2022 X PLAID - Poor Range Performance Help: Getting 50 - 77% of EPA 311 miles

[kchau]

Average Wh/mi of 331 is pretty much spot on with EPA.

Check Out 2022 Tesla Model X Official EPA Range/Efficiency Ratings

The refreshed Tesla Model X (2022 model year) has received its official EPA range and efficiency ratings.

insideevs.com

 

[seenhear]

OP, battery performance isn't the right way to express this by the way. A battery contains energy, consumption depends on what draws energy from it, not the battery itself. Warranty on capacity is 70%, they don't talk to you before that.

I would invoke legal action if they tried to tell me that a 29% reduction in capacity on a car with 4000 miles on it is acceptable.

 

[seenhear]

I forgot I also wanted to comment on this. It sounds like you were charging it back up to 90% or more? That is indeed going to take a long time. Trips in the Tesla are really more efficient time wise if you are using the bottom part of the battery and charge only as much as you need to get to the next SC. On my 359 mile trip today, I made 2 SC stops: one for 18 min (22% to 54%) and one for 26 min (22% to 69%). The plaid X will charge much faster than mine does. There shouldn’t be many situations that require a 40 min supercharging session.

This is SO true, and a message I am constantly trying to spread to other EV owners.
This is also the concept that to me, drives a 400-500mi or larger range/capacity. If you can do a road trip and cycle between 10% and 60% SOC as you drive and charge, you will save the most time. Charging over 60% slows drastically.
So, you want a batter where 50% of full gives a range that is a reasonable amount of driving time/distance for a road trip. For me, that's around 3-4 hours or about 250miles, which points to a 500mi range. Charging a latest tech high voltage battery from 10-60% takes only about 15 minutes. That is right on parity with how long most people stop in an ICE-based road trip. 15min every 3-4 hours.
In my S75, I have to add 70-75% (150mi) range every 2 hours, which takes about 40-45 min. So for a trip from SF to LA, this adds about 2 hours to the drive time, or 7 hours instead of 5hr. Really not tenable, and if it weren't for Autopilot and free Supercharging, we would never use the S for road trips.

 

[seenhear]

Average Wh/mi of 331 is pretty much spot on with EPA.

Check Out 2022 Tesla Model X Official EPA Range/Efficiency Ratings

The refreshed Tesla Model X (2022 model year) has received its official EPA range and efficiency ratings.

insideevs.com

How is it spot on? That article shows the XPlaid with 22's gets 311 combined city/hwy range based on a consumption rate of 370Wh/mi. 370 is not spot on with OP's 331. In fact, OP should be getting much MORE range than the EPA did, based on his 331Wh/mi consumption.
Also the EPA's numbers don't add up. They show a relatively poor consumption rate of 370Wh/mi combined, but a pretty good range of 311mi. Put these two numbers together and you get a battery capacity of 115kWh which is way bigger than what Tesla makes for these cars. As I posted, the battery seems to be roughly 100kWh (I read 99 in one article) with a "usable" capacity of 95kWh.

None of this is adding up, except that OP's battery capacity seems to be WAY off from expected. By about 17% which is huge for a brand new Tesla.

 

[seenhear]

Question for all: Do you think I have a range issue, or is this normal? And if this is normal, shouldn’t there be better education for first time Tesla buyers around range reality vs. as advertised?

Here's the bottom line:
You need to stick with the numbers of miles, watt-hr, and watt-hr/mile, stick to capacity (in kWh and miles of range) and economy (calculated or displayed Wh/mi).
The X-Plaid is rated to get 311mi on a 100kWh battery. That's a nominal consumption / economy of 321.5 Wh/mi. For this number lower is "better" (more efficient / more range). Your car reported an economy of 331 Wh/mi for a 180mi trip. That's your CAR'S own reporting of it's efficiency. The range of the car, based on that efficiency should be worse than the EPA range, because 331>321.5. So you own that and acknowledge that you're not expecting a range of 311 when getting an economy of 331. But you would expect a range of 100kWh / 331wh/mi = 302 miles. But your trip indicates you would only get about 257 miles of range (180/.70). This implies that your BATTERY has limited capacity for some reason.

This is NOT about your economy, or 22" wheels, or headwinds or hills. ALL of that is bundled into your CAR's self reported economy number. That 331Wh/mi is exactly the amount of energy it used divided by the distance it drove, inclusive of all drag, hills, lead-foot driving, etc. Anyone can take a trip, get the average economy for that trip, and compute the expected full charge range if you drove that way for the battery's whole capacity.

So don't let them say "it's because of your wheels, extra passengers, hills, wind, traffic, etc." It's not, all those things are included. This is only about the energy capacity of your battery on that day. Now, the one thing I know that can affect this, is temperature of the battery. What was the weather like that day?

As for your comment that batteries discharge more slowly when full and when almost empty, that's true, but it would not affect these numbers. It would only affect your ability to do full/hard acceleration and full regen. When SOC is very low, my car even limits normal acceleration (I don't have a performance model). But the capacity is still the capacity. Stick to the numbers.

 

[biokleen]

I think the range is very optimistic. While energy graph was available I played with it a little bit - the best I could do was 350Wh/mi while seriously trying to be gentle. Anything more 'spirited' would jump to 450-600 range. I noticed that if I make short trips my battery charge will drop by 1-2% every time within first minutes of driving. I assume some sort of preconditioning is going on and it sucks juice out of the battery. If I compare to MY LR - MX Plaid is very thirsty. My expectations were "a little bit more" thirsty but that is not the case. Since removal of "energy" I have no idea about the consumption but I am charging it a lot more than MY.

 

[seenhear]

I think the range is very optimistic. While energy graph was available I played with it a little bit - the best I could do was 350Wh/mi while seriously trying to be gentle. Anything more 'spirited' would jump to 450-600 range. I noticed that if I make short trips my battery charge will drop by 1-2% every time within first minutes of driving. I assume some sort of preconditioning is going on and it sucks juice out of the battery. If I compare to MY LR - MX Plaid is very thirsty. My expectations were "a little bit more" thirsty but that is not the case. Since removal of "energy" I have no idea about the consumption but I am charging it a lot more than MY.

I highly recommend people not consider the "rated range" (EPA or otherwise) for the OP's situation. It's not about range, it's about battery capacity.
It's easy to calculate the battery capacity, based on reported % SOC at two time points, the distance driven between those two time points (the longer the better), and the average consumption (Wh/mi) between those two time points (best to reset one of the trip computer's trips for this). So do a drive and collect these data:
SOC1 = battery % charge at start of drive.
SOC2 = % charge at end of drive
D12 = distance driven (cars drive upwards of 3 miles per percent, so the longer your trip, the more accurate your result will be.)
CONS12 = average consumption/economy during trip, in Wh/mi
Then TRIP% = SOC1-SOC2
TRIP_ENRG = (CONS12/D12)
And,
BATT_SIZE = TRIP_ENRG / (TRIP%/100)

OP gathered these exact data. They drove 180mi, and had a change in SOC of 70%, and during that trip they averaged 331 Wh/mi.
331 Wh/mi * 180mi = 59,580 Wh of energy, or rounding off, 59.6kWh.
That 59.6kWh of energy resulted in a 70% drop in battery SOC. So,
59.6kWh / 0.70 = 85.1 kWh total expected battery capacity.
This is way off from what the X-Plaid should have; it should have somewhere in the neighborhood of 95kWh to 100kWh expected full battery capacity.

You can do this kind of experiment on any Tesla car, and drive as hard as you want, into wind, up hills, with 22" wheels, or 19's, etc., it doesn't matter. So long as you aren't peeling out for large portions of this test drive (wheels slipping on pavement), you should get an expected/predicted full capacity that is in the ball park of your battery's reported size (if your car is relatively new).

OP's battery is very new. They should be getting something well above 90kWh predicted battery size based on a trip's data.

I really think OP, @akahitek you should complain and ask for a full battery diagnostic test, and ask to get a copy of the results.
If you make the mistake of saying "I'm not getting the range I think I should be getting" then they will just tell you you're driving harder than you should, or your wheels are too big, or maybe it was cold that day and windy, etc. If you say "I don't think my battery has the capacity it's supposed to have" that will result in a more technical discussion, and investigation of your battery's health.

In addition, or alternatively, you can go to

scan my tesla

'scan my tesla' is an Android app that will connect to a Tesla Model S, 3, X and Y CAN bus, and show and log hundreds of readings. Please note you need a special wiring harness to connect, more details under Adapters. This app gives you numerous live statistics such as: - Battery power / voltage

www.scanmytesla.com

Buy one of their adapters and cables, and get your own battery health report. This is also handy for long-term tracking of your battery's capacity, which WILL go down with age.... just not as quickly as we're seeing with OP's Plaid X.

 

[_jmk]

The plaid X has 92kWh or so usable, less than it used to be. Out of that 5kWh is basically below the zero (you can still use it, but you have to take the car below zero), so the range you see on the screen is based on 87kWh of usable energy. Note that this is when the car is brand new and well balanced. So, 85kWh sounds about right.

 

[seenhear]

The plaid X has 92kWh or so usable, less than it used to be. Out of that 5kWh is basically below the zero (you can still use it, but you have to take the car below zero), so the range you see on the screen is based on 87kWh of usable energy. Note that this is when the car is brand new and well balanced. So, 85kWh sounds about right.

Where'd you get this info? I googled (a bit) and could only find references to the plaid battery being either 100kwh, 99kwh, or "95kwh usable."
Also, "usable" usually means the usable amount over zero. The reserve is not counted in the usable amount.
Would love to know a reliable source on true battery capacity.
The options code for the plaid battery refers to it being 99kWh, made with 18650 cells.

 

[_jmk]

Where'd you get this info? I googled (a bit) and could only find references to the plaid battery being either 100kwh, 99kwh, or "95kwh usable."
Also, "usable" usually means the usable amount over zero. The reserve is not counted in the usable amount.
Would love to know a reliable source on true battery capacity.
The options code for the plaid battery refers to it being 99kWh, made with 18650 cells.

It was all over the news when the plaid came out, the pack is smaller now. Rest like the capacity under the zero you can test yourself.

 

[seenhear]

It was all over the news when the plaid came out, the pack is smaller now. Rest like the capacity under the zero you can test yourself.

I don't own one, so can't test.
The plaid battery IS smaller than the previous "100D" battery. It is now 99kWh, not 100kWh.
If it was "all over the news" please find a couple references for me, because I can't find anything that states the actual capacity of the various Tesla batteries in kWh, other than articles which re-state what is listed in the option codes, which only use round multiples of 5, except for the plaid battery which is listed as 99:

BTX4
90 kWh

BTX5
75 kWh
EPA range 237 miles (MX), 249 miles (MS 75), 259 miles (MS 75D)

BTX6
100 kWh

BTX7
75 kWh

BTX8
75 kWh

BTX9
100 kWh Battery Pack with Weight Reduction
Model S 2020/05

BTXA
18650J2 Battery Cell
Model S/X 2020

BTXB
99kWh 18650 Plaid E5/E6 VIN battery
Model S/X 2021 LR/Plaid

 

[sorka]

The plaid X has 92kWh or so usable, less than it used to be. Out of that 5kWh is basically below the zero (you can still use it, but you have to take the car below zero), so the range you see on the screen is based on 87kWh of usable energy. Note that this is when the car is brand new and well balanced. So, 85kWh sounds about right.

SMT shows my usable is 96.9 which and with rated wh/mile being 291 it comes out to exactly the 333 miles my MXP (with 20" wheels) shows.

The OP drove 189 miles at 331 wh/mile which is 59.58 kwh. The SOC decreased from 95 to 25% which would be 67.2 kwh IF the new usuable battery capacity was 97 kwh.

@akahitek , what is your 100% charged? You can also answer that question by taking your current rated range for whatever charge you have and divide it by the SOC. i.e. if you have x miles showing at 80%, then x / 0.80 to get your 100% rated charge.

That should be 311 or close to it.

Currently, based on the data your provided, there's a discrepancy of 7.6 kwh. The battery lost 7.6 kwh more than you use for actual driving. Something's off or you used a ton of AC/heat....OR regen braking. One thing about regen braking is it throws the calcs off. Your wh / mile is strictly based on how far you drove and how much energy you pulled out the battery and how much you put back in. It does not account for the conversion round trip loss, so if you did a ton of regen braking, your SOC will drop more than your wh / mile said you used.

My wife is horrible at this. When she drove our P85D, here range was horrible even though her wh / mile weren't bad. It's because she was always slightly accelerating and then decelerating on the freeway and never kept an exact constant speed and when she slowed down, rather than coasting down to a lower speed, she'd regen brake.

It took several years to figure out why her range was so much worse and why the battery dropped so much more with us having similar wh / mile readings on long trips.

Obviously get alignment checked. Can be the biggest cause of range loss.

My best range ever on my MXP with no wind and temp in the 70s was 286 and that was on my 130 mile commute home with one mountain pass (15 Pacheco Pass) driving no faster than the speed limit.

More typical is 296 / wh mile driving 5 mph above the speed limit.

75mph in a 65 gets about 320 wh / mile.

 

[seenhear]

My best range ever on my MXP with no wind and temp in the 70s was 286 and that was on my 130 mile commute home

Did you mean to say consumption instead of range here? The context of the rest of you post seems to imply that this 286 number is units of wh/mi (consumption) not 'miles" (range).

 

[seenhear]

OR regen braking. One thing about regen braking is it throws the calcs off. Your wh / mile is strictly based on how far you drove and how much energy you pulled out the battery and how much you put back in. It does not account for the conversion round trip loss, so if you did a ton of regen braking, your SOC will drop more than your wh / mile said you used.

Can you elaborate on this? Maybe some math examples? I'm not following you on this. Using regen should give you better actual range. If you turn regen to LOW instead of NORMAL, you'll get less range on average out of your battery.

 

[sorka]

Did you mean to say consumption instead of range here? The context of the rest of you post seems to imply that this 286 number is units of wh/mi (consumption) not 'miles" (range).

Yes.

 

[sorka]

Can you elaborate on this? Maybe some math examples? I'm not following you on this. Using regen should give you better actual range. If you turn regen to LOW instead of NORMAL, you'll get less range on average out of your battery.

Regen does not improve range over no regen and NO actual braking. It's better to use regen than scrubbing speed off through friction brakes but it's still more efficient to drive in a style that doesn't require any regen braking. Just like hypermiling a Prius, my 100+ mpg trips only occurred when I used no regen braking at all.

The point being that the wh / mile calculation only takes into account distance driven, kwh out, and kwh in (regen braking) but the roundtrip in and then out loses about 10%

If put 10 kwh into the battery through regen braking, the wh / mile calcs are based on how much you put in, not how much it raised the SOC which will be less than the 10kwh you put back in.

 

[seenhear]

Regen does not improve range over no regen and NO actual braking. It's better to use regen than scrubbing speed off through friction brakes but it's still more efficient to drive in a style that doesn't require any regen braking. Just like hyper miling a Prius, my 100+ mpg trips only occurred when I used no regen braking at all.

I'm not seeing this. Let's take the Prius out of it, since that's a hybrid, just to not confound things.

If I'm driving my model S steady on a flat freeway at 75mph, and I need to slow down to 60mph, if I shift into neutral and coast down to 60mph, all that energy is lost to the wind and baseline drivetrain friction over a longer period of time granted, than if I used regen or friction braking. If I use friction braking, I slow down faster, so less energy is lost to wind and drivetrain friction, and more is lost to heating the rotors and pads. If I turn on regen and use only regen not rotor/pad friction, that energy that was lost to heating the rotors and pads is put into the battery, minus a bit for mechanical-electrical conversion inefficiencies.

I don't see how using regen in this example can result in worse (actual driven) range than not using it.

The point being that the wh / mile calculation only takes into account distance driven, kwh out, and kwh in (regen braking) but the roundtrip in and then out loses about 10%

If by "round trip in then out" you're talking about the electrical-mechanical-electrical conversion inefficiencies, agreed, but so what? You're still regaining energy that otherwise would have been otherwise 100% lost.

If put 10 kwh into the battery through regen braking, the wh / mile calcs are based on how much you put in, not how much it raised the SOC which will be less than the 10kwh you put back in.

OK so this is a different issue than what you're saying above. Above it seems you're saying that regen gets you no benefit over just coasting to a new lower speed, which I don't buy.

But here you're saying that the calculations of consumption for a trip do not jive with the SOC indicated for that trip, right?

I recently took a 36.5 mi trip that was about 95% freeway and thus nearly all slowing was using regen and not friction brakes. It started at 92% and ended at 72%, for a delta-SOC of 30%. Here's a mid-trip image to show what my driving looked like:

Here's a end of trip image:

So,
36.5 mi * 327 Wh/mi = 11.9355 kWh reported energy used to move the car (and me) from point A to point B. For that trip, my SOC dropped by 20%.
11.9355 kWh / .2 = 59.6775 kWh This is about 5~6kWh less than what SMT says my full pack currently is (I forget the exact number right now, but it's around 65-ish kWh IIRC). This is a similar discrepancy to OP's actually. It also corroborates your claim of 10% round trip losses related to energy out of and into the battery during driving+regen. (There are other inaccuracies though, since 1% SOC represents about 2 miles driven, so our precision in measuring miles and Watts and hours is better than our precision in measuring the SOC.)

Now, to the topic about regen being beneficial or not for actual range driven.
Let's assume regen put a net total of 4kWh back into the battery. If I had done all my slowing down via coasting in neutral (and somehow miraculously avoided any collisions) my ending SOC would have been about 66% instead of 72%. I still would have driven 36.5 miles. But I'd have less energy left in my battery. How is this in agreement with your claim that "regen does not improve range"? Even if the losses in/out of the battery were 20% or 50% (!!!) you're still recapturing SOME energy and putting it back into the battery. This results in more range than you would have if you use any other form of slowing your car down. Not sure what I'm missing here, but I'm open to being educated.

 

[sorka]

Now, to the topic about regen being beneficial or not for actual range driven.
Let's assume regen put a net total of 4kWh back into the battery. If I had done all my slowing down via coasting in neutral (and somehow miraculously avoided any collisions) my ending SOC would have been about 66% instead of 72%. I still would have driven 36.5 miles. But I'd have less energy left in my battery. How is this in agreement with your claim that "regen does not improve range"? Even if the losses in/out of the battery were 20% or 50% (!!!) you're still recapturing SOME energy and putting it back into the battery. This results in more range than you would have if you use any other form of slowing your car down. Not sure what I'm missing here, but I'm open to being educated.

You're not taking into account the extra distance you'd have coasted through the atmosphere vs scrubbing off energy with pads or regen braking. You don't lose as much with regen braking but you still lose.

Another way to look at it is if you're at steady state on level ground not changing your speed, you're at the most efficient you can be for that speed. You're losing energy through air resistance regardless even if you're breaking. The loss of energy at any given speed due to air resistance is a sunk cost. You can't get that back but you add to the cost with any sort of braking that isn't 100% efficient on the store/retrieve round trip.

 

[seenhear]

The loss of energy at any given speed due to air resistance is a sunk cost. You can't get that back but you add to the cost with any sort of braking that isn't 100% efficient on the store/retrieve round trip.

OK I get it now.
Still though, realistic driving needs active breaking. Coasting rarely is appropriate. Regen is the next best thing.

The big question now, is why doesn't Tesla calculate consumption using energy changes to the battery, instead of the motor(s)? That's annoying.

 

[sorka]

OK I get it now.
Still though, realistic driving needs active breaking. Coasting rarely is appropriate. Regen is the next best thing.

The big question now, is why doesn't Tesla calculate consumption using energy changes to the battery, instead of the motor(s)? That's annoying.

Totally and there are many scenarios where you need active and quick braking. The specific scenario, that my wife is guilty of, is a constant slight acceleration followed by a slight deceleration (using regen)...back and fourth back and fourth constantly the entire drive.