Tesla was so swamped with complaints about driving ranges that it created a secret team to cancel owners’ service appointments, source says::To suppress the volume of complaints the automaker created a secret “Diversion Team” in Las Vegas to cancel appointments, Reuters reported.
If you know the true answer, but you give your customer a false answer to make your product look better than it is, there’s a word for that. It’s “fraud”.
Counterpoint: Ive taken numerous road trips in both of our family’s Tesla (Tesli?) as well as a couple loaners, and the built in navigation is always spot on with the estimates. Like it’s eerie how it can predict within a percentage point on a 2 hour or more drive within the first 10 minutes of a trip.
Range anxiety really is only experienced by those that it doesn’t affect (i.e. potential buyers)
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That’s a 28% exaggeration in economy.
You’re putting a certain amount of electricity into that car, and you are being told that amount of electricity is good for 320 miles. You’re only getting 250 miles from that. Everyone else is only getting 250 miles from that. The only people supposedly getting 320 miles of range from that charge are the salespeople convincing you to buy it. Misrepresentation of the distance you can travel on a battery is no different than misrepresentation of the distance you can travel on a tank. You’re just multiplying the MPG by the size of the tank, or the kWh/mile by the battery capacity.
Suppose I buy a sedan with a rating of 32mpg. But I’m only getting 25mpg. I put 10 gallons in the 10-gallon tank, expecting to drive 320 miles, but I have to stop and put another 10 gallons in after 250 miles.
Everyone else who bought the same sedan is getting 25mpg. Meanwhile, my other car, an SUV from a different manufacturer, is also rated 32mpg, and actually gets 32mpg. Everyone else who bought that SUV is reporting pretty damn close to 32mpg.
Clearly, the manufacturer of this sedan is pulling something shady. It doesn’t become less shady when the sedan is burning gallons of diesel instead of gallons of gasoline. Or gallons of propane instead of gas or diesel. Or cubic feet of natural gas or hydrogen instead of a liquid fuel. Or pounds of steam instead of a combustible fuel. It doesn’t become less shady when the sedan is consuming kWh of electricity instead of a mass or volume of a physical substance.
The problem is that other vehicles adjust the projection based on current conditions - when I drive up a mountain, my projected range drops like a rock. When I drive back down I can end up with more range than I started. Reporting the “ideal” case during operation is misleading at best.
Yeah, it seems like using ‘miles’ as an indicator or energy left is the root cause. If they just change the kwh left or similar they’d be more accurate but, ironically, confuse way more people.
Though, ironically a scale of Full - 3/4 - half - 1/4 - empty is perfectly fine for gas. There is usually a visual gauge of % for charge, but it isn’t as prominent as the range. Oddly, my car has it divided roughly in thirds.
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You can display percent instead of rated miles
Counter counter point: if the Tesla is doing fraud with the range estimate there is no need to estimate anything that precisely. Just make the software show the same number as guessed when you arrive let’s say you end up with 86 km left as “estimated” at the end of the trip but in reality it’s more like 42 km and the Tesla just shows something else.
Except that is really falsifiable. I pull data with TeslaFi and there’s definitely no shenanigans being done.
The simplest explanation is that it’s impossible to say (miles left) when you consume significantly more power going faster, going uphill, on a very hot day, etc. So they just go with the epa estimate based on your % state of charge and that’s it.
If you want detailed info the car will quickly give it to you and consider all those factors if you put in a destination
The gauge shows epa range available given battery SoC. Once a destination is entered it gives you an accurate estimate in the gps directions.
It can’t guess anything until it knows where you’re going.
Not sure why you’re being down voted. This has been my experience as well.
The remaining battery estimate given at the beginning of the trip is fairly accurate.
I believe it would be Teslae.
I believe it’s actually Teslapodae since it’s from the Greek
Yes, if the projected range is more optimistic than reality, it’s always because I drive faster than 120-130 kph. Otherwise it’s absolutely spot on or even better than projected, for example if I drive 100-110 kph for a while.
In Europe the manufacturers are legally bound to quote the WLTP range. Which is hopelessly inaccurate… But nowhere near as bad as the NEDC that preceded it. Of course people still come on forums wondering why they don’t get <50% more than actually possible> out of their car, and I don’t blame them… the law is an ass.
TBF to Tesla though the in-car estimate is (I think) EPA and isn’t far off… It’s doable in summer, at least. Winter you’ll lose 30% but that’s normal for all cars.
Many manufacturers get around this by quoting an estimated range and then the WLTP in small print ie. Highway Range: Est 415km in normal conditions (600km on WLTP cycle)
Hasn’t it been proven that the range can go longer but Tesla caps it? I remember during a hurricane Tesla said it was extending the range so drivers can make it out.
That’s not he projected range shown on the display. That’s the actual range the battery will give you.
They temporarily removed a bit of the safety margin built in to reduce battery wear, allowing people to get out of harms way without a stop to charge if they were on the limit. But only for people moving away from The affected area, etc. so smart and helpful.
Ah okay, thank you for the additional info.
I dislike both Tesla and Musk but as an automotive company I’d wager they have good safety factors on at least most of their engineering, so for example in the name of keeping the battery from degrading too fast the tesla probably stops drawing power from the battery when the battery voltage drops to a certian number. The safety factor just means that the number it shuts off at is likely a good bit before the batrery would theoretically start to take damage.
I can’t find any other reason they would intentionally keep range off the product, because its not like they selling a solution to it. So I assume they probably just lowered the voltage at which the Tesla stops drawing power because getting stuck in the hurricane was obviously more dangerous. I could be wrong though, this is just from my expirences with bateries in engineering applications.
I think that would be “Teslae” 😉