I concede that you and the EPA is correct.
But we are talking past eachother here.
We're not talking facts here, but emotions. That's what sells or doesn't sell cars: the average is far less interesting than the worst case.
So your misjudgment consists only of looking at the issue as a non issue, from objective and correct observations as opposed to how most people see it: they confuse a mathematical average, with a distribution and range, with an actual absolute number. And the number they want is some low cut off on the normally distributed rated range, not the medium or median value.
Range should actually be given like this: rated range 265 miles [95% confidence interval 180-310 miles and varies widely with conditions].
The comment I originally responded to claimed that "real world" range is 75% of what the EPA rating is, and that getting rated range was very difficult in his small experience driving the car. I countered that, no, the EPA rating is the EPA rating and that beating rated range is not difficult in my experience - in any car I've driven, highway or otherwise. Then people went nuts. I really do not understand why.
Anyway, the problem with that is that nobody knows what confidence intervals are, so it wouldn't work as a public facing issue. And those numbers aren't given that way for gas vehicles, either. Thing is, I suspect the same people who get horrible mileage in their S also get horrible mileage in their gas vehicles, but they don't notice because they don't have a nice big number right in front of them to fret about, which happens to charge up to the same number every morning when they get into the car. That's the way in which this is psychological, for some reason new EV drivers attach so much importance to range, and talk about it constantly, and ICE manufacturers are happy to let this happen because they want people to be worried about this as if it's some sort of thing unique to EVs, and to think that mileage varies more with EVs than it does with ICE vehicles.
But that's what Tesla's tool on their site was all about, showing how various behaviors affect efficiency. I thought this was a good learning tool, because it let people know that if you think you're not going to get somewhere, *just slow down a bit*. Unfortunately many of these comments show that some people took that tool to mean "look how terrible this car does in my conditions!" even though the same is true of any vehicle - snow, cold, heat, and high speeds make you less efficient.
This also follows the same maxim that must be remembered whenever reading internet reviews of any product - the only people complaining here are the people who, for whatever reason, drive less efficiently than the rest. The rest of people who have no problem with it naturally aren't going to bother complaining because there's nothing to complain about. The same has happened with many cars, the lawsuits for EPA mileage claims naturally will come from the people who are below average, because the ones above average have no reason to file a lawsuit, do they? And it's also interesting that these lawsuits happen more often with hybrids, which makes it seem to me that hybrid owners are more interested in MPG than most people, so they're more likely to notice this sort of thing, and their car is more likely to have the tools available to let them notice this type of thing.
Now, if you want to use a term other than "real world," and instead say "my minimum range under my personal worst possible driving conditions and where I don't do anything to mitigate that," then that's another thing entirely. But it would be silly for Tesla to publish efficiency numbers for each individual case. So instead they publish the average, using the standard EPA numbers and test protocol which are typically more conservative than any other rating agency I'm aware of and which are used on all cars so people can say "hm, well if I'm 10% less efficient than average on my current car then the same will probably apply to my EV." Which is entirely reasonable and based in the real world.
I do wish they hadn't taken down the "go electric" tool on the website though, that thing was super useful in so many ways.
