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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

#551

Post by idlewords »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #78
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".

I thought braking aggressively increases range.

You can also recharge the battery by going in reverse, a solution I'm baffled more people don't know about.

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

#552

Post by mrguyorama »

ke88y wrote: post #185
JimtheCoder wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"My wife had to sit at the back of the car for a month while I argued with them." She must have enjoyed having a chauffeur for a month...

Chauffeurs tend to drive vehicles that are more comfortable than the back seat of a Tesla. Sitting in the back seat of any non-luxury sedan sucks.

Tesla claims to be a luxury car.

Plenty of Luxury sedans meanwhile have terrible back seats that basically cannot be used, because it's a luxury car, not a family car.

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

#554

Post by cudgy »

mdgrech23 wrote: post #466
cudgy wrote: post #450

“In March, Alexandre Ponsin set out on a family road trip from Colorado to California in his newly purchased Tesla, a used 2021 Model 3. He expected to get something close to the electric sport sedan’s advertised driving range: 353 miles on a fully charged battery. He soon realized he was sometimes getting less than half that much range, particularly in cold weather – such severe underperformance that he was convince…

They come up w/ the range under absolute perfect driving conditions that don't actually exist. The driving conditions should reflect normal driving conditions.

The problem is what are normal driving conditions? Another poster mentioned having efficiency numbers by the grade of the road, which would provide more information to buyers.

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

#555

Post by Aloha »

glogla wrote: post #478
filleokus wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does heating in internal combustion engine cars really affect fuel consumption? My assumption was that most cabin heat was waste heat from the engine, that would otherwise be vented out? Given the dismal efficiency of ICE, shouldn't it be enough to keep a cabin warm even in quite cold climates?

The engine by itself produces a lot of waste heat. But modern engines are more efficient and take a while to warm up (especially diesels, but small turbos like Honda 1.5 too) so cars sometimes implement resistive heating to heat the cabin quicker. Also some cars have independent heating that can be used to heat up the car up without running an engine. Not sure how exactly it works but I think it uses special battery.…

Which ICE cars use resistive heating? I've never seen an alternator large enough on an ICE car to do it. (I'm also skeptical of how well that'd work on a 12v electrical system)

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

#556

Post by steveBK123 »

moduspol wrote: post #535
steveBK123 wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say you live in a state with a 55mph speed limit. The car has a lifetime average of 0.300 kWh/mi over 4 years of driving. It's December, ambient temperature is 20F and it is snowing. Your last 10 drives consumption rate was 0.400 kWh/mi because its cold out. There's A LOT of smarter things the car can do than use its factory set 0.250 kWh/mi consumption to spit out the range on dashboard. Erring on the side of…

It's not erring on the side of the absolute best state. The EPA-rated miles represent a standardized mix of highway and city miles. The best state would be over 600 miles [1]. It's erring on the side of consistency, as it's also representing the battery's state of charge. It would only serve to confuse users to try and guess whether the current trip is a highway or city drive, will end in the next minute or two hours…

Look, I get it, some people love these cars and will stand no criticism, fine. I had one, they are lovely. We are allowed to want things we like to be better.

But all the "just use nav estimate" arguments miss that some people drive more than one place?

If I am driving out an hour to do some shopping, visit my parents, and then drive back.. it may be a total of 90mi but the first leg is 30mi. Do I need to pre-enter my round trip as multiple waypoints to get an accurate view of whether I will make it home or not?

Seems silly.

Just guesstimate a more accurate dashboard view range like you do in other place sin the UI.

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

#557

Post by mrguyorama »

TheAlchemist wrote: post #5

That's a pretty damning article and it looks like there are more and more of those coming. Tesla still somehow benefits from its innovators / clean company reputation, but at this pace it won't be long before agencies start to act on what's become much more than just 'optimistic marketing'.

>agencies start to act

Uber is still a publicly traded company, despite explicitly starting up by just ignoring and bypassing existing regulation.

The US is so anti-consumer it will never relevantly punish a business making money.

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

#558

Post by bumby »

jodrellblank wrote: post #423
bumby wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to TSLA, it takes into account elevation though...

"unless you chart a specific trip"

So the implication is it's getting it's data from local weather stations and not from the vehicle itself, no?

If anyone know, I'd be interested in the more details and what led to that decision.

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

#559

Post by mrguyorama »

wredue wrote: post #87
ke88y wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that reputation already died in the last 2-3 years. It's now pretty common in my circle to hear people say they'll pay a premium to not own a Tesla. Primarily because of lots of bad experiences with build quality/repairs, but also because there are now lots of high quality alternatives. Namely Rivian and Lucid, but also the legacy automakers (two friends bought mach-es recently and there's a smattering of F-1…

Our caravan has been a pile of shit, which I’m sure anyone who’s ever had a caravan can attest to. Anyway. We are looking for reliability and imagine my surprise when Kia, of all brands, came out king of generally affordable reliability. Plus their EV reviews reasonably well. A lot has changed in 10 years for vehicles I guess…

The problems that were unique to Kia cars were predominantly in the engine and transmission, so it's not exactly a big surprise that removing those two parts means they make better cars.

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

#560

Post by rtkwe »

syntaxing wrote: post #114
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…

Not defending Tesla but battery range is really hard without context. Kinetic energy is velocity^2, which means moving twice the speed takes 4X the energy. They probably can get the right estimate for a destination because it knows the speed limit for the route and using that as your velocity can give you a better answer.

KE is not 4x the energy continuously used though that's 4x the energy spent getting to that speed. Air resistance does also square with velocity and that is an amount that's constantly required to be spent to maintain that speed.
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