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That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

wheels.blogs.nytimes.com

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Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#191

Post by secabeen »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #131
codex wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The battery's heating system likely drained the power overnight. The battery pack must be kept above a certain temperature or it will become irreparably damaged.

Do you have a reference for that? I ask because while I can imagine there are limits the kinds of things I've not seen one for Tesla's battery packs. I see that typical LiOn type batteries have a 'one month at -20C (-4F)' sort of limit, car batteries are typically better than that, good to -40F or so. Edit: This article http://electronicdesign.com/power/operating-conditions-get-t... says "permanent damage at -50 degr…

What I've heard on this angle is that the Tesla maintains the batteries at a safe operating level overnight to enable the owner to drive at any time. They could implement a storage mode that allows the batteries to drop below operating temperature while staying above damage temperature, but their software does not yet do that.

Tesla has a bit of the Apple approach to software, where they intentionally limit the number of software options to not overwhelm the user. This may change as they continue development, but it's where they are now.

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#192

Post by andrewfelix »

tunesmith wrote: post #162

I put a graph together showing all the points/counterpoints and here's what I'm left with. - not charging past 90% at the 1st station is defensible. Especially if Tesla warns it will shorten the battery's life. - It'd be better if Tesla's software took temperature into account when estimating mileage range. - Broder is being ridiculous about the cruise control and his speed estimates, and the temperature. He has part…

"reads like Broder was trying to stack the deck"

I disagree. I think Broder is doing what a lot of journalists do and has accentuated the overall negative experience to create a better narrative.

In spite of the poor communication and slight exaggeration, I don't feel like there was malice or a great deal of intent on Broder's behalf. He generally had a poor experience. The errors in his story do not negate that, and I don't get the impression that he had intentionally stacked the deck against the car.

Musk on the other hand has intentionally implied that Broder lied and was possibly motivated by a hatred of the Tesla concept. That is a ridiculous assertion to make by someone in his position. The data does not back that up.

Musk should have just presented the facts and let us interpret them.

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#193

Post by zevyoura »

DeepDuh wrote: post #179
niggler wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If the support person gave different advice, he was setting himself and his company for the mess up, and the mess up ensued." This is why we need the call logs. And I fully suspect Tesla records them, so the fact that it wasn't released may suggest that Broder's account was indeed correct

While the whole discussion makes me skeptical of both Broder and Tesla's customer service, I'd like to add here that Tesla most probably would need permission to do that. Even releasing GPS data is already a questionable move - IANAL, but I believe in Europe this would be pretty much unthinkable, except if he gave explicit permission on paper first (general agreement terms probably wouldn't be enough, because of the…

This would be a more significant concern if he was driving his own car, but since it's a Tesla owned review model, I'm sure they have legal rights to it. In addition, given their past troubles with Top Gear I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla wrote it into a review agreement.

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#194

Post by HelloMcFly »

enraged_camel wrote: post #133
HelloMcFly wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk is a business man and is concerned about marketing as much as anyone else. Here are his comments aimed toward the Volt: "Yet the state of the electric car is dismal, the victim of hyped expectations, technological flops, high costs and a hostile political climate.” Not exactly and objective view, or totally fair.

Uh, that was said by Broder in one of his previous articles. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/sunday-review/the-electric...

You're right. I was equating that quote and the calling-the-Volt-a-"lawnmower" quote (http://articles.businessinsider.com/2009-05-11/green_sheet/2...) together. I was reading about them yesterday. My mistake.

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#195

Post by HelloMcFly »

TillE wrote: post #74
jacquesm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's just that much of the HN crowd is more apt to be on one side vs. the other. I don't think so, it's just that one part of the HN crowd likes data more than 'someone said'. So now it is up to Tesla to provide even more data, preferably with an exact re-run of the conditions in the presence of said journalist. That should clear up any kind of difference and would establish whether or not there is either a bug in…

The whole thing hinges on whether you're stupid enough to leave Norwich without sufficiently charging. Do the same run a hundred more times, and nobody will fail as long as they exercise that basic amount of care. In that sense, reproduction is pointless. We already know the result, within a margin of error.

I just don't think that's fair. If Tesla Engineers tell you "an hour's charge will bring the battery back" then I think many people would just take that at face value.

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#196

Post by taproot »

vacri wrote: post #183
taproot wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am still unclear, were these diagnostics being sent to a tesla server somewhere or was this information hardlined post review? Source? Also, how is this bad anyway? Google probably has this information already, if not google, your phone's carrier definitely does.

The more people that track your movements, the more potential for security breaches or malicious use.

I trust Tesla a lot more than I trust Google, Facebook, ISP's, or the banks, and they know everything there is to know about me.

I do understand what you are saying (perhaps more than most people), I guess we just differ in opinion about how much it matters.

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#197

Post by Jun8 »

waterlesscloud wrote: post #49
nikcub wrote: post #42

The biggest mistake Elon made in his response was to dump all that data and to attempt to tear apart each part of the review. This means that the rebuttals now involve taking pieces of that and disproving them in the aim of disproving Tesla's entire argument. Tesla should have posted nothing more than a single line statement saying that Broder left the last charging station for a 65 mile trip with 32 miles on his ran…

Agreed. They've allowed Broder to just ride this out by muddying the waters. He walks away from this only slightly tainted now. At the very least, his notes and the resulting article are not accurate. He confirms this himself. This isn't surprising, and not necessarily malicious. But it's extremely common, as anyone who has ever dealt with a journalist knows. As a group, journalists simply get a great number of thing…

"As a group, journalists simply get a great number of things wrong and cannot be relied on for detail oriented work."

This is quite a general statement, which in itself cannot be defended. Furthermore, I think that NYT's standards are higher than the average journalist taken "as a group". Their fact checking is rigorous (although, of course, is not infallible, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jayson_Blair)

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#198

Post by corresation »

VeejayRampay wrote: post #100
nikcub wrote: post #42

The biggest mistake Elon made in his response was to dump all that data and to attempt to tear apart each part of the review. This means that the rebuttals now involve taking pieces of that and disproving them in the aim of disproving Tesla's entire argument. Tesla should have posted nothing more than a single line statement saying that Broder left the last charging station for a 65 mile trip with 32 miles on his ran…

Exactly. The bottom line is that if there's no good reason to leave a gas station with 32 more miles to go in the tank if you intend to go another 65 miles. The fact that the car is electric or a Model S is irrelevant. It's just a dumb choice and if you make such a mistake, I am of the opinion that it disqualifies from saying anything about said car. Especially if you usually specialize in mostly hagiographic article…

The bottom line is that if there's no good reason to leave a gas station with 32 more miles to go in the tank if you intend to go another 65 miles.

I find the notion that people like standing around looking at charging stations for hours on end extremely odd. The test was supposed to simulate a normal driver, and a normal driver will absolutely do the minimum necessary. With gasoline -- a ridiculous energy rich substance that we can fill in just a few short minutes -- most of us still find the five minute fill up once a week or less a nuisance.

Tesla is actually contradicting themselves a bit: They berate him for not heeding the in-car predicted range, and then pat themselves on the back that it actually went 51 miles, and supposedly still had juice (apparently an accessory battery was dead). In other words, that what their engineers supposedly told him (that it would recover the incredible loss of power overnight, from 90 miles left to 20 miles left, once the batteries warmed up) was actually largely right.

Musk also makes a big show about him not turning down the temperature, when his own graph shows that not much further in the journey he turned it to the minimum for an extended period of time.

Reading both sides, I find Musk's heavy handed attack response incredibly unpalatable. He was so hasty in attacking, he ignored that his own data and his own claims in many ways supported the reporter.

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#199

Post by meisterbrendan »

Tesla customer care appears ignorant/poorly trained. This debate over things as trivial as a .6 mile discrepancy actually underscores the most damaging assertion that can be made against Tesla: that driving its vehicles in normal winter conditions requires some sort of finesse or special knowledge that most customers won't have. Niether end customers nor reporters should be expected to have deeper knowledge of the product they are buying/testing than the customer care agents who are assisting them. Tesla needs to clean its house of bad customer care and accept responsibility for its role in Broder's bad experience.

Re: That Tesla Data: What It Says and What It Doesn’t

#200

Post by i2oc »

As a Model S owner I found that taking the position that an electric vehicle (EV) should behave exactly the same as an internal combustion engine (ICE) car, especially in sub-zero temperatures was a big mistake on his part. Before we set out to test the limits of our Model S in cold weather we spent time learning about how it behaves. Call me crazy, but when using a different fuel source that seems like a reasonable step to me?

http://www.colinbowern.com/posts/drive-smart-in-the-cold-wit...

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