Not really a surprise - I don't think there was really any doubt about the performance of the Tesla in normal weather. The NYC area right now is well above freezing, approaching +10C in the daytime, nowhere near the deep freeze that occurred during the NYT drive.
This still doesn't put to rest the expected (but somehow controversial) concerns about lithium battery performance in cold weather. This concern IMO needs to be put to rest if electrics want to break into the mainstream market. Early adopters may be willing to plan judiciously around range and expected weather, but I doubt mainstream consumers will be so forgiving.
Having a car of (somewhat) limited range lose a large chunk of its battery just sitting overnight in a parking lot, in weather that is cold but hardly unusual for the region, is a problem. That both on-board software and human advisers seem poorly prepared to compensate for this is hardly a nail in Tesla's coffin, but does need to be sorted out.
That whole debate is becoming utterly ridiculous. Either it works as Tesla Motors says, or it doesn't.
If it's so hard to get cold temperatures in the States, just send one unit up here a few miles North to Canada, we'll be back in the -20C during the week.
Alaska is a popular place for cold weather testing among many manufacturers. Subaru, in particular, beats the crap out of their cars for extended time periods in sub-zero temperatures.
Number of Teslas registered in Norway: 15 in 2010, 48 in 2011, so they sold 33 Teslas in 2011.
Source: Statistics Norway[1], the official state agency for everything statistics.
Compared to say ~300,000 registered Toyotas (2011), I guess it depends on how you define "big" :)
But we do have a somewhat sizeable enthusiast "electric car" community. We deal with the cold by plugging in whenever possible, and most electric cars are used only for local transport.
There's apparently two Tesla S in Norway at the moment. It has generated interest here as well, and we have articles like "How to charge the Tesla Model S" [2] on a site that translates to "charging-stations.no",
In Switzerland you're almost certainly closes enough to a decent sized town to stop and get rescharged at any time. Europe in general is just not as spread out as the US, nor are its cities defined by freeways. Different world.
Tesla's other challenge, i suspect, will be really hot spread out places like parts of Australia.
Coincidentally also the two richest countries of Europe. I'm just guessing here, but there's a chance the percentage of buyers in those countries who don't also have a sizeable conventional car might be smaller than in other countries.
I thought one of the benefits of electric cars was that since you had them plugged in overnight you could program them to automatically heat the car to a pleasant temperature for when you went outside to drive, taking energy for this directly from the charger, rather than the battery. And that if your schedule was a bit more unpredictable you could activate this via a smartphone app as well.
Plugging in overnight would have made the NYT review a non-event. In fact, it doesn't look like the CNN review involved an overnight stop at all.
NB: Tesla claims you don't have to plug in overnight. Whatever other problems the NYT reviewer had, he wasn't cheating by leaving it unplugged overnight.
It can and does, but the writer in the NYT did not do that. Wherever he stayed overnight probably didn't have a charger? Although I've never seen a building without a standard outlet somewhere outside... perhaps it wasn't available or he just thought he didn't need it.
This probably works well when you're at home and have your own charging point in the garage. It doesn't work so well when you're in a hotel somewhere and the nearest charging point is a public one in the next town over. (Attempting 110V charging may actually make matters worse in cold weather, based on the experiences of other Tesla owners.)
I believe it presently does. In fact, I believe that's the reason why the battery charge level dropped overnight in Musk's presentation of data and why, according to some folk, plugging it in to a normal power socket isn't enough to actually charge it as the battery pack draws more power than the socket can supply simply keeping the thing warm.
Such a process will of course drain the battery which still achieves the end result of 'can travel less distance on a full charge'.
I'm sitting in front of a 1500 watt radiant heater, it seems implausible that 1500 watts isn't enough power to keep a car sized battery pack in an enclosed space warmed to operating temperature.
For an idea what 1500 watts will do, I keep a 400 square foot room with only an R8 (US) ceiling and unheated space below at a 20°F differential to outside with this heater. It can't keep up when it gets too cold out, but my room has about 200 times the surface area of a Tesla battery pack.
Edit: maybe more than 20°F. I just shut it off for the day at °85F inside and 37°F out, so 48°F difference, but it is sunny, so the roof and two walls are warmer than 37°F. Data collection is hard. If only I worked in a uniform spherical room located in empty space…
I think the number I heard for heating the battery was 1.3kW. The model S battery is long and flat and hence has lots of exposed surface to lose heat. Also, it was in the teens when the original reporter left his car outside. So, is plausable.
I'm rather thinking of being plugged in. 1500 watts is about all you can plan on drawing without blowing a breaker. The context, if I understood correctly, was that plugging in to a 120v household outlet was a net loss because 1500 watts was insufficient to warm the batteries to charging temperature and that presumably some numbskull in Tesla's software group decided to run the heaters even if it resulted in a net loss of power.
The explanation of the anecdotes is probably complicated, but I believe that the Tesla chargers monitor the voltage at the input to the car and reduce their current draw to keep a minimum voltage. So if your 120v transformer is a little on the low side (they vary) and maybe you used that 100' 16g extension cord you had handy, and maybe your house was wired when aluminum house wiring seemed like a good idea and that outlet has a bit more resistance between the wire and the terminal screw, you might be getting a lot less than 1500 watts. There could well be a point in the charging curves where there is a problem, but I don't think it is because 1500 watts isn't enough.
I've no idea, I'm no expert in the tech. I'm sure 'better' would always help (though not necessarily overnight when it's a case of just slowing equalisation since you're talking long timeframes) but I don't know if there is a both better and economically viable process?
Diesel also needs special considerations in colder weather (the fuel becomes too viscous at lower temperatures). Just a different set of problems to petrol, not a dealbreaker imo.
As someone who had an 80's diesel car as his first, I can verify that even leaving them in a high school parking lot during a cold winter school day in Maine is a bad idea.
I had to wait about a week for the weather to warm up before the glow-plugs were enough to start it.
However, I believe a Tesla is a different case. I always keep my car's fuel tank above half-filled to preserve the fuel filter (and you should too). While the Tesla might lose some charge during the day in a parking lot or overnight, I can't imagine it would be a seriously substantial amount.
Correct, I mis-typed. Also, the more room there is in the tank, the more room there is for water vapor in the air filling the rest of the tank to collect. This can cause rust.
Not really, any more. The fuel is winterized at point of purchase, so fuel geling is rather unlikely these days (and if it does, there are additives that will un-gel it.
Modern glow plugs are also much better. In my VW TDI, at 10F the glow plug cycle is only about 3 seconds, and then it fires right up. No glow plugs need at all above 35F.
Usually you're right. Unfortunately we had a bit of a facepalm last year here in MN when the diesel-powered school buses wouldn't start at -10F or something. It turns out that in the state's hurry to push biodiesel on municipal vehicles, someone forgot that it gels at higher temperatures than "normal" diesel.
Thousands of schoolchildren were quite happy, though.
Same for our 2011 TDI. Never had to worry about fuel or engine issues, even in quite cold weather (not arctic, but we live in RI, so there are some cold winter nights to contend with).
Regarding the fuel, there are some details, along with some discussions of operating temperature, in the Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_diesel_fuel. The temperature ranges suggest that you're unlikely to have serious issues with your diesel car, if you buy fuel appropriate for the season. The inconvenience factor of owning a diesel car compared to a petrol one is pretty minimal, as far as the sort of cold weather that most people who might consider buying a car (as opposed to something with tracks, skis, or 4' tyres) will generally encounter.
We had most of december and january below -15C sometimes down to -30C and diesel cars had no problems. Most problems were caused by guess what: batteries not giving enough juice to start. Diesel cars, having bigger batteries, were actually more reliable.
I kinda sit in the middle. We need this technology, and people like Musk pushing and investing in it. But equally, his attitude to criticism borders childish and is very off putting.
What I don't get about any of this, from both sides, is that this is the early days of the technology and its clearly work in progress. As usual, early adopters pretty much know what they are investing in and expect and accept that there are going to be problems and that the systems are far from perfect. I mean, imagine a review of the first petrol engined cars, a few years after initial conception. Musk should be constantly reminding people that problems will happen, and this is the beginning of decades of development and evolution, while motoring petrol head journalists need to stop trying to pretend Musk is selling a perfect petrol car replacement, and that it is indeed work in progress at a relatively early stage.
To me it is clear that the Tesla car is still problematic, but it is also clear that its improving at a decent rate. In a decade, I imagine the whole system will work flawlessly, ish.
Sadly all I see are two camps, Musk supporters and petrol heads almost raging at each other like political parties, while Musk stirs it, resulting in non partisan parties look on aghast, keeping wallets well closed.
As for the idea that this CNN review, just after a controversial one, would be anything other than perfect is a delusion. Even if we bin foil hat theories that CNN were soft on Tesla for what ever reason, Tesla would have done everything to ensure this test went perfectly and contradicted the previous one. What ever we are up to, if a test goes wrong, we would all make sure the next test was an improvement. If not, then we have no business in any form of development.
The experience with Top Gear has probably influenced the reaction here. I don't find it childish to strongly defend your product if you believe a journalist has written a hack job on it.
>I don't find it childish to strongly defend your product if you believe a journalist
Childish really is the best word for it.
It wasn't a measured, intelligent response. It came across as a "beat the journalist up" because they posted a bad review. Reminds me of the sort of thing you see bad restaurant owners do when they respond to diner's complaints.
It came across as a "beat the journalist up" because they posted a bad review. Reminds me of the sort of thing you see bad restaurant owners do when they respond to diner's complaints.
I disagree completely -- a better analogy would be that a restaurant owner gets pissed off because the reviewer complains of a fly in his soup when circuit cameras reveal this was never the case.
And then everybody rushes to the defense of the reviewer saying "He was just explaining what a fly in the soup would have been like!" and "Yeah, but the soup was cold and took to long to come out!"
I didn't think the initial article made Tesla look bad at all.. It pointed out a few problems such as needing charging stations closer together, better awareness on electrical card and maybe a better understanding of the effects of cold on a battery... Other then that I thought the car and Tesla seemed fine ul until Musk's responses.
Regardless of how much warmer the weather is than when Broder drove the car. If Broder had charged the car completely instead of partially regardless of the obvious drop in capacity in colder weather he still would have made it. CNN have just proven the car is capable, cold weather aside nothing would be much different here.
Are we forgetting the data from the NYT review clearly showed Broder driving around in circles in a car park? The CNN reporter even said he got lost and yet still made it with miles to spare in the batteries. When you consider the amount of on-board power drawing computing functionality, sensors and logging equipment on the Tesla 200+ miles is impressive.
If you're buying an electric car for driving 200+ miles in one go, an electric car is certainly not for you. Tesla fills a niche of drivers who commute to and from work, occasionally to meetings and maybe the airport but don't expect luxury taxi service companies to start buying and driving Tesla electric cars any time soon...
Quite personally I am sick of hearing about this whole situation. It's like watching a primary school fight, lots of name calling and accusation slinging, but no violence.
I agree with you regarding Elon's motivation, but I think Elon's reason for talking about the circling 0.6 miles wasn't to claim that it was a meaningful distance/fuel issue, but rather that it was evidence of Broder's true motivation.
It might not prove he drove in circles in a parking lot, but you have to admit there are discrepancies in the data that have not been explained fully by the NYT editor that don't prove he didn't deliberately try and drain the battery all for having the scoop review that tries and dispels Tesla's claims of efficiency.
There are a lot of claims that were not proven by Musk, like driving through the downtown Manhattan.. When Lincoln Tunnel is nowhere close to Downtown.. (or properly Lower Manhattan)
Let's not start nitpicking, that stop was new for the reporter. He stopped once on the different side of the highway (North bound) and on this side of highway (South bound) the tesla station was in a completely different place.
So yea, it's very plausible that he was looking for it.
It was the northbound trip before the first charge. For the southbound trip, the car was effectively dead on the tow truck(it didn't have enough charge to disengage the parking break):
I believe the niche is partially the price and partially those who want to arrive to work in style. Manager, CEO, COO style employees are the kind of people who'd buy this for the attention and to reaffirm the statement, "Yeah, I'm rich, but I work for it"
It's worth pointing out that they're staying at the Milford SuperCharger quite a lot longer than Elon's data showed NY times did. They're charging it a lot more - and would even if it was too chilly out for the batteries to operate at optimal discharge rate, they'd still be in the clear as a result.
This is more of a PR move - of course if you calculate it out it's possible - the NY Times driver wasn't staying at SuperChargers long at all and missed mark by 30mi.
Every time someone reads this, a kitten gets run over:
"Instead, I found myself maneuvering around slower cars. Now, I normally spend most of my time on the New Jersey Turnpike out in the left lane going at least 10 or 15 miles an hour faster than I was in the Model S. But sitting in the middle lane, I was keeping up with traffic. I certainly didn't feel out of place -- except for the fact that I wasn't burning any gasoline."
It's supposed to be a performance car. A proper review should imply hoonage and speeds likely to raise the author's insurance premiums. It shouldn't take the Consumer Reports first impression of the Nissan Leaf as it's model. The Tesla S is not a fucking Prius.
The only thing more dull than hypermiling stories are hypermiling videos, and the only saving grace of this story is that we are spared those.
How Musk can act incredulous over assertions that the Model S is impractical for US intercity travel while acknowleding one hour fuelings every three hours is beyond me.
>How Musk can act incredulous over assertions that the Model S is impractical for US intercity travel while acknowleding one hour fuelings every three hours is beyond me.
One and a half hours if you actually charge to 100% rather than 90% - which CNN presumably did since their charging stops lasted that long. (And that's with top-of-the-range Superchargers; standard 240V dedicated car chargers are basically useless for long trips unless you're planning to stop and leave the car charging overnight.)
He was already going 60-65. He just admitted to going 70-80 on the freeway; and, given the other cars, the speed limit is probably 60.
I love speed as much as the next guy; but this was a review that, as far as I could gather, was CNN's version of peer reviewing the Time's article... and finding it wanting. A normal person isn't taking their car to the track. TopGear already did that test on an even more suited car. If you were testing the range of a Bugatti Veyron to see if it was useful as a commuter car, would you go flat out the whole way? Or, more realistically, if you were testing a Subaru WRX STi, or an Evo X, for its "normal driving conditions" range, would you be keeping your revs at 4-5k the whole way?
The speed limit on the NJ Turnpike is largely 65, but traveling at 70 - 80mph on the turnpike is normal, often the speed to just keep up with traffic, depending on the day/where you are on the road.
Wanting to go 80 on the NJT isn't "taking it to the track", it's "driving from A to B".
It's been significantly warmer the last few days than it supposedly was when the first trip was done. Given that temperature has a big effect on the car's energy, both the battery capacity and use of the heater, I'd say CNN's results don't disprove the NYT article.
Yeah, they totally missed the circling in a parking part. And they did not call any towing service as well, whose people were experts in high end cars. :)
Gas-guzzling SUVs can serve a legitimate purpose justifying their price point. Luxury electric cars don't, neither from a conservation, ecological or (apparently) practical standpoint.
"I was given battery-conservation advice at that time (turn off the cruise control; alternately slow down and speed up to take advantage of regenerative braking) that was later contradicted by other Tesla personnel."
The emphasized part makes no sense (vs. driving at constant speed), regen braking is not perpetual motion machine. Technology reporter should know that. Still amazing how such a foolish advice was given him by Tesla personnel.
And I would say the secondary failure is in the advice given to Broder over the phone.
Had the people on the phone just told him to charge longer, anything Broder said about the extra time charging would have come across as a simple, forgettable nitpick. It's extraordinary events like getting stranded that readers remember.
"a route 30 miles longer that avoided New York City, and it's battery draining traffic congestion, altogether."
I would have thought that slow, stop-start traffic is the ideal conditions for an electric car, both in terms of driving pleasure and energy use compared with traditional cars.
He's talking about taking the Tappen Zee Bridge vs the George Washington Bridge. I actually used to live in Groton CT (the terminus of both trips) after graduating from the University of Delaware (the origin of both trips). I would never ever use the GWB. The extra 30 miles is always worth it. You can sit on the GWB and associated roads for 3-4 hours on a Friday night to go 10 miles. Not a good situation no matter what kind of car you have (and ironically, there aren't a lot of gas stations in that area, definitely not well marked).
I doubt they orchestrated the original article. Their choice is pick a fight or let the article stand. Picking a fight looks like the better choice to me, though personally I have no interest in reading someone else's bunfight.
If I were Tesla PR, I'd jump on this. Drop everything else about the article; just throw a big party in DC in the morning, and ferry people to Boston for a big party the same evening (with refreshments and entertainment available in Newark and Milford, naturally). Get owners' clubs involved, make it an annual pilgrimage.
If I were Tesla PR, I already orchestrated the entire thing, including instructing the CNN crew to fully recharge at every station and not stop overnight.
The overnight stop is really a red herring: The battery only lost about 5-7% of capacity overnight, which is much less than the difference between a standard charge (90% of capacity) and how much the Times charged the battery (72%). Actually, it's too bad CNN didn't stop someplace for the night just to prove this.
That mere 70 miles of buffer made me a little nervous, especially after I missed an exit and added a few miles to the trip. I followed Tesla's recommendations and kept the cruise control pegged to between 60 and 65 much of the way and kept the climate control at 72 degrees. And I minimized stops. But I made it
What's the point of having a car that costs north of $50K and as much as $90K if you have to worry about missing an exit? This whole thing is bad press for Tesla, they thought they had the "gotcha" moment ("he went in circles in the parking lot" for a whopping.......0.6 miles while trying to find the charging station) but it just showed a prospective buyer how fragile this very expensive car.
Let me repeat it: this car is very expensive and cannot be relied to go for a few hundred miles because it has so many variables. This is a niche car at best, a rich person maybe can brag about it while having other normal cars.
I see you have never missed an exit on the NJ turnpike. Even with a ICE you can easily run out of gas due to the large distance between exits and Service plazas. Thats one _more_ point towards the car, Even during a normal disturbance it can still work just fine if you you know actually charge it.
You can exit and drive a few miles into a town to find a gas station and fill up in 2 minutes.
If you filled your tank you know what you have inside, it will not drop due to temperature (relatively speaking)
A tow truck can ultimately bring you gasoline.
All these things rule the electric car out for me and many others, unless I am worth $20 million and buy one as a third car. I'd be scared of running out of power all the time.
If what your saying is true, then there is no reason for there to be tow trucks with gasoline , but there are. I know we have better infrastructure for ICE. We have built it out over 100 years , and because of that I think we still have a bias against switching to electric vehicles, but the real takeaway is that the problem is now infrastructure level. The cars are as good as if not better then their ICE counterparts (in many ways they are better and forced to be better due to the infrastructure limitations) There is always going to be the chance that your going to run out of juice. I would say its marginally greater then the chance your going to run out of gas , but thats not a car problem, and from just the car standpoint the number of things that can break is greatly reduced.
I'd like a Model S (although, ideally, something more BMW 3-series sized, same performance, and slightly cheaper, and AWD), with the 300 mile range, specifically for daily use in the Bay Area. It is unlikely I would need to worry about range, and just plug in every night (although plugging in at the office would make sense, too)
Being able to periodically ferry it between locations using the supercharger would just be a bonus; I'd be fine with a car which could never leave a 75 mile radius of Palo Alto, provided I also either had a second car (ideally diesel, 45+mpg or a diesel truck), or could rent one whenever I left.
I suspect most people who can afford $100k cars can afford multiple cars, or don't do 400 mile road trips on a regular basis.
This still doesn't put to rest the expected (but somehow controversial) concerns about lithium battery performance in cold weather. This concern IMO needs to be put to rest if electrics want to break into the mainstream market. Early adopters may be willing to plan judiciously around range and expected weather, but I doubt mainstream consumers will be so forgiving.
Having a car of (somewhat) limited range lose a large chunk of its battery just sitting overnight in a parking lot, in weather that is cold but hardly unusual for the region, is a problem. That both on-board software and human advisers seem poorly prepared to compensate for this is hardly a nail in Tesla's coffin, but does need to be sorted out.