this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2023
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I concur, this is also my experience. The car GPS has never directed us to travel further than the charge allows--and it will include stops at superchargers on the way as necessary. It's really not that big an issue.
But, the range that it presents you in the UI is not the actual range that you can travel. The fact that the car won't plan out a route for a location 300 miles away when it claims you can travel 320, but will instead include a stop at a supercharger at around 200, kinda proves they know this.
I think the projected range is basically the platonic ideal if you were traveling in a perfectly flat landscape, with no wind, with an external temperature of 18.2°C, traveling at 37.25 miles per hour or whatever. Every deviation from that ideal will hurt your range. In my experience, I tend to get probably 250-ish miles on a 320 mile charge, depending on the time of year.
Gas vehicles tend, on the other hand, to undersell the range in my experience, and people are used to going further than the car says they can.
That's a 28% exaggeration in economy.
You're putting a certain amount of electricity into that car, and you are being told that amount of electricity is good for 320 miles. You're only getting 250 miles from that. Everyone else is only getting 250 miles from that. The only people supposedly getting 320 miles of range from that charge are the salespeople convincing you to buy it. Misrepresentation of the distance you can travel on a battery is no different than misrepresentation of the distance you can travel on a tank. You're just multiplying the MPG by the size of the tank, or the kWh/mile by the battery capacity.
Suppose I buy a sedan with a rating of 32mpg. But I'm only getting 25mpg. I put 10 gallons in the 10-gallon tank, expecting to drive 320 miles, but I have to stop and put another 10 gallons in after 250 miles.
Everyone else who bought the same sedan is getting 25mpg. Meanwhile, my other car, an SUV from a different manufacturer, is also rated 32mpg, and actually gets 32mpg. Everyone else who bought that SUV is reporting pretty damn close to 32mpg.
Clearly, the manufacturer of this sedan is pulling something shady. It doesn't become less shady when the sedan is burning gallons of diesel instead of gallons of gasoline. Or gallons of propane instead of gas or diesel. Or cubic feet of natural gas or hydrogen instead of a liquid fuel. Or pounds of steam instead of a combustible fuel. It doesn't become less shady when the sedan is consuming kWh of electricity instead of a mass or volume of a physical substance.
The problem is that other vehicles adjust the projection based on current conditions - when I drive up a mountain, my projected range drops like a rock. When I drive back down I can end up with more range than I started. Reporting the “ideal” case during operation is misleading at best.
Yeah, it seems like using 'miles' as an indicator or energy left is the root cause. If they just change the kwh left or similar they'd be more accurate but, ironically, confuse way more people.
How would anyone actually use that information?
Same as a fuel guage I'd imagine.
I've never seen a fuel gauge marked in any kind of units like liters or gallons, just fractions of a full tank.
Tanks is a unit of volume....
How many liters are there in a tank?
Implementation defined.
But like kWh you can easily learn (either intuitively or by the dark magic of multiplication) the ratio between tanks and ability to get to your destination.
The idea that people can't learn that they get roughly 6 or roughly 3 etc km per kWh with their driving style and thus physical units should be hidden from them is insulting and anti-intellectual. Stop trying to project your stupidity and anti-curiosity onto others.
Says the idiot who doesn't even know what a unit is.
An international standard unit is not the same thing as a unit. A cubit is a unit even though people's arms aren't all the same size.
I said stop trying to project your stupidity onto others, not double down on it.
Bye, asshole.