Does anyone ever get rated range?

[GaryW]

I suppose I should have answered this another way. I drove down I-95. I was able to average 65-70, with traffic, road construction, etc. I planned to stop about every 250-275 Miles, but I only made it that far once.

The problem was the range on my bladder, not the battery.

4 hours is about my limit, and the one time I went over 4 hours, I was wishing I hadn’t!

Did the trip take longer than if I drove a gas burner? If so, the difference was less than 15 minutes on a 11 hour trip. I know I rushed both meals a little, as the car got close to fully charged in 40 minutes.

Should we ask uncle Elon to work on the bladder issue for us?

 

[sdorn]

I suppose I should have answered this another way. I drove down I-95. I was able to average 65-70, with traffic, road construction, etc. I planned to stop about every 250-275 Miles, but I only made it that far once.

The problem was the range on my bladder, not the battery.

4 hours is about my limit, and the one time I went over 4 hours, I was wishing I hadn’t!

Did the trip take longer than if I drove a gas burner? If so, the difference was less than 15 minutes on a 11 hour trip. I know I rushed both meals a little, as the car got close to fully charged in 40 minutes.

Should we ask uncle Elon to work on the bladder issue for us?

My problem is that the bladders in the car are not in sync with the locations of superchargers so we end up having to stop for both.

 

[ThosEM]

Damnedest thing: looked at my consumption chart after completing a trip from Rochester NY to Annapolis MD. The last 50 km (from about even with Baltimore) showed 141 Wh/km, which is the lowest value I've ever recorded. During this part of the drive on the Baltimore beltway and I-97 to Annapolis, we were traveling at 75 mph / 120 kph most of the way and I was not babying it. Must have had a tailwind? I swear the efficiency of the system improves steadily as it is driven over hours and successive supercharges.

 

[jbcarioca]

Im my ~40,000 Tesla miles I have often done Rated Range or better, with the odd trip getting half Rated range or so. The latter required seriously "Autobahn" style driving.
When driving ~90MPH steadily Eastward in Southern Wyoming I managed 215 Wh/mi for a ~200 mile leg due to serious tailwinds coupled with handy large trucks to draft.
From time to time on long legs I drive at or about 70 mph but try to draft large vehicles, consistently beating rated range.
Driving downwind and/or drafting have allowed me to have decent speeds while beating rated range.
For what it's worth my lifetime Wh/mi for my P85D is 299.

Most of my drafting is using the two second setting on TACC. I do not ever draft without TACC. I also only draft when the highway is clear and well-maintained and my 'draftee' is itself clean and apparently well-maintained. I often follow high speeds large trucks but also frequently follow large SUVs, oddly they seem to be mostly Escalades.It's easy to be dangerous in drafting, so I devote a fair amount of extra diligence. Even in the absence of speed limits I limit mine to 90 MPH because TACC is limited to that speed.

 

[Peter Lucas]

Watt hours per mile does not define range. Range is in miles per full charge. Considering that Tesla does not give you access to the entire nominal capacity of the battery, you cannot simply calculate range from wh/mi.
Furthermore, since most of us rarely charge to 100% and even more rarely discharge to near 0%, you can only know the real range of your car by noting how far you got on what portion, percent, of the battery. So, for example, if you went 100 miles and your battery went from 80% to 30%, them you can infer that your range is 200 miles. You cannot expect this sort of calculation to be accurate for small portions of battery use because the battery percent indicator may not be perfectly proportional to actual battery capacity.
When you do this calculation a few times, I think you will discover that your cars real range is much less than advertised.

 

[jbcarioca]

Watt hours per mile does not define range....

Almost everyone is quite capable of calculating range from a Wh/mi indication. After all Wh/mi is the standard driving efficiency measure. I don’t quite understand how you seem to be arguing otherwise. That measure reduces the major inconsistencies in estimates of battery capacity percentages and estimated ranges by measuring consumption. In every fuel usage calculation for motor vehicles I know the metric of merit is fuel used per distance.

Possibly I do not understand your point.

 

[pinball_player]

I get the rated range while driving to work since it is on a highway that usually runs about 55 to 60 MPH. That results in about 240 Wh/mile usage.

Now that I have the 21" wheels and tires, the usage has increased, so I am going to get less now.

But when I drive 75, of course the rage is less than the rated range.

 

[ThosEM]

Watt hours per mile does not define range. Range is in miles per full charge.

That's a valid quibble, but it's semantic rather than substantive. As you note, hardly anyone actually measures their range, possible exception of the EPA. So the title of the OP should be "Does anyone ever get rated consumption?" That's what we routinely measure, and record in our trip records, and what's being discussed here in this thread.

How do we even know what the rated consumption figures are? I have inferred them from comparing actual consumption with the level of the "rated" and "ideal" lines on the energy plot. I make rated consumption to be 189 Wh/km or 304 Wh/mi and ideal consumption to be 162 Wh/km or 261 Wh/mi. As they say, your (inverse) mileage may vary.

Those numbers aren't so practical for "in you head" calculations. My Model S (late 2013) has a rated range when fully charged of 412-416 km, which I round off for practical purposes to 4 km per % on the battery gauge. I can make that figure pretty routinely though I may have to slow down in some cases.

 

[jerry33]

Any time I get rated or less, I look to see what’s wrong. I’m not even too pleased when I get as low as ideal.