Tesla Phantom Battery Losses of 20%

[clostridium]

If I'm driving 298 WH/Miles since the last charge, I believe this is very NORMAL driving
. AC on
. Radio on
. (300 to 350)WH/Mile driving habit

I would say this is all normal driving.

Regardless of EPA reports or whatever... as a Tesla owner, I would much more appreciate a transparent reporting of HOW MANY MILES I CAN REALLY DRIVE.

With all due respect, I call BS on anyone who says they are getting MORE than the stated miles available... I just don't see it (and please share your magic with us).

If I see on my odometer (150 Miles available). I would like to know that I can "reasonably" get 150 miles, not 120 to 130.

Tesla should underestimate the miles available rather than over estimate. (since chargers are not available on every other street corner)

At this point, they are OVERESTIMATING...

I'm not a hyper miler. I weave in and out of traffic on the highway far more than I should which adds in accelerations and decelerations I wouldn't have if I didn't do that. I make some people nervous when they ride with me. I'm also not doing a bunch of hard accelerations. You may very well drive more spirited than I do. My car is currently averaging overall 297 wh/mi for the 7500 miles I've been driving it which includes the tail end of an Ohio winter and in recent months based on teslafi I am doing much better. I've included my July teslafi.com summary below. I'm averaging 273 wh/mi for the month so far. Most of the longer drives (> 25 miles) run below that average. Teslafi uses the ratio of actual miles vs rated miles to compute their "efficiency" number. It's interesting because even though the car is reportedly rated for ~290 it looks like you can to average about 265 to get 100% efficient per teslafi. That number varies a little bit, between 263-268 wh/mi based on my calculations.

I also pasted in a summary from one drive so you can see how it uses the rated miles consumed vs. actual miles. The variation between rated miles and efficiency is part of why I don't use the miles setting for my battery status on the car. I set it for percentage and then I look at the center screen efficiency number to get a sense for how I'm doing. I also keep in mind a general conservative rule of thumb of 2.5 miles of range per 1% of my 75D's battery (that works out to about 300 wh/mi - 1% is 0.75 kwH divided by 2.5 = 300). In the winter I go with 2 miles of range per 1% which works out to 375 wh/mi which is what you'd see on a pretty cold day. For longer trips I also run them through evto-tesla on my iphone and it's usually pretty darn close to right and it accounts for temperature, altitude change, etc.

I have a 2016 S75D with 19" wheels. The wheels make a big difference too.

So I guess you might call BS on me since sometimes I get more than the rated miles and I often get more than the rated wh/mi and I'm almost always beating the EPA estimated wh/mi (340 - see link below).

I am curious if anyone out there can explain why the difference between those two concepts and then also why the EPA site says that they got 340 wh/mi with my car so why are the rated miles working out to 260's.

Fuel Economy of New Tesla Vehicles

 

[JohnQ]

This is silliness. Some people get rated miles because they drive conservatively in a mild climate. Some don't even come close because of speed and weather. I'm one of the latter. I've averaged 326 Wh/mi the past 3 months. That's about average for me based on my last 4 years of ownership. Most on this thread are reacting to the phrase "phantom loss." There's nothing phantom about it. As pointed out by others, mpg in an ICE varies widely based on driving style and weather as well.

Your driving style gets you 80% of rated miles. So does mine because I drive 15-20 mph above the speed limit on highways. Someone else's style gets them 105%. Thus it ever was. If you want to get better range, just slow down. Other than temperature (which you can't control) nothing else has the same impact. But I'm guessing you don't want to do that ... nor do I. So we live with below rated range.

 

[Meros]

I'll give my 2 cents. Forget about driving style. Let's just focus on energy consumed and how much the reported battery level dropped.

The car reports 25% more miles remaining when set to ideal miles (as compared to rated miles).

The OP consumed 35.4kWh and the reported mileage remaining dropped by 156 miles. That's 227Wh/mi which is very low and suggests his car is set to report ideal miles instead of rated miles. If the car had been set to rated miles, 35.4kWh of consumption would have reduced the reported miles remaining by 125 miles or so (283Wh/mi).

I usually have my car set to rated miles or just plain "percentage". I've made long drives and the consumed rated miles is usually consistent with the reported energy consumed in kWh. If I take kWh consumed divided by rated miles consumed, I usually get around 290Wh per rated mile, regardless of the Wh per actual miles driven. As long as my actual consumption is 290Wh/mi or better, I can typically travel 1 mile for every rated mile consumed from the battery.

 

[TaoJones]

SoCalMS - you're not crazy. I've observed this pretty much since day 1.

Short urban commutes in particular tend to exacerbate the poor efficiency. Most owners are unaware because they charge more frequently or they don't do the math or both.

Very simple to figure out:

Charge to some percentage - say 90%.
Drive for a few days down to say 40%.
Observe actual miles driven - call it 94.
Divide by the percentage used - in this case 50%.
Observe the new number of miles: 188. Divide by the marketed EPA number *or*, more appropriately, your actual miles at 100%, since over time there is some loss (in my case after the first ~65K miles, 3.7%.

Call it 261. So 188/261 et voila, 28% under rated.

Point being that unless you drive from charger to charger in one shot on a flat road in mild weather at moderate speed, you ain't getting the magic number. Can you? Sure. Will you? Generally not.

On the road, the behavior is easily attributed to high speed, net positive elevation, cold weather, or all three. In town, it's more HVAC use and the propensity to use more energy while driving in general. I haven't met a single owner who drives at rated (274 Wh/mile) *in town*. On the road? Sure. Not hard to do as long as you don't live in Utah. Or Texas.

Want to really torpedo your effective range? Take a few 1-2 hour conference calls while parked with the AC or heat running during a week of short urban hilly commutes. I've seen 40% loss.

Model 3 owners won't like that at $0.20/kW in CA. No financial advantage at the pump, as it were, over driving a decent hybrid.

I'd like to think that showroom personnel would take the opportunity to educate new customers in this regard, but that ain't happening.

Live and learn.

 

[DB 2]

I am curious if anyone out there can explain why the difference between those two concepts and then also why the EPA site says that they got 340 wh/mi with my car so why are the rated miles working out to 260's

Two unrelated factors explain how EPA's 340 Wh/mi becomes ~270 Wh consumed per rated mile used on the dashboard. First, EPA's testing measures recharging at the power meter (what you pay the power company for). Tesla computes power consumption from the battery. Charging is only 80-85% efficient (particularly with AC to DC conversion in your on-board charger), so it takes about 340 Wh from the power company to get 290 Wh in your battery.

Second, if rated miles were deducted at a rate 290 Wh consumed per RM, your car would shut down just as you hit 0 miles (or 0%) on the dash. Since estimating remaining charge is inexact, one would expect equal numbers of people shutting down while still showing miles remaining, and people continuing to drive well after 0 miles is shown. This is not what happens, though. Driving below 0 miles is far more common than shutting down with miles remaining. This is achieved by (or results in) having rated miles disappear faster than 1 every 290 Wh. Instead, they disappear every 270 Wh (approximately, and varies by model). I have tested my car extensively, and it is clearly designed to hit 0 miles remaining when the best estimate of power remaining in the battery before shutdown is 3.8 kWh.

(FYI: for my car Tesla established 298 Wh to equal 1 rated mile, but a rated mile disappears with every 282 Wh of consumption. This differential results in (or results from) the 3.8 kWh remaining when I hit 0 miles or 0%)

(More FYI: if you drive for 3 kWh after the dash reports 0 miles, and then start charging, the car will not start adding miles or percentage points to your state of charge meter until those 3 kWh have been put back first)

 

[deonb]

With all due respect, I call BS on anyone who says they are getting MORE than the stated miles available... I just don't see it (and please share your magic with us).

Here is the magic:

If you want to get rated range, move to Oregon or the North East - the EPA range is based on 65mph top speed.

It SHOULD be based on 75mph or at least 70mph to be more representative of the country, but it's not.

Or each state should have their own EPA range.

 

[KarenRei]

That is super-interesting. Did it ever make it into any type of production? Would we see it in the wild these days?

I still have the code around here somewhere. But it was the company's property, so I don't think I have any rights to it any more, even though the company is defunct. I'm not a lawyer but I don't want to risk doing anything that could potentially, say, expose me personally to the company's liabilities when it went under.

That said, I have been idley playing around with rewriting some aspects of it. Maybe I'll make a new freeware version some day. The original tool was intended to be freeware - I stupidly listened to the early test users who after trying it insisted to me, "You have got to commercialize this!" :Þ

Good thing Tesla wasn't depending on your software, wasn't it?

If there had actually been any income into the company, I actually could have afforded to hire people other than my sales rep and marketer. People to actually help with the programming and, rather than me working 18-hour days for a year and a half trying to do that while handling management as well, while my savings got eaten through.

The GM partnership probably would have eventually gotten some purchase orders - it was looking to be heading in that direction, we were having lots of very high level meetings. But the money was gone. And I was just broken by then.

The real problem is that I'm probably the worst person to run a company, in that I don't have a capitalist bone in my body. Which is funny because my father's a major oil executive I'm a Linux user. Free software advocate. I hate patents and copyrights. And there I was, running a company, having to take free tools off the net and close them off, spend my money on patents... it was like a mockery of everything that I stand for. And I'd love to have lived in some ideal world where you can just say "Well, I'm not going to play by those rules!". But those rules are what get you taken seriously as a company. The patents weren't actually going to protect us worth a damn - China ignores them, big companies have legal departments that could have torn us apart, etc, etc. But nobody takes you seriously as a startup if you don't have them.

 

[KarenRei]

I'll add that I learned to hate the auto industry. And I also came to respect more what Tesla has been doing to shake it up. Every time I flew into Detroit I had to take all of these designer-suit designer-everything executives out to a dinner that cost several times more per plate than I'd ever eaten before (I tried to eat as little as possible without it being noticeable to keep the costs down - "I'm on a diet" is a great excuse). Then pay all of their bar tabs at these expensive places, because the part after discussing business over dinner is doing the same at the bar. My sales rep informed me that they were skipping the usual next step (which they usually do with male business partners), which is discussing business at a strip club after they leave the bar. And of course I'd go to all of these auto shows and they're surrounded with "booth babes" whose job it is just to stand there and try to look sexy next to a car.

Their vehicle design paradigm is defective, has been for decades, and they've not done anything about it, and it's taken a company like Tesla to fix it. Every time you want a new piece of functionality? Hey, some supplier has it - we just need to wire their "box" into the system. Oh, new piece of functionality? Here's some other supplier's "box", ready to wire into the system. And another, and another, and another, all of this horribly redundant hardware, oversized, overweight, drawing more and more power from the alternator, turning the wiring harness into a giant expensive mess. Tesla has been working on centralization for quite a while, and it looks like they'll be finishing throwing this paradigm in the dustbin of history with the Model Y. Good riddance.

 

[Sparky]

If I'm driving 298 WH/Miles since the last charge, I believe this is very NORMAL driving
. AC on
. Radio on
. (300 to 350)WH/Mile driving habit

I would say this is all normal driving.

Regardless of EPA reports or whatever... as a Tesla owner, I would much more appreciate a transparent reporting of HOW MANY MILES I CAN REALLY DRIVE.

With all due respect, I call BS on anyone who says they are getting MORE than the stated miles available... I just don't see it (and please share your magic with us).

If I see on my odometer (150 Miles available). I would like to know that I can "reasonably" get 150 miles, not 120 to 130.

Tesla should underestimate the miles available rather than over estimate. (since chargers are not available on every other street corner)

At this point, they are OVERESTIMATING...

I have no idea why your coming up 20% short.
If I get what your saying, it is that the "miles remaining" number on the display seems too optimistic. And your example was for less than a full day so that we know the Wh/mi isn't missing any "vampire drain" from sitting over night?
If so, considering 298 Wh/mi is a very decent efficiency for a Model S. I'm a little surprised you fell so far short of the rated miles.

As a comparison, On Saturday, I drove a route you may be familiar with; from my home in Glendale over the Grapevine to the ButtonWillow supercharger. I started with 227 miles rated range and arrived with 103 after driving 119 miles. My Wh/mi was a little better than yours (290).
I drove "safely" on I-5 which means around 75, less when the traffic was heavier. Still, I covered the 119 mi in 99 minutes including stoplights from my garage to the freeway.
I find when I drive at or just below 280 Wh/mi, I get rated range. In this case, I came up about 6% short instead of the 3.5% I would expect 100*(290-280)/280. I'm fine with this and it's nowhere near as bad as your numbers. I can definitely slow down a bit and get rated range.
However, when I want to know if I have enough miles, I use the % charge remaining at destination value as the best proxy for "miles available". It seems quite accurate. It's a bit more conservative, adjusts to your driving style and elevation profile and even outside temps (I think). Why not try that and see if it does better for your needs?

Aside from that, I can't see why your miles remaining come out so much worse than mine.

 

[Mediocrates]

Regardless of EPA reports or whatever... as a Tesla owner, I would much more appreciate a transparent reporting of HOW MANY MILES I CAN REALLY DRIVE.

There is no such thing. You're expecting the vehicle to tell you how many miles you will drive in future conditions. Those miles do not yet exist. Those conditions do not yet exist. This is the fundamental flaw with viewing a current capacity (battery charge) as a future usage. Gasoline vehicles do not show gas tank capacity in miles for this very reason. The concepts are incongruent, and I think Tesla has done owners a disservice by defaulting to this display mode (an opinion that some share and others do not).

Switch your display to percentage charge and learn how your driving habits associate to charge usage. You did this for every gasoline car you owned. The process works the same with a Tesla and can be discerned in a fairly short period of time (easily a few weeks) due to the amount of information a Tesla provides you about energy usage.

 

[AnxietyRanger]

I agree these particular comments stem likely not from any fault but a certain disconnect between how range is calculated and what is actually reached and when.

I'll leave what is reasonable, official and/or misleading for others to ponder, but two IMO helpful/practical points to consider. BEVs are much more susceptible to faster than estimated range loss than ICE (gasoline) cars in two scenarios:

1) Highway/motorway speeds. Somewhere above 60-65 mph BEV starts using much more energy than the corresponding increase is on ICE.

2) Cold weather. Whereas cold weather does increase gasoline consumption, it usually evens out as the engine warms. There is no such benefit in my experienve with a BEV. Travel long-range in cold, your range is affected adversely.

Drive motorway speeds in cold on BEV and you may be lucky to get 50% of your range.

 

[supratachophobia]

There is no such thing. You're expecting the vehicle to tell you how many miles you will drive in future conditions. Those miles do not yet exist. Those conditions do not yet exist. This is the fundamental flaw with viewing a current capacity (battery charge) as a future usage. Gasoline vehicles do not show gas tank capacity in miles for this very reason. The concepts are incongruent, and I think Tesla has done owners a disservice by defaulting to this display mode (an opinion that some share and others do not).

Switch your display to percentage charge and learn how your driving habits associate to charge usage. You did this for every gasoline car you owned. The process works the same with a Tesla and can be discerned in a fairly short period of time (easily a few weeks) due to the amount of information a Tesla provides you about energy usage.

I actually see that as kind of a pro level Tesla thing to do. After a while, you know the miles don't matter, it's all about the percentages and then you stop worrying.

 

[SocalMS]

To OP: Sounds like you have the car set to Ideal Miles instead of Rated Miles. Check under Settings / Units & Format / Energy & Charging on the Controls page of the touchscreen.

I'm currently using Rated Miles.

 

[shokunin]

Make sure you turn off the not-so "Smart Preconditioning" and turn off cabin overheat protection. Both items will consume energy that is not counted in the trip meters. Over the course of 3-4 days I lost about 50 miles just due to cabin overheat protection a few weeks back. Turned it off and it has been fine since.

 

[Qbenjamin]

I notice that I lose about 5-10% battery life driving at normal speeds on roads here in Tampa. On the highway, I lose 20-30% of my battery life when driving on the highway around 75mph.. Of course this is all in comparison to what's showing as my remaining battery life in the dash.

 

[TexasEV]

I notice that I lose about 5-10% battery life driving at normal speeds on roads here in Tampa. On the highway, I lose 20-30% of my battery life when driving on the highway around 75mph.. Of course this is all in comparison to what's showing as my remaining battery life in the dash.

You do realize that rated range (not "battery life") isn't based on driving 75 mph, right? You're not losing anything, you're appropriately using more energy the faster you drive. It's just physics.

 

[SocalMS]

You do realize that rated range (not "battery life") isn't based on driving 75 mph, right? You're not losing anything, you're appropriately using more energy the faster you drive. It's just physics.

I suppose in order to get the ideal mileage... we all have to drive our Teslas like an old lady in a Prius.... (which completely defeats the reason for even owning a Tesla - at least for me..)

(no offense to old ladies)

 

[clostridium]

I suppose in order to get the ideal mileage... we all have to drive our Teslas like an old lady in a Prius.... (which completely defeats the reason for even owning a Tesla - at least for me..)

(no offense to old ladies)

I've never gotten the ideal mileage, I don't know why they even quote it to be honest. I'm not sure though if you are mixing terminology - the person you responded to was speaking about rated mileage which is different. A number of people are able to get rated mileage and without driving like an old lady in a Prius.

As others have pointed out this is just like any car regardless of propulsion method. You will have mileage differences based on how you drive. Some of how you drive is about how spirited you drive and with hybrids and electric cars there are also other factors too like maximizing regen. There will also be a bigger difference in efficiency vs. temperature for electric vehicles for a variety of reasons.

I've almost never gotten the EPA rated mileage in any gas or gas/electric hybrid vehicle I've owned and even if I did it was only for short periods of time. I've come closer to the EPA rated performance in this car than any of the prior vehicles I've owned in 40+ years with the exception of a 1987 Toyota Camry I drove in college from 1992-1996 I have never done better than EPA ratings. I'm not entirely sure what exactly you are continuously upset about. You haven't directly responded to several people who have made reasonable suggestions and instead choose to just complain. Some of us are trying to help you achieve your goals somehow. It makes it seem like you really don't care and you are just venting when you don't seem to take what people say seriously.

Read back through the 4 pages of responses to your original question. People put effort into trying to address your concerns. If you aren't happy call your service center and see what they can tell you. If that doesn't work I'm not sure what to tell you to do but if you really don't care about what people have to say please don't waste everyone's time anymore. If you are still attempting to troubleshoot and figure this out I'm sure many of us are still happy to try to help.

 

[Doubletap67]

You do realize that rated range (not "battery life") isn't based on driving 75 mph, right? You're not losing anything, you're appropriately using more energy the faster you drive. It's just physics.

I'm fairly sure the OP is talking about the same "anomaly" I started a thread about when I first got my car last year: multiplying the Wh/mi by miles traveled doesn't equal the percentage of battery consumed. Example: I have a 75D, it's supposed to have about 72 kWh of capacity in reality, if I drive 100 miles at 300 Wh/mi (for the sake of simplicity), I've used 30 kWh and 50% of my battery - that's 60 kWh of total capacity, not 72.

Note this has nothing to do with driving style or rated versus ideal miles - energy used times distance as a percentage of the battery capacity consumed should add up, shouldn't it?

My conclusion was that there's energy used that isn't part of the stated Wh/mi or total kWh consumed for a drive of a given distance. Various responses at the time agreed/disagreed with that conclusion and I had no satisfactory resolution to the question. I got my car in the middle of a cold (for us) winter in Vancouver, so I chalked it up to heating usage that wasn't being tallied. I haven't checked if the battery still calculated out as smaller that it is on paper now that it's summer.

 

[jerry33]

The EPA number isn't supposed to be what you get, it's supposed to be a standardized test to let you compare. The way it is supposed to work is:
1. You get your average energy use (AEU) from your logbook.
2. You find the EPA number for your current car.
3. Divide AEU by EPA to get the ratio.
4. Look up the EPA number for the car you want to purchase.
5. Multiply the EPA from the candidate car by the ratio found in step 3 to get a close estimate of what the candidate car will do for you.