NYT article: Stalled on the EV Highway

[ToddRLockwood]

Excellent overview, Arnold. I think I would add that people, and especially the stock market, have short memories.

Elon has mentioned the possibility of arranging a couple of identical drives with other journalists, just to illustrate that the Model S is up to the task. They'll have to move quickly, though, while the cold temps are still around. Perhaps a Boston to Washington round trip.

 

[dsm363]

Their response:
The Charges Are Flying Over a Test of Teslas Charging Network - NYTimes.com

 

[dsm363]

John Broder and the NY Times respond to Tesla

The Charges Are Flying Over a Test of Teslas Charging Network - NYTimes.com

His response it up.

 

[rolosrevenge]

Interesting development, but he still doesn't answer the question about why he didn't try to plug-in at the hotel. That's hardly an unrealistic expectation to ask the front desk if they have a place to charge your EV. I also didn't feel from his original article that he was merely reviewing the super charging network, but rather the S in general.

 

[dsm363]

Interesting development, but he still doesn't answer the question about why he didn't try to plug-in at the hotel. That's hardly an unrealistic expectation to ask the front desk if they have a place to charge your EV. I also didn't feel from his original article that he was merely reviewing the super charging network, but rather the S in general.

I just called the first three hotels that showed up in Google for Groton, CT and they all said 'I don't think so' when I asked if they even had a 110V outlet. If he didn't do a range charge because he was worried about 'harming the battery' or didn't even know about it, I am not surprised he didn't do his homework and find somewhere to charge overnight. His excuse that he was only testing the Supercharger network falls apart since he didn't even bother to fully utilize the network.

There is a post on this topic in the News section now
John Broder' response: The Charges Are Flying Over a Test of Tesla’s Charging Network

 

[Grendal]

Their response:
The Charges Are Flying Over a Test of Teslas Charging Network - NYTimes.com

I thought this was a much better written story. The writer was humble and copped to not necessarily following drirections and having a lack of knowledge about the car.

I look forward to his repeat of the test drive.

 

[daxz]

The Ford Model T had a 10 gallon engine with an approximate range of 200 miles. Gas stations were surely few and far in between back then. If the NYT reporter had been reviewing the Model T back in the early 1900s, he would have figured 1/2 a tank was enough to go 300 miles, and have been shocked when he had to be towed... and he would have written a headline that his Model T had to be towed because it just wasn't good enough.

Fast forward 100 years, we have a range we can drive in the Model S and not that many fill-up stations YET. Sure seems like this writer wanted the article to turn out one way and sabotaged it.

A better analogy with the Model T would be if he got just enough fuel along the way and then stopped the night, if the fuel shut-off valve was left open then all the fuel could have overflowed the carburetor and left it with not enough gas. (this was a common issue with Model T's and A's)

I think in this article NYT and TSLA made assumptions on how the trip should be done, and when you AssUMe ...

 

[dsm363]

Isn't there some NY Times article from the early 1900s that says gas cars will never make it as they are difficult to refuel and not as easy to use as horses? Can't seem to find it.

Here is an article from 1911 in the NY Times about EVs
ELECTRIC VEHICLES ATTRACT ATTENTION - Pleasure Cars Not Forgotten at Garden Motor Truck Show -- Record Attendance. - View Article - NYTimes.com

 

[medved]

From the article: "This evaluation was intended to demonstrate its practicality as a “normal use,” no-compromise car, as Tesla markets it."

Now we know the Model S is not without a compromise: Every time you stop the car you have to keep searching for a place to plug in.
Model S - constant search for an outlet.

 

[Grendal]

From the article: "This evaluation was intended to demonstrate its practicality as a “normal use,” no-compromise car, as Tesla markets it."

Now we know the Model S is not without a compromise: Every time you stop the car you have to keep searching for a place to plug in.
Model S - constant search for an outlet.

It's still an EV. That means it works in a different way than a gas car. It certainly doesn't mean it works exactly like a gas car in every circumstance.

 

[StephenM]

There are way too many people giving Mr. Broder the benefit of the doubt here. He clearly wanted to run out of juice on the road to make for a sensational story, and though carefully crafting his story to make it seem like "it coulda happened to anybody" it's pretty obvious that he's either a shill or a moron or both.

Plus: if TM was not already working furiously to resolve vampiric losses (particularly in cold weather) they are now.

Minus: another unwarranted hit to the viability of the EV to the masses.

 

[dsm363]

From the article: "This evaluation was intended to demonstrate its practicality as a “normal use,” no-compromise car, as Tesla markets it."

Now we know the Model S is not without a compromise: Every time you stop the car you have to keep searching for a place to plug in.
Model S - constant search for an outlet.

Owning a performance version of a ICE is also not without compromise. You always get worse gas mileage than it's non AMG/M counterpart. Not the case for the Performance Model S. All technologies have their plusses and minuses. Nothing new here.

 

[Arnold Panz]

From the article: "This evaluation was intended to demonstrate its practicality as a “normal use,” no-compromise car, as Tesla markets it."

Now we know the Model S is not without a compromise: Every time you stop the car you have to keep searching for a place to plug in.
Model S - constant search for an outlet.

I thought this was the worst part of Broder's response. Most people using any car are parking at home every night where finding an outlet isn't an issue. He chose not only to try to travel hundreds of miles (something most people don't regularly do), but to do it over two days. Simply charging to max range to start (which, contra his article, once in a while won't harm the battery life), and plugging in overnight anywhere (even a 110v) would probably have prevented him from running out of battery. That's not superhuman to expect.

Any "road trip" requires advanced planning. When I was a kid in the 70s my parents took us out west for a long vacation and we drove from Denver to California using an AAA trip-tik (sp?). We got stuck in the middle of Yosemite in the middle of the night with no gas because my father "thought" there would be a gas station soon. No different than bad planning with an EV, and no we've never let my father forget!

 

[Citizen-T]

From the article: "This evaluation was intended to demonstrate its practicality as a “normal use,” no-compromise car, as Tesla markets it."

Now we know the Model S is not without a compromise: Every time you stop the car you have to keep searching for a place to plug in.
Model S - constant search for an outlet.

I don't accept this. Anyone that expects the Model S to be a better ICE than an ICE is just plain kidding themselves. That doesn't mean that it can't be a better car. Basic operational knowledge is a prerequisite for using any machine. You can't play dumb and say, "well my ICE doesn't lose range over night so I didn't know." The technology is different, it deserves to used differently, that doesn't make it inferior. That does not equate to compromise.

Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot. Imagine we lived in a world dominated by EVs and the ICE was breaking in. Imagine that a journalist had one of the first viable ICEs for a weekend of test drives. Imagine in his review he wrote, "I turned the car on this morning then made myself some breakfast, when I got down to the garage I found my cat dead at the door! Apparently I wasn't supposed to do that, something about carbon monoxide, but hey, this is a normal use case for any EV owner! ICEs just aren't ready for the real world until they fix this defect!"

Obviously you need to open your garage door before you turn the car on. Millions of people do this every day around the world. They don't view this as a "compromise". Plugging in your car when you know it is going to be sitting for any period of time is not a compromise, it's just different.

 

[Lyon]

All in all I don't mind that the writer is defending himself somewhat and it looks like a more robust supercharger network will result from this experience.

I will make one small comment on something he wrote. Perhaps it's my legal training but he analogizes plugging in at night while it's bitterly cold (while one is sleeping) to being an OCD EV acolyte "who will plug is at every Walmart stop." The two are not analogous. While I am critical of Tesla for not telling him to find a 110 to plug into for the night, it's not the issue he's making it out to be. I've been plugging in every night for the last month and it's quite a bit less annoying that plugging in every time I stop at a store. Aside from that one line, I felt the rest of the article was a fair defense. I may feel entirely different when Elon publishes the car's logs. Oh, and someone should have told him to do a Range charge!

I hope this leads to Tesla appointing someone to act as an information source EVERY TIME they provide a car to a journalist. Take the tester through an hour-long delivery-style session. It really seems to me that most of the issues (if not all) this writer encountered could have been avoided had he possessed a little more knowledge. I would not have expected anyone here to have had the same issues he did.

When I tell people my car is electric they will, invariably, tell me about some charging station around town. I have made it a point to tell them, while I am able to use most of those, I don't because I simply don't need to. I charge at night and then don't worry about it during the day.

 

[Kevin Sharpe]

This article and its aftermath isn't going to damage Tesla, or EVs. But it's a reminder to EV proponents and the industry regarding how EVs are positioned and marketed.

Agreed.... we have a long way to go before an automative journalist can step from an ICE into an EV and undertake an American "road trip". Today, EV drivers need some serious education about the benefits and limitations of the technology and this may or may not have happened in this case. ICE and EV vehicles are not the same and we need to stop marketing them as such because it will only result in disappointed drivers IMO.

 

[StephenM]

I don't accept this. Anyone that expects the Model S to be a better ICE than an ICE is just plain kidding themselves. That doesn't mean that it can't be a better car. Basic operational knowledge is a prerequisite for using any machine. You can't play dumb and say, "well my ICE doesn't lose range over night so I didn't know." The technology is different, it deserves to used differently, that doesn't make it inferior. That does not equate to compromise.

Imagine if the shoe was on the other foot. Imagine we lived in a world dominated by EVs and the ICE was breaking in. Imagine that a journalist had one of the first viable ICEs for a weekend of test drives. Imagine in his review he wrote, "I turned the car on this morning then made myself some breakfast, when I got down to the garage I found my cat dead at the door! Apparently I wasn't supposed to do that, something about carbon monoxide, but hey, this is a normal use case for any EV owner! ICEs just aren't ready for the real world until they fix this defect!"

Obviously you need to open your garage door before you turn the car on. Millions of people do this every day around the world. They don't view this as a "compromise". Plugging in your car when you know it is going to be sitting for any period of time is not a compromise, it's just different.

Well said. There are far fewer downsides to an EV as a solution for personal mobility if this technology had come before the ICE. Even coming over 100 years after the ICE it's still a compelling choice (and the future).

Taken from John Broder's response to the debacle:

"She said to shut off the cruise control to take advantage of battery regeneration from occasional braking and slowing down. Based on that advice, I was under the impression that stop-and-go driving at low speeds in the city would help, not hurt, my mileage."
Uh-huh. You really deduced that because someone advises you to turn off cruise control to extend range, that you will get better range by diverting to stop-and-go city driving as opposed to expressway? This is the case for Mr. Broder being a moron.

"Knowing then what I know now about the car, its sensitivity to cold and additional ways to maximize range, I certainly would have treated the test differently. But the conclusion might not have been any better for Tesla."
And this would be the case for him being a shill.​

 

[Norbert]

But it defeats the purpose to hand someone a Tesla and then tell them to drive it like his grandmother if he hopes to reach his destination. Or to freeze his toes off along the way.

That might be true for the EV1, or an attempt to use the Volt without using gasoline, but not for the Model S. Sounds like a victim of the article's misleading nature.

- - - Updated - - -

Agreed.... we have a long way to go before an automative journalist can step from an ICE into an EV and undertake an American "road trip". Today, EV drivers need some serious education about the benefits and limitations of the technology and this may or may not have happened in this case. ICE and EV vehicles are not the same and we need to stop marketing them as such because it will only result in disappointed drivers IMO.

Some serious education like 'take a maximum charge' ? *If* there was a plain communication problem, the author should not have let develop that into an article like this, and then publish it.

- - - Updated - - -

Their response:
The Charges Are Flying Over a Test of Teslas Charging Network - NYTimes.com

This has a new version on the input he got from Tesla after the night:

The rest of that story is told in the article, including a Tesla official’s counsel, which I followed, that an hour of charging at the Norwich, Conn., utility would restore much of the range lost overnight, which had disappeared because of what he called a “software glitch.”

Here it sounds like the charging time ("an hour") was given in advance, with the expectation that it would restore the lost range. If so, then he should *easily* have seen that this didn't happen, and not start an about 60-mile trip with a displayed rated range of 32 miles. If so, this was a grave mistake on his part. (And instead just charge more.)

 

[Kevin Sharpe]

Some serious education like 'take a maximum charge' ?

Possibly, who knows? Surely the point is that we can't expect anyone used to an ICE car to understand the subtleties of driving 200 miles in an EV. You understand range mode and plugging in at night but most lay people do not. The problem with a lot of EV marketing is that it implies that anyone can jump in and achieve the published range... you see lots of examples on TMC where owners have been shocked by the realities of EV driving.

 

[JRP3]

There certainly seems to have been some assumptions made by both the reporter and Tesla. Those of us quite familiar with EV's take for granted things that the general population may not even be aware of. I get the impression the reporter was too afraid of fully charging the pack, and counted too much on range being restored through warming during use.