They mention "significant weight reduction" but don't mention how much weight they saved. Considering how heavy Model S's are, this seems like it could be a productive approach, though on the other hand if there were easy/obvious ways to reduce unnecessary weight, it would have been done by now. On some level it's a trade-off between being too heavy and being unsafe, though reducing the weight also means it doesn't h…
Model S Long Range Plus: Building the First 400-Mile Electric Vehicle
51–60 of 358 posts
Re: Model S Long Range Plus: Building the First 400-Mile Electric Vehicle
#52"a new custom tire" sounds expensive to replace when you drive over a nail
Yes but don’t most “luxury” automobiles come with non-cheap tires to begin with that may or may not bring 2% mileage improvement with them?
Re: Model S Long Range Plus: Building the First 400-Mile Electric Vehicle
#53I'll wait for Consumer Reports or the EPA before believing any of Tesla's range claims. E: As in from the EPA itself and validated by Consumer Report's field-testing, not Tesla claiming EPA certification and verified through easily cheat-able testing.
Teslas are known for achieving only 75-85% of EPA in the real world. This is based on my own data, owning multiple Teslas over four years. The issue is that short drives suffer HVAC losses and long drives are at highway speeds, which is significantly above the speed the EPA uses for their dyno. tests. Further, Tesla actually runs the tests themselves and uses their own calculations to simulate wind resistance.
Plural of anecdotes etc.
Re: Model S Long Range Plus: Building the First 400-Mile Electric Vehicle
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another bonus of having an EV is charging in your own home. You end up with a full tank every night.
Yeah, it's silly to compare. BEV charging infrastructure is trivially expanded and piggybacked on an already ubiquitous power grid. You still need big trucks constantly hauling liquid hydrogen around for the fuel cell option...
Re: Model S Long Range Plus: Building the First 400-Mile Electric Vehicle
#55Re: Model S Long Range Plus: Building the First 400-Mile Electric Vehicle
#56It's really incredible what Tesla is doing. Haters gonna hate, but they continue to innovate and move the industry forward.
Doesn't help that everyone on Tesla forums love to praise the company no matter what they do, so it's not like this is something easy to learn prior to using the car for some time.
Re: Model S Long Range Plus: Building the First 400-Mile Electric Vehicle
#57Re: Model S Long Range Plus: Building the First 400-Mile Electric Vehicle
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes but don’t most “luxury” automobiles come with non-cheap tires to begin with that may or may not bring 2% mileage improvement with them?
I guess it depends what you mean by "luxury", but the vehicles I'm thinking of tend to come with sticky high-performance tires. these actually increase rolling friction.
Re: Model S Long Range Plus: Building the First 400-Mile Electric Vehicle
#59Wow, they are doing brake blending now? I'd be interested to know how good their implementation is. I always assumed they refused to do it because it's so damn hard to perfect.
Tesla doesn't do any blending of the brake pedal. Pressing the brake pedal always applies the friction brakes only. However, since a software update last year, they have had a one-pedal driving mode (Stopping mode "Hold"). In this mode, the vehicle is able to come to a complete stop without using the brake pedal, using a blend of re-gen and friction brakes to do so. In practice, it means it uses re-gen down to a very…
Re: Model S Long Range Plus: Building the First 400-Mile Electric Vehicle
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can duplicate pretty much the same effect with cruise control in my gasoline powered car. If I go on a 5 hour freeway road trip with cruise at 65mph and spend 95% of my time in the right lane, there's definitely a 2-3 mpg improvement in fuel consumption, vs 75 mph. At that point it becomes a tradeoff in time vs money spent on extra fuel, and need to get somewhere in a hurry. Over a 4.5 hour period if I can cruise a…
For ICE cars, it depends on what the mfg has optimized for. I had an Infinity years ago and I remember that it was optimized for 70mph precisely as per the owner's manual. Higher or lower speeds would be less efficient.
I don't really have a problem with my effective range being less do to my driving style as long as it's predictable (and it is).