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Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints

reuters.com

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Re: Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints

#201

Post by Lendal »

jvanderbot wrote: post #8

I have a model Y. I hate almost everything about it. But most germane, The "Battery meter" at the top of the display is total bunk. That's got to be "rosy" numbers. It'll display a the battery in miles, but it's at least 25% inflated. However if you punch in a destination, you'll get exact numbers, and those are insanely reliable. It claims (and I don't believe any claims coming from tesla) that it'll factor wind, el…

While there are things to hate on with Tesla cars, range is not one of them. I have a Model Y and for the most part I like it. I plug it in when it needs charging. What's so hard about that? I've been on several 6000+ mile journeys across the country and never had a problem, even out west where charging is more sparse.

The thing I hate most about my car is that I spent $10K on "Full Self Driving" and rarely use it. It totally sucks and is definitely the worst $10K I've ever spent on anything. That money could have gone to a nice vacation somewhere and I would be happy about that. But no, every time I try out the FSD, I come away disappointed.

Re: Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints

#202

Post by stetrain »

cevn wrote: post #183
stetrain wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I leave the battery meter set to percentage, the “miles” option is really just percentage dumbly mapped to miles. The golden number in a Tesla Is absolutely the navigation route estimate. While navigating you can open the Energy app as well to see more detail, how you are doing compared to the estimate, and specific factors affecting consumption.

I also use percentage. It's not something that I usually think about. I just know that my "real range" is 180 miles at highway speeds. That's not something they tell you when you buy a Tesla. I also just don't use navigation if I've been somewhere more than once. Just navigate with my head..

Tesla advertises EPA range which is a mix of city and highway driving with an average speed way below normal interstate highway speeds.

I use the navigation all the time, even when I know the way, because it knows about traffic jams and so I can get a good range estimate for longer trips. It even gives you a round-trip estimate back to your starting point.

Re: Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints

#203

Post by rsynnott »

wredue wrote: post #70

>Inside the Nevada team’s office, some employees celebrated canceling service appointments by putting their phones on mute and striking a metal xylophone, triggering applause from coworkers who sometimes stood on desks. It’s weird how this sentence was probably supposed to surprise the reader, but I really just reflected on how the fans conduct themselves regularly and thought “yup, sounds about on par”.

This is standard Weird Sales Culture stuff, but it's a bit odd for customer support.

Re: Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints

#204

Post by aaronblohowiak »

brookst wrote: post #91
pi-rat wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And much more than one would intuitively think. I just finished a long drive for summer vacation. Driving through Denmark (completely flat) at 130 km/h would absolutely wipe the battery, would be surprised if I managed even 350 km on a full charge. Driving over the mountains in Norway however, from 0m elevation to over 1000m and down again, at slower mountain roads (max 80 km/h), yielded almost 500 km on single charg…

Air resistance is proportional to square of velocity. That goes up pretty quickly!

And the power required to move against the air goes up by the cube of speed (as you multiply the resistance times your speed itself.)

Re: Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints

#205

Post by hypnoosi »

WatchDog wrote: post #28
jvanderbot wrote: post #8

I have a model Y. I hate almost everything about it. But most germane, The "Battery meter" at the top of the display is total bunk. That's got to be "rosy" numbers. It'll display a the battery in miles, but it's at least 25% inflated. However if you punch in a destination, you'll get exact numbers, and those are insanely reliable. It claims (and I don't believe any claims coming from tesla) that it'll factor wind, el…

Seems like it’s common across all EVs for the range to be inflated by around 20%, at least for freeway driving. In a recent review, a Tesla did a slightly better job than most of the cars tested, as far as portion of stated range achieved. https://youtu.be/fvwOa7TCd1E&t=36m15s

I used to have a Nissan Leaf. Same trip took 30% less charge, just because of the if was driving a behind a large track most of the way.

Re: Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints

#206

Post by [deleted] »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #93
londons_explore wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Battery meter at the top is EPA range - ie. the official range measurement method, in basically ideal conditions. The routefinder 'learns' from your previous driving habits. Driving style easily has a 50% impact on range between "drives 50 mph slipstreaming behind a truck" and "drives 90 mph and brakes aggressively at every corner".

No reason it has to show the EPA range. My family’s Subaru has “learned” that it lives in the mountains and the range estimates reflect that. And I’m pretty sure it’s a simply looking at what kind of gas mileage it got recently. When we have kayaks on top of the car, it readjusts the mileage estimates down pretty quickly. All these comments about ICE vehicles being the same ignore that when ICE vehicles have estimate…

[deleted]

Re: Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints

#208

Post by gen220 »

mwint wrote: post #179
gen220 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should have higher expectations of your vehicle. My 2016 ICE car's "miles left" meter is accurate to +/- 2 miles from the moment I top up the tank (80% highway driving, 20% hilly city and rolling country roads). IMO, accurately telling the vehicle operator how many miles of juice you have left is a KPI, as it informs when you'll need to plan for refueling. Having driven an EV for a few weeks in identical conditio…

> My 2016 ICE car's "miles left" meter is accurate to +/- 2 miles from the moment I top up the tank (80% highway driving, 20% hilly city and rolling country roads). No way. That’d be accurate to under 1% - well within the variation you’ll get just from different air densities (temperature, pressure, humidity). Forget about A/C on or off, tire pressure, etc. It’s gotta be tricking you somehow.

We regularly do road trips of 200+ miles, and we get 350 miles on a full tank of gas. At the beginning of the trip, the GPS will say something like "250 miles to your destination" and the car will say "180 miles left"

I regularly pull off the highway to fill up with around "20 miles" left, when there are ~90 miles left in the trip (e.g. it was dead-on accurate for the last 160 miles), according to the GPS. I agree that it's spooky.

I think, when making estimates for "miles left", our car must be doing some calculation like (rolling estimate of mpg) * (gallons left).

It's also possible that it keeps a buffer of ~1 gallon of gas that it never tells us about, when quoting the total range, and it eats into this buffer without telling us. There's certainly a bunch of tricks they could be pulling off.

The point is, from a driver's point of view, I have a trustworthy number. If they need to pull off some tricks to achieve that trustworthiness (e.g. low-balling total range), that's OK with me.

With EVs, "total range" is a marketing term, so they have a strong incentives to fib about it. Unfortunately, this makes the vehicles worse to operate.

Re: Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints

#209

Post by rootusrootus »

HWR_14 wrote: post #22

The article ends: > [one customer] ultimately concluded there is nothing wrong with his car. The problem, he said, was that Tesla is overstating its performance As I read this, either his car was defective or he was lied to to convince him to make a $XX,000 purchase. It seems that Tesla should be facing some form of fraud-based lawsuit over the lies selling the car or treating it under warranty, right?

Most normal Tesla owners I'm familiar with just come to accept that the website range claim is complete horseshit. They go on with their lives and just don't worry about it. For around town, it'll get somewhat close to rated range anyway, and road trips aren't that common for most people. The supercharger network is pretty good, and if you have to stop every 200 miles instead of the rated 358, then so be it.

Personally I think the EPA should revamp the rating system. I want to see every manufacturer forced to admit what range to expect if we use 90% of the battery capacity, at 70 mph, in 32F ambient temperature with climate control set to 68F. The only time people really care deeply about range is on the interstate, so the range numbers really ought to reflect that.

Re: Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints

#210

Post by toss1 »

Yup. Quite blatant fraud, false advertising, deliberate falsifying of car data at Elon's request.

But why not? They get away with it for at least a decade+, if not forever. so far, after many years of fraud, all they get is a few bad press reports with a relevance half-life measured in hours. Maybe some prosecution team or class action firm will eventually go after them, resulting in a fine or settlement, another decade later, that won't even approach the scale of their gains from the fraud.

This is the system Elon is good at hacking, not technology.

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