safe and quiet country to visit, but for some reason, I'm not planning a trip there anytime soon. Gasoline doesn't even come close to winning internal combusion category. Diesel blows it away in reliability.
Gasoline vehicles have gone from being absolute pains in the ass to maintain (I've worked on and rehabbed many an old vehicle, including mid 80's Oldsmobiles, 70's era air cooled VWs, and mid to late 90's GM vehicles) to significantly less pains in the ass, but still finicky creatures. 4 or 5 years in on modern ICE vehicles, you're going to start seeing problems that can often be expensive. If its not the electrical, it will be failed pump on the cooling system, or even a cracked impeller (now that they are made of plastic).
Can you prevent this all with regular maintenance? Of course, but let's not pretend like this isn't much more complicated than it needs to be. An electric vehicle isn't going to have tubes, pumps, fans, impellers, thermostats, spark plugs, valves,cylinders, ignition coils, injectors, oxygen sensors!!! ($10 part with several hours of labor to replace), catalytic converters... and my god how many other expensive, prone to breaking moving parts can I name.
And then you are sitting there talking about turbochargers? Really?? Do you have any idea what kind of maintenance is required, and oh wait, now we can up our octane to 93, pay out the ass for gasoline, and deal with all the extra wear an tear high compression turbo engines deal with......
Thanks, glad to see we have a stage of mutual respect established.
Gasoline doesn't even come close to winning internal combusion category. Diesel blows it away in reliability
Ah, I see, only the most reliable thing can be considered reliable? More importantly, gasoline engines can be designed like diesels. We have direct injection for gas engines. We have low-rpm torquey gasoline engines (see the slant-6). A key reason diesel engines tend to be more reliable is because diesel engines are often used in applications that demand reliability, while gasoline engines are often used in applications that are willing to sacrifice some reliability for extra performance. Which, mind you, is not something electric vehicles will be immune from.
If its not the electrical, it will be failed pump on the cooling system
And I suppose you think electric vehicles don't have liquid cooling and heating systems? Cute.
Why exactly would an ELECTRIC VEHICLE be less prone to electrical failure, anyway?
talking about turbochargers ... do you have any idea what kind of maintenance is required...
No, I have no idea. In fact, I've never even heard of turbochargers before, I'm not sure why I said that word!
Turbochargers are a trade-off to handle a deficiency. Electric cars make trade-offs too, as they are not perfect either; their deficiencies are simply different.
Re turbochargers: For a sufficiently high fuel price, compression becomes a necessity. Atmospheric engines have more or less disappeared (100% for diesel since about 10 years) from the lineup of European manufacturers for example.
I find it amazing how when you throw out exploding millenia old dead plants in a box suddenly your motor and power train are about as complex as a RC matchbox car. Sure, replacing batteries is absurdly expensive, but that really is it. If you can just get the cost of the battery replacements down, you don't have to worry about belts or mufflers or the gear shift breaking due to complex machinery going on the fritz.
I'm sympathetic to electric vehicles, but they don't escape the problem of complexity. There's still power steering, brakes, gearboxes, differentials, a/c, and a million other things that can go wrong - little of which has the 100+ years of engineering development that ICE vehicles have.
I'm not saying don't buy one, but don't expect electric vehicles to be as reliable as ICE vehicles for at least another decade. Maybe two or three.
My Prius (which is almost guaranteed the worst of both worlds as it's both gas and electric) has had a stellar maintenance record - and I'm a very lazy oil changer and neglectful owner.
Electric vehicles using software "clutches" are to ICE-powered cars as SSD is to HDDs - at first, there will be downsides and only the adventurous will get to showboat, but in several generations the only reason you don't get an electric car (SSD) is if you really need the range (storage space using our analogy) or can't afford the upgrade.
Spoken like an engineer: your points are technically quite correct, and yet, often irrelevant to the consumer!
For the average consumer of automobile technology, these are non-issues. Logistical and pricing issues are moderated and subsidized by governments and car manufacturers. From the consumer's point of view, you go to a gas station once a week, and the car "just works."
As superior as an electric system may be technically, economically, environmentally, etc, if you want it to take off, the UI and logistics need to be smoothed over until you get a similar level of "it just works" which matches the consumer's experience with gasoline.
These three points affect anyone who lives near heavy automobile traffic. Just because it's an externality doesn't mean it doesn't exist!
> its price is too determined by foreign politics.
When gasoline prices doubled from $2/gallon to $4/gallon, people certainly thought that was relevant. The price spike is partly responsible for the rise in hybrid vehicles.
> it puts high stress and heat on the car, requiring constant maintenance.
Oil changes every 5k miles and major services every 15k don't qualify as "just works" in my book.
> it's not shelf stable.
I'll grant you this one is irrelevant to consumers.
> it stinks. > it's toxic. > it's too noisy.
These three points affect anyone who lives near heavy automobile traffic. Just because it's an externality doesn't mean it doesn't exist!
I live near a heavily trafficked road. To be honest these aren't problems; the noise issue is far outweighed by a) people playing uber-loud music on their car stereo (not any different with electric cars) and the noise of the electric train (BART) that runs above the road.
As an example of the externalities of gasoline, living near a highway has been shown to have high correlation with the incidence of childhood asthma hospitalizations.
Fair enough about stink and noise, but personal experience really isn't good for judging toxicity. Automobile-related pollution is a pretty big deal, but it manifests as large-scale health changes, not immediate personal changes.
Well, yes, if there's a train right by the road, of course it will be louder. A train is one of the noisiest things you can have around. That's hardly a point in favor of gas cars. This seems a bit like trying to demonstrate that eating a bucket of deep-fried twinkies isn't so bad for you by comparing it to a bottle of bleach.
(too late to edit the parent) I didn't so much want to defend gasoline cars, as to observe that the externalities are much less of a burden nowadays than people might expect. I was surprised by this myself, but then vehicles in California are orders of magnitude cleaner than the cars I grew up with.
> Oil changes every 5k miles and major services every 15k don't qualify as "just works" in my book.
There are few items in this day and age that don't require owners to perform periodic maintenance. Tesla cars aren't immune from requiring annual inspections (http://www.teslamotors.com/service) either.
I don't know why people are writing off stinks/toxic/noisy. As someone who has at various times lived near large roadways, this is a huge concern. Car pollution is a really big problem
Because its a problem which affects the environment, not the consumer. You could buy an electric car and it wouldn't help one bit. You'd have to get everyone to buy one.
It's a problem of external effects. Now if we would make an effort to attribute the costs of these external effects to their originator, internal combustion engines would be wholly unavailable to anyone under 1M$ net worth almost instantly. We don't do so because a) it takes effort (and thereby generates costs all in itself) and b) we usually don't care about the plight of future generations and those around us and c) we want the economy not to crash.
And we don't even know about all the external effects that gasoline cars have; there was this article in Mother Jones [1] recently that correlated leaded gas to the crime rate, owing to the detrimental effects lead has on the human brain.
Unless you drive an older car. My 14 year old Saturn's oil was rough when I changed it at 3200. I can probably take it to 5000 now that it has synthetic blend in it, but I'm not going to take a chance with a 154,000 mile old engine.
>These three points affect anyone who lives near heavy automobile traffic. Just because it's an externality doesn't mean it doesn't exist!
However, it occurs over such a timespan that the immediate effects are a non-issue, just long-term. The average person does not take into serious consideration the 30+ year effect of a decision, but a more near-term one.
Well, the Tesla cars' batteries are permanently wrecked and have to be replaced - at a cost of about half the price of a new car! - if you put them into long-term storage without leaving them connected to a charger, or if the charger becomes unplugged or loses mains power. That's even worse!
More concentrated, and more efficient, so it affects fewer people and creates less pollution overall. Additionally, we can power them with zero emissions power sources once we get there. People should really stop trotting out the coal power plant argument in trying to claim that this is somehow a relative weakness of EVs, because it's really not.
Obviously it has to match or surpass the experience with gasoline. This is what Tesla has done, surpassing that experience for some(rich) people.
The rest is mainly a cost issue. Conventional cars have 100 years of mass production advantage.
It will take some time until price goes down, and catch gasoline. Electronics, batteries and electric engines are way easier to mass produce than thermal engines.
Perhaps you should ask owners, many of whom I have heard state exactly that. It's big, comfortable, fast, quiet, clean, futuristic, high status, low maitenece and beautiful machine. Not hard to see its appeal.
It's much faster than other cars in its class. It has supercar worthy acceleration and handling (thanks to that low battery pack it hugs the ground like you have wings).
It's not a sports car, luxury cars pride themselves on what you can't hear.
Well, the best performing option does have excellent acceleration (4.4s to 60) - but they aren't actually that fast in terms of top speed - 130mph. Of course, that is pretty irrelevant to most of us who don't have unrestricted Autobahns to drive on.
But from an engineering point of view, I just don't find ICEs elegant. Too many moving pieces, and all that for about 30% efficiency (the remaining 70% is lost as waste heat). Good thing gasoline is so energy-dense, because when you're wasting 70% of your energy, you need that.
ICEs are, at their core, plenty elegant. The trouble is efficiency and low emissions are not their strong points.
I would argue that efficiency and low emissions do not preclude something from being elegant. Steam plants can also be elegant, and they can be extremely efficient and low-emissions, but a steam plant cannot be bolted onto a motor car or a small aeroplane for which a turbine would be inappropriate. All forms of heat engines have their upsides and downsides.
Anyway, at the end of the day, consumers don't care one iota about engineering elegance.
The biggest ongoing problem is going to be CO2 emissions. Given few alternatives to ICEs (EVs and hybrid vehicles are available, but unsubsidized TCO remains higher, and even accounting for carbon costs may be higher, I'd have to research that), we're going to have liquid-fueled vehicles for a long time.
The real question is where that fuel will be sourced.
CO2 emissions is coupled to fossil fuels, not necessarily gasoline, if you're talking about renewably-generated gasoline (say from biofuels, though I suspect biodiesel is more likely). And if you're getting hydrogen (an energy storage medium, not an energy source, and an awfully low-density one to boot on a volumetric basis, with significant storage and transport issues) from fossil-fuel generated electricity, you've mostly just transported the CO2 emissions problem (modulo carbon sequestering, which is presently and likely forever highly uneconomic).
I address issues of alternate fuels in a prior post, and suspect we'll see liquid hydrocarbons, of some stripe, for quite some time.
I sort of figure your first block of text is self-evident. Apparently a lot of people don't think so; perhaps I need to be much more verbose in the future.
Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. H.L. Menken.
A fair number of people can't put it together. The fact that we've extracted and re-released to the atmosphere a significant fraction of the hydrocarbons which have been sequestered via biological activity over a ~260 million year period, within a century, seems to escape a lot of folks.
As does the distinction between energy sources and energy media. And while technically fossil fuels are themselves a medium for sunlight, humans don't have to drive that particular conversion.
Besides, pedantism is one of the rare pleasures of old age.
The emissions are going to come from wherever the energy is made.
I'd like to see efforts at using energy sources to manufacture gasoline from environmental sources of carbon, making the fuel carbon-neutral. How does that compare to electric vehicles?
But for all of that, liquid hydrocarbons offer among the best weight/volume energy storage capacity available to us. The alternatives: EVs, LNG, hydrogen, compressed air, flywheels, etc., just don't hack it. For an efficiency perspective, the next best bet is human-powered vehicles, but these aren't an option for all people. Transit and dense infrastructures are your next best bet.
While I see us moving from fossil fuel, I still see liquid fuels playing an important role in mechanized transit (ground, water, air) for as long as we're technologically capable of doing so.
I share your dislike of ICEs but you are being far too kind with that 30%. At best 20% is (high-end) typical. Which means that for every 5 gallons of fuel you feed it, it throws away 4. That is SUCH poor engineering that it's verging on insane that we've embraced these stinking, finicky beasts long enough to destroy most of the planet's (easy) fossil fuel reserves.
I do like the idea of Electric car as a fuel abstraction layer. Say a proper hybrid where it is fully electric motors but could be run completely on a fuel generator that could be any sorts of fuel.
An (really?) "ICE" aka internal combustion engine isn't limited to gasoline it can also burn alcohol, natural gas, propane and I'm sure many other less smelly fuels.
Diesel is another but it's a bit smelly although I was behind a Mercedes diesel SUV and didn't realize it until I read the rear badge, no smell at all.
Although bio-diesel or even straight vegetable oil can be burned since Rudolph Diesel intended the diesel engine to run on peanut oil so farmers could afford the fuel.
None of which matters a bit if you just want to take the thing on a 200 mile road trip. People do care about the things on that list, but they care about being able to get where they're going more.
I agree with the gist, but a modern car's performance won't degrade with altitude: the ECU controls the engine's air intake pressure, so you might get a bit of extra wear on the forced induction system from the extra compression needed, but I don't think you'll see a perforamcne drop.
It is a source of energy that not every country has enough. Most countries in the world have different sources of energy(from coal to wood, going through nuclear).
The countries that do not have enough of it have to invent stupid excuses for invading the countries that do have, incurring in high costs while killing millions, because if not transportation halts and the economy nukes.
It is a highly pollutant for cities, specially diesel particles that are carcinogenic, while on electric generation plants you could use particle filters that are very efficient and cheap, and also far from where most people lives.
It is very complex and things breaks a lot. You need to change the oil frequently, drive belts and also the brakes while with regenerative braking they last forever.
Once the Supercharger network is in place, I'll be driving my Model S up to my parent's house next Thanksgiving from Atlanta. That's 1000 miles, without any concerns about heating or AC usage.
The reporter in this article both failed to charge his car as much as needed and took a large detour that took off some range of the car. If you want to drive recklessly, sure, you're going to run into issues. But there is a significant enough Level 2 charging infrastructure already and Tesla's Level 3-ish Supercharger network is going to supplement that entirely. As it is, I can already take long trips. I just have to wait longer for a full Level 2 charge than I will on a Supercharger in the very near future.
30 minutes for 150 miles of range from a near-empty battery. Approx 60 minutes for a full charge from empty. It does slow down as it gets closer to full, but the timeframe is measured in minutes instead of hours.
So for a 1000 mile trip, that is going to be about 6 charging stops.
3 hours added to the trip - and probably more like 4 hours when you consider that the Supercharger stations are not going to be located right on the main roadways all the time.
A 1000 mile trip in a gas vehicle would require 3, maybe 4 fuel ups. I've timed my fill-ups many times, 7 minutes from off the road to back on (assuming an en-route gas station) is about the average. So, figure 28 minutes lost to fueling, vs. 4 hours. The Tesla will take at least 3.5 hours longer to make the same trip.
1000 miles at an average of 50 mph (seems low, but I've driven 720 mile trips from NH to MI many times) is 20 hours if you drive straight through. 20.5 hours with gas, 24 hours with Superchargers.
I love the Tesla cars, I've seriously considered the Model S, but I don't see how (for me) it is really a viable long-distance driver yet. Yes, you have a better chance of not getting stranded vs. maybe a Nissan Leaf, but it's a suboptimal alternative to gasoline still.
All of this going on the assumption that the charge station is not fully occupied at the time you want to recharge, which with 30 to 60 minute recharge times is going to get improbable pretty fast when electric cars become more popular. Imagine everyone at the local gas station leaving their car at the pump for 60 minutes...
I think we can safely conclude that unless there is going to be a huge breakthrough in battery technology really soon, EV's that run on batteries alone are not going to be a success for anything but short-distance commutes.
I'm still hoping for breakthroughs in other technologies that would make generating electricity so cheap that we can afford to waste a lot of it producing hydrogen. That would instantly obviate the need to lug around heavy batteries that take long to recharge, run out fast, require a lot of energy to produce, and are full of nasty chemicals that pollute the areas where they are mined.
Battery-powered EV's simply aren't all roses and sunshine, and I'm frankly quite amazed how easy the negatives are papered over.
The big thing that you're not accounting for is that the majority of charging is probably going to be done at home just letting it charge overnight. Also, you don't need a huge, expensive, and maintenance intensive gas pump at every station, you just need a power cord and some way for someone to swipe a credit card. No more having huge gas tanks buried beneath the pavement, just have an extremely beefy electrical hookup and you're good to go. Everything is all solid state with no moving parts, heck you could even disable the car while it's being charged to prevent idiots from taking off without unhooking first.
Superchargers are intended for on-the-road, long-haul recharge. While your local gas station is used by everyone in the neighborhood, most Tesla drivers, most of the time, will be charging overnight or during work hours at home, work, or a dedicated car park. Which should reduce demand somewhat.
From Google Maps, the Harris Ranch location is presently a single charging station. That is something which should be readily scalable as demand rises.
Your usage pattern at a given Supercharger station would be a factor of total traffic on nearby highways, Tesla ownership, and recharge needs. Present stations are at highway plazas -- not necessarily in high-ticket areas (hello, Harris Ranch and Barstow), but given the vehicle owner demographics and minimum 30 minute linger time, they'll likely offer typical captive-audience amenities, so the time won't be a total loss.
And charging is possible from other outlets, though at 5 miles/hour from 110AC, that's a good (or bad) 60 hours to recover full range. More likely you're getting sufficient charge to get to a higher-rated output.
Further though: so long as queuing depth is one vehicle (that is, you arrive, all chargers are filled, and there are no vehicles in front of you), the mean wait time assuming a 50% charge is 30/n, where n is the number of stations. So, 6 stations, queue depth of 1, you'll wait on average 5 minutes for someone to pull out, extending your total recharge time to 35 minutes. If Tesla strives for this as a 95%+ level of service, it should be tolerable, though high-travel periods (holiday weekends in particular) would tend to be worst-case scenarios.
Correcting myself: mean wait time would be 30/(2*n). As on average you'll arrive when another car is halfway through its charging period. So for a 6-charger station, 2.5 minutes wait time. On average.
> unless there is going to be a huge breakthrough in battery technology really soon, EV's that run on batteries alone are not going to be a success for anything but short-distance commutes
I don't think that's the only option, battery swapping springs to mind as an alternative to beat the problem.
Your math is all wrong because you assume you're some sort of anaerobic being that doesn't consume food or produce waste :)
All those Supercharging stations are going to be located right next to places to eat. With about 4-5 hours between stops, that's right around when my stomach is going to start rumbling and I'll want to take a longer stop anyways.
Actually my math is based on real world experience. I can easily drive for 12 hours straight without a major food break. Quick bio break at a gas station, sure. Turn a 7 minute fillip into a 12 minute fill up.
On a trip that long, my wife is generally along as we'll, so we can trade off shifts driving. We will usually bring some snacks to eat along the way as well.
So, my numbers are still pretty accurate. You can go farther between fill ups on gas, and you can refuel (you, and the car) in less than 30 minutes ( or 45-60 minutes of you need more than a top-off, based on accessories use in the vehicles).
That sounds like hell on wheels. If you're worried about your long-haul trip taking an extra 30 minutes every two hours, maybe you should be flying instead?
Just betting that you don't regularly travel with kids...
I just drove from San Francisco to San Jose yesterday with my family, had to stop twice along the way for near-emergency bathroom breaks. 45 minutes every 4 hours sounds like NO PROBLEM.
We stop every 1.5 hours, when possible, for stretch/potty breaks, and every 3 hours or so for food. I think that planning your meals around charging isn't such a bad idea.
They'd likely need more charging ports, though, in the long term.
True, but you may not want to leave your vehicle plugged in by itself for 30 ~ 60 minutes. I guess you could get food and eat it in/around the car while it charged...
I think that is partially the idea with supercharger stations--that there will be amenities nearby within eyeshot of the cars.
I think it'd be cool to have coffee shops or a lounge setting where you can use your computer in a relaxed environment while you make sure nobody messes with your car.
But honestly, when on a road trip with family, I am lucky to have a stop as short as 1 hour if we are eating a meal.
Rrriiiggght. People driving BMW's always stay in their cars or park them human attended parkinglots that take security seriously - if someone doesn't, then it usually results in keyed paint work, slashed tires or vomit in your car.
Everything you mentioned except the somewhat silly "attempt to hack the onboard systems [in a half hour]" is stuff that ICE luxury cars are just as subject to. Save for the possible novelty thrill of messing up an electric car vs. a combustion one, this risk isn't increased at all.
I said nothing about increased risk, I addressed the issue of the car being "safe" for the 30 minutes or longer that it takes to charge simply because "The charger cable locks into the charging port while the car is locked, so no one is going to mess with it while you're gone."
As for "novelty value and thrill" well, yes, it's stupid, pointless, and exactly the kind of dumb arse flash fad that has happened in the past and could well happen in the future - there's no logic to such things.
If there is no increased risk, then it is "safe" relative to the normal baseline for "safe" that most people would apply to a car. Pointing out that it is not safe in some unrealistic absolute sense is kind of pointless, don't you think?
It's like telling someone that a neighborhood he's thinking of moving into is unsafe without mentioning that your assessment based on the fact that the neighborhood is as likely as any other to get hit by a meteor. That doesn't qualify it as an "unsafe neighborhood" on the scale most people care about.
A 1000 mile trip in a gas vehicle would require 3, maybe 4 fuel ups. I've timed my fill-ups many times, 7 minutes from off the road to back on (assuming an en-route gas station) is about the average. So, figure 28 minutes lost to fueling, vs. 4 hours. The Tesla will take at least 3.5 hours longer to make the same trip.
On the other hand: you'll be shelling out about $60 for each gas station stop; and $0 for each Supercharger stop. That adds up too, you know.
> So for a 1000 mile trip, that is going to be about 6 charging stops.
> 3 hours added to the trip - and probably more like 4 hours when you consider that the Supercharger stations are not going to be located right on the main roadways all the time.
On the other hand, with normal commuting patterns you have to refuel your gasoline car about once every two weeks or month depending on the car and your driving habits. With an electric car, you just plug in every night and never stop at a smelly gross gas station again.
I don't know why people complain that when you use a product for what it's not designed for, it's bad at it. Electric cars are bad for road trips. If you're going 1,000 miles, use an airplane or at least a train.
All of what you said is true, but what people who buy these cars read is
"Only a four hour difference for not using gas? Sign me up!"
I see what you mean about convenience, but a lot of people will forgo that. Besides, if you're traveling 1000 miles, why does 4 hours matter unless you have a hard deadline and need to travel straight through?
I tend to measure long drives in terms of how long it will be until I don't have to get back in the car. That probably isn't the right mindset for a 1,000 mile trip, but there you go.
Anyway, the whole discussion is silly, no one buys a $45,000 car with a less than 200 mile range for the practicality of it.
When Zipcar gets a hold of Google's self-driving cars, then you won't even have to wait around at the recharging stations. You can just jump into the next available fully-charged car, and off you go. With a reservation, the entire route could be automatically planned ahead of time with railroad-esque precision. You heard it here first!
Depends on where you're going and what you're carrying.
Family of four with a baby or two, and a trunk / roof rack full of luggage? Transferring between cars would be a bit of a PITA. I'd opt for the swappable battery in that case (or a liquid-fueled vehicle).
Do you mean carry an extra battery, or do an exchange? While you "could" do an exchange, similar to how propane tank exchanges work, do you really want to be trading your pampered battery in for some random battery with an unknown history?
Battery swap almost necessitates leasing the battery. You cannot reasonably own a $10,000 thing you swap multiple times a week. But leasing it works extremely well.
I assume that such a lease approach would have to carry insurance to cover battery damage, similar to buying coverage for car rentals. At least with car rentals, the insurance isn't very affordable, and leads to some people being irresponsible with the property.
The insurance for a car lease is totally affordable. And that's what it would be -- a long-term lease.
You would lease a battery for 3 or 5 years from a company, and then swap at that company's swap stations. They would bill you on something like total miles put on the vehicle or total miles delta put on at swap stations. You would have exactly one entity with which you would interact in case of battery issues: the company.
That's a much more scalable approach. Supercharging stations, etc, seem like an insufficient band-aid. Imagine a gas station with each pump occupied for 30 minutes a piece.
That makes the most sense. Imagine a Jiffy Lube style setup: you drive on to a station, robotic arms automatically remove your battery and install a new one, and you're on your way. Total time: under 2 minutes. Boom!
They had the dumb idea of using renewable energy for the charging stations and, here's the dumb part, BUILDING THEIR OWN CARS instead of licensing out the battery tech to all the car companies for cheap. It was pretty clear for all the glowing profiles that came out when the company was forming that the guy running it was charismatic but a flaker.
Why don't they rent (instead of selling) the batteries, and have stations to swap your battery for a full one before recharging the empty one at their leisure? That could take the "refuel" time down to a minute!
"In early October 2012, Agassi resigned from his role as worldwide Better Place CEO, and was replaced by Evan Thornley, CEO of Better Place-Australia. Briefly, Agassi remained on the company board, but a week later he resigned from that position as well. A few days after Thornley's appointment, Better Place asked its investors for a round of emergency funding, totaling about $150 million.[8][9] On October 11, 2012, Haaretz reported that Better Place might lay off up to half its staff of several hundred employees.[10] On October 29, 2012, Ynet reported that Better Place would that week lay off 150 to 200 people out of its 400-person staff in Israel as it seeks financing to combat its cash-flow problems.[11]
In late January 2013, Thornley resigned, and Dan Cohen was named acting CEO by the board.[12]"
That's good, so it's basically "stop a bit, have a cup of coffee while your car charges"? Still not compared to gasoline, but, hey, viable electric cars!
More like a lunch time meal and dinner, considering I've got 17 hours of driving in front of me at that point. That's about 3 meals, so most of my stops will be for longer periods of time anyways.
So add on about 12% onto a time estimate to account for the extra charging time. I'm estimating about 2.5 hours for 150 miles which isn't unreasonable for freeway driving.
If you're going < 300 miles, then it's really a moot point anyways. At that range, you'll have enough in the battery before leaving to get you there without a charge along the way.
And that's awesome until yo need to go beyond that single charge range. Then charging might be a problem where ever you wind up still, though it is getting much better I admit.
You would be better off flying or renting a gasoline/diesel powered car. You cannot be assured the charging stations will work, not be in use, or situations change which prevent you from getting to one.
> Plus the real negative part of the article that Musk is glossing over is, having to turn off heat in a vehicle just to get somewhere, got to be loads of fun in the summer too.
You "have" to do the same thing in a gas powered car if you don't fill up the tank when given the chance.
> Using the heater does not affect range in a gas powered car.
It typically does (though not as much as the chiller would).
There's two costs to using the heater:
1. The electricity to power the fan comes from the engine. I'm not sure how much of an impact this actually is (depends on the power the fan needs) but there's something there.
2. The heat from the heater comes from the engine block, which cools the engine. On cold days (<15 F) this can have a huge impact on the engine's temperature and will often cool the engine well below it's most efficient operating temperature.
Look, electric cars are great, and I'm looking forward to the day when I can buy one, but this is BS.
First, the power the run the fan is minuscule. On the order of a few Watts. Maybe a few tens of Watts at most. It's an order of magnitude less than what is needed to run seat heaters (and those have almost no measurable effect on a Model S's range, which is why "range mode" uses seat heat in favor of air conditioning). The energy use you're talking about is enough to move the car an extra few hundred feet after a multi-hundred mile drive.
Second, every ICE has a thermostat on the radiator. It greatly reduces coolant flow to the radiator when the car is warming up, or any other time that the coolant is below optimal temperature. I spent many years in the northern (continental) United States and never encountered a situation where the coolant temperature gauge on an ICE car failed to show normal operating temperature after 10-20 minutes of warm-up time.
The cold-weather fuel economy difference in a conventional car mostly comes down to greater air density.
More to the point: the energy-intensive aspect of heating an ICE car, the heat itself, is a waste product of the engine and needs to be removed regardless. Even in cold weather.
In an EV, heat must be generated at a very high energy expense. You can play with the mileage range estimator on Tesla's website. For the largest capacity (85 kWh) batter, heat knocks range down by about 50 miles. Depending on conditions, at 55 MPH, you're talking 350 to 300 or so with heat at 32F. A gasoline powered ICE will likely actually get slightly higher performance due to greater thermal gas expansion at low temperatures, and lower overall cooling demand: while running the cab heater doesn't consume much power, spinning the radiator fan does, and can usually be avoided in cold weather.
> I spent many years in the northern (continental) United States and never encountered a situation where the coolant temperature gauge on an ICE car failed to show normal operating temperature after 10-20 minutes of warm-up time.
Go further North. I have not seen the temperature gauge on my car move since about October, and I have a huge piece of cardboard blocking the entire radiator to stop air flow.
I have a huge piece of cardboard blocking the entire radiator to stop air flow.
This won't make any difference unless the thermostat is open. If your temperature gauge is on "cold", you're not even close to the point where the thermostat will open if it's operating normally. Which raises the question: have you had your thermostat checked to make sure it's not stuck open?
> This won't make any difference unless the thermostat is open
Actually, it makes a huge difference as it stops an enormous amount of very cold air going through/around the radiator onto the engine. Everyone up here does it, else cars would not be warm enough to run properly.
> Have you had your thermostat checked to make sure it's not stuck open?
Of course. Everything works great in summer when it's ~+25C
To give you a better understanding of how cold -50C actually is, I can drive for an hour, get out and put my hand directly on the exhaust manifold of my 4-cyl East-West engine (exhaust at front for cooling) and it's only just warm to the touch.
Ah, that explains it. :-) I used to do cold weather testing when I worked as an automotive engineer; the coldest we ever tested at was -30 C, and there were plenty of test vehicles that didn't fully warm up at that temperature.
Check your thermostat, if it's too cold it should block off the radiator completely meaning that your piece of cardboard would do nothing if it was working properly.
No. There's a reason why racers love cold air intakes, and it's not for efficiency, it's because you get to burn more fuel and thus make more power!
The extra fuel comes automatically because modern EFI (electronic fuel injection) motors use several sensors in a feedback loop to ensure that the air:fuel ratio is 14.7:1
There is an air temp sensor and compensation that adds roughly 1% fuel for every 10F drop in temperature. Then the oxygen sensor in the exhaust system measures whether combustion is hitting the 14.7:1 target and adds or subtracts fuel accordingly.
Drag goes up proportional to the density of the fluid. Having more oxygen to run your engine will give you more energy, but I suspect that it won't keep up with increases in drag.
Yeah I suspect this is it. The density is inversely proportional to temperature and drag is proportional to to density. Even if the engine is more efficient (in a steady state) with denser air, the relationship is probably sub-linear.
My car is markedly less efficient in winter on short trips, even though England doesn't moves vertically with the seasons. Over longer journeys this phenomenon is much less of a problem.
The engine's preferred operating temperature is much higher than any reasonable air temperature, and until that point is reached the engine oil will be less lubricative and the fuel (particularly in the case of diesel) less inclined to combust. It will naturally take longer to reach that preferred temperature when it is cold outside, because not only is the air cold but the engine is also this big lump of cold metal, absorbing the heat of combustion and pulling it away from the cylinder where it is needed.
The sparse atmosphere robs the engine of power, but that doesn't mean that it is less efficient, I think that matters on the car/driver.
Personally, high altitude driving helps my fuel economy -- I would speculate that it's due to decreased air resistance and the lack of power forcing me to drive a little more conservatively.
Colder weather reduces fuel efficiency because during warmup, extra fuel is injected into the cylinders to maintain performance, since it's harder to get ignition when the air is colder. In other words, better to waste some fuel than to hit the gas and have a lot less acceleration than usual.
1) The nominal amount of electricity used by a heater blower motor is not going to measurably affect the range of your trip (this is most likely the same for the Tesla)
2) The heat from the engine block is waste heat from the relatively inefficient combustion process. This heat has to be actively dissipated in most driving conditions (typically even in winter). It is essentially free to pipe this heat into the cabin. Now contrast this with the Tesla's 400 electrical resistance heater, which has to directly compromise range to generate cabin heat.
I'm mildly curious why they use direct electrical resistance.
It's not like you can't make heat pumps that operate down past 0F.
My mitsubishi mini-split:
1. Can produce it's full BTU load all the way down to 5F, and 75% BTU load down to -13F.
2. Doesn't bother to blow air until it's warm
:)
They aren't even that much larger than a resistance based coil system (though I could imagine the model S may not be able to fit them)
The electricity to power the fan comes from the engine. I'm not sure how much of an impact this actually is
The fan practically never runs in cold weather. The only time it's needed is in hot weather, when you're stopped or at low speed and there's not enough airflow over the radiator and/or condenser. In cold weather the thermostat controls engine temperature, not the radiator, so the fan never gets told to turn on.
Ah, ok. That actually does draw a significant fraction of the available power on the 12V electrical system (in my car the interior lights dim perceptibly when the climate control blower is on high), but by the standards of the engine it's still not much.
No. The greater the electrical load placed on the alternator, the greater the parasitic load on the accessory belt.
That being said the amount of electricity, and thus the load on the belt, to run the fan is very very tiny compared to the energy required to heat the air. In an ICE, the heat energy is literally free. You were going to dump it anyway, might as well be into the cabin.
I agree with siblings that we're not talking about a significant effect on mileage, but technically there is still an effect. When the ventilation fan kicks on, this will be an additional current draw. Since the voltage regulator is an analog device, it will respond to the resulting slight dip in system voltage by increasing the alternator field strength slightly. The engine will then have to apply slightly more torque to the alternator, which will burn slightly more fuel.
Since engine speeds vary greatly, having a dumb alternator that provided power scaled in proportion to RPM would be a disaster.
That's not how a generator works. Take a DC motor and spin it with your hand and it'll generate a bit of a voltage potential across the terminals on the motor. If you short those together and then try to turn the motor you'll notice that it's significantly harder to turn.
Not exactly... the alternator provides "up to" a certain amount of electricity, but as more of that electricity is actually used for things it gets harder for the engine to spin the alternator and so you end up using (slightly) more gas.
The alternator (or really any electric generator) has a magnetic field, and a lot of coiled up wire. Moving the wire thru the field generates electricity, the faster the wire moves the higher the voltage is. But the more current is moving thru the wire (more load, more things using the electricity), the more it pushes back against the magnetic field (because that current in the wire generates its own field) and so the harder it is to make it move.
As I mentioned, this was added in an edit - but even the A/C doesn't affect range as much as you might think. It is roughly ~8% in your typical ICE, which is less than rolling your windows down at highway speeds. No idea what the effect of running AC on a Tesla's range is though.
When I first heard the A/C vs. windows-down comparison it struck me as non-intuitive. I eventually reasoned that having windows down at speed results in moving much more air through the cabin than the A/C does. It takes work to move air, but it also takes work to run the compressor. There would have to be a break-even point at which having e.g. the driver's window and the rear passenger's window down a couple of inches each is cheaper than the A/C.
Interestingly, the graphs on pages 14 and 15 of the linked report don't appear to support your point. That is, the green curve is strictly less than the blue curve at all investigated speeds.
On several occasions I've had to judiciously use A/C in hot weather in my petrol powered car, so that sort of power/thermal management seems to be a "real negative" of cars in general.
"Plus the real negative part of the article that Musk is glossing over is, having to turn off heat in a vehicle just to get somewhere, got to be loads of fun in the summer too."
If that is the negative part then write an article about that and see how many views it gets. Fabricating a bunch of stuff will get more hits.
According to that chart, reviewer stalled out after traveling 51 miles (point 7) after seeing an estimated range of 32 miles (point 6). Except for the cold overnight loss-of-estimated-range, the car's reported range estimates all seem accurate and conservative.
So, was the 'detour' Musk refers to mixed in with the overnight drop? Or perhaps there was another unreported drain on the battery, overnight?
Looking back at the original article - www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/automobiles/stalled-on-the-ev-highway.html?pagewanted=all - it seems that at low-power-charge point 6, "after an hour [Tesla] cleared me to resume the trip to Milford". Presumably, that's why the reporter set out on a 118-mile journey (6-7, 7-8) with a car whose self-reported estimated range was only 32 miles.
So some things to look for in Musk's reply: (1) Why the severe overnight range drop? (2) Why the mixed-signals about whether it was OK to depart Norwich (point 6)?
The NYT does not seemingly have the incentive to fabricate this much data. Musk on the other hand is defending his company.
I look forward to their being more information released, but given the above chart, I do not immediately believe that the NYT reporter lied just because the company that was being reviewed says so.
I don't claim to know what's going on, but the NYT most certainly does have an incentive, and so does the reporter: it's a controversial, interesting story. Tesla has been firing on all cylinders, the Model S has won many accolades, and this reporter's experience is the first major black mark on the company's reputation. A positive review would just be another on the pile and would hardly be noticed, but something like this is guaranteed to get attention.
Also most papers these days have had bouts of blatantly paid pieces (either fluff or hit pieces). The data stands to be investigated, as Musk has effectively demanded.
The other way to look at is intimidation by Musk. If you are going to get called a liar if you print a negative story about Tesla, because the product is so great it can't possibly have flaws, maybe you just spike a story that has a negative slant. Are we really well served by that?
If logs in the car indisputably show that the journalist's article did not match the experience, then he should be called a liar and we would be well served by it.
I doubt Musk can instantly tweet the logs to prove his point... they're probably full of irrelevant data and have to be processed a bit before publishing in defense against this. Musk is just jumping on this so the article doesn't sit there for too long giving people what he believes is the wrong impression about his product.
Top Gear already had this exact interaction with Tesla. Either the Times didn't do their homework, or there is a high return on negative Tesla reviews.
There is a high return on anything news breaking or extreme. Bloggers make up things constantly, report unsupported anonymous tips, etc.. Many of them or paid and fired based on the number of page views they get. Not really surprising this behavior is creeping into traditional media.
I'm all for Tesla defending itself, but is a barrage of tweets really the best way for Musk to address reviewers (and competitors)? Maybe it's the nature of the medium, but it just seems a little silly to defend your business in fractured, abbreviated little snippets.
Actually, I think it is quite appropriate for the situation. It's a tool for immediate, tactical damage control. Long, arduous responses to accusations take just a long as the, in this case, article that made the accusation. For argument's sake, if the NTY journalist is a tool, Musk, Tesla, and, really, all of us have a lot riding on lies and manipulation be squashed as soon as they happen. On the other hand, if it's true, which would come out one way or another anyways, then maybe electric vehicles aren't really mature enough.
I really hope that this guy gets canned if he wove a narrative that is deceptive and false. Too much is riding on the public impressions. That being said, there are, at least, two Tesla roadsters in my area and they don't seem to have a problem driving around.
Am I the only that likes a good ol' throw-down! Put up or shut up, suckers.
It might not be the best way, but it does seem plenty trendy.
Also, assuming a more 'official' response is in the works, a tweet is still faster so both are probably a decent idea during a time-sensitive event like bad publicity.
Maybe it's just because I don't use Twitter frequently, but an instance like this seems to highlight how ridiculous restricting yourself to 140 characters can be.
You have something important to say, and you're forced to drop pronouns and abbreviate words and break your message into several pieces. Your response to the world reads like a rushed text I'd get from my little sister.
To me, it just makes the whole thing feel somewhat petty.
Musk can control who sees his tweets, he can't control who prints his press release.
Putting the tweets out there ahead of time also changes the conversation's point-of-view. Now the public will demand answers from the NYT along with Musk while everyone waits for the data. Hell, he doesn't even need to publish the data for a while. Everyone can sit back and watch what the NYT does next.
Not true. Tesla sued BBC's Top Gear for libel after a review [1]. That didn't stop Tesla from getting this NY Times piece [2] and other award-winning press, such as Motor Trend Car of the Year 2013.
I dunno - do you really think auto reviewers are all a same-think cabal who hold grudges on each other's behalf? I've met a bunch, and I don't think that's correct. Most are out to ... drumroll ... write reviews. If Tesla puts out a good product, they'll get good reviews.
Not to mention that most writers have a pretty good idea who else on their beat is writing tripe. And if someone has a habit of doing this sort of thing, they're not going to care one whit when that person is exposed.
I thought many auto reviewers were like entertainment reporters (my perception could be out of date)-- they usually go on review junkets paid for by the auto makers and often don't post reviews that are too negative for fear of not being invited again.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Consumer Reports bought a Tesla for review, and when they announced it, they mentioned all the hoops they jumped through to prevent Tesla from knowing that they bought one.
>they mentioned all the hoops they jumped through to prevent Tesla from knowing that they bought one.
Given Musk's tweet about how they always enable data logging for journalists, i'm wondering why it was so important for CR not to let tesla know they bought one.
Yes, this is more about Consumer Reports than about Tesla. CR cares a lot that they aren't getting any kind of special car. They want the exact same car their customers would get.
Honestly, I'm surprised anyone is even willing to do a review, when they have shown a willingness to sue the press for libel. Why bother taking the risk? Just let them have no press.
Any company or individual should be willing to sue the press for libel. It should also not be of any concern to a media outlet because by rule you should not be committing libel.
It would be an awesomely poor publication that is only willing to report on people and organizations that won't sue the publication when it intentionally misrepresents the facts.
In a perfect world. But in the real world, your concern has little to do with whether or not you actually committed libel. Just because you didn't, doesn't mean the company that you just trashed won't lawyer up and claim otherwise. If US courts were "loser pays", this would be somewhat less of a concern.
Which makes the fact that Tesla lost the lawsuit in the UK even more remarkable. The burden of proof rests on the defense in the UK, not the plaintiffs.
And if Elon fails to actually prove this reporter lied/fabricated the review and just waffles, the NYT is going to skewer Tesla in their response and this story will get much more legs than if they had just ignored the review.
Your hypothesis is playing out already. I just saw a piece on CNBC a few minutes ago talking about the negative NYT Tesla review where they mostly talked about how glowing the reviews have been for the Tesla S and how as a company they are really doing well. My overall impression is that people were taking the NYT review with a grain of salt even before Musk called BS. But NYT also called BS on him, so let's see whose numbers add up.
Machines lie constantly. Get some filter oil on your mass airflow sensor, and watch your ECUs nose grow. Hell, we almost nuked the russians, and them us, due to a lying machine :)
True that. However, that would be a bit of a stretch. A more likely outcome is great coverage in short course for Tesla and another short tone-it a-couple-of-notches-down by NYTimes on the third page.
isn't the temperature variability of li-ion a rookie mistake? have you ever taken a camera skiing? I did last week and it froze in 15-20 minutes, due to neg 15 wind chill and and exterior placement. Warmed it up, it worked fine.
If tesla is selling the car on the east coast, this is not a "fake" scenario. From a PR perspective, the damage is done. Gotcha;s aside by either NYT or Tesla (whoever is right) it sorta doesn;t matter...
Tesla S has a battery heating system, although that's why you are supposed to plug it in overnight, which didn't happen in this case, apparently. So "not working in the cold" becomes "uses extra power to keep itself warm in the cold".
Everybody else for that matter, this seems to be a very cavalier use of what should be private data. Not at all what I would like to see as somebody who cares about privacy. Is it possible to turn off the logging?
Near the top of the article: Tesla data logging is only turned on with explicit written permission from customers, but after Top Gear BS, we always keep it on for media.
I would guess that when Tesla allow you to borrow one of their cars for the purpose of writing a review one of the lines on the contract says they are allowed to record your journey. The original article mentions it is normally turned off for customers.
Journalists are not the owners. They do not have an expectation of privacy when reviewing a car. They can use their own cars when cheating on their spouses.
It was a bizarre piece, especially for the NY Times. It read like someone who got a car that had a 30MPG sticker on the window, put in exactly 10 gallons of gas and planned a trip of exactly 300 miles. In the snow. Any normal person wouldn't have even been in that situation, but the reporter then proceeded to use every opportunity to double down on his bad choices.
Tucked towards the end was a note about how the mileage estimate is indeed an estimate and that cold weather (or hot!) among other things can affect milage. Shocker.
Now finding out that the facts may not have been represented is even more curious.
To be fair, the reporter did leave a margin of error. He may not have understood the uncertainty in the mileage estimates, but he wasn't planning things to the mile. It doesn't seem unreasonable for him to have believed that a range greater than the distance planned by a factor of 2 was safe before parking the car overnight.
He neglected to fully charge when he had the chance (chances actually) or to plug it in overnight. He had a story to write and made sure it ended up like he wanted.
It's also not interesting to publish an uneventful review consisting of a week of mid-range commuting and running errands. This is the exact use Tesla is selling the car for, but big name reviewers (Top Gear, NYT) insist on putting it into unrealistic situations until it 'fails.'
From actual Tesla owners, the performance seen by the NYT reporter appears to be par for the course. To date most all-electric vehicles have struggled in the cold. The Nissan Leaf has a terrible time of it, with the range decreased significantly. I was honestly excited to see how Tesla S card would fare in cold weather, and how the Tesla engineers got around this problem. Disappointingly it looks like they didn't, and (anecdotally) the problem may be even worse on the Tesla S than on the roadster or even the Leaf. Bummer.
To everyone comparing the cold weather performance of the Tesla to an ICE: yes, ICEs do get harder to start and less efficient in the cold. But for an ICE, that kind of cold is significantly under 0 farenheit - most of the U.S. is at a low enough latitude that temperatures like this are rarely seen and modern ICE cars will start happily without the need for block heaters and other measures. The reporter had significant trouble at temperatures around 30F which even an air-cooled car from decades ago will shrug off. We're talking about maybe 10% of the population having to take special measures during especially cold times of the year (block heaters for temps < 0F) vs >50% of the population (plugging in overnight, every day, for temperatures <= 30F). HUGE difference
Another blog post which sounds a bit more horrific than the NYT experience, although the Tesla owner really takes it with a good attitude:
Other interesting information gleaned from the thread - 120V is useless for electric cars, you really have to have a dedicated circuit for them. And did I mention they hate the cold?
I'm rooting for Tesla and for electric cars. But I do wish they were rated to perform at lower temperatures, and that everyone (Tesla and reporters alike) was more transparent about this. I'd rather see a few people turned off on electric cars and the rest informed and trained with the care and feeding of the cars during winter, than to see people stranded out in the cold because they weren't aware of their cars' performance envelopes.
ICEs are significantly less efficient at startup and until they get up to their normal operating temperatures. That's not so much a problem for long range trips, but taking multiple single-digit mile trips spaced apart in the time dimension.
EVs have no problem "starting" in low temperatures. You might not be able to draw as much power for the drive train as the pack is heating up, but it's not a primordial "fuel-air-mix won't explode" problem.
There is no "problem" to get around; you either risk your battery pack getting damaged or you have an active battery management system that regulates the packs temperature. That will consume power, no way around it.
Now there are some conflating issues we have to consider. Tesla recently disabled in a patch the sleeping modes of some onboard components, and this vampire load might be contributing greatly to the large loss of energy reported overnight. The other is the drivers mentality; you don't drive it to the point of 5% remaining and then fuel up, thats how you do it with ICEs. Instead, you just simply plug it in whereever you can. And frankly, if you are going to keep it outside overnight at very very low temperatures (thereby forcing the battery management system to expend energy for heating), plug it into a 120V. They can (contra to your statement) get enough power from even from a 120V to keep the battery pack (and your range) at least at the same level, if not adding range.
---
A side remark: I very much think this is a complete non-issue. 90% of driving is commuting, it is decidedly not long-range trips. And then this is mostly an issue of infrastructure; if there were at least 120V plugs at every parking lot, you wouldn't ever have to worry about these vampire loads. Infrastructure, since we are at it, is of course a much much bigger problem for gasoline cars; think of all the steps necessary to refine oil into gasoline and make it available at gas stations. Driving an ICE across states at the time of their advent would not have been a particularly enjoyable experience due to the general unavailability of fuel.
It's blown out of proportion for the normal use case, but I still think it was a very interesting review. I didn't expect them to be great road-tripping vehicles at this point, but was a bit disappointed by how the weather affected things. Even Musk's comments so far don't change my impression of that: so it's fine for a road trip if you make sure you don't get stuck in traffic, and make sure you never ever miss a chance to get it fully charged up, especially if the weather is cold? That's just not going to be competitive convenience-wise for long trips right now, no matter how much spin you want to put on it. The open question to me is just how fast the driver was going on the highway (90+ would make me raise an eyebrow or too), I'm not really sympathetic to the rest of Musk's claims at all. And unless he can provide some conclusive log evidence, collaborated by outside evidence, that's far more damning than what his comments so far describe, it reflects pretty poorly on the company to me. Much more poorly than the original review, since I expected that to be pretty much a worst-case scenario—and was very interested in just how well it would handle that kind of stress test.
Edit: the thing that really bugs me about the response is that it's empty so far. If you've got conclusive evidence, show the evidence. Don't go all he-said-she-said in the meantime.
I didn't buy his explanations when I saw him on CNBC and Bloomberg. The impression I got is that he's whitewashing the review, focusing on how fast he was driving and pointing to another NYT reporter who got 300 miles (and when the anchor pointed out that it was in different driving conditions, he sort of glossed over it).
Speaking of inconveniences, how can someone who lives in an apartment own a Tesla vehicle? Most parking garages I've come across don't even have a standard 110v outlet, let alone the 240v outlets needed for faster charging. Is the solution for them to hope that there's a supercharger near by? It seems like Tesla is only viable if you live in a house.
Increasingly seeing charging stations in multilevel carparks both in large apartment complexes and offices. I could charge a Tesla or shatever at work every day if i had to. Heck even The University of Alabama had EV charging stations.
ICEs are significantly less efficient at startup and until they get up to their normal operating temperatures. That's not so much a problem for long range trips, but taking multiple single-digit mile trips spaced apart in the time dimension.
Overblown, at least for modern cars. Girlfriend sometimes drives an ICE 1.5 miles to work, Gas mileage suffers ~30% versus freeway driving. When I did ~7 mile trips to work and back efficiency was <20% worse than freeway driving. Combustion chamber temps warm relatively quickly.
EVs have no problem "starting" in low temperatures. You might not be able to draw as much power for the drive train as the pack is heating up, but it's not a primordial "fuel-air-mix won't explode" problem.
In theory you're correct. In practice, ICEs will start and operate at temperature of -40F (perhaps with a bit of help heating the oil). The Tesla in the article was brought to its knees in temperatures within the positive teens.
And then this is mostly an issue of infrastructure; if there were at least 120V plugs at every parking lot, you wouldn't ever have to worry about these vampire loads.
Except now you have to convince everyone to install 120V plugs in parking lots, wire them up, figure out a way to bill for this or provided it for free, AND you have to remind the consumer to plug in every time they park their car.
You could always rent a vehicle for your remaining driving needs. For 10% of total driving that might be somewhat impractical, but 10% sounds like a pretty high estimate for trips that would challenge the Model S's range. That's one long-range trip every week and a half. Yes, there are people who drive like that, but they are very much in the minority.
If you drive to grandma's/the in-laws/"up to the cabin" three or four times a year, that's only 1% of trips (assuming you commute every day and run local errands on the weekends). Most families in the US already have multiple vehicles. Why can't one be an electric?
The reviews from Tesla owners who have their own experience with the car in cold weather is interesting.
Can anyone tell me why the car discharges when plugged into a 120V supply? It's mentioned in one of the links above and in the NYT article.
I'm aware that you can't supply much current with a standard 120V supply, but why would it discharge? I would imagine at a minimum you'd have a very slow charge rate, but from these two anecdotes, it appears in cold weather it still slowly loses charge when plugged into 120V.
Is the car constantly heating the battery? I could see that being the issue as engine block heaters draw a ton of current and they take a long time to heat up an engine block. I'm assuming the battery has a lot more thermal mass than a 300 lb engine block.
I thought the cold caused batteries to slow down on discharge rate. The LiPo batteries I use for RC planes keep a charge much longer if they are refrigerated. They have a horrible discharge rate when cold though.
I speculate that it is a interaction of several things:
1) The current firmware assumes there is "unlimited" energy available when charging, so it can keep the battery warm with little impact on charging rate (this is not a bad assumption for everything other than 120V/15A charging).
2) The current firmware assumes that the battery needs to be kept warm when charging (this is not a bad assumption for everything other than 120V/15A charging, but may not be correct for low-power charging).
3) The power required to keep the battery warm in near-zero (Fahrenheit) temperatures is nearly the same as the maximum continuous power available from a 120V/15A outlet (1.44kW, because the maximum continuous load is only 80% of the maximum load), at least initially.
The firmware probably needs to be tweaked for cold-weather, low-power charging. The firmware needs to know how to estimate state of charge when the battery is colder than normal. It could probably prioritize charging ahead of heating until the battery reaches a higher state of charge.
Great thread. Thank you for linking it. My recurring thought as i read through it was of the iPhone first and second generation when battery life was pretty awful and you tended to carry a charger and nurse your phone through the day (much as with my first GSM cellphone). The iphone 4 had battery life to the point where you just didnt need to care any more (like my motorola razr).
Problem is, Tesla doesn't have moore's law to make the car run faster on the same charge or allow more empty space for bigger batteries, so the only real solution is more charging stations and faster charging.
To be pedantic, it is not that 120 V is not enough. It's that the amount of current you need at that voltage is prohibitive because of wire sizing, which is needed to minimize resistive voltage loss and dangerous wire overheating.
It's fine for a moderate commute where you're driving less than 60 miles or so (assuming a 12 hour overnight charge). More so if you've got access to higher-output charging at another location. The case in the NY Times Tesla review is specifically for a long-range winter road trip, for which Superchargers are pretty much essential.
I don't think saying "120v isn't enough, you need to rewire your entire house" is really accurate either. Most water heaters, stoves, and some central heaters run off a merged breaker for 240v. You can easily use one of those lines for the car if you don't plan on taxing the thing the entire time (though I figure if you have 50k for a car you have 1k to add an extra circuit and wire your garage up for it).
Yes, although at least in my view part of the selling point is that we have plugs everywhere, so you have electricity anywhere right? Well, hunting around for a 240V plug is a big harder than 120V.
Also, even though 99% (???) of the world is on 240V, I think the current rating on those circuits still limits power to around 2kW sustained.
This kind of circuit isn't very common in households, but it's fairly simple to get one if you need it - most houses have three-phase power right up to the door, so an electrician can install it in a few hours. My grandfather had one for his circular saw.
But yes, hunting for these circuits on a road trip will be harder than finding a household circuit. Although that could change rather quickly if electric cars prove popular.
> I'm in Scandinavia, and our standard household circuit is 10A@230V for 2.3kW.
Only 10A? That seems very low, the common "mainland" circuits seem pretty much all rated 16A (@230V). So you can't even run some electric kettles at your place?
(but I confirm you can get 3-phase for very high loads, you'll usually pay the electricity company through the nose for running it though)
I think the older standard was 10A circuits for most of the house, 16A for kitchen and washing room and a dedicated 20A for the electric stove. I thought 10A was the most common still, but I may be wrong there.
The standard for newer houses, the past 10-15 years or so, is indeed 16A. I have 5x16A + 1x20A and a 35A main circuit breaker, so I can pull about 8kW all together. Enough for a few kettles :)
(This is for a a 40m^2/400 sq.ft. condo. A house would have more circuits and a larger main circuit breaker. And this is for Norway - we tend to follow similar standards as Denmark and Sweden, but there may be differences I'm not aware of.)
In Australia 240v @10A is a atandard household circuit, and dryers etc. run on 240V 15A circuits. (I believe 400V is obtainable as per the GP but I haven't lived i Australia for a while.)
I'm in Australia, and our power supply is 230V AC (+/- 6%) (240V was the standard before 2000, but is still within the acceptable limits). Most power outlets are 10A (max ~2300W) but I also have two 15A sockets in my house for the air conditioners (3450W - I also use one to power my coffee machine, which pulls 3200W when warming up!), and could theoretically get a 20A socket (4600W) installed. With an industrial outlet, you can get single phase power of up to 32A (7360W), but I doubt most electricians would install that for you at a house.
Oddly enough, I've got a 32A socket hooked up to a water pump. I'm not entirely sure why the electrician installed in, there's no way the pump draws more than an ampere or two.
Thanks for explaining the 240/230v difference, I'd always wondered why it existed.
And some parts of EU still actually have 220V. There's no major practical difference between 220V/230V/240V, it's just that different parts of the world came up with slightly different standards. As standardization has progressed, now all of EU is on a nominal 230V ± 6% 50Hz -- in practice the countries are still supplying their old voltages. 230 is presently 220 in Hungary and 240 in UK. Since both are within the mandated 6%, this doesn't cause problems. Eventually, as parts of the grid are serviced and replaced, it will be transformed into unified 230V.
It's a used commercial 2 group machine. I got it for less than $1000 and it makes better coffee than the $2000-$3000 automatic domestic machines in the shops.
It is a little cumbersome though (had to plumb it to a tank, etc)
I don't think saying "120v isn't enough, you need to rewire your entire house" is really accurate either. Most water heaters, stoves, and some central heaters run off a merged breaker for 240v. You can easily use one of those lines for the car if you don't plan on taxing the thing the entire time (though I figure if you have 50k for a car you have 1k to add an extra circuit and wire your garage up for it).
Also, 240v cars makes so much more sense in a world where 99% of people use 240v outlets, and in the US you can just oscillate two 120v's and get a usually-good-enough 240v signal.
Naturally, on any occasion when it is actually possible to check a journalistic report against reality, the journalist will turn out to be lying. This is not absolutely universally true, but it is impossible to appreciate just how often it is true until you have been reported-on in a case where you know the facts yourself.
tl;dr of course they're lying, it's easier to make stuff up then investigate so why wouldn't a reporter always just lie?
There really needs to be a phrase for this. I've noticed it myself. Whenever the news reports on something I happen to know a little bit more than average about, they almost universally get material facts (not just nitty gritty details) completely wrong. Taken inductively this is pretty damn scary.
It's called the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I don't necessarily endorse it, but here you go:
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.” — Michael Crichton
Ironically, Crichton was himself known to play fast and loose with facts. Mathematicians laughed at his portrayal of chaos theory and its implications in Jurassic Park, and the scientific community cried foul over his portrayal of climate science in State of Fear.
It's of course ok to bend facts when it's in the service of a fictional story, but Crichton too frequently was portrayed (often by himself) as a true subject matter expert.
Crichton's Travels is a fascinating and infuriating book. You know he's a human being just like yourself, but yet his thought processes are as alien as anything you'd expect to find in a Star Trek script.
The idea that the author of The Andromeda Strain could be taken in by spoon-bending was also more than a bit frightening.
A novelist is allowed (and encouraged!) to bend facts to make their books more exciting to the reader. Crichton may or may not have been an expert on certain subjects, but the contents of his fictional novels are not relevant to that discussion.
Sure, except that Crichton was extremely outspoken regarding "climate change as a lie"[1] where he used his book, State of Fear, to present his views as facts[2]:
I have had over a dozen positive articles about me written in newspapers, blogs, and TV segments over the years. Every single one of them misrepresented key facts, exaggerated my accomplishments, and oversimplified the invention/process. Initially I was shocked at the inaccuracies but over time I realized that despite the journalists' best intentions, they have to look at my story from different points of views and pick the angle that best fits the column's theme/focus - prodigious kid invents technology even Microsoft can't (David vs. Goliath), smart techies whip up app on weekend (HP/Apple garage-style startup), friendly-neighborhood IT guy takes a stab at unrelated field (everyone's a hidden genius).
One could argue that news must be devoid of any such slants, angles, or specific POVs but then we get caught in a debate about boring news that won't sell vs. sensationalized news that is meant solely to increase sales. Just like for programmers it is a constant balance between quality, deadlines, and cost, for journalists it is between truth, importance, and sales. '12 more people dead in blast in Tel Aviv' is truth and important but not sensational enough to sell. 'No-name D-list celeb gets caught speeding' is truth and sensational but not important.
In articles like this, they're trying to make it sound important and sensational while skirting around the limits of truth. In personal articles we've been involved in, they play the angles to show importance and make it sensational while not caring much about the factual accuracies.
But I like boring news that get straight to the point. Often the "getting an angle" style just makes the story longer, incoherent and boring.
I don't really like to write. I am only doing it because of a desire to express an idea or concept. Maybe journalism could improve with that spearhead.
I think "perverse incentives" covers it pretty well. Reporters who care more about truth than narrative are filtered out of most media outlets due to the basic economic forces involved. Season 5 of The Wire elucidates it better than I ever could (and of course, the series was crafted by a former journalist).
This needs to be the top comment. In a former life I was a local politician and currently I do some public policy work. I can say without a doubt that journalists do not print the truth. They print the story they want to convey. I've been quoted and misquoted so many times that I realized that the media just can't be believed. Now I do work on some government financial issues and media always gets it wrong, even when I show them government documents obtained by FOIA to show them they are wrong. The real kicker is that there's essentially no effective way to call media out on false reporting.
This is not absolutely universally true, but it is impossible to appreciate just how often it is true until you have been reported-on in a case where you know the facts yourself.
No, in that case you have a single data point that doesn't prove a larger point.
Don't get me wrong, I have no data to prove either side's argument, but suggesting that almost every single article written is a lie seems like a high level of paranoia.
I've had and heard about about enough encounters with journalists to say that while they may not outright lie, they will twist or omit facts to fit whatever angle they have in mind for the story. Often it's just somewhat annoying to those who know the whole story, other times it paints a completely wrong picture. But as a reader it's difficult to spot this because you usually don't have the entire background story.
I don't think it's paranoid to think that almost every article about a non-trivial subject contains over-generalizations, misquotes, or outright falsehoods. It's been startlingly consistent in the cases where I had a thorough understanding of the subject.
>Naturally, on any occasion when it is actually possible to check a journalistic report against reality, the journalist will turn out to be lying
I don't think this is true "on any occasion"; that journalistic lying is news indicates that it rarely happens or rarely is caught.
I think it's possible to see this as an example of a problem with this individual journalist, or with the culture of journalism, without assuming "the journalist will turn out to be lying" in all circumstances.
"that journalistic lying is news indicates that it rarely happens or rarely is caught."
Of all the times that I've been interviewed, I've been misquoted more often than not. Many others have noticed the same thing.
Scott Adams: "I've been interviewed several hundred times in my career. When I see my quotes taken out of context it is often horrifying. Your jaw would drop if you saw how often quotes are literally manufactured by writers to make a point. "http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/quote_approval/
Marco Arment: "I’ve learned the hard way, over and over again, that it’s most wise to talk to journalists the way you’d talk to the police: ideally, don’t. You have everything to lose and almost nothing to gain."http://www.marco.org/2012/09/19/quote-approval
I wonder why tech savvy people don't make use of the perfectly good recording device they carry with them at all times (their smartphones) to avoid being "misquoted".
Let the reporter do as he pleases, but inform him that you have a record of the interview too. That would keep them honest.
It doesn't help one bit. Journalists don't usually let you verify quotes, and once the newspaper is printed, there's little you can do. Even if you manage to get a rectification, no one reads it.
The first is that few are in a position to prove journalistic lies.
The second is that journalists do not like pushing reporting on other journalists lying because they are outing people they know, and they may get the same treatment some day.
The third (and in some ways most important) is that since the rise of the "blogosphere" in recent years, facts have become much less important. (Why? Because if you report something wrong you get clicks, then you publish a retraction and get clicks, then you can do a puff piece about "how could this happen" and get more clicks. Bingo, you earned ad dollars 3x when fact checking would have earned you nothing. What incentive, then, is there to fact check?) Therefore there is an erosion of standards which means that we should expect lying to go up over time.
My sister was famous back in "the good old days" of the 80s, back when media actually cared about its reputation. Even then it was a good idea to assume journalists were lying slime. Today I firmly believe that it is much worse.
If you are a blogger and disagree, then tell me this. How much of a fact check did your last 5 stories get beyond, "Can I find someone else saying this?"
Amateur-run blogs are far more honest than reporting, in my experience. The sympathetic phrasing would be that bloggers haven't had all but the last shreds of their integrity worn away by an editor demanding 6 column inches by deadline, over and over again. The unsympathetic phrasing would be that bloggers are not professional liars and might naively fear getting caught. Either way, I trust non-professional blogs over Wired News any day. Blog coverage is often honest and accurate. Reporting, when I or anyone I know or any subject I know about in detail is being reported on, almost never is.
Depends on the blogger. There are plenty of amateur hacks, particularly when you get into an echo chamber based on politics, conspiracy theories, religion, etc.
But there are a ton of subject matter experts (like John Baez) out there blogging on objective stuff, and their average quality is often amazing.
We're not even talking about John Baez here, just blogs randomly selected from the set of blogs on the Internet that I actually run across, which is admittedly a biased sample. The thought that any mainstream media could possibly, possibly be as trustworthy as a John Baez blog post is a thought worthy only of derisive laughter.
My last 5 blog posts (robotics on Hizook.com) were exceedingly fact checked. But then again, I'm a subject matter expert: I have a PhD in robotics. Terrance Tao... also exceedingly fact checked (Fields medal winner blogging about math). Richard Lipton... same (famous computer researcher blogs about P vs. NP).
I know that's not your point... but not all bloggers are equally sketch. Some of us know what we're talking about.
I also blog occasionally, and fact check my stuff. But if you're going to make money by the ad impression, you have a very specific set of incentives. Care and integrity are not high on the list.
Woah woah here... I wasn't about to fully support the grandparent here, but I would hazzard a guess that more often than not, persons end up misquoted, out of context, or sentences are strung together "just so" to make you "think" in a certain manner, that may not be factual. It happens everywhere. My own anecdotal evidence: I was in boy scouts, we camped near a farm field, trampled rows of corn to make a boundary for a capture the flag game, got busted, and had to go back and pick up all the corn by hand and make amends with farmer. The newspaper wrote up a fantastic article about how local boy scouts helped the community by helping a farmer reap damaged crops. there were no lies or factual inaccuracies in the article, sans lies of omission. From this, and what others respond to you, I'd believe this happens more often that not. But certainly not at 100% either.
It sounds like you are basing a sweeping assertion on your personal experience. I certainly empathize, but you simply can't paint the entire profession with that brush Even with the "not universally" half-caveat, you are still implying journalists lie and fabricate more often than not.
Even with the "not universally" half-caveat, you are still implying journalists lie and fabricate more often than not.
It would be an extraordinary claim to suggest that's not the case. Journalists are basically people who would rather be writing fiction, but who haven't figured out a way to get paid for it.
It's a terrible-sounding generalization to make, but I will stand by it.
Where on earth do you get that generalization from? You think that the journalists following the 2012 election didn't care about the subject at hand at all, and were just looking for a new source of writing inspiration?
Where on earth do you get that generalization from?
See above.
Election reporting isn't comparable to the scenario in this story, because there are literally more reporters than there are subjects being reported upon. In my experience journalists play fast and loose with the facts when there is a low likelihood that someone will call them on it. That's why the previous NYT scandals have involved remote correspondents (Blair) and/or cases where the journalists are serving as lapdogs for powerful political interests (Miller).
If this NYT reporter indeed misrepresented the facts of his test drive, then he's just an idiot, plain and simple. He either knew or should have suspected that the car was logging his every move, and that an adverse review would be challenged strongly by the company.
You made a generalization about journalists, which I disputed. Your response has granted that your original generalization is not, in fact, generally applicable (with reasoning that ought to also exclude all political journalism, as well as the vast majority of other current affairs news and sports journalism amongst others) and then started talking about the NYT review.
So I'm not really sure how I'm supposed to respond. You can't make a broad statement like "Journalists are basically people who would rather be writing fiction" then immediately rebase to "the scenario in this story".
Tesla previously accused BBC's Top Gear of airing a "phony" review and sued them. The case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the review was essentially true and that no reasonable person would draw untrue conclusions from it. (my words)
I haven't read every last word on the case, but it seems to me that Top Gear gave Tesla a very harsh review... but that they didn't cheat or do anything really wrong.
IMHO, I would at least give the NYTimes a chance to respond before jumping to any conclusions.
Top Gear's review was mostly very positive. Tesla picking up on the "bad" only advertised the "bad" to any one who hadn't seen the Top Gear review. Now we might see the same thing again here with the NYT.
I'm all for electric cars, seems to me to be the future. But if Musk and Co will insist on reacting like a scolded car every time some reviewer says something negative, in a really over sensitive way, they aint never gonna look good.
On top of that, they are aggravating relationships that could be crucial in the future. Dunno about the NYT, but I can see Top Gear just ignoring them, even when the car does improve. And there would come a time when TG does say, "yes this car is now practical". Well, there might have been. Who knows now.
Sad that Musk is still crying over the TG "BS" too. Seems a bit of a grudge holder, even when proved wrong in law.
I really like Musk's usual style and what he stands for, I also think he is doing a great job developing these cars, and soon, he will get there, but all this is a real turn off to me. And I can't help thinking he is making his own life worse with these reactions.
> Sad that Musk is still crying over the TG "BS" too. Seems a bit of a grudge holder, even when proved wrong in law.
Ronald Reagan's publicists used to love it when Frontline would have some scathing exposé of the administration, so long as they accompanied it with stock video of Ronald Reagan going around looking presidential, cutting ribbons at new senior care centers and such. It didn't matter if the announcer was discussing his cutting funds for such places. The text of the message didn't matter to them at all, only the images.
We think of ourselves as lofty, intelligent Homo sapiens, but we really mostly operate on an ape-like, "monkey-see, monkey do," level.
If you put yourself in shoes where such effects are really significant and cost you money or valuable publicity, I think you'd start to understand a bit more. It's much the same with various forms of prejudice and "oversensitivity." It's difficult to really understand the costs to all parties involved, short of direct experience.
So in summary, while Top Gear was correct in saying it had a 55 mile range with the way they were driving it on their race track, they falsely claimed that the car ran out of charge and had to be pushed into a garage. Instead they just turned off the car and pushed it into a garage.
But the judge said that this is the kind of thing you expect from Top Gear as an entertainment show and it was ok to say it ran out of charge?
If I remember correctly, Top Gear did not say the roadster ran out of batteries and had to be pushed. Rather, they said if it ran out of batteries, you may have to push it, and demonstrated with the car turned off. This looks bad, but isn't technically libel.
> Except that, you know, gas is everywhere and a tank lasts more than a hundred miles.
Not accurate on both counts.
1. If I drive East West or North from my house right now on major national highways, I won't find a gas station for many hundreds of KMs in any direction.
Well, a claim can't be libelous if it's true, regardless of how entertainingly it is presented. I didn't mean to re-litigate the case. You can read what the judge actually wrote here: http://www.onebrickcourt.com/files/cases/tesla_73294.pdf The more interesting bits are towards the bottom.
And that's with the UK libel laws, which wikipedia describes as:
"English defamation law puts the burden of proof on the defendant, rather than the plaintiff, and is considered an impediment to free speech in much of the developed world. "
I like Tesla, and wish them really well, but it's TOP GEAR... I love Top Gear, but to expect any sort of honest, unbiased, and completely factual review from them is madness in the first place. That's really what makes the show so great is that it is nothing but jokes. The only thing in it though, is that there's a little bit of truth behind every funny joke...
I'm skeptical of Musk's claim that the review was fabricated. What motive would the author have to fake the review? He would lose all of his credibility as a reporter, essentially killing his carer if anyone found out. Seems like a really high price to pay.
That said, Musk also has a lot to lose by calling out a reporter for fabricating data. It's a pretty serious allegation, and he could get into hot water over it. Therefore, my intuition is that either: 1) Musk is not reading the data correctly, missing some important details, or 2) The data was recorded incorrectly by the car. My bets are on (2).
I have absolutely no idea what the facts of this case are - BUT - to your point, an author's motive to "enhance" his reporting a very simple: It makes for a more interesting story. A more interesting story gets more views, more people talk about it, and it enhances the (perceived) reputation of the reporter.
Also, as much as it pains me to say it, there's precedence for this sort of thing. Simply put: reporters make shit up from time to time.
Again, however, I have absolutely no idea who's right/wrong here and won't make a single assumption until the facts are out.
Writers are expected to deliver a "good read". Nothing beats a bit of tragedy!
Writing a review that stands out against lots of positive reviews can give you a reputation as someone who isn't scared of controversy. This could have been a career boosting "critical" review.
The industry at large is still pro-petroleum. Want a reputation as pro-electric? Annoy your mainstream motoring marketing departments - the ones that lend you a stream of high quality vehicles to try, take you to track days, invite you to nice launch events, if you're lucky, fly you to their German HQ for new launches...
Yes. It's not a direct comparison, but you don't see motoring journalists complaining about running out of petrol. "I only though I had to put $5 in... and it told me it was no longer empty... why did I run out 100miles down the road?"
Apparently lying or exaggerating is common in 'journalism.' Probably based on our desire to weave narratives. I don't disagree with you or know anything about this case, but let me provide an anecdote where (1) seems more likely despite the abundance of attention, reputation, and high stakes (I just read this on plane yesterday by coincidence):
"What motive would the author have to fake the review?"
No one is saying he faked the whole review just that he omitted a couple heavily mitigating details. Since there were multiple legs where the car was claimed to come up short it will be interesting to see if all of those are refuted by the data or not.
From another article the "long detour" appears to have been getting stuck in traffic in lower Manhattan. Now, I don't know if Elon does much NYC driving, but IMO it's not worth pinning your credibility on a quick trip back to the interstate from the city.
While not lying, it is common to exaggerate details as putting them in a more colorful light makes for more interesting articles that attract more readers. Pretty much all major media are doing that.
One of the motives I can think of is rather simple: oil in the USA is a BIG economy, one that the likes of Tesla Motors would more than likely disrupt. Maybe it is in the best interests for some people to keep at the status quo for a while longer.
"The Times's February 10 article recounting a reporter's test drive in a Tesla Model S was completely factual, describing the trip in detail exactly as it occurred. Any suggestion that the account was "fake" is, of course, flatly untrue. Our reporter followed the instructions he was given in multiple conversations with Tesla personnel. He described the entire drive in the story; there was no unreported detour. And he was never told to plug the car in overnight in cold weather, despite repeated contact with Tesla."
> Tesla recommends charging Model S each night or when convenient to maintain optimum driving range and battery health. If you go on vacation, plug in your Model S before you leave.
The reporter is either an idiot or he wanted to become stranded.
That doesn't make it seem like the charge should go down overnight, just that you should top it up whenever you can because the range is pretty limited.
But Tesla explicitly says that even while they recommend it, you don't have to plug in over night: "The Model S battery will not lose a significant amount of charge when parked for long periods of time. For example, Model S owners can park at the airport without plugging in." And that the temperature make no difference: "Model S is engineered to perform in both hot and cold climates." (http://www.teslamotors.com/models/facts)
I seriously doubt anyone is going to spend $60-100k on a car that's well known to be different than all other cars and take it out on a road trip without any planning. If the author had charged the car when he had several opportunities to do so he would not have had any trouble.
I got a new car recently (gas powered) and I have not tried to test its range indicator by planning a trip to its capacity. If I did I would not take a detour through the largest city in the country or test out the acceleration. I also wouldn't stop at multiple gas stations and decide to not fill the tank. But hey, my article about sensibly using a vehicle wouldn't have made it into the NYT so what do I know.
If your neophyte owner never owned an object with a battery before and no one told him/her that battery charge drops if it is cold ... I fear he/she is no part of the modern world.
If Tesla sold millions of these cars, lots of people would not read the web page or manual about special maintenance conditions. It makes perfect sense to write a review from the perspective of average or below intelligence.
I'm looking at this from a different angle. Based on what I read from this article [1], Tesla is able to send data from a car back to the factory and on at least one occasion has done so without the permission and knowledge of the owner.
"In at least one case, Tesla went even further. The Tesla service manager admitted that, unable to contact an owner by phone, Tesla remotely activated a dying vehicle’s GPS to determine its location and then dispatched Tesla staff to go there. It is not clear if Tesla had obtained this owner’s consent to allow this tracking5, or if the owner is even aware that his vehicle had been tracked. Further, the service manager acknowledged that this use of tracking was not something they generally tell customers about."
"There appears to be no reference to Tesla having the ability to track a vehicle’s location at its discretion in either the data recording section of the Roadster Owners Manual [Page 1-2, Column 2: PDF] or the addendum that covers the GSM connection [Page 9: PDF] "
I agree this is troubling, but sadly I don't think it will be much longer until most of us submit to this sort of monitoring by our insurance companies.
It's easy to write off Elon Musk's attacks on Top Gear and the NYT as an overzealous founder defending his company or as a savvy PR strategy against bad press, but you also have to keep in mind the number of parties that want to to see Tesla fail and the huge amount of influence they have, namely the oil and traditional auto industries. Most "revolutionary" companies come under similar resistance. I'm interested to see what facts Musk lays out.
Implying that the the oil and auto industries have gotten to the NYT is a serious accusation. Incidentally, the NYT is sticking by its story and has called Musk's accusations "flatly untrue".
In addition I couldn't find any articles in the first 3 pages that you could describe as having an anti-oil/pro-environment stance and certainly none that would raise the ire of big oil. Do you have examples?
My comment was only into relation to the influence the oil and gas industry has on media companies, not to this particular author or to this specific story.
I am not the OP and I didn't make the accusation. But if the accusation is "that the the oil and auto industries have gotten to the NYT" then yes that is both serious and obvious.
Tesla really does themselves no favours by their confrontational stance with the media. I hope - for their sakes - they are on stronger ground here than they were with their embarrassing lawsuit against the BBC.
Backstory: The BBC show Top Gear reviewed a Tesla, and gave it a glowing review, but noted that it was very expensive, that it would only last 55 miles if driven hard on a race track, that the brakes broke once during testing, that if you run out of charge you'd have to push it, and that at one point it overheated and suffered reduced performance. Tesla hit the ceiling and sued for libel over every negative comment in the review. But as even they eventually admitted, every single claim was absolutely true, and a judge threw the lawsuit out as completely groundless. Tesla's argument was that it may have been true, but it was misleading, but even in Britain the truth is an absolute defence for libel, as 30 seconds with Google would have told them.
Now they're going after another news organisation, again claiming that a review contained lies. If they can't substantiate this one either, they're going to look like idiots.
Top Gear did not use the truth as a defense. On the contrary the judge ruled that the truth did not matter. In other words the judge ruled that Tesla would not be entitled to win even if Top Gear had lied. The case never got to the fact finding stage.
Tesla did have evidence that Top Gear lied -- the car had never run out of charge, even though Top Gear said it did. But the case never got to the stage where Tesla would present this evidence.
Horrible reporting by TNW!
Musk claims, "NYTimes article about Tesla range in cold is fake. Vehicle logs tell true story that he didn't actually charge to max & took a long detour"
The reporter doesn't claim he had charged the battery fully in all occasions. He states how long he charged the car for and what the milage indicator provided.
I can argue Musk is trying to get ahead of the story and create doubt among potential buyers about the veracity of the story. That's all he needs to do.
Basically, Tesla will probably come out with data that shows the battery was not fully charged and hence why lower milage. However, the reporter says he only charged the car for the distance he thought he needed. Therefore, Tesla will be a head of the story and the headlines his PR will create is that the car was not fully charged. And most people, including readers of this site, will not do further investigation. Rest assure those who are still considering buying a Tesla will buy it not knowing if the battery might have a temperature range issue.
The length of the detour really matters here. Even if Tesla's claims were true, unless there was truly malicious reporting going on, I think even this kind of basic negligence is still a valid point against the Model S. Consumers might forget to charge their car properly, or not take into account detours/pitstops when planning for the Model S's range.
Note -- I absolutely love Tesla and I can't wait for them to prove everyone wrong, but that still doesn't make the initial claim entirely invalid. I want to see the data before I make conclusions.
It is different, because range can change depending on external factors you have no control over. You can charge the car thinking you have 300 miles of range, and you do. Then you make the same trip again, but an overnight frost takes a huge chunk of that away from you, and now you can't make it back. That's the apparent situation, anyway. It won't happen often but can happen in special situations: ski trips, having to park your car outside due to lack of indoor spots, an extra day in the airport parking lot, etc.
It's different because when you realize your mistake with a gasoline engine, as long as you aren't driving in eastern Utah or some similar remote location, you can easily stop at any one of thousands of convenient gas stations to correct your error. Perhaps that will be true someday for Tesla, but it isn't today.
That combined with the charging time is the only difference.
I thought it strange in the Top Gear review of the Roadster that they even mentioned it only got 55 miles on a full charge on their track (and faked it running out of charge). Most gasoline cars won't do much better when driving so flat-out. That is nothing unique to electrics whatsoever.
Using that as a basis to say "It simply doesn't work" was why Musk (rightly) is trying to cover himself when the press reviews. They seem to have some motive to defame Tesla. Nobody could say for sure if oil is behind it but it certainly smells fishy.
"that they even mentioned it only got 55 miles on a full charge on their track (and faked it running out of charge). Most gasoline cars won't do much better when driving so flat-out."
Uhm, even NASCAR vehicles go farther than 55 miles flat out. Most sports cars do not degrade that far. Even dropping down to 8 mpg would still net almost all sports cars over 100 mile range flat out.
If finding an electrical outlet the owner of which is set up to charge you money for your electrical charge and then sitting there for several hours seems as convenient to you as stopping at a gas station for several minutes, you should buy a Tesla.
Nobody is claiming that it is as convenient as filling up a petrol tank.
This reviewer went out of their way to fabricate a sub-optimal experience in the vehicle. Tesla owners seem perfectly capable (or we'd surely hear about it) of avoiding these same mistakes.
This reviewer went out of their way to fabricate a sub-optimal experience in the vehicle
Can we stop this? Until Musk posts data saying otherwise, it looks like the 90-mile range dropped to a 25-mile range while the car was parked overnight. Parking a car is not something crazy.
I'm sure Elon Musk and Tesla are glad that they have the data logs for the trip. In my view, this is going to be key. All you need to do is compare the account by the journalist with the actual data and see where the discrepancies are.
It might be too earlier to tell w/o looking at the data ourselves, by if I had to bet I'd bet on Elon/Tesla for this one.
Well said: "if you had a gas vehicle, filled the tank halfway, meandered through downtown manhattan, and then expected to reach your previous destination people would just think you're a fool"
NYT takes facts seriously and they issue written corrections for even the most trivial inaccuracies. If the allegations by Musk are true, the article's author will be looking for a new job soon.
I had experience with journalist and they don't so much as lie as much as they "enhance the truth". Like your battery was lowish on cold weather but you still got there, but in your journal you write "Battery took cold badly and I was unsure if it would get there with the charge I had. By grace of gods and not Tesla I managed to get there". Compare that sentence to this "Battery worked below optimal when weather was below freezing, but I still got where I wanted." Which one sounds more appealing to general public? Which one is more sensational.
Experience shows that this is a myth. Judith Miller was peddling rubbish for months (years, according to Salon.com) before she was stopped. The NYT isn't special and belief that it is so is dangerous.
I used to take for granted that what I read in the NYT and learned from other highly regarded sources was factual and thoughtful. Then I read an articles about a subject I knew really, really well and the reporter got it completely wrong. Then it happened again and again. This made me worry about the quality of the information on subjects I don't know about.
I began to realize that journalists are not experts in all things or sometimes even one thing. Instead they are usually simply good writers operating under tight deadlines. And their goal is to write pieces that attract the attention of readers not simply provide accurate information. Lastly they are humans who make mistakes and have biases.
Take everything you read with a grain of salt. Think about how likely it is to be correct and not sensationalized or biased in some way. Check with others sources before you add what you read to your knowledge. The most dangerous thing is to think you know something that is either not known or wrong.
The NY Times article didn't pass the sniff test the first time I read it.
If you look at the map on the article, it clearly shows that the writer chose not to charge in Manhattan when remaining range read 79 miles and destination was 73 miles away (he barely made it). Later he leaves Norwich after only charging the car up to 32 miles of range remaining while the destination is 68 miles away... No wonder he ran out and had to be towed after 51 miles.
Oddly, some of this data is conveniently excluded from the article. The writer claims Tesla cleared him to drive from Norwich to Milford (68 miles). But he fails to mention that at the time the car reported 32 miles of range remaining (As indicated in the data on the map). Something is very fishy here.
It does seem colossally stupid to drive a 79+ mile trip when the meter says you only have 32 miles left.
There are issues with how Tesla reports its charge and maintains it charge, but, seriously, why try a trip that the car is telling you you cannot make? (EDIT: and that's after the car has been over-reporting its range for you the whole time. What, did you think it suddenly flipped the way it makes mistakes??)
ANOTHER EDIT: The writer says in his article: "after an hour they cleared me to resume the trip to Milford." The trip wasn't 79+ miles, it was about 46 + 11 miles. I wonder if it's going to be he-said-she-said about whether he was approved to make the drive.
It's a bit disingeious of Musk to propose that journalists repeat this trip, knowing full well that the problems reported in the original article stem from cold weather. The weather on the East Coast is getting warmer by the day. It is almost spring. Even if Tesla can tell each journalist to stop charging at Norwich at the same point they did originally (assuming they can determine that reliably), the battery state at that point, and going forward, will be different because of the weather.
The sensationalist part of this review is the bricking of the car. This happens shortly after the reporter claims that "after an hour they (Tesla) cleared me to resume the trip to Milford." So, any detour is only meaningful to the outcome of this review if it occurs after this clearance, because at that point Tesla HQ knows what the range of the car should be, and whether or not he will make it, and when to tell him to stop charging. Milford is a straight shot from Norwich. If a detour did occur in this critical period, it would reflect very badly on the author.
The thing about product reviews in mainstream publications like the NYTimes, is that their goal isn't just to tell you how good the product is. Most of the readers aren't actually on the market for a Tesla, they just want to be entertained and feel like they learned something new. To reach these casual readers, the reviews really need to be narrative stories. "Range anxiety" makes for a very good narrative because it adds a layer of suspense (ie "will he make it?"), so it makes sense that the reviewer would have a motive for faking the review even if his goal isn't to hurt Tesla.
That being said I have no idea if the allegations are true and am eagerly awaiting Tesla's full blog post with evidence.
This morning would have been a wonderful time to buy stock. TSLA was way down (due to this review?) and earnings are coming up soon. This makes me wonder if the NYTimes or this reporter had some ulterior motive; a conspiracy to discredit Tesla? A personal vendetta? Why would a reporter lie about the test?
There's probably a much simpler explanation: That automotive journalists are really lazy, have a story in mind before they ever drive the car in question, routinely do stuff like this, and are only being called out now because of black boxes being embedded into some newer cars such as Tesla's.
He was not an automobile journalist, which is probably why it reads like he has no concept of how cars work or that planning a trip to test a car's theoretical range limit in winter is a poor way to review a car. John Broder is on the "Green" beat:
> To get a story that's more interesting than "I tried this car and it was good".
And because it fit the reporter's expectation of what would have happened, without having to bother with actually following through with the experiment.
It seems from the article he did perform the experiment, but lied about his procedure. He drove further than he claimed to, and didn't fill the battery as he claimed to.
Why he would bother to do that instead of simply lie, I don't know.
I agree, I would be surprised if the reporter did make it up completely. His description is quite detailed, and it would be a bizarre thing to do, especially for someone writing for the NY Times. But such bizarre things have happened.
I will be interested to see the purported data. It may in fact turn out to be a relatively minor omission. I hope we'll see.
A positive review of something that is already Motortrend's Car of the Year would draw about zero views. A made up ordeal could draw millions (I've seen it posted all over the place).
If the detour was really long, hopefully the NYT will get sued. If the car wasn't fully charged by the reviewer it will be much harder to prove.
Only if you're planning to flip it for a short term gain and are willing to gamble on earnings being good.
You'll be able to get it for $25 to $30 / share within the next 18 months. Save your money, bide your time. If we're just talking historical analysis (assuming you have no special knowledge of Tesla earnings etc), it's rarely a good idea to buy near the 52 week high, on top of being at its all time high, much less on top of a stock market near all time highs.
Tesla is so volatile it's almost guaranteed to fall back to earth and provide a far cheaper buying entry point. The stock price is completely unsupported by earnings, meaning it's completely driven - without a buffer - by the typically manic mood swings of investors.
Let the investors running Tesla up, swing to depressed and buy it far cheaper. Or to put it another way, wait until the herd is fearful and then be greedy.
doesn’t mince its words: 'Jan. 10 article recounting a reporter’s test drive in a Tesla Model S was completely factual [...] Any suggestion that the account was "fake" is, of course, flatly untrue.'"
Well, that joins issue directly with what Musk is claiming. Now it will be interesting to check the facts.
Earlier Hacker News thread about the New York Times review:
AFTER EDIT: I wonder if the reporter had a GPS-enabled tracking device on his person while he was doing the reporting? Maybe, maybe not, but that would be one more way to establish where the reporter (and, thus, presumptively the vehicle) was at different times during the test drive.
The car has a GPS on it, and (for owners) theres a REST API from Tesla that will relay its coordinates to you. I assume they are logging positions when logging is enabled.
What is it about Elon Musk's companies constantly suing people? Tesla sued Top Gear for libel. SpaceX sued a safety consultant asking clarification about a rumor [1]. Now this tiff may well end in a lawsuit.
So how many lawsuits is that? 1 for SpaceX and 1 for Tesla...
The SpaceX lawsuit seems justified, since it was basically extortion, as a thinly veiled consulting offer. SpaceX have real astronauts, with real experience, to advise them. This includes retired astronaut & shuttle commander Mark Kelly.
Yeah, it's a bad article, but the best I could find. The article is slanted because the it only contains quotes from SpaceX, so you hear only one side of the story, with nothing from the defense. The case was settled.
The review gave me the impression that the vehicle did not provide accurate (over a period of time) predictions of how much mileage was left. If that is the case, why should the vehicle logs be more accurate? If the car measures something wrong, the logs would reflect that.
Presumably the vehicle is logging its GPS position at regular intervals. That's a pretty uncontroversial thing to do.
Then, the car uses the GPS mileage data alongside numerous other inputs to update its cruising range estimate based on what it thinks the batteries' current state of charge is. As anyone who has ever used a laptop or a cell phone knows, that is a far-from-solved problem.
I admire Musk and love what he's doing in general. I think he's an inspirational entrepreneur. It makes sense that he's defending his company. Having said that I think this is an interesting tack to take. Firstly, this is the New York Times. I'm sure they take their integrity pretty seriously. Secondly, Musk has sued before so that would make them particularly sensitive to ensuring that they got their facts and figures correct if they're going to post a negative article. Thirdly, I'm not sure how much of an argument Musk is really mounting here. There are still a bunch of charges left unaddressed. That the charge dissipated much faster than it was telling the driver. That cutting things like heating and speed were solutions? That it didn't have a sufficient charge to unlock a handbrake etc.
Why does this matter? Well, we all know Tesla is a cutting edge technology. Those who buy that car understand that they're going to take on additional hardships and risks vs a gasoline vehicle. Culturally, what message is Musk sending by attacking the author and avoiding many of the issues raised? If you buy a Tesla and experience problems do you want a company that questions your honesty and integrity or one that says "Sounds like a horrible experience let's do everything on our power to fix it?"
The main thrust of the article seemed to be that Tesla's charging stations aren't sufficient in the Northeast, being almost at max range apart. I doubt even Musk would disagree with that.
No, the crux was that this car is useless because Tesla's charging stations are sufficient in the Northeast and that the car doesn't have the range that it should and that if you get this car it will leave you stranded.
Tesla has just started making their charging network so of course it's not sufficient in the Northeast, it's not sufficient anywhere. It's also not intended to be the sole supplier of electricity for your car, and the indented use of a Tesla vehicle is not long road trips. Most people will leave their home every day with a full charge and arrive home at night with almost a full charge.
If a person writing a car review were test-driving a brand new Ferrarri, and was in constant contact with customer service about something-or-other, do you think they'd tell them to fill up the gas tank? or drive carefully in snow?
No. They would assume a person writing a car review is not an idiot and understands basic car concepts.
If anyone even doubts whether the NYT are going to respond to this (of course they are), you can ping their public editor @sulliview, who's an immense treasure to the paper. She'll report on it, no doubt.
Our culture is badly broken. When "the social contract" for broad swathes of society is so little regarded that lying is a matter of course, then we have already reached worrying levels of dysfunction, of the sort that historians point out when they discuss the fall of the Roman Empire, Czarist Russia, or the USSR. A point all of those have in common: The denizens came to assume public information was false as a matter of course, as a time and sanity saving measure. Large swathes of our society think of lying, even when deceiving large swathes of the public, as a kind of sport, and profiting from such lying as a kind of serendipitous fortune to be exploited without conscience, like finding cash on the sidewalk.
Such attitudes are shoved in my face when I see exclamations like, "Pictures or it didn't happen!" It's the same when big media corporations trade in innuendo and conspiracy theories and deliberately sabotage the dissemination of knowledge for their own ends. Such attitudes are so pervasive, that large swathes of the population actually disbelieve in any kind of objective truth, and accept mere social proof as its substitute and superior.
It's entirely possible that the journalist in question is innocent of deception and only guilty of poor journalism and/or poor trip planning and/or insufficient UI design. However, the issue with the review and that of the social contract are entirely related. In a world where reality itself is relative and subject to social proof, there is no need to double check your facts or to prove the null hypothesis. In a world where science is just another fabricated self-serving belief system, there's no need to apply one's scientific literacy or application of physics learned in school when doing things like taking a car trip in winter. One only need know enough to read the dials and gauges to be a good consumer, then complain loudly if things do not go one's way.
True competence, be it in programming or journalism or any significant endeavor, requires diligence with and prostration to the truth. Our society as a whole has forgotten this and our society as a whole is oblivious to the price it is paying as a consequence.
Another way to think of it: Our society as a whole doesn't have the epistemological foundation needed for the level of technical sophistication it has.
This is why range extenders will stay popular even as battery technology improves.
In ten years' time, I predict that straight battery-only electric vehicles will cost less than the gasoline equivalent and be VERY popular as commuter vehicles because gasoline prices will be over $6/gallon (especially if we build the Keystone XL pipeline to send more oil overseas).
One car in many households will likely require some kind of range extender, which increases the purchase and maintenance costs. There's a reason why SUVs are so rare in Europe: we've been spoiled by cheap gasoline in America.
If this is true, then he should sue NYT or the author, unless the author admits it's true in another article. I've heard quite a few random people use the NYT article as an argument against Tesla/electric cars, and I think that article can have long term negative impact on electric cars (even if it won't be a complete deal-breaker for electric cars). So he needs to either get them to admit the review was not accurate, or sue them.
Didn't Tesla sue Top Gear for basically the same thing? I recall that didn't turn out well for Tesla, though perhaps the fact that Top Gear is widely recognized as being entertainment not serious journalism had something to do with that.
I don't know if their seriousness played into it. My understanding is that the judge ruled, essentially, that Top Gear was correct when they spoke about the car having extremely limited range when driven on their race track and that no reasonable person would confuse range on a racetrack with regular driving.
(And IANAL, but the UK is somewhat infamous for its plaintiff-friendly libel laws.)
My impression was that the 'seriousness' came into play because they did not merely claim that the car had poor range on a track, but that it ran out of juice while they were testing it, which was not the case. Making untrue statements to make a true point about a limitation of the car was permissible since nobody reasonably expects anything else of Top Gear. I doubt a "serious" publication can get away with that sort of thing though.
I'm a fan of both Tesla and Top Gear, and Tesla's complaints about Top Gear always seemed a bit daft to me. That is mostly because of who Top Gear is though.
I'm curious if a private owner tried to sue Tesla for range claims if Tesla would magically show up with the logging data for the customer.
This will a be moot point with drones in the near future though, most vehicles will have a 24/7 travel log from the government, just like they track all phone calls domestically without warrants. It will be super easy for a cluster of drones to track every car from start to destination.
I went to school in Newark Delaware and lived in Groton Connecticut.It's a long drive. There is almost always traffic somewhere.
I wouldn't expect an electric car to make it without a charge. I would usually fill up my gas tank twice. The fact that they made it close is great. The fact that the charging stations are that far apart sucks.
That's a chicken and egg problem. Electrical charging stations are far cheaper to build than gas stations. At least until there's enough electrical cars to require an upgrade of the whole infrastructure.
> "the tested Tesla was filmed being pushed into the shed in order to show what would happen if the Roadster had run out of charge."
Is this true? Is there no "emergency portable charge kit" that one could haul to anyplace with electricity and get a quick charge, possibly good for ~15 miles? If not then I smell a business opportunity.
If you are rich enough to own a Tesla, you probably also are rich enough to have a second car or to fly. I've been considering getting a Tesla, and long distance doesn't matter that much to me because I'd take a 2 hour flight over a 7 hour drive any day.
Challenging thing. I agree the NYT article read like a hatchet job but still. Nobody likes having their baby called ugly, the response though could be a bit more measured. Looking forward to Tesla's log analysis and their take on the situation.
Maybe when Tesla becomes a more global brand, they'll start using heat pumps for heating.
It takes some effort to make a car that works in different conditions. Some brands that might work great in Central Europe have bad reputation in cold climates. Failure to start, puny indoor heating power, door insulation freezing shut, water lodging in concave spots and freezing. It is common enough that it is probably a conscious strategic choice to just not test / fix it. Then again, locally built houses also often fail in the weather. I guess humans never learn.
Even if the reporter fabricated parts of the story, aren't the concerns about driving in cold weather still relevant? Any Tesla owners want to weigh in?
No more so than the concerns of driving in warm weather (AC uses electricity). You get less than optimal mileage in less than optimal conditions. This is true for any vehicle. My gas powered car jumps around on its range calculation too.
As a Norwegian and Tesla investor, I must admit I'm a bit worried by this story. Isn't range also affected by the batteries performing worse in cold weather? If this effect is worse than Tesla had anticipated (weather this cold is routine where I live, Norway, and this is slated to become the second biggest Model S market after the US), I am worried that they might have missed other things as well.
Tesla is located in California. It's a really hot and really dry climate. How about cabin fogging and moisture? How about the #1 killer of cars in wet and icy climates, rust? It seems elementary, and it should be. But like I said, I must admit I'm a bit worried.
I'm rooting for Tesla, but it would be a hilarious testament to Californian hubris if the Model S was undone by failure to consider the fact that other places have weather.
According to an owner's report(1), driving Nissan Leaf in cold winter (Canada) with aggressive heating reduces its range to about half of its claimed 160km optimal range.
One big difference is that heat (and thus warm air) is a by-product of internal combustion, so a typical car's heater will ALWAYS work, which turns out to be critical for survival in certain climates. Having the A/C go down in extremely hot weather will leave you uncomfortable; having the heater go down in extremely cold weather can kill you.
The author "had" to go heat off because he neglected to charge his vehicle. If you don't put gas into your conventional car it will also pose a safety concern in the winter.
> One big difference is that heat (and thus warm air) is a by-product of internal combustion, so a typical car's heater will ALWAYS work, which turns out to be critical for survival in certain climates.
It'll work as long as you have gas, just as the Tesla's will work as long as you have battery.
Was just what I was thinking. Running out of gas, or having your engine crash in -40 degree Celcius weather is a life-threatening situation if you've been stupid and not packed any clothes.
> 1) gasoline-fueled cars have a significantly higher range than their electric battery-fueled peers,
The Tesla's 300 mile range is pretty close to most of the gas-powered cars I've owned here in the US.
> 2) heat is "free" in a gas-fueled car where it's an added cost in electric battery-fueled cars, and
Yes, but idling an electric car is free, where it's an added cost in gasoline-fueled cars. If I slide into a ditch in winter and get stuck, I'm going to be depleting my fuel either way.
With a 16-gallon tank at 25MPG, you'd get 400 driving miles out of a tank, and many hours of idling (assuming typical consumption of 1/4 to 1/2 gallon per hour idling gives us a minimum of 32 hours on a 16-gallon tank of gas). It's not clear how long you could run just the heater on a model S, but I'd assume it's over a day on a relatively full charge. Still, 33% more range is nothing to sneeze at.
While I'm at it, I'll also note the density of gas stations as a huge advantage over the relatively sparse network of battery charging stations, which can certainly add to the anxiety of winter driving, as mentioned in the review.
I just want to tell my atypical story. I moved to Illinois from Florida, for grad school. My car was 12 years old. I had bought it used in Miami. The A/C worked fine. Come November of my First Real Winter, I find that the heater didn't work at all. Probably a stuck switch somewhere, having not been moved for years. Decided it was cheaper to keep all my gear on while driving than to get the car fixed. Made for some very cold trips.
I wouldn't want to drive in those critically cold areas without blankets/sleeping bag in case there was a problem and the car broke down. I've not been in temperatures cold enough for me to be unable to survive for an hour, with the clothes and blanket I've had in the car. (Worst was when I locked myself out of the car in the NM desert and had to sleep overnight in my coat in ~20F weather until a nearby store opened the next morning.)
And I wouldn't want to drive in the desert SW without lots of extra water, for the same reason.
This is silly. It's like buying a toaster and then complaining when it fails to make panini.
You don't get an electric vehicle for the purpose of driving from DC to New York.
I have always plugged my EV in on a 120 volt circuit. It gets about 50-60 miles of charge per night. My commute is 10 miles. The car is full every morning, no matter how cold it is.
Tesla blog coming soon detailing what actually happened on Broder’s NYTimes “range test”. Also lining up other journalists to do same drive.
I'm not a journalist but I would be more than happy to test drive and do a write-up! I would think it would be pretty easy to find 1000 journalists willing to do this.
Unfortunately, it's not an exact repro, as the original journalist's problems had to do with cold weather, and the weather is getting warmer as we speak.
Based on Tesla's past claims against Top Gear (that turned out in favor of Top Gear in court), I would give the NY Times the benefit of the doubt here. Especially since Tesla hasn't produced any evidence yet.
That court case does not mean as much as you think it does. Just because Top Gear won, does not mean that they were truthful. The judge merely said that even if Top Gear lied their lie would not be legally actionable.
Tesla needs to pay gas stations to install 220v receptacles and include an adapter kit with every Model S that will fit all of the common plugs out there. That's all there is to it. Consumers aren't going to want to buy these cars en masse if they're scared of being stranded somewhere, and they're going to be scared of being stranded somewhere if it's 100 miles either way to the nearest charging station, regardless of how much range the car has left.
Are you reading this, Elon? Pay gas stations to install 220v receptacles, and map the locations of those stations onto your cars' GPS systems. Make the kit, and make a compartment for the kit. Make an announcement that you're going to start doing this, and start doing it NOW.
I told you so right here on HN, just after the journalist posted his sensational article.
This is all too common from car journalists: some of them will try to fake any test they can to try to harm the reputation of an upcoming car many people do believe in.
I'm not saying that journalist did it: all I said is that you should always be suspicious of claims like that by journalists. Many of them are little attention whores so you have to read between the lines.
And wait for more tests, counter-claims, car owners reports, etc.
It's sad that the journalists (not this one specifically) lack integrity because you can never know if an article was honestly done or not (like in this case).
hmmm lets see: a journalist of media behemoth that major stake is in hands of the same people that have stakes in gasoline car manufacturers drafted a negative review for a company with a product that may forever shift the way we drive cars and how much we spend for this privilege...
> Tesla Model S was completely factual [...] Any suggestion that the account was ‘fake’ is, of course, flatly untrue.”
Yes of course, CNBC never lied in the entire history of a written word! [1].
Also, my memory ma not serve well, but weren't the CNBC journalist send to take photos from camps in Afganistan and when it turned out that there were no camps, they found some fence and faked the story of a reporter being inside the "camp" by taking photos through said fence?
