Range Failure

[gnuarm]

One more thing. People run out of gas all the time. My guess is those people will also run out of electricity when they start driving electric cars. On the positive note, you were not one of those people - you did not run out of electricity.

Compared to an ICE it is much harder to refuel an EV with the dearth of charging available, much easier to run out and much harder to recoup. Ask a friend to bring you a can of electrons!

When I reached a working level 2 charger I only had about 10 miles of range left... maybe. There weren't many remaining options. In this neck of the woods the reporting on charging is a bit spotty. The library where I charged only had one of two units working, but there was another pair at the city parking lot. But in the last 60 miles I had passed NO chargers of any sort other than knocking on a door to ask about plugging into a 120 volt outlet! That would be so embarrassing.

I have a new, used gen 1 mobile cable I need to test out. I tried texting someone listing their home 14-50 outlet and have not heard back in a day. I expect the home charging offers are actually not terribly reliable. Fast forward 5 years and there will be a lot more options, but today is today. Someone pulled up to ask about the car while I was at the Superchargers and I told him the truth, charging at home is great if you have a 240 volt outlet. For trips you need to deal with the limitations.

 

[mswlogo]

I'm sorry, but reaching your destination with only 5% in the winter does tend to spell disaster. By the way, when you used Plugshare, did you leave a comment that it was inoperative?

And always look at the range graphs, that's where reality is.

Really. I won't even trust below 20% in Winter. 5% is nuts. Too many potential variables.

 

[gnuarm]

That is bad advice indeed. The graphs supply a wealth of information if you know how to interpret them.

I'm not sure what would be useful other than the estimated range if you want to know the estimated range. I can't picture pulling out a calculator and doing my own calculations instead of trusting the provided tools.

The history tells you about how you are driving. Over the same bit of road my history graph and yours would be different. One would be able to predict our relative outcomes if driving conditions stay the same. But they don't always.
It doesn't take future conditions into account.

Hmmm... then it is pretty useless, but I'm pretty sure you are wrong. Everyone who had encouraged me to forget the range indicator on the dash display said the navigator estimate DOES take into account the known factors of the remaining trip. Not sure what you base your claim on.

The energy graph does take terrain into account but it does not consider road surface condition nor wind. Teslawinds is an application that displays the latest reported wind for your region resolved into headwind and crosswind components for whatever heading you are on. The data are quantized in time and space but are considerably better than nothing. If you see a stiff headwind you can expect realized range to be less than predicted and conversely. And if, for example, you are proceeding north with reported winds from the east and know that you will be turning east soon you can anticipate that you are going to lose range starting with that turn even though things are looking good while you are going north.

You seem to be going on about irrelevant issues in this case since the various conditions were good. There was a slight breeze, but nothing to consider and the road was dry on a warm day.

In summary, using Teslawinds and the energy graphs I don't get any consumption surprises. Not to say that I may not someday. But using what is available to you properly you should be able to do the same.

How do you activate Teslawinds in the car?

 

[IdaX]

Did you check the winds? I pulled into Twin Falls supercharger on fumes once arriving with 3% left and couldn’t figure out why I almost didn’t make it until I got out of the car. 20mph headwind the whole trip it turned out — that’ll do it!

 

[gnuarm]

Really. I won't even trust below 20% in Winter. 5% is nuts. Too many potential variables.

Why do people keep talking about "winter". The "winter" issue is temperature and that was in the 60s from the time I started. The battery never showed any indication of being cold and I had already driven 200 miles before charging for the second and final leg. How does "winter" factor in???

As I said, the range estimate nearly always goes up and this case was no exception rising to 12%. It was only after I plugged in a couple of alternate routes to check them the estimated range really dropped to nearly nothing then did NOT rise back up. It makes me wonder what would have happened to the estimated range had I not stopped and recalculated. Would it have quit on me with significant percentage showing in the battery indicator like it did with Bjørn Nyland? THAT'S scary!

 

[gnuarm]

Did you check the winds? I pulled into Twin Falls supercharger on fumes once arriving with 3% left and couldn’t figure out why I almost didn’t make it until I got out of the car. 20mph headwind the whole trip it turned out — that’ll do it!

I ended up being in and out of the car a few times (the first to find a bathroom) and never noticed a significant wind. 20 MPH is very significant. Maybe I need to install pitot tubes.

 

[IdaX]

Nowadays I program an intermediate point on the route into my weather app and check wind direction and speed if I’m on a challenging leg.

 

[mswlogo]

Why do people keep talking about "winter". The "winter" issue is temperature and that was in the 60s from the time I started. The battery never showed any indication of being cold and I had already driven 200 miles before charging for the second and final leg. How does "winter" factor in???

As I said, the range estimate nearly always goes up and this case was no exception rising to 12%. It was only after I plugged in a couple of alternate routes to check them the estimated range really dropped to nearly nothing then did NOT rise back up. It makes me wonder what would have happened to the estimated range had I not stopped and recalculated. Would it have quit on me with significant percentage showing in the battery indicator like it did with Bjørn Nyland? THAT'S scary!

Which means the original estimate was off by 7%. In may not always go in your favor.

Any temperature that might require you to run you heater could impact things. As well as Rain, Wind, Terrain, Speed, Traffic.

You gambled shooting for 5% and lost. If you suddenly accelerate when the battery is that low, you could drop to 0% in a blink.

As soon as I saw you say "5%" I knew how it was gonna end. Well you actually did better than I expected, I expected it to end in a call to road side assistance.

 

[juliusa]

I can't imagine what the typical person would do with the range issues presented by this car.

Hundreds of thousands of Tesla owners are doing just fine. Millions of BEVs on the road. Just like some people will run out of gas in their ICE, some people will have range issues with their BEVs.

Compared to an ICE it is much harder to refuel an EV with the dearth of charging available

Airplanes seem to manage ok...for the most part. Not a lot of gas stations in the sky, except for the military. But I think they onboard more than 5% over the calculated requirrement to get to the next airport.

As I said, the range estimate nearly always goes up

Except when it does not. 5% is cutting it close - heaven forbid you miss an exit, or there is a detour.

 

[GHammer]

Ok, but I'm not following what the graph tells me that the number doesn't. The number is very simple to follow as the trip progresses and is the part I have to worry about to see if I will make it to the destination.

I'm a gear head and am not bothered too much learning the intricate details (well some of the details). I can't imagine what the typical person would do with the range issues presented by this car. A friend who goes with me on some of these trips would literally have freaked out by the issues of having to look for charging in the wild.

The trip graph is useful because you can see exactly when consumption issues occur that will impact on you're arrival SOC and give you time to react. It is also useful when you're cutting the final charge close because there is a situation where the final charge on the nav shows above zero but a hill right before the end of the trip can cause you to run low prematurely getting over the hill.

I cant tell you why this happened in your particular situation but I feel you are being way too dramatic about it. After tens of thousands of miles road tripping I have never felt anxious or limited by driving an all EV Tesla. I think you've also made some incorrect assumptions that I would like to clear up for others. As mentioned several times, 5% arrival SOC is not an adequate buffer. I would never rely on the arrival SOC estimate to increase, the variables will almost always negatively impact range. While 60 degrees is not cold, it still not the optimal temperature for range, according to my TeslaFi logs my optimal efficiency is at 85-90 degrees. My usage increases by about 8% at 60 from 85.

 

[MXn00b]

This was the worst possible place for this to happen. Once off the highway there is a big, black hole of charging for quite a few miles. Not a pleasant experience.

Oh, you must have missed my post about going over La Manga Pass in a CO snowstorm with an estimated -3% remaining to make it ~80 miles to my destination. It was about ~75 miles back to the nearest PlugShare.

Compared to an ICE it is much harder to refuel an EV with the dearth of charging available, much easier to run out and much harder to recoup. Ask a friend to bring you a can of electrons!

You know full batteries have the same number of electrons, right?

The energy graph does take terrain into account but it does not consider road surface condition nor wind.

You seem to be going on about irrelevant issues in this case since the various conditions were good. There was a slight breeze, but nothing to consider and the road was dry on a warm day.

Your conditions were good, but was you Wh/mi good? In my experience, my Wh/mi was higher than normal, so I believe the range calculator was adjusting for it. Sounds like you normally drive more efficient than expected, but for some reason this trip was less. Maybe your estimator was on the fritz. I just wish it would have a more detailed alert than “Stay below … MPH” because driving too fast is probs the highest and most common contributor, but not when you get into these confusing situations. I think my rolling resistance was raised by snow in the wheel wells, but that doesn’t explain how my estimate got better going down the pass. In these situations I think it is just being overly cautious. Apparently performance is hard to judge under 5% charge, so it's safer to tell you to charge than keep going and get there with 1%.

How do you activate Teslawinds in the car?

Go to Tesla Winds and Elevation and set up the accounts, then go to the URL in car browser. I haven’t done it yet since the URL is very long and I haven’t learned the calendar sync trick.

 

[ajdelange]

I'm not sure what would be useful other than the estimated range if you want to know the estimated range. I can't picture pulling out a calculator and doing my own calculations instead of trusting the provided tools.

Mental calculations are often adequate. For example, if I ask the planner to lay in a route to the Joyce Kilmer SC (Yelp review: "I think that I shall never see a place so lovely to stop and pee") it tells me that it is 197 miles from here and that starting at 90% charge I can expect to have 8% left when I arrive. That's 82% of my battery. I should be able to go about 3 miles on 1% of the battery per the EPA range of 295 for the car so the 197 miles should cost me 66%. 82% is 12% more than that and 12/66 is a bit less than 0.2 so the planner is telling me that I need about 20% more i.e. that I can expect about 80% efficiency. Looking at Stats data I see that this is about what the average X driver gets.

The planner has taken into account the terrain and the speed limits along the route. You can see, though the resolution is not adequate for great detail, places where the projected utilization curve goes a bit flatter or a bit steeper than the trend. These are places where you will be going down hill or up hill or expected to be driving faster or slower.

As you set out your actual history will be displayed to you and you will be able to see, graphically, whether you are doing better or worse than the plan indicates. And it also shows, based on what it knows about the rest of the route (terrain, speed limits) its projection for the rest of the trip.

It doesn't take future conditions into account.

Hmmm... then it is pretty useless, but I'm pretty sure you are wrong. Everyone who had encouraged me to forget the range indicator on the dash display said the navigator estimate DOES take into account the known factors of the remaining trip. Not sure what you base your claim on.

Based on the fact that it cannot possibly know that you will (prudently) slow down if your actual history line dips below the original projection curve or speed up if it goes above (the prudent driver would bank it especially if the estimate at destination were 5% remaining), nor whether the wind will come up or shift direction nor whether you will encounter a traffic jam nor whether it will start to rain or snow nor whether you will have to drive on gravel or dirt.

You seem to be going on about irrelevant issues in this case since the various conditions were good. There was a slight breeze, but nothing to consider and the road was dry on a warm day.

Clearly the relevant conditions weren't good because if they were you wouldn't have observed what you did. You did not have a failure of the car's navigation software. The failure was on the part of the driver to understand what the displays are telling him and what the relevant factors determining range are. Also, the decision to arrive at a destination with 5% charge in a place where alternatives are sparse without having thoroughly checked out the alternatives is hardly prudent.

I'm a gear head and am not bothered too much learning the intricate details..

That's exactly what you need to do.

I can't imagine what the typical person would do with the range issues presented by this car.

Until there are half a dozen reliable chargers in every hamlet, village and and town (i.e. until the chargers are as dense as gas stations) these cars are not for the typical person. Certainly my wife can run errands with the car around town but I could never expect her to begin to understand how the energy utilization curves work. Some people just do not have the particular skill sets required. Perhaps you are one of those people. I've noticed that you make a lot of posts about failures of the navigation system which, upon analysis, turn out not to be failures at all. Thousands of other drivers find it more than adequate.

How do you activate Teslawinds in the car?

Go to their website and follow the instructions for obtaining keys for the two services that allow access to the winds and elevation data. Follow those instructions exactly. In once case you must not only obtain the key by activate it. Now go to the car. Navigate to the TeslaWinds site and enter the keys. This can be a big pain because one of them is very long (20? hex characters) and they don't always take on the first attempt. Keep trying. You may have to come back and try another day but don't give up. Eventually you will succeed. When you do you are taken to a URL which contains your keys. Bookmark this.

 

[gnuarm]

Which means the original estimate was off by 7%. In may not always go in your favor.

Any temperature that might require you to run you heater could impact things. As well as Rain, Wind, Terrain, Speed, Traffic.

You gambled shooting for 5% and lost. If you suddenly accelerate when the battery is that low, you could drop to 0% in a blink.

As soon as I saw you say "5%" I knew how it was gonna end. Well you actually did better than I expected, I expected it to end in a call to road side assistance.

I really think my posts are not read at all. I didn't gamble on 5%. As I've said repeatedly, the remaining charge estimate rose to 12% as I drove. If it hadn't been reporting 12% when I passed the two additional Superchargers along the highway I would have stopped to charge.

As I've also said, the range estimate has never dropped more than 2% as I drove. A 12% drop in range is about 36 miles!!! That much drop in estimated charge happened while driving less than 60 miles at speeds of 35 to 55. Clearly the range estimate is terrible under those conditions. I just wish I knew exactly what those conditions were that would have caused this.

 

[gnuarm]

Hundreds of thousands of Tesla owners are doing just fine. Millions of BEVs on the road. Just like some people will run out of gas in their ICE, some people will have range issues with their BEVs.

Airplanes seem to manage ok...for the most part. Not a lot of gas stations in the sky, except for the military. But I think they onboard more than 5% over the calculated requirrement to get to the next airport.

Except when it does not. 5% is cutting it close - heaven forbid you miss an exit, or there is a detour.

These are exactly the type of posts that ignore that the driving public will never buy cars they can't depend on to get them to their destinations. They also show people don't read.

 

[gnuarm]

The trip graph is useful because you can see exactly when consumption issues occur that will impact on you're arrival SOC and give you time to react. It is also useful when you're cutting the final charge close because there is a situation where the final charge on the nav shows above zero but a hill right before the end of the trip can cause you to run low prematurely getting over the hill.

I still don't see where the graph gives me any info I don't get in the remaining charge estimate other than historical. When I see the remaining charge go down, I know right away there is something different than what the estimator expected. I don't have to glare at a graph.

I cant tell you why this happened in your particular situation but I feel you are being way too dramatic about it. After tens of thousands of miles road tripping I have never felt anxious or limited by driving an all EV Tesla. I think you've also made some incorrect assumptions that I would like to clear up for others. As mentioned several times, 5% arrival SOC is not an adequate buffer. I would never rely on the arrival SOC estimate to increase, the variables will almost always negatively impact range. While 60 degrees is not cold, it still not the optimal temperature for range, according to my TeslaFi logs my optimal efficiency is at 85-90 degrees. My usage increases by about 8% at 60 from 85.

You and everyone else keep talking about the initial 5%. I passed two Supercharger stations with the estimate at 12% and have said so several times early in the thread. Clearly you remember what you want to remember.

If there were any issues with battery temperature, I'm sure it would have warmed up in the initial 150 miles since the car was Supercharged. Again, all of this stated several time, yet you continue to state inaccurate issues with the trip.

And again, I'll say this is all irrelevant since the estimator knows the battery temperature and all the other issues. The point where range dropped was when I left the highway and drove at slower speeds, some stretches as low as 35 MPH.

It is very clear the range estimator failed. I've been advised to ignore all the other indicators in the car and trust in the navigational range estimator. Now there is nothing left to trust. I'll just need to charge, and charge and charge.

 

[gnuarm]

Go to Tesla Winds and Elevation and set up the accounts, then go to the URL in car browser. I haven’t done it yet since the URL is very long and I haven’t learned the calendar sync trick.

The in car browser is probably the least reliable part of the car. During this exercise I tried to use it to access Plugshare and it would not function. It would bring up the site, but it won't let me change any of the settings, they change but then change back. It usually won't even let me dismiss the cookies notification and the screen freezes. If my phone doesn't get a signal I'm hosed in that department. So please never suggest anything important be done on the in car browser.

 

[ajdelange]

We each have our own definition of "gambling". If you left your destination with an arrival estimate of 5% you were, IMO, gambling. My personal threshold is 20% but that's personal and what I actually put into the trip planner very much depends on whether I can get to a reliable charger (which at this point seems to mean exclusively SC's) on that 20%. Now I grant you that seeing that terminal estimate rise to 12% would be comforting but just as I would want to know why my history graph showed a deficit relative to the overall plan I'd want to consider why I got the bonus. Of course I don't know why you got the bonus but as an example suppose you came down a mountain. You could be fairly confident that you could keep the bonus if you were staying on the plain. If you knew you had to go back up to elevation you would know that you could not rely on keeping that bonus. Please don't respond with "I didn't go up or down a mountain". This example is only an illustration of one way in which the lord giveth but also taketh away.

Yes, range estimates are terrible over short distances (the last part of a trip). Over 10 or 20 miles I may see 260 Wh/mi consumption or I may see 480. One can usually figure out what the responsible factors are (wind, elevation change and temperature are usually the big three) after the fact. That's why the smart driver plans for a hefty margin at destination or has another backup plan (e.g. the ChaDeMo chargers collocated with the Tesla SC's at the previously mentioned Joyce Kilmer rest stop).

 

[ajdelange]

I still don't see where the graph gives me any info I don't get in the remaining charge estimate other than historical.

When (and if) you do we won't be seeing threads like this one.

It is very clear the range estimator failed.

No, it didn't. You failed to interpret what it told you in the way you should have and thus has a bad experience (though you did ultimately come out OK). Rather than criticize the software you should resolve to learn from the experience. If you can't then sell the car.

I've been advised to ignore all the other indicators in the car and trust in the navigational range estimator.

Find advisors who know what they are talking about.

 

[mswlogo]

I still don't see where the graph gives me any info I don't get in the remaining charge estimate other than historical. When I see the remaining charge go down, I know right away there is something different than what the estimator expected. I don't have to glare at a graph.

You and everyone else keep talking about the initial 5%. I passed two Supercharger stations with the estimate at 12% and have said so several times early in the thread. Clearly you remember what you want to remember.

If there were any issues with battery temperature, I'm sure it would have warmed up in the initial 150 miles since the car was Supercharged. Again, all of this stated several time, yet you continue to state inaccurate issues with the trip.

And again, I'll say this is all irrelevant since the estimator knows the battery temperature and all the other issues. The point where range dropped was when I left the highway and drove at slower speeds, some stretches as low as 35 MPH.

It is very clear the range estimator failed. I've been advised to ignore all the other indicators in the car and trust in the navigational range estimator. Now there is nothing left to trust. I'll just need to charge, and charge and charge.

First, for many of us 12% is cutting it close as well. And to top that off your starting at 5% and EXPECTING it to climb to 12%.

Normal driving, especially efficient driving, really doesn't warm battery up much at all. Temperature inefficiency isn't just the battery either. It's running heater. Running Defroster. etc.

The range estimator is an ESTIMATOR. It was your estimating the estimator that failed.

The fact you passed two super chargers at 12% then ran into a very close call later speaks volumes.

You might go down to say 10% if it's a trip you've been on many times, same time, same weather etc. And only if it's really inconvenient to use a different route or require extra stop or extra cost (say because destination might be free or something). But if it's unfamiliar I would not target below 20%. And if say I did want to take a gamble. I certainly wouldn't blame the car estimator for failing.

 

[mxnym]

We each have our own definition of "gambling". If you left your destination with an arrival estimate of 5% you were, IMO, gambling.

So to be clear, you would consider it gambling to leave a supercharger with an estimate of 5% left at your destination in spite of the fact that you know you are going to pass two more superchargers along the way to said destination?