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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

#591

Post by 01100011 »

hooloovoo_zoo wrote: post #526
treyd wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Subaru knows about the issue but you have to bring it to their attention if you want a fix. This seems incredibly irresponsible when people could die from being stranded when the meter lies about being able to get home like the other commenter described.

As a fellow 2017 Outback owner, Subaru at least sent out a notice to have this fixed for free in April 2019.

I never got that notice. There is also a firmware bug related to undercharging the battery(shutting the charger off too early) which was also not communicated to me and resulting in getting stranded with a dead battery. Fortunately the car was in a retail parking lot that time and not in the middle of nowhere on the 5 freeway in central CA like when we ran out of gas.

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

#593

Post by 01100011 »

jayd16 wrote: post #537
01100011 wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rented a MY a couple months ago and was surprised how much I, and more surprisingly, my wife, hated it. Now, I despise Elon and the risky safety decisions of Tesla engineers, so I'm biased, but I wanted to give them a shot. Range was horrible. We drove about 100 miles and spent a couple hours over several sessions at superchargers. The handling and turning radius sucked. The controls were frighteningly distracting an…

You drive 100 miles and spent hours charging? That makes no sense. We're you towing something?

Exactly. Nope, no towing. Drove about half those miles and spent about 45 minutes at a supercharger, then drove another 35 or so and spent a little over an hour at another one. In the second case I was trying to get to 90% so I could return the car above the 72% I picked it up at.

We ran the A/C most of the time. I was driving pretty conservatively with about 50/50 highway/city streets. I did try to show off the acceleration abilities once but didn't fully floor it. It's possible that, being a rental(although fairly new) the battery had taken some charging abuse.

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

#594

Post by b112 »

mikestew wrote: post #581
b112 wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, 25k where I am, but in Canuck bucks. Still, even 10k is better than 0k. And many small claims courts forbit compelled discovery. I paid $100, had no lawyer, wrote 2 pages of "what happened", served the paperwork by hand (and went back to the court and gave an affidavit to that effect), and ... The other side "big corp" had a law firm, and several lawyers. I paid $100 and spent a few hours. The paid 50k to their…

The other side "big corp" had a law firm, and several lawyers. Interesting: no lawyers in U. S. small claims court. That probably has something to do with the lower dollar limits in the U. S., but IANAL nor spend much time in court.

There are no lawyers as lawyers. Here, anyone can represent you, on your behalf. But all sorts of lawyerish things (discovery) are prohibited, cost recovery, and the judge must explain things to you, especially if some party uses gibberish(legalese) in an argument.

So the playing field is level, a lawyer as a lawyer doesn't happen, and so it is amusing to see Big Corp pay out of their nose.

Oh, and they must have a representative "standing by" which often means in person.

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

#595

Post by dietsche »

rootusrootus wrote: post #187
dietsche wrote: post #160

As a Tesla owner, I think the source of the confusion is the EPA range displayed in the HUD on the Tesla. We toggled ours to show the battery percentage, which is much more useful to us. We've never owned a gas vehicle that met it's EPA range and the Tesla is no different. No one takes EPA MPG * GALLONS of gas and expects it to be a real life estimate of range. Wind resistance increases EXPONENTIALLY with speed. Driv…

> We've never owned a gas vehicle that met it's EPA range and the Tesla is no different. No one takes EPA MPG * GALLONS of gas and expects it to be a real life estimate of range. Because gas stations are still far more common than fast chargers. We'll get there with EV charging, but right now range does matter, especially if you routinely see half of what was advertised.

I had a similar thought before we purchased our Tesla. Our actual experience has been much better than expected. Here's why:

1) Everyday Driving / Commuting: Much like an ICE vehicle where one thinks about 1/2 tank, 1/4 tank, etc... we think about percentages. For us, a round-trip to the in-laws is 50% in the summer and 60% in the winter, for example. Commuting round trip is ~15% in the winter, and ~12% in the summer. This combined with the fact that the car starts every morning charged to 80% means that we really don't ever worry about super charging in our day-to-day life.

2) Road Trips: The navigation software on the tesla automatically add charging stops where needed, and critically, it is very accurate when predicting range as a percentage when it knows your destination. We typically charge until it say we'll reach our destination/charging stops with 10%. That reserve has always been more than enough even on 1000 - 2000 mile road trips.

My general advice to anyone with a Tesla who has range anxiety: 1) Put the round trip into the trip computer. (e.g. Home => Place I Want To Go To => Home) 2) Always make sure you'll get to your next charging stop with 10 - 15% left according to the trip computer. 3) Relax and enjoy the auto-pilot :)

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

#596

Post by detourdog »

avidiax wrote: post #335
detourdog wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got an i3 with a range extender and a 2 gallon gas tank. The gas tank range can't exceed the battery range and still be an EV. I use the battery almost all the time but knowing I can gas and go 80 miles is great. I drove 1,400 miles to Florida and back. It wasn't noticeably worse experience than an ICE.

https://www.motortrend.com/features/how-to-hack-a-bmw-i3-for... Your car probably has a 2.4 gallon tank, but it's been electronically limited to 1.9 gallons.

It depends on the model year/battery size. That was a US only implementation and as you know there is a work around. The other European feature that should be available in the USA is the ability to set when the REX starts to kick in.

The USA requires the REX to kick in at 6% charge. The problem at that level is that the battery can't compensate during short high power drawls. There is a cheat code that enables the REX to kick in a 25% charge remaining. This seems to provide more on demand amperage but I'm not sure what is happening. Hills and wind have a larger effect on speed when off the REX. The REX is just a tiny motor that maintains the battery level but doesn't connect directly to the electric drive train.

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

#597

Post by ineedasername »

usaar333 wrote: post #384
blake929 wrote: post #313

A lot of comments are discussing the difficulty in estimating range accurately or how all EPA estimates are inflated. But the article claims Tesla knowingly uses an algorithm with inflated numbers and swaps the rost estimate out for a more accurate estimate at 50% charge. That's different than a good faith attempt at estimating range and a dark pattern.

I was trying to interpret what that means. I'm guessing they aren't factoring current conditions above 50% and instead rely on average conditions. I'd be surprised if this is actually worse than what the EPA views as average given the truth-in-advertising requirements they put on Tesla. This isn't entirely unreasonable. Most people whose battery is at 80% aren't going to be depleting it in the next few hours, so say…

> This isn't entirely unreasonable… factoring the present cold morning might produce overly pessimistic guesses

It’s always unreasonable in something like this to present knowingly inaccurate data when accurate data is available. As others have pointed out, Teslas do seem perfectly capable of doing this based on their performance when estimating a particular route. It’s also something other brands do better, so even if there was an argument to be made that Tesla didn’t have the data, it would still be the case that they should have it.

It is also not pessimistic to give an estimate in the conditions you outline: It’s accurate. Whether you’re going to be driving that long is irrelevant because Tesla should not be defaulting to some probabilistic behavior guess prior to even starting the car or entering a route. It should default to “hey, I see you’re driving your car. If you keep driving this is your range”. It shouldn’t default to “I don’t know how long you’ll be driving so I’ll just give a range estimate that assumed you’ll drive for a short time now and then more later and maybe later the conditions will provide better range, so let’s use that number”

I’m not sure why Tesla would be defended in this point by anyone when other EV’s do this more accurately and consistently. If it was a general problem and no one could do it any better then by all means it would be unreasonable to complain about Tesla, it would simply be a limit of the technology. But it’s not.

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

#598

Post by somat »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #436
lancesells wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The use of AC / Heat will also just burn through your battery or your gas at a much faster rate.

Slight nitpick: Using heat won't affect gas consumption of an ICE car. The heat is waste heat that otherwise would be dissipated through the radiator at the front of the car. Turning on the heat diverts coolant to a heat exchanger (tiny radiator) in the ventilation system that warms the air in the cabin.

However note that sometimes the A/C will be on at the same time as the heater in order to dry out the air.

This is one of those stupid facts that lives rent-free in my head. "If you want 'dry' hot air you need to dry it before sending it to the heater. The primary purpose of the A/C is to dry the air(this also happens to cool it), there is already an A/C unit in the ductwork, profit" But I decided to fact check myself and was not able to find much information. I did find one page that said this mainly occurs on the "defrost" setting, which makes sense as this is what is used when you don't want your windows to fog.

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

#599

Post by AnimalMuppet »

klaff wrote: post #351
prewett wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Air resistance is proportional to v^2. My dad told a story once where he was driving out west borrowing one of his brother's cars with a broken speedometer. After he got back he said to his brother, "the car just seemed to top out at a certain point" and his brother said "yeah, that's about 85 mph" (the national speed limit was 55 mph at that time). So at 85 mph the air resistance equaled the force the engine could a…

Force is proportional to square of speed but power = force*speed so proportional to speed^3.

That's not how this works.

First, the force that is proportional to the square of the speed is the drag force, which means it's the force you need to supply just to keep the speed from dropping. Power = force * speed is a different "force" - it's the force produced by the engine.

Second, power output of an engine typically has an RPM where it peaks. Past that point, more speed means less power output, which means much less force output, because the force is the power divided by the speed. But force needed still increases as the square of speed.

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

#600

Post by sschueller »

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”.

Why a xylophone and not a bell? Seems like an odd choice for an instrument other than it's name also starts with an x...
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