Slashdot Mirror
Elon Musk Pledges To End "Range Anxiety" For Tesla Model S
An anonymous reader writes: Elon Musk has used his Twitter account to announce a press conference on Thursday which he claims will end "range anxiety" for Tesla's Model S sedan. Whatever change they're making will be implemented through an over-the-air software update to the cars, affecting the entire fleet. Range anxiety is the term for a fear that your vehicle won't have enough fuel/charge to reach its destination. It's a common reason for people to avoid buying electric cars, given the much smaller infrastructure build-out compared to gas stations. If Tesla is improving the Model S's range through a software update, then it likely involves optimizations to the battery and to the ways in which power is used. Tesla has also talked about developing a feature called "torque sleep," which puts one of the drive units to sleep while not needed. They say it can wake up and begin delivering torque again "so fast that the driver can't perceive it."
A simple voice request from the car speech synthesizer, asking for a city, a street, or something not very specific which can be used for broad calculations, and then let the user know: "You might have not enough battery to go/come back home"/"You can make a round trip 8 times to that destination"/"You might run out of juice but there's a supercharger nearby, would you like me to reserve a spot for you at hh:mm AM/PM?"
I love that I live in a day that this is perceived as "simple"!
Calculating range is a lot trickier than you might think, as so many factors come into play. I once started a company that worked on such range calculation software, we had to use very detailed vehicle models, use weather forecasts, historical weather data (to estimate road conditions - for example, snow, ice, water etc on the road), reasonably high resolution altitude models, real-time traffic data, traffic estimation, accessory power consumption (including factoring in weather data for climate control systems), driver behavior modelling, etc, and of course the fact that there's not straight roads going out to any given point in any given direction. And everything plays off everything else. The ambient temperature might affect your battery pack temperature which might affect its voltage which might affect the efficiency of the drive system and so forth. We discovered a lot of unexpected behavior, like how in order to get accurate wind resistance calculations we had to estimate realistic wind gusting patterns because the average wind speed (and direction) doesn't give the same results as a wind varied around an average. And there were a lot of things that we just didn't have and couldn't get data on, such as components of the car that weren't performing at the level that they should when new (though we had some ideas on how to estimate that), decisions that the driver might make later (such as to turn on/off accessories, change their driving speed, make unexpected stops, etc), and so forth.
The standard approach of just drawing a circle around a person might work sometimes but be way, way off at other times. The actual range of an electric vehicle is a sort of pointy polygon warped along terrain contour lines and extending out the furthest on straight moderate-speed country roads with few stop signs / lights.
Interestingly enough, while we had varying levels of interest from most major manufacturers, there was one manufacturer who made it clear right out that they do all of their software stack devel on such aspects in-house and have no interest in working with an outside entity. That manufacturer was Tesla.
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
Id be curious to see exactly how much of this 'range anxiety' is a users genuine sensation of anxiety in proportion to the new technology, versus manufactured fear from the media and pundits. Jeremy Clarkson from the BBC's top gear has done everything in his power, for example, to cast a very negative light on even the most powerful hybrid and electric vehicles.
that having been said, yes, vehicles have a definitive range. The same holds true for automobiles in that if you lead-foot it to work every day, you wont get the "advertised" mileage at all. If youre gingerly with the pedal and work to embrace things like hypermiling though, youll garner significantly higher gas mileage. The only thing different about 'electric' is the higher torque curve in most cases, the noise level, and the emissions depending on the fuel source of your local power plants and sometimes the transmission. The car still functions like any normal car, meaning that if you run your AC constantly in the summer you can also expect poor mileage. Mileage in winter will also decrease, just as in petrol automobiles because things like the Mass Airflow and temperature sensors will run the engine in 'worst case' mode to warm the engine quickly, thus burning more fuel.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Its *very* unusual for a full tank to get you 700 miles of travel, even at optimum fuel efficiency for the particular vehicle.
In fact, tanks are typically sized such that the vehicle in question will get in the neighborhood of 400-500mi to a tank.
Small, fuel efficient vehicles tend to have ~9 gallon tanks, this would require nearly 80mpg to reach 700 miles.
Medium-sized vehicles tend toward ~14 gallons, and would require 50mpg to reach 700 miles.
It's incredibly rare that a vehicle large enough to be paired with a 20 gallon tank would also be efficient enough to get the 35mi/gal it would take to reach 700 miles on a single tank. Exceptions come in the form of vehicles designed around long-haul transit (such as semis), built with over-sized fuel tanks.
I got burned out and was out of money. We had a pilot project with GM, they really liked the software, but I just couldn't keep going. :(
It's by the way part of the reason I really hate the patent system, it games everything against small players. Not that patents were ever used against me - but because I had to *get* patents, everyone wants to know what's in your patent portfolio before they even consider investment or contracting with you. I had to spend a whole programmer's salary of my own money paying for patent attorneys just to get a most minimal amount of coverage. Which meant that all of the programming work fell on me. And everything about the auto industry is such a colossal money pit... hiring marketing people to get you in the door, having these ridiculously expensive dinners with execs, and on and on. I lost so much money on that thing.
This was in the days before kickstarter and the like took off, it might have been easier to raise enough money to stand a chance these days. But I just couldn't keep doing it. I was overworked and broke and totally out of my comfort zone managing a company. I never should have listened after all the people who beta'ed what I planned to be a free tool told me "oh my god you have to commercialize this!" :
"TAMS shouldn't be destroyed. They should just tag us before releasing us into the wild." -- Maeglin
Already the original batch of engineers who worked with Elon have branched off pursuing other electric vehicles. Almost all the package delivery trucks (UPS, USPS, FedEX) can go electric. 90% of the school bus fleet can go electric. Garbage trucks that make lots of stops and starts will benefit greatly by going electric. Panel trucks used by mechanics, plumbers etc can also become electric. Elon is not pursuing them. But there is an active Elon alumnus working on these projects. With quick swap batteries, taxi fleet can become electric.
It is merely a question of financing. Interest rates are at historic lows. That is what is now fueling the solar panel installations and wind energy projects now.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They rolled out an update to their almost forgotten Roadster that took the range from 245 to 400 miles recently... I assume they've hit upon a new algorithm to manage their drive motors and battery use.
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
For you it might be 1000 miles, for most people Tesla have already more than exceeded their requirement. On the rare occasions when they do want to drive more than the Tesla allows on a single charge they will probably want to stop for a 45 minute break anyway, during which they can recharge.
I'm a Leaf owner. I never have range issues, I never worry about it, and charging saves me time compared to pumping liquid fuel because the only time I ever go out of my way to do it I combine the rapid charging with a bathroom/coffee break. For most people most of the time even a Leaf is fine, it's just that they worry about those rare long journeys and seem to forget that they own another petrol car anyway.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I agree with the general notion that max range on an electric needs to be further than you'll ever drive in a day.
But 1000 miles is a bit beyond even my idea of acceptable range. If an electric could get 600-700 miles on a charge, I'd be happy.
Or alternately, if I can fully recharge an electric in ten minutes, that would also work. You might even be able to sweet talk me into a thirty minute recharge if the range were such as to allow for ONE recharge requirement per day of driving (which means a range of 500 miles or thereabouts).
In neither case would the "but...but...people have to stop for lunch/bathroom/etc" matter. When I'm driving to visit family, I'm not going to stretch a 10-hour drive into a 15-hour drive by taking long breaks on the road....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"