Tesla created secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints

[CitizenVectron]

Tesla’s secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints

WWW.REUTERS.COM

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About a decade ago, Tesla rigged the dashboard readouts in its electric cars to provide “rosy” projections of how far owners can drive before needing to recharge, a source told Reuters.

 

Par for the course.

[Captain Pickle]

I hope owners like Swedish meatballs!

[TUFKAK]

I lm glad I never bought one of these pos’

[SuperSpreader]

Feels good to never have bought in. My wife's Chevy Bolt was always accurate. I mean the batteries started exploding and they bought it back but accurate!

[PaladinSolo]

Haven't really seen cold weather mileage talked about with cars, school bus manufacturers have told us from the start that when its cold out that 135 mile range is gonna be more like 70 when its cold out, not surprised its about the same with cars, but it sounds like Tesla was even overhyping their ideal conditions mileage.  Basically unless its 70 and overcast you're not going to ever hit the advertised mileage with an EV, once you're outside the 60-80 degree temperature range the battery needs to be cooled or heated to maintain ideal temperatures, and those are separate to the interior a/c, and heaters.  So mileage drops like a stone in cold temps, and a fair bit in hotter temps but cooler is less energy intensive.

[finaljedi]

This is definitely the guy I trust to create the everything app.

[CitizenVectron]

17 minutes ago, PaladinSolo said:

Haven't really seen cold weather mileage talked about with cars, school bus manufacturers have told us from the start that when its cold out that 135 mile range is gonna be more like 70 when its cold out, not surprised its about the same with cars, but it sounds like Tesla was even overhyping their ideal conditions mileage.  Basically unless its 70 and overcast you're not going to ever hit the advertised mileage with an EV, once you're outside the 60-80 degree temperature range the battery needs to be cooled or heated to maintain ideal temperatures, and those are separate to the interior a/c, and heaters.  So mileage drops like a stone in cold temps, and a fair bit in hotter temps but cooler is less energy intensive.

 

In Canada in -40C temperatures (and parked outside overnight), Teslas appear to have a reduced range on the scale of -40%. The main reason is not battery efficiency in the cold, however (which is a relatively minor hit), but rather cabin heating. If you're willing to drive without cabin heat, the range only drops by 10% or so. Obviously everyone likes heat, though, lol.

[PaladinSolo]

33 minutes ago, CitizenVectron said:

 

In Canada in -40C temperatures (and parked outside overnight), Teslas appear to have a reduced range on the scale of -40%. The main reason is not battery efficiency in the cold, however (which is a relatively minor hit), but rather cabin heating. If you're willing to drive without cabin heat, the range only drops by 10% or so. Obviously everyone likes heat, though, lol.

What i'm saying is the batteries have a heating and cooling system to keep them at their ideal temps, which is between ~65-80 degress F, in order to do this they have separate heating and chillers for the batteries themselves that are separate from your cabin heating and a/c, like yeah even if you don't turn your heaters on in the winter you're going to see pretty big mileage loss because of the battery heaters themselves.

 

In the last year or so i've sat through far too many EV presentations, another thing is in extreme cold your batteries will also not take a charge so the battery heaters need to be on so that it can even charge, on buses this takes as much as 4kwh from your charger so if you have a low end fast charger at 20kwh its taking 20% of your power just to keep the batteries warm enough to charge.  I'm sure something similar is happening with cars, basically EVs with ion lithium batteries in cold weather is no bueno.

[TwinIon]

I see cold weather range talked about all the time with EVs, though it's not really a worry for me here in San Diego. Tesla, and really all EV makers, should probably be forced to disclose the full effect of cold on range.

 

I think the issue around cold is pretty secondary compared to the rest of this article. Teslas show an unrealistic, best case scenario range figure for the first 50% of the battery life. The mere fact that the algorithm would fix itself after 50% shows they had a better way to estimate range, they just didn't want to show people real numbers. The other striking thing about this story is that they got so many service requests because they were lying about the range that they had to set up a whole customer service division to canceling appointments, which was apparently necessary because most of these people's cars were fine and there wasn't anything to be done. So rather than lower the number of complaints by showing people the realistic numbers that Telsa can calculate, they decided to build a team dedicated to eliminating the appointments.

 

Not that I want to absolve Telsa here at all, but I think a lot of this comes from an unnecessary level of range anxiety suffered by the general public. Yes, there are plenty of people that regularly drive hundreds of miles a day, but that is not most people. I know people who won't even consider an EV because of range but haven't personally driven more than 200 miles a day in a decade or more, and it wouldn't even be their only car!

[DarkStar189]

2 hours ago, CitizenVectron said:

 

In Canada in -40C temperatures (and parked outside overnight), Teslas appear to have a reduced range on the scale of -40%. The main reason is not battery efficiency in the cold, however (which is a relatively minor hit), but rather cabin heating. If you're willing to drive without cabin heat, the range only drops by 10% or so. Obviously everyone likes heat, though, lol.

I know someone that has a Mustang Mach E. I asked how he liked it and his biggest complaint was the range. Said he wished he wouldn’t have bought it so quickly without researching more.  We get in the car and he’s like check out this bullshit…the range said 249 miles. Turns the heat on and it goes down to 165. He travels for work a couple of times a month (62 miles each way, 124 total) and said he takes his wife’s car in the winter just to be safe.