Hi,
I'm a long-time Tesla owner. I've taken many road trips in a Roadster, two different Model S, and a Model 3. I've also looked carefully at energy use on road trips for several years, and I'm pretty familiar with the factors that affect range. But we recently returned from a road trip in our X. While we've had the X for a year and a half, this was our first road trip in it, and I noticed something different with Tesla's energy estimator that has me curious.
With other cars on past road trips, my wife and I would typically charge until the energy estimator said we'd arrive at our next stop with 20%. Then we'd take off, and the estimated amount at our destination would immediately start dropping. Normally we'd arrive with something like 10-12%; every now and then it would be even lower and we'd slow down; sometimes in good conditions we'd actually arrive with 20%, but never more than the initial estimate. This was to be expected, because while Tesla's estimator took speed limits and elevation in to account, it seemed to assume we'd stick to the speed limit and only have good weather - neither of which was typically the case.
However, in this trip in the X, we had some very different results. We almost never arrived at a destination with less energy than Tesla's estimator suggested; the few times we did, it was only a couple of percent less. We usually arrived with more - in fact, some times a LOT more. A couple of times we left a charger with the estimator saying 15%, but we actually arrived with 30%, or one time even 42%! (I joked about just driving on to the next charger; surely we'd arrive there with a full battery). Our driving was pretty much the same as in other cars. The weather was pretty hot and dry, but we have taken several trips in those conditions in the past.
Are other people seeing this? Is this unique to the X, or is it the result of a firmware change that affects all Teslas, or...?
I'm a long-time Tesla owner. I've taken many road trips in a Roadster, two different Model S, and a Model 3. I've also looked carefully at energy use on road trips for several years, and I'm pretty familiar with the factors that affect range. But we recently returned from a road trip in our X. While we've had the X for a year and a half, this was our first road trip in it, and I noticed something different with Tesla's energy estimator that has me curious.
With other cars on past road trips, my wife and I would typically charge until the energy estimator said we'd arrive at our next stop with 20%. Then we'd take off, and the estimated amount at our destination would immediately start dropping. Normally we'd arrive with something like 10-12%; every now and then it would be even lower and we'd slow down; sometimes in good conditions we'd actually arrive with 20%, but never more than the initial estimate. This was to be expected, because while Tesla's estimator took speed limits and elevation in to account, it seemed to assume we'd stick to the speed limit and only have good weather - neither of which was typically the case.
However, in this trip in the X, we had some very different results. We almost never arrived at a destination with less energy than Tesla's estimator suggested; the few times we did, it was only a couple of percent less. We usually arrived with more - in fact, some times a LOT more. A couple of times we left a charger with the estimator saying 15%, but we actually arrived with 30%, or one time even 42%! (I joked about just driving on to the next charger; surely we'd arrive there with a full battery). Our driving was pretty much the same as in other cars. The weather was pretty hot and dry, but we have taken several trips in those conditions in the past.
Are other people seeing this? Is this unique to the X, or is it the result of a firmware change that affects all Teslas, or...?
