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Tesla Motors Battles the New York Times
redletterdave writes "Days after the New York Times released a brutal review of Tesla's electric Model S sedan, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has fired back, claiming the Times article was completely bogus and misleading. In the article in question, Times writer John Broder took the Tesla Model S on a test drive from Washington to Boston, stopping at various service plazas in Delaware and Connecticut well within the projected 265-mile range of the car, as rated by the EPA. However, Broder's Tesla Model S, despite a heftier 85 kilowatt-hour battery for an extra 100 miles of range in 'ideal conditions,' died shortly before reaching its final destination. Broder blames the cold weather and heating issues for his abridged trip; Musk, however, claims the driver did not follow Tesla's instructions, which is why his trip was cut so short. 'We've taken great pains to ensure that the car works very well in the cold, which is why we're so incensed by this ridiculous article,' Musk said."
You're driving it wrong.
WTF? Isn't it common sense to fully charge an electric car before embarking on a journey to test the car's range? This guy should be fired from the NYT.
:. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
Well, if the logs to show that he didnt fully charge the battery.. then he didnt fully charge the battery.
"His name was James Damore."
Delete your nytimes cookies and then you should be able to read the article.
This was on boing boing a few days ago and one conclusion was that the Tesla charging stations are spaced at almost the maximum range of the car but the car can't get that range in cold weather when the cabin heater is being used. In an electric car there is not enough parasitic heat loss to heat the cabin so the energy comes from the batteries.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
In the actual interview, Elon Musk mentioned the NY Times reporter failed the following three things:
1) Didn't have a full battery
2) He took detours
3) He went above the speed limit
And gee surprise, your battery ran.
Let me clarify: I do think he over-reacted. That said, not fully charging an electric car's battery before doing a range test is somewhat irresponsible of the reviewer, and it's not hard to see why Tesla might not be happy with the results of the test. Perhaps the NYT should fully charge the car over night, then re-run the test.
And it totally makes sense that to drive a hundred grand luxury car that you'd have to take only the direct routes, not the ones you may actually want to take. This is a gigantic failure of useability.
The main downsides to electric cars are:
- Range
- Refueling time (charging)
- Cost/Maintenance of the batteries
These limitations aren't new. If they severely impact you then an electric car is not suitable at the moment; end of story.
Also, a semi has great towing capacity but the city mpg is terrible.
Have you ever read how EPA estimates are done? You put a car on a dyno and run it through some fanciful schedule for what a "trip" should consist of. Too many hills, some extra wind, or a heavy foot will heavily skew real-world numbers. If your car gets 50mpg, what sane person would pump one gallon of gas and set out across the desert for the next gas station, 50 miles away. I get the iPhone joke, but if you're trying to max the car's economy, you very well could be driving it the wrong way.
Lithium batteries really don't handle cold temperatures very well at all -- one of the many reasons that aircraft have continued to use good old fashioned Nickel-cadmium or lead-acid batteries (until the Dreamliner came along).
When they're too cold, they neither take a full charge, nor do they deliver their rated capacity or maximum current.
I would say that, given the weather on the East Coast of the USA during the drive, this played a significant factor in the lack of range encountered -- but I acknowledge that it may not be the only factor.
Perhaps another factor is the enhanced need to heat the passenger compartment. Unlike a regular IC-powered car, there's very little "waste heat" in an EV so perhaps over-zealous use was made of the electric heating - thus producing further heavy drain on the battery and reducing range.
The problem (for Tesla) is that people don't want an EV that comes with a long list of "don'ts" and "cautions" in respect to power management and the effects of low/high temperatures on range. They just want a car they can unplug, jump in and drive -- with an unqualified guarantee of a known range. That's effectively what they get now with their IC-powered cars and that's what they want from any replacement.
the popular assumption with regenerative braking is that it's actually better because you'll regenerate more power as you brake.
You're fired. Pack up your shit and get out.
So the Tesla is only suitable for people who:
1) can be certain of a full charge every time they leave the house; 2) never take detours, or get forced into detours by road construction; 3) never go above the speed limit;
Given that, I'm absolutely shocked that this isn't already a mass-market blockbuster - it's clearly suitable for all the common use cases!
To be fair, if you do start with a non-full tank, drive longer distances or raise the RPM (by driving it at higher speeds) to a fuel-driven car engine, you can expect that you may not be able to reach the next petrol station (i.e. what you describe is, in principle, not specific to electric cars). The difference is in the advertised range.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
nor do I own a car with a battery.
Do tell? Do you have to start it lawnmower style?
Let's consider this...
NY Times has a flawless ride, everything goes well, the result? An article like all the rest...nothing noticeable. It's not like the Tesla S is unknown anymore.
NY Times can push things hard to try to make for a failure, now we have a controversial article on a new technology. That'll sell. And that's really all those old paper rags care about.
The fastest way to look overly-sensitive and closed minded is to blame the press. It's just about the worst PR move you can make.
What they should have done is issue a press release that they were working closely with the reporter to find out what anomolies may have occured so they can improve the design if needed. They are in serious need of a new PR firm.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
Overnight charges before a short trip are unreasonable
Meh, my Porsche has a rated range of about 350 miles. That's really not all that much further than the Tesla S. And according to what I average, with my driving style its closer to 317.
Yet, I don't worry much about making "short trips" of a couple hundred miles even if the tank is only half full when I set out, for the simple reason that I am really rarely more than a couple dozen miles from a place to fill up, and there is pretty much always a gas station before any large stretches of highway.
That is really all the issue here with the Tesla. Its not the range so much that is a problem, but the availability of places to refill. If I can quick charge a Tesla S for 200 miles pretty much anywhere then I'll never have to do an overnight charge to get the 265 absolute max.
I'm not sure how ubiquitous fast-charge stations are for the tesla or electric cars in general in new york... or anywhere else for that matter. But if they can get even a good fraction of the penetration that regular gas stations have, the tesla's range is already good enough for most people. And its only going to get better.
"So, nobody can read NYT's article (without registering/logging in), but everyone can read Musk's rebuttal. That's going to make the debate fairly one-sided in the public's mind."
And who's fault would that be, Mr. Murdoch?
And as for damage, Tesla's stock price dropped five dollars, from what I hear. Who reads the NYT? Stockbrokers and finance people do.
After making arrangements to recharge at the Norwich station, I located the proper adapter in the trunk, plugged in and walked to the only warm place nearby, Butch’s Luncheonette and Breakfast Club, an establishment (smoking allowed) where only members can buy a cup of coffee or a plate of eggs. But the owners let me wait there while the Model S drank its juice. Tesla’s experts said that pumping in a little energy would help restore the power lost overnight as a result of the cold weather, and after an hour they cleared me to resume the trip to Milford.
Looking back, I should have bought a membership to Butch’s and spent a few hours there while the car charged. The displayed range never reached the number of miles remaining to Milford, and as I limped along at about 45 miles per hour I saw increasingly dire dashboard warnings to recharge immediately. Mr. Merendino, the product planner, found an E.V. charging station about five miles away.
My questions are:
Since I'm not rich enough to afford one of these, yet I still have two cars, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that I wouldn't expect people to use their electric luxury car for long trips. Hell, we take our less-efficient car (minivan) on trips because it is more comfortable. It seems to me that the Times was looking for a way to fail the car to make their story better. Most of us would probably commute in this thing.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I used to have a 2005 BMW. Whenever I filled it up it would show 330 miles to empty. Yet after 200 city miles the tank would be dry. Amazingly the car was not able to see the future and know how many lights I'd have to stop at. What a crap car. I'll write a scathing article about it.
Whose fault it is is somewhat irrelevant. Do you want a car that you have to remember to plug-in overnight and which you have to carefully plan your trips to ensure that you can get to the next refuelling station? Even if you fully understand how they work and their limitations you can easily make a mistake by forgetting to plug it in and suddenly you can't drive to work the next day because it takes several hours to charge.
What Top Gear does can hardly be considered serious reporting, or even serious car reviewing.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Let's spell it out:
Car has theoretical maximum range. This range assumes driving optimally (meaning within certain speeds) and assumes you start with full charge. For internal combustion engine, they have similar maximum range, that also includes certain driving speeds, which is usually FAR more constrained then on electric engine based vehicle due to severe torque penalty on ICE when running in non-optimal RPM range for that specific engine - if you wonder why, look up why internal combustion engines need multi-speed gear box while electric engine on tesla only needs one speed for optimal performance.
So the claim is that guy who was supposed to test theoretical max range:
1. Didn't top off the tank
2. Drove at speeds significantly higher then optimal for fuel consumption
3. Chose a longer route
4. Did a lot of stop-and-go during the trip
Do find me even one vehicle of any kind on the market that would manage to keep its theoretical maximum range with this kind of driving? Because internal combustion engine's energy consumption would actually increease from this kind of driving style far more then electric engine with regenerative breaking both due to no capture of energy on breaking (it's dissipated as heat on brake pads/drums) and due to engine working in non-optimal RPM ranges for much longer periods in case of ICE.
All in all, if Musk's claims hold, reporter was either very stupid (which could be true - he claimed that he thought that constant stop-and-go would not impact his range) or was intentionally trying to get advertisement for his story.
Either way, we'll find out when full logs are released.
You may not have heard about it, but plenty of other people did when Tesla's stock price plummeted 2.5% moments after the review was uploaded to New York Times's website. The damage was immediate. In other words, Tesla lost $100 Million in capital in a matter of minutes because of the New York Times's review. That could be a devastating libel claim, but in the mean time, Tesla has to deal with $100 million fewer dollars.
Tesla didnt lose shit. Stock exchange speculators did.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
202 miles driving with a detour through the city at 5 mph is not just 2 miles longer than 200 miles of highway driving.
But the heater, the lights, and the stereo system are running, plus regenerative braking isn't magic.
Stop and go traffic for an hour or two in the winter with the heater at full blast could easily drop tens of miles from the total range.