8 ms·

Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway

94 points by jfb 14y ago

codex 14y ago
It sounds as though the problem is simply that the car loses range unexpectedly depending on the weather, so you can't necessarily count on the range you thought you had the next morning, and the degree of mile loss can be extreme. I imagine this is a problem for road trips, the occasional camping trip or overnight at a friend's house, or even when using an outdoor parking lot for eight hours (e.g. when at work or at an offsite). However, for daily commuting, it's not an issue, because presumably there is sufficient buffer if you charge every night. What's a bit disturbing about this article isn't the laws of physics, but that he was being coached directly from Tesla. If Tesla HQ can't coach a reporter 1:1 out of a devastating result, what hope does the average early adopter have? Either the reporter twisted the facts, or the car has horrible temperature problems, or the Tesla coaches seriously screwed up. I hope it's not a real issue. A hotel manager might be able to let one Tesla plug in overnight, but there isn't infrastructure to let ten or twenty Tesla owners do the same--yet. However, just as wifi became a competitive advantage to offer at hotels, so will EV charging stations. Perhaps even pay parking lots will begin to offer them.
tokenadult 14y ago
Very worth reading if you want to know what it's like to drive a Tesla Model S on an actual road trip. The New York Times reporter John M. Broder finds out that the gauge in the Model S to estimate remaining mileage before the next charge is badly confused by temperatures below the usual temperatures in California. I remember back when I used to have a travel-intensive job that I was flying into airports all over the United States and getting into unfamiliar models of cars rented on the corporate account. That was sometimes no fun at all. But all of those cars fit everyone's familiar mental model of displaying fuel remaining. The Tesla Model S, by contrast, reports miles still able to drive in a dynamic model that can rapidly get out of touch with reality. And of course it takes a good bit longer to fully recharge a Tesla, even with high-speed recharging, than to pump gasoline into any other kind of car. This will take some major getting used to for most drivers.
- jfb 14y ago
  Of course an EV is going to have trouble in cold weather -- it's just physics. It's just surprising to me that so obvious a situation didn't come up in testing the software. As a resident of Toronto who was interested in the Model S, it's a bit eye-opening.
- purplelobster 14y ago
  For sure. The lack of charging stations will eventually be solved, but longer charging times and unreliable readings might be with us forever. Hopefully the cost offset for fuel will make it worth it.
  - bwhite 14y ago
    Gas stations are incredibly common. Public EV charging stations will never be as common unless a different business model is adopted. If EVs become common, people will have home charging stations. Demand for non-at-home charging stations will come from (1) folks who drive a lot and need to charge intraday (and who cannot charge at work) and (2) road trippers. The sum of both of these categories is fairly small and less demand means less supply. So if you do fit into one of those two categories, you will need to plan your driving carefully instead of figuring that you'll be able to pick up some gas when you need it. This can be overcome by arranging for the proliferation of public EV charging stations even absent the demand. Perhaps the manufacturer or municipalities will subsidize it.
    - glenra 14y ago
      Making people sit and wait for an hour whenever they need to recharge is just plain nuts. It makes the "road tripper" use case untenable. The right way to handle this for road trippers is to swap the battery packs or swap their contents. Don't make the driver wait while his battery is recharged - swap in a full pack and send him on his way. Charge the battery that was left behind slowly and at leisure, then give it to the next driver who pulls in needing a charge. I don't care how many charging stations there are - adding multiple hours of charging time to a short trip like that is just not going to work. Although there's one other conceivable option for a technical solution - if you could add charging circuitry to the freeway and recharge while driving, that would be a game-changer.
stcredzero 14y ago
My friends think I'm dowdy. Until recent years, I was very conservative about estimates. Every "event" in a trip adds 5 minutes, no matter how "nothing" it seems. I was often too early, but never late. A Tesla S with the 260 mile battery, I would treat like a car with 130 miles range. Plenty for an around town commuter and errand vehicle. A Leaf, I would treat like a 50 mile range car. Also, why don't those things come with a propane heater? Electric heat makes no sense.
- michael_miller 14y ago
  Knowing nothing about heaters, I'm curious: why does electric heat make no sense? My intuition would be that an electric heater would require far fewer components (especially considering the battery is already in place), be less dangerous, and require less maintenance. What is the relative efficiency of electric heaters to propane heaters?
  - eropple 14y ago
    I don't think they "make no sense", and I'm not sure a propane heater is the answer, but an electric heater is going to require the use of battery power otherwise used for getting you from point A to point B.
    - stcredzero 14y ago
      In terms of how big a chunk they take out of range, they're a disaster.
  - danielweber 14y ago
    Electric heat via resisters is very simple, but very inefficient. (EDIT: Thermodynamically space-heaters are 100% efficient, since they always convert their source energy into heat. They are inefficient from a monetary point-of-view.) You can do electric heat via heat pumps, but it requires more equipment and it doesn't work if it's too cold. You can get about a 4 to 5 advantage over plain resistance heat. Gasoline engines lose a lot of energy to waste heat -- but sometimes that waste heat is exactly what you want.
zdgman 14y ago
It seems like the charge right before he stalled was the issue. I know he wasn't at a super charging station but he probably should have spent a couple of hours re-charging it instead of an hour. Cold weather and running something that is power intensive (the heater) will drastically effect your mileage if you are relying on a battery to power your car. Tesla probably should do a better job of communicating this but it doesn't seem like a flaw with the car.
- jfb 14y ago
  Cold weather is going to murder your range. That's not a flaw with the car per se, but it's definitely an issue with EVs.
- freehunter 14y ago
  If the battery meter can't cope with typical American temperature ranges yet it being sold in these areas, yeah, it's a flaw. If it says 100 miles left and after 10 miles now tells you 50, yeah, it's a flaw. Can the flaw be corrected? Maybe, maybe not. But it's still a flaw.
  - zdgman 14y ago
    I wouldn't call this a flaw, it happens to batteries when they are exposed to temperatures like this. The gauge for the battery is accurately trying to show you your usage in real-time. I bet he probably could have gauged it by jumping in the car turning it on and then starting the heater as well. His mileage would have declined before he even started driving. Think of it this way, batteries always improve in 2nd / 3rd gen devices (look at apple) and I am sure that is what Tesla will start to address.
    - alexqgb 14y ago
      The flaw (and it is a very major flaw) is in the reporting system, which is unable to give drivers planning their drives reliable information with which to plan their drives. That is flawed almost by definition. The reasons why are utterly irrelevant. A flawed fuel reading is a fundemental flaw in a product that is essentially useless without fuel.
saulrh 14y ago
This blog post states the obvious: early adopters better know what they're in for and what they're doing. The author isn't an experienced early adopter and doesn't know what they're doing, and rightly concludes that the technology isn't ready for universal mainstream use. Unfortunately, the article entirely fails to address the point and is aimed squarely at an audience that won't get it either. It will be used as ammunition against electric vehicles for months. This subtle, yet thorough, misrepresentation is irresponsible and quite annoying.
- malloreon 14y ago
  Replace him with "an experienced early adopter." How would the article be different? Would he have been able to get where he wanted to go, or would he have not tried to go as far as the car said he could go?
  - saulrh 14y ago
    He wouldn't have tried running the vehicle to the edges of its optimal-condition performance in non-optimal conditions. Or he would have been expecting trouble and reacted early enough to avoid being towed. Or, most of all, he would have emphasized in his writing that his experience is unusual and that the article will be obsolete in a year. An average consumer with one of these cars will be able to draw on years of wisdom and infrastructure that the early-adopters had to develop for them.
    - stcredzero 14y ago
      > He wouldn't have tried running the vehicle to the edges of its optimal-condition performance in non-optimal conditions. Yeah, either the author was kinda ignorant about how batteries react to weather, or he was trying to achieve a bit of sensationalism.
  - labcomputer 14y ago
    >Replace him with "an experienced early adopter." How would the article be different? So, I've been reading the forums at teslamotorsclub.com recently, and there are a lot of questions (and answers) about the Model S's range. From what has been written over there, it sounds like the car's speed has the biggest impact on range. In the NYT piece, I notice that the only time he mentions his speed is after it started to look like he might not have enough range to make it to his destination--and then he only mentioned how slow he had to drive. I would submit, then, that an "experienced early adopter" would know that his driving speed matters and therefore not try to drive down the expressway "upside-down at mach 3 with his hair on fire." I also notice that the author made no attempt to charge the car at his destination in Connecticut. Instead, he planed to rely exclusively upon Tesla's "Superchargers" for the entire trip. Again, an "experience early adopter" would know that the Model S can be plugged into a clothes dryer outlet and fully charged overnight (i.e., no waiting). He could have started his second day with a fully-charged battery, if he chose to. Actually, the author probably would have had enough range for the rest of his trip if he had even plugged into a standard 120V domestic outlet in Groton. Frankly, it sounds like the author was trying to make his life difficult. Almost a third of the verbiage is devoted to range problems that were a direct result of his decision not to charge in Groton. When drivers choose not to fill up before driving across Death Valley, do we blame the driver or the car? This isn't to say that the car is ready for prime-time. After all, the author may be representative of the general public. However, I think that anyone with even a modicum of curiosity about his new car--and more importantly, someone who, by purchasing one, had some sort of incentive to make things work instead of writing a diatribe in the NYT--would have no trouble figuring out these things, and avoiding the range problems described in the article.
ngvrnd 14y ago
Well, that could have gone better.
peteforde 14y ago
As a fan of Tesla's efforts, it pains me to read this; no matter where the blame lies (physics, bad planning, poorly tested diagnostics software) this article will haunt the company for years. Every oil lobbyist will eat this up, and it should become the foundation of any EV-haters argument. And that sucks. However, I'm annoyed that Tesla's UX people let a car with this much design intelligence leave without connecting range estimations to a simple thermometer. I understand that to HN readers batteries in the cold is "simple physics" but if the battery indicator jumps around like a BitTorrent download time estimation, people will quickly learn to not trust what the car tells them. Consumers that are highly neurotic about the road trip problem are much more likely to remember these sorts of horror stories when making a purchasing decision.
- CamperBob2 14y ago
  Also, the idea that recharging stations spaced 200 miles apart are in any way adequate for a 265-mile trip is just... weird. Would you trust your laptop or cell phone's battery life estimate to that extent?
- fernly 14y ago
  But if I read the article right, the car IS adjusting its display for temperature. When the temp went down, the calculated available miles went down also -- and almost accurately, that is, the car went dead about when the miles-left display went to zero. The question I'd have is, how much current would they have to divert to keep the batteries warm? It seems like the juice expended to hold the battery pack at 20C might be less than the capacity lost by letting the batteries go down to an ambient -5C. Or, they could provide what a lot of east-coast cars have, a built in engine-block heater that you plug in to a 110V extension cord overnight. Except in this case it would be a battery pack warmer, but the same idea, keep the important bits toasty over a cold night.
  - chrisbolt 14y ago
    When the temp went down, the calculated available miles went down also -- and almost accurately, that is, the car went dead about when the miles-left display went to zero. Showing that the range is zero when the battery is dead is not hard. The problem is when the displayed range drops faster than you're traveling, and if that wasn't the problem, he wouldn't have been stranded. If it was adjusting its display for temperature, it wouldn't have been wrong. Or, they could provide what a lot of east-coast cars have, a built in engine-block heater that you plug in to a 110V extension cord overnight. Had he plugged the car into a 110V outlet overnight, the battery would have been charged in the morning.
nlh 14y ago
So I run a luxury car rental company and one of the most common questions I get from folks these days (especially those in the tech community) is: "When are you guys getting a Tesla?" This article is _exactly_ why we're not getting one for the fleet anytime soon, and it's basically the answer I've been giving people since the Roadster came out (and the questions started). Tesla is an awesome, awesome company. I'm a fan. I'm thinking of getting a Model S for myself. I think (and hope) they're going to be huge. But they're not ready for the truly mass-market quite yet - and car rental customer (even luxury car rental customers) are the mass market. I could see the exact scenario outlined in the article happening to renters constantly - except for one difference: We would be yelled at by the customers, not Tesla ;) ("Why is my car saying 'battery dead'? I did nothing wrong. Send a truck to pick me up or I'm writing a bad review about you guys.") Sigh. Anyway, I'm still a fan despite the headaches - and I know they'll grow out of it.
- bengl3rt 14y ago
  Off topic, but... Luxury car rental company? Please tell me more (like do you have a website??) I ask because I know of a couple of luxury car rental companies, but there is one ore more things about each of them that make them exceedingly unpleasant to deal with. I would be interested to try doing business with a luxury car rental company that is run by people who also read HN - seems to be a good signal for not-totally-fucked-up business practices.
  - MJR 14y ago
    A little googling later... http://www.gothamdreamcars.com/ http://www.gothamdreamcars.com/
- ilaksh 14y ago
  I think that people are blaming the wrong thing here. The car works great. The problem is that there are very few places to charge it. If there were more than two cities in the whole area to charge, he could have stopped sooner at one of those.
  - 14y ago
danielweber 14y ago
I used to be excited about electric cars, but lately I've been wondering if it wouldn't be better to use the power source to manufacture fossil fuels using an environmental source of carbon and ship that to customers. That would make the fuel carbon neutral. Because the world understands completely how to store and handle and deal with liquid fossil fuels.
- stcredzero 14y ago
  There's also something elegant about the technology. If you compare the complexity and expense versus the energy density of a lithium-ion battery pack and a metal can, there's no comparison. However, in an ideal world, I would think that carbon neutral hydrocarbons would become a niche fuel for things like long haul trucks and bulldozers. (And for auxiliary space heaters in people's electric cars.)
revelation 14y ago
If you're staying somewhere, plug it in. Even a 110V will be able to keep the battery warm enough to avoid these losses. No, its not perfect. Neither is the choke on your motorcycle or the people in siberia waking up every 2 hours to start their combustion engines because blowing up what was generated in thousands of years refuses to happen in a cold engine block. But I guess everyone with a modicum of knowledge has by now realized that a) we can't keep blowing up that stuff and b) there won't be another magic energy material like oil, ever again.
CamperBob2 14y ago
In a rational world, every one of the gas stations he passed would have had a rack of fully charged swappable batteries, ready for installation in less time than it would have taken to fill a conventional gas tank. Why nobody seems to understand how stupid charging an EV in real time is, is something that I find astonishing. (To clarify: I can understand why most people don't understand why non-swappable batteries are stupid, but I can't understand why someone like Elon Musk doesn't understand that. I'll admit that it makes me wonder if I'm missing something.)
- bpc9 14y ago
  The article mentioned that the top-end battery weighs in at half a ton --- not exactly hot-swapping material. Also, when it comes to safety, center of gravity, chassis rigidity, etc --- I'm sure there were a myriad of engineering decisions beyond weight that go against hot swapping. And that's not even getting to added cost and logistics of maintaining a network of skilled battery swap experts, "ownership" over the batteries (e.g. who is responsible for replacing failing units if they are shared around the community of Tesla owners). I'm probably just scratching the surface with a minute of thought. I'm sure that the folks at Telsa have been over this ground, and much more.
  - CamperBob2 14y ago
    You're right, those are all drawbacks. They all pale in comparison to the advantages, though. Swapping my car's battery should be as big a deal as swapping the propane cylinder on my gas grill. And yes, batteries these days are perfectly capable of monitoring themselves in a leased-usage scenario. Your laptop battery has its own CPU and EEPROM, for instance. To understand why, see any recent news story on the Dreamliner.
    - eropple 14y ago
      It would be nice, sure, but your propane cylinder doesn't cost thousands of dollars or weigh half a ton. There are physical realities to contend with.
noonespecial 14y ago
Here's a hint from the usability department: Underestimate the remaining miles. Even if that makes you look bad up front. Its an eerie form of cognitive dissonance when your reserves are dropping faster than you consumption and the wheels in your mind spin wondering "will I have enough". You never forget this feeling. Even if its just a test drive, you'll associate Tesla cars with that feeling forever after.
- CamperBob2 14y ago
  Exactly. The alternative is to require your customers to pass a DiffEq test before you sell them the car.
- rogerbinns 14y ago
  > Underestimate the remaining miles I suspect they already do, hence the comment that he'll still have some range even when it says zero. The problem is what number to display after a full charge. If it doesn't strongly resemble the specification range then people won't be happy.
evck 14y ago
Worked at Tesla and never got to see the 'recharge now' warning. That would be quite alarming.
andyl 14y ago
I just drove by some dude who was running down a pitch-dark freeway with a small child at his side. They were carrying a can of gas to refill at the station a couple miles ahead. Damn gasoline engines - so unreliable! You'd think after 100+ years of development they'd have sorted this stuff out.
- CamperBob2 14y ago
  Hardly the same thing, unless the guy's gas gauge lied to him.
  - outworlder 14y ago
    Which happens sometimes.
    - CamperBob2 14y ago
      And can be fixed when it does.
uslic001 14y ago
Not ready for primetime is an understatement.
notdrunkatall 14y ago
As a TSLA shareholder and as a general fan of the company, this is disappointing. TSLA's been doing everything right, which is what has given them so much momentum so early in the game, and if they are going to be the big disruptor that I'm betting on, they cannot afford to lose that momentum. If they start mis-stepping, they won't last long, and this is a misstep that many, many people at TSLA should have seen coming from many miles away. Batteries suck in the cold. Did no one think to test the Model S in the east's freezing temperatures before they turned one over to a journalist? What gives, Elon?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- revelation 14y ago
  There is no magic fix for this. It's like asking to turn off gravity and friction so you can have a more comfortable trip. The reason for the big losses in the cold is the battery management system that is trying to keep the pack warm and has to expend energy to do so. You can opt not to do any battery management, but then you get thermal runaway and a life-threatening Boeing situation, or (in the cold) your battery pack is damaged. They picked the best option there is under the circumstances.
  - nickv 14y ago
    Possible valid fixes: - Have the reporting system look at current temperature and change the reported range. - More supercharger stations closer together. (200 miles apart for a reported range of 268?! Ballsy. Especially in the extreme cold of the northeast. Reckless when you are giving a car to a NYTimes reviewer.) - Don't have the parking brake LOCK so you can't even move the car without a flatbed truck. - Have the car warn/inform the driver when they park somewhere cold to keep it plugged in to warm the battery up and that's off the top of my head. Many things can be done. This isn't necessarily a 'physics problem.' It's communicating and setting expectations. When the car says "100 miles" and you are stuck at the side of the road after 50 miles, it doesn't matter that "the physics make sense". What matters is you were screwed by completely false information. The fix is simple. In fact, it's so simple, I would be SHOCKED if the TSLA guys aren't already including it in a future firmware update.
jacobn 14y ago
Electric cars are second cars - the commuter one, not the road trip one. They currently don't make sense for road trips, absolutely. But they make a ton of sense for commuting, most likely even in cold climates. It's an interesting and broadly relevant article, but it feels like we're having the wrong discussion - we might be single males, but the target market for the time being is well off families considering a new second car... ;)
thrownaway2424 14y ago
This is why electric cars are not magical fairies and can't solve the structural problems around transportation in the USA. They suck for long-haul travel, but nobody should have to have their own car for long-haul travel. It should be possible to travel around by train, using a rented car for only the last short leg of the trip, if it happens to be rural, or local public transport otherwise. Electrics would be just perfect hired cars if you only needed to go ten miles and back or something like that.
cromwellian 14y ago
Why did the reporter have to rope Steven Chu into the article? Even if all the facts are 100% right, it seems lame to try and make this a political issue. I know people who have done family road trips with the Tesla S already and didn't have those problems in normal weather. One could surmise that pushing the edges of the range AND pushing extreme weather conditions might be risky, and in an EV it is certainly riskier than in a gas car, but like the Top Gear "driving a roadster on a race track drains the battery horrendously", it somewhat reads like an attempt to intentionally push an EV to the breaking limit, and then write a negative article about it. The political angle of trying to make Tesla look like a Steve Chu/DoE failure increases my suspicions. Could you imagine a reporter writing an article about a gas car that he intentionally drove at the limit of its mileage, got stuck on an interstate, and then turned around and roped in government loans to General Motors? The Tesla S deserves criticism in order to shake out bugs and improve the software to reduce customer surprise, to better predict battery life, no doubt about that. But this should not be used by the anti-EV crusaders who have an axe to grind to score points against ex-Obama administration officials.
- goodcanadian 14y ago
  I agree with your comments about the politics, but I have one nitpick. 30F does not sound like extreme weather. Where I grew up, below freezing is normal for half the year. I am really curious how they are going to solve the problem of making electric vehicles work at -40F.
- jasonlotito 14y ago
  The weather described in that article is not extreme. It's normal. Driving at much slower speeds than traffic and not using heat in the winter is the extreme part. Cars that require extreme conditions to drive have problems.
- cromwellian 14y ago
  I agree, on the northeast, 30F isn't extreme. I'm biased, I live in California where I wear shorts and t-shirt almost 365 days a year. :)
agwa 14y ago
Is there anything to be gained by making the parking brake electrically actuated? Such parking brakes are becoming increasingly common in cars of all types and it bugs me. From an engineering perspective, it seems like it's just introducing a complex dependency that can fail to a critical part of the car.
joonix 14y ago
I don't understand why we're not trying to run our cars on natural gas.
toddasmith 14y ago
Filling up a Toyota Camry with gasoline (say 15 gallons) adds about 90 pounds of fuel. A lithium-ion battery with the same energy content would weigh about 5,800 pounds. Clearly electric vehicles will have a difficult time competing with gasoline vehicles no matter how much charging times are reduced or how much better the software gets. It seems that without some breakthrough the sweet spot for battery-electric vehicles is urban driving done after charging overnight at home.
jswanson 14y ago
Elon musk is claiming that the article is misleading: NYTimes article about Tesla range in cold is fake. Vehicle logs tell true story that he didn't actually charge to max & took a long detour. source: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/301049593385340928 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/301049593385340928

94 points by jfb 14y ago

codex 14y ago

It sounds as though the problem is simply that the car loses range unexpectedly depending on the weather, so you can't necessarily count on the range you thought you had the next morning, and the degree of mile loss can be extreme. I imagine this is a problem for road trips, the occasional camping trip or overnight at a friend's house, or even when using an outdoor parking lot for eight hours (e.g. when at work or at an offsite). However, for daily commuting, it's not an issue, because presumably there is sufficient buffer if you charge every night. What's a bit disturbing about this article isn't the laws of physics, but that he was being coached directly from Tesla. If Tesla HQ can't coach a reporter 1:1 out of a devastating result, what hope does the average early adopter have? Either the reporter twisted the facts, or the car has horrible temperature problems, or the Tesla coaches seriously screwed up. I hope it's not a real issue. A hotel manager might be able to let one Tesla plug in overnight, but there isn't infrastructure to let ten or twenty Tesla owners do the same--yet. However, just as wifi became a competitive advantage to offer at hotels, so will EV charging stations. Perhaps even pay parking lots will begin to offer them.

tokenadult 14y ago

Very worth reading if you want to know what it's like to drive a Tesla Model S on an actual road trip. The New York Times reporter John M. Broder finds out that the gauge in the Model S to estimate remaining mileage before the next charge is badly confused by temperatures below the usual temperatures in California. I remember back when I used to have a travel-intensive job that I was flying into airports all over the United States and getting into unfamiliar models of cars rented on the corporate account. That was sometimes no fun at all. But all of those cars fit everyone's familiar mental model of displaying fuel remaining. The Tesla Model S, by contrast, reports miles still able to drive in a dynamic model that can rapidly get out of touch with reality. And of course it takes a good bit longer to fully recharge a Tesla, even with high-speed recharging, than to pump gasoline into any other kind of car. This will take some major getting used to for most drivers.

jfb 14y ago
Of course an EV is going to have trouble in cold weather -- it's just physics. It's just surprising to me that so obvious a situation didn't come up in testing the software. As a resident of Toronto who was interested in the Model S, it's a bit eye-opening.
purplelobster 14y ago
For sure. The lack of charging stations will eventually be solved, but longer charging times and unreliable readings might be with us forever. Hopefully the cost offset for fuel will make it worth it.
- bwhite 14y ago
  Gas stations are incredibly common. Public EV charging stations will never be as common unless a different business model is adopted. If EVs become common, people will have home charging stations. Demand for non-at-home charging stations will come from (1) folks who drive a lot and need to charge intraday (and who cannot charge at work) and (2) road trippers. The sum of both of these categories is fairly small and less demand means less supply. So if you do fit into one of those two categories, you will need to plan your driving carefully instead of figuring that you'll be able to pick up some gas when you need it. This can be overcome by arranging for the proliferation of public EV charging stations even absent the demand. Perhaps the manufacturer or municipalities will subsidize it.
  - glenra 14y ago
    Making people sit and wait for an hour whenever they need to recharge is just plain nuts. It makes the "road tripper" use case untenable. The right way to handle this for road trippers is to swap the battery packs or swap their contents. Don't make the driver wait while his battery is recharged - swap in a full pack and send him on his way. Charge the battery that was left behind slowly and at leisure, then give it to the next driver who pulls in needing a charge. I don't care how many charging stations there are - adding multiple hours of charging time to a short trip like that is just not going to work. Although there's one other conceivable option for a technical solution - if you could add charging circuitry to the freeway and recharge while driving, that would be a game-changer.

stcredzero 14y ago

My friends think I'm dowdy. Until recent years, I was very conservative about estimates. Every "event" in a trip adds 5 minutes, no matter how "nothing" it seems. I was often too early, but never late. A Tesla S with the 260 mile battery, I would treat like a car with 130 miles range. Plenty for an around town commuter and errand vehicle. A Leaf, I would treat like a 50 mile range car. Also, why don't those things come with a propane heater? Electric heat makes no sense.

michael_miller 14y ago
Knowing nothing about heaters, I'm curious: why does electric heat make no sense? My intuition would be that an electric heater would require far fewer components (especially considering the battery is already in place), be less dangerous, and require less maintenance. What is the relative efficiency of electric heaters to propane heaters?
- eropple 14y ago
  I don't think they "make no sense", and I'm not sure a propane heater is the answer, but an electric heater is going to require the use of battery power otherwise used for getting you from point A to point B.
  - stcredzero 14y ago
    In terms of how big a chunk they take out of range, they're a disaster.
- danielweber 14y ago
  Electric heat via resisters is very simple, but very inefficient. (EDIT: Thermodynamically space-heaters are 100% efficient, since they always convert their source energy into heat. They are inefficient from a monetary point-of-view.) You can do electric heat via heat pumps, but it requires more equipment and it doesn't work if it's too cold. You can get about a 4 to 5 advantage over plain resistance heat. Gasoline engines lose a lot of energy to waste heat -- but sometimes that waste heat is exactly what you want.

zdgman 14y ago

It seems like the charge right before he stalled was the issue. I know he wasn't at a super charging station but he probably should have spent a couple of hours re-charging it instead of an hour. Cold weather and running something that is power intensive (the heater) will drastically effect your mileage if you are relying on a battery to power your car. Tesla probably should do a better job of communicating this but it doesn't seem like a flaw with the car.

jfb 14y ago
Cold weather is going to murder your range. That's not a flaw with the car per se, but it's definitely an issue with EVs.
freehunter 14y ago
If the battery meter can't cope with typical American temperature ranges yet it being sold in these areas, yeah, it's a flaw. If it says 100 miles left and after 10 miles now tells you 50, yeah, it's a flaw. Can the flaw be corrected? Maybe, maybe not. But it's still a flaw.
- zdgman 14y ago
  I wouldn't call this a flaw, it happens to batteries when they are exposed to temperatures like this. The gauge for the battery is accurately trying to show you your usage in real-time. I bet he probably could have gauged it by jumping in the car turning it on and then starting the heater as well. His mileage would have declined before he even started driving. Think of it this way, batteries always improve in 2nd / 3rd gen devices (look at apple) and I am sure that is what Tesla will start to address.
  - alexqgb 14y ago
    The flaw (and it is a very major flaw) is in the reporting system, which is unable to give drivers planning their drives reliable information with which to plan their drives. That is flawed almost by definition. The reasons why are utterly irrelevant. A flawed fuel reading is a fundemental flaw in a product that is essentially useless without fuel.

saulrh 14y ago

This blog post states the obvious: early adopters better know what they're in for and what they're doing. The author isn't an experienced early adopter and doesn't know what they're doing, and rightly concludes that the technology isn't ready for universal mainstream use. Unfortunately, the article entirely fails to address the point and is aimed squarely at an audience that won't get it either. It will be used as ammunition against electric vehicles for months. This subtle, yet thorough, misrepresentation is irresponsible and quite annoying.

malloreon 14y ago
Replace him with "an experienced early adopter." How would the article be different? Would he have been able to get where he wanted to go, or would he have not tried to go as far as the car said he could go?
- saulrh 14y ago
  He wouldn't have tried running the vehicle to the edges of its optimal-condition performance in non-optimal conditions. Or he would have been expecting trouble and reacted early enough to avoid being towed. Or, most of all, he would have emphasized in his writing that his experience is unusual and that the article will be obsolete in a year. An average consumer with one of these cars will be able to draw on years of wisdom and infrastructure that the early-adopters had to develop for them.
  - stcredzero 14y ago
    > He wouldn't have tried running the vehicle to the edges of its optimal-condition performance in non-optimal conditions. Yeah, either the author was kinda ignorant about how batteries react to weather, or he was trying to achieve a bit of sensationalism.
- labcomputer 14y ago
  >Replace him with "an experienced early adopter." How would the article be different? So, I've been reading the forums at teslamotorsclub.com recently, and there are a lot of questions (and answers) about the Model S's range. From what has been written over there, it sounds like the car's speed has the biggest impact on range. In the NYT piece, I notice that the only time he mentions his speed is after it started to look like he might not have enough range to make it to his destination--and then he only mentioned how slow he had to drive. I would submit, then, that an "experienced early adopter" would know that his driving speed matters and therefore not try to drive down the expressway "upside-down at mach 3 with his hair on fire." I also notice that the author made no attempt to charge the car at his destination in Connecticut. Instead, he planed to rely exclusively upon Tesla's "Superchargers" for the entire trip. Again, an "experience early adopter" would know that the Model S can be plugged into a clothes dryer outlet and fully charged overnight (i.e., no waiting). He could have started his second day with a fully-charged battery, if he chose to. Actually, the author probably would have had enough range for the rest of his trip if he had even plugged into a standard 120V domestic outlet in Groton. Frankly, it sounds like the author was trying to make his life difficult. Almost a third of the verbiage is devoted to range problems that were a direct result of his decision not to charge in Groton. When drivers choose not to fill up before driving across Death Valley, do we blame the driver or the car? This isn't to say that the car is ready for prime-time. After all, the author may be representative of the general public. However, I think that anyone with even a modicum of curiosity about his new car--and more importantly, someone who, by purchasing one, had some sort of incentive to make things work instead of writing a diatribe in the NYT--would have no trouble figuring out these things, and avoiding the range problems described in the article.

ngvrnd 14y ago

Well, that could have gone better.

peteforde 14y ago

As a fan of Tesla's efforts, it pains me to read this; no matter where the blame lies (physics, bad planning, poorly tested diagnostics software) this article will haunt the company for years. Every oil lobbyist will eat this up, and it should become the foundation of any EV-haters argument. And that sucks. However, I'm annoyed that Tesla's UX people let a car with this much design intelligence leave without connecting range estimations to a simple thermometer. I understand that to HN readers batteries in the cold is "simple physics" but if the battery indicator jumps around like a BitTorrent download time estimation, people will quickly learn to not trust what the car tells them. Consumers that are highly neurotic about the road trip problem are much more likely to remember these sorts of horror stories when making a purchasing decision.

CamperBob2 14y ago
Also, the idea that recharging stations spaced 200 miles apart are in any way adequate for a 265-mile trip is just... weird. Would you trust your laptop or cell phone's battery life estimate to that extent?
fernly 14y ago
But if I read the article right, the car IS adjusting its display for temperature. When the temp went down, the calculated available miles went down also -- and almost accurately, that is, the car went dead about when the miles-left display went to zero. The question I'd have is, how much current would they have to divert to keep the batteries warm? It seems like the juice expended to hold the battery pack at 20C might be less than the capacity lost by letting the batteries go down to an ambient -5C. Or, they could provide what a lot of east-coast cars have, a built in engine-block heater that you plug in to a 110V extension cord overnight. Except in this case it would be a battery pack warmer, but the same idea, keep the important bits toasty over a cold night.
- chrisbolt 14y ago
  When the temp went down, the calculated available miles went down also -- and almost accurately, that is, the car went dead about when the miles-left display went to zero. Showing that the range is zero when the battery is dead is not hard. The problem is when the displayed range drops faster than you're traveling, and if that wasn't the problem, he wouldn't have been stranded. If it was adjusting its display for temperature, it wouldn't have been wrong. Or, they could provide what a lot of east-coast cars have, a built in engine-block heater that you plug in to a 110V extension cord overnight. Had he plugged the car into a 110V outlet overnight, the battery would have been charged in the morning.

nlh 14y ago

So I run a luxury car rental company and one of the most common questions I get from folks these days (especially those in the tech community) is: "When are you guys getting a Tesla?" This article is _exactly_ why we're not getting one for the fleet anytime soon, and it's basically the answer I've been giving people since the Roadster came out (and the questions started). Tesla is an awesome, awesome company. I'm a fan. I'm thinking of getting a Model S for myself. I think (and hope) they're going to be huge. But they're not ready for the truly mass-market quite yet - and car rental customer (even luxury car rental customers) are the mass market. I could see the exact scenario outlined in the article happening to renters constantly - except for one difference: We would be yelled at by the customers, not Tesla ;) ("Why is my car saying 'battery dead'? I did nothing wrong. Send a truck to pick me up or I'm writing a bad review about you guys.") Sigh. Anyway, I'm still a fan despite the headaches - and I know they'll grow out of it.

bengl3rt 14y ago
Off topic, but... Luxury car rental company? Please tell me more (like do you have a website??) I ask because I know of a couple of luxury car rental companies, but there is one ore more things about each of them that make them exceedingly unpleasant to deal with. I would be interested to try doing business with a luxury car rental company that is run by people who also read HN - seems to be a good signal for not-totally-fucked-up business practices.
- MJR 14y ago
  A little googling later... http://www.gothamdreamcars.com/ http://www.gothamdreamcars.com/
ilaksh 14y ago
I think that people are blaming the wrong thing here. The car works great. The problem is that there are very few places to charge it. If there were more than two cities in the whole area to charge, he could have stopped sooner at one of those.
- 14y ago

danielweber 14y ago

I used to be excited about electric cars, but lately I've been wondering if it wouldn't be better to use the power source to manufacture fossil fuels using an environmental source of carbon and ship that to customers. That would make the fuel carbon neutral. Because the world understands completely how to store and handle and deal with liquid fossil fuels.

stcredzero 14y ago
There's also something elegant about the technology. If you compare the complexity and expense versus the energy density of a lithium-ion battery pack and a metal can, there's no comparison. However, in an ideal world, I would think that carbon neutral hydrocarbons would become a niche fuel for things like long haul trucks and bulldozers. (And for auxiliary space heaters in people's electric cars.)

revelation 14y ago

If you're staying somewhere, plug it in. Even a 110V will be able to keep the battery warm enough to avoid these losses. No, its not perfect. Neither is the choke on your motorcycle or the people in siberia waking up every 2 hours to start their combustion engines because blowing up what was generated in thousands of years refuses to happen in a cold engine block. But I guess everyone with a modicum of knowledge has by now realized that a) we can't keep blowing up that stuff and b) there won't be another magic energy material like oil, ever again.

CamperBob2 14y ago

In a rational world, every one of the gas stations he passed would have had a rack of fully charged swappable batteries, ready for installation in less time than it would have taken to fill a conventional gas tank. Why nobody seems to understand how stupid charging an EV in real time is, is something that I find astonishing. (To clarify: I can understand why most people don't understand why non-swappable batteries are stupid, but I can't understand why someone like Elon Musk doesn't understand that. I'll admit that it makes me wonder if I'm missing something.)

bpc9 14y ago
The article mentioned that the top-end battery weighs in at half a ton --- not exactly hot-swapping material. Also, when it comes to safety, center of gravity, chassis rigidity, etc --- I'm sure there were a myriad of engineering decisions beyond weight that go against hot swapping. And that's not even getting to added cost and logistics of maintaining a network of skilled battery swap experts, "ownership" over the batteries (e.g. who is responsible for replacing failing units if they are shared around the community of Tesla owners). I'm probably just scratching the surface with a minute of thought. I'm sure that the folks at Telsa have been over this ground, and much more.
- CamperBob2 14y ago
  You're right, those are all drawbacks. They all pale in comparison to the advantages, though. Swapping my car's battery should be as big a deal as swapping the propane cylinder on my gas grill. And yes, batteries these days are perfectly capable of monitoring themselves in a leased-usage scenario. Your laptop battery has its own CPU and EEPROM, for instance. To understand why, see any recent news story on the Dreamliner.
  - eropple 14y ago
    It would be nice, sure, but your propane cylinder doesn't cost thousands of dollars or weigh half a ton. There are physical realities to contend with.

noonespecial 14y ago

Here's a hint from the usability department: Underestimate the remaining miles. Even if that makes you look bad up front. Its an eerie form of cognitive dissonance when your reserves are dropping faster than you consumption and the wheels in your mind spin wondering "will I have enough". You never forget this feeling. Even if its just a test drive, you'll associate Tesla cars with that feeling forever after.

CamperBob2 14y ago
Exactly. The alternative is to require your customers to pass a DiffEq test before you sell them the car.
rogerbinns 14y ago
> Underestimate the remaining miles I suspect they already do, hence the comment that he'll still have some range even when it says zero. The problem is what number to display after a full charge. If it doesn't strongly resemble the specification range then people won't be happy.

evck 14y ago

Worked at Tesla and never got to see the 'recharge now' warning. That would be quite alarming.

andyl 14y ago

I just drove by some dude who was running down a pitch-dark freeway with a small child at his side. They were carrying a can of gas to refill at the station a couple miles ahead. Damn gasoline engines - so unreliable! You'd think after 100+ years of development they'd have sorted this stuff out.

CamperBob2 14y ago
Hardly the same thing, unless the guy's gas gauge lied to him.
- outworlder 14y ago
  Which happens sometimes.
  - CamperBob2 14y ago
    And can be fixed when it does.

uslic001 14y ago

Not ready for primetime is an understatement.

notdrunkatall 14y ago

As a TSLA shareholder and as a general fan of the company, this is disappointing. TSLA's been doing everything right, which is what has given them so much momentum so early in the game, and if they are going to be the big disruptor that I'm betting on, they cannot afford to lose that momentum. If they start mis-stepping, they won't last long, and this is a misstep that many, many people at TSLA should have seen coming from many miles away. Batteries suck in the cold. Did no one think to test the Model S in the east's freezing temperatures before they turned one over to a journalist? What gives, Elon?

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
revelation 14y ago
There is no magic fix for this. It's like asking to turn off gravity and friction so you can have a more comfortable trip. The reason for the big losses in the cold is the battery management system that is trying to keep the pack warm and has to expend energy to do so. You can opt not to do any battery management, but then you get thermal runaway and a life-threatening Boeing situation, or (in the cold) your battery pack is damaged. They picked the best option there is under the circumstances.
- nickv 14y ago
  Possible valid fixes: - Have the reporting system look at current temperature and change the reported range. - More supercharger stations closer together. (200 miles apart for a reported range of 268?! Ballsy. Especially in the extreme cold of the northeast. Reckless when you are giving a car to a NYTimes reviewer.) - Don't have the parking brake LOCK so you can't even move the car without a flatbed truck. - Have the car warn/inform the driver when they park somewhere cold to keep it plugged in to warm the battery up and that's off the top of my head. Many things can be done. This isn't necessarily a 'physics problem.' It's communicating and setting expectations. When the car says "100 miles" and you are stuck at the side of the road after 50 miles, it doesn't matter that "the physics make sense". What matters is you were screwed by completely false information. The fix is simple. In fact, it's so simple, I would be SHOCKED if the TSLA guys aren't already including it in a future firmware update.

jacobn 14y ago

Electric cars are second cars - the commuter one, not the road trip one. They currently don't make sense for road trips, absolutely. But they make a ton of sense for commuting, most likely even in cold climates. It's an interesting and broadly relevant article, but it feels like we're having the wrong discussion - we might be single males, but the target market for the time being is well off families considering a new second car... ;)

thrownaway2424 14y ago

This is why electric cars are not magical fairies and can't solve the structural problems around transportation in the USA. They suck for long-haul travel, but nobody should have to have their own car for long-haul travel. It should be possible to travel around by train, using a rented car for only the last short leg of the trip, if it happens to be rural, or local public transport otherwise. Electrics would be just perfect hired cars if you only needed to go ten miles and back or something like that.

cromwellian 14y ago

Why did the reporter have to rope Steven Chu into the article? Even if all the facts are 100% right, it seems lame to try and make this a political issue. I know people who have done family road trips with the Tesla S already and didn't have those problems in normal weather. One could surmise that pushing the edges of the range AND pushing extreme weather conditions might be risky, and in an EV it is certainly riskier than in a gas car, but like the Top Gear "driving a roadster on a race track drains the battery horrendously", it somewhat reads like an attempt to intentionally push an EV to the breaking limit, and then write a negative article about it. The political angle of trying to make Tesla look like a Steve Chu/DoE failure increases my suspicions. Could you imagine a reporter writing an article about a gas car that he intentionally drove at the limit of its mileage, got stuck on an interstate, and then turned around and roped in government loans to General Motors? The Tesla S deserves criticism in order to shake out bugs and improve the software to reduce customer surprise, to better predict battery life, no doubt about that. But this should not be used by the anti-EV crusaders who have an axe to grind to score points against ex-Obama administration officials.

goodcanadian 14y ago
I agree with your comments about the politics, but I have one nitpick. 30F does not sound like extreme weather. Where I grew up, below freezing is normal for half the year. I am really curious how they are going to solve the problem of making electric vehicles work at -40F.
jasonlotito 14y ago
The weather described in that article is not extreme. It's normal. Driving at much slower speeds than traffic and not using heat in the winter is the extreme part. Cars that require extreme conditions to drive have problems.
cromwellian 14y ago
I agree, on the northeast, 30F isn't extreme. I'm biased, I live in California where I wear shorts and t-shirt almost 365 days a year. :)

agwa 14y ago

Is there anything to be gained by making the parking brake electrically actuated? Such parking brakes are becoming increasingly common in cars of all types and it bugs me. From an engineering perspective, it seems like it's just introducing a complex dependency that can fail to a critical part of the car.

joonix 14y ago

I don't understand why we're not trying to run our cars on natural gas.

toddasmith 14y ago

Filling up a Toyota Camry with gasoline (say 15 gallons) adds about 90 pounds of fuel. A lithium-ion battery with the same energy content would weigh about 5,800 pounds. Clearly electric vehicles will have a difficult time competing with gasoline vehicles no matter how much charging times are reduced or how much better the software gets. It seems that without some breakthrough the sweet spot for battery-electric vehicles is urban driving done after charging overnight at home.

jswanson 14y ago

Elon musk is claiming that the article is misleading: NYTimes article about Tesla range in cold is fake. Vehicle logs tell true story that he didn't actually charge to max & took a long detour. source: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/301049593385340928 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/301049593385340928