So I run a luxury car rental company and one of the most common questions I get from folks these days (especially those in the tech community) is: "When are you guys getting a Tesla?"
This article is _exactly_ why we're not getting one for the fleet anytime soon, and it's basically the answer I've been giving people since the Roadster came out (and the questions started).
Tesla is an awesome, awesome company. I'm a fan. I'm thinking of getting a Model S for myself. I think (and hope) they're going to be huge.
But they're not ready for the truly mass-market quite yet - and car rental customer (even luxury car rental customers) are the mass market.
I could see the exact scenario outlined in the article happening to renters constantly - except for one difference: We would be yelled at by the customers, not Tesla ;) ("Why is my car saying 'battery dead'? I did nothing wrong. Send a truck to pick me up or I'm writing a bad review about you guys.") Sigh.
Anyway, I'm still a fan despite the headaches - and I know they'll grow out of it.
Luxury car rental company? Please tell me more (like do you have a website??)
I ask because I know of a couple of luxury car rental companies, but there is one ore more things about each of them that make them exceedingly unpleasant to deal with. I would be interested to try doing business with a luxury car rental company that is run by people who also read HN - seems to be a good signal for not-totally-fucked-up business practices.
Very worth reading if you want to know what it's like to drive a Tesla Model S on an actual road trip. The New York Times reporter John M. Broder finds out that the gauge in the Model S to estimate remaining mileage before the next charge is badly confused by temperatures below the usual temperatures in California.
I remember back when I used to have a travel-intensive job that I was flying into airports all over the United States and getting into unfamiliar models of cars rented on the corporate account. That was sometimes no fun at all. But all of those cars fit everyone's familiar mental model of displaying fuel remaining. The Tesla Model S, by contrast, reports miles still able to drive in a dynamic model that can rapidly get out of touch with reality. And of course it takes a good bit longer to fully recharge a Tesla, even with high-speed recharging, than to pump gasoline into any other kind of car. This will take some major getting used to for most drivers.
Of course an EV is going to have trouble in cold weather -- it's just physics. It's just surprising to me that so obvious a situation didn't come up in testing the software. As a resident of Toronto who was interested in the Model S, it's a bit eye-opening.
For sure. The lack of charging stations will eventually be solved, but longer charging times and unreliable readings might be with us forever. Hopefully the cost offset for fuel will make it worth it.
As a fan of Tesla's efforts, it pains me to read this; no matter where the blame lies (physics, bad planning, poorly tested diagnostics software) this article will haunt the company for years. Every oil lobbyist will eat this up, and it should become the foundation of any EV-haters argument.
And that sucks.
However, I'm annoyed that Tesla's UX people let a car with this much design intelligence leave without connecting range estimations to a simple thermometer.
I understand that to HN readers batteries in the cold is "simple physics" but if the battery indicator jumps around like a BitTorrent download time estimation, people will quickly learn to not trust what the car tells them.
Consumers that are highly neurotic about the road trip problem are much more likely to remember these sorts of horror stories when making a purchasing decision.
It's going to haunt not just Tesla for years, but all electric vehicles. And with good reason - calculating the remaining potential energy of Lithium batteries is difficult, even without throwing in the variable of temperature. It is not, by any means, "simple physics". The battery is a weak point in all EVs right now, and not just because of this.
Full disclosure, I own a Zero motorcycle. The thing is amazing in SF city traffic. It's less amazing on the highway. You should read up on Terry Hershner. He's taken a Zero motorcycle cross country by driving for 45 minutes and charging for 45 minutes. So, it can be done, but road trips are not the optimal use case for an electric vehicle. yet. :)
But if I read the article right, the car IS adjusting its display for temperature. When the temp went down, the calculated available miles went down also -- and almost accurately, that is, the car went dead about when the miles-left display went to zero.
The question I'd have is, how much current would they have to divert to keep the batteries warm? It seems like the juice expended to hold the battery pack at 20C might be less than the capacity lost by letting the batteries go down to an ambient -5C.
Or, they could provide what a lot of east-coast cars have, a built in engine-block heater that you plug in to a 110V extension cord overnight. Except in this case it would be a battery pack warmer, but the same idea, keep the important bits toasty over a cold night.
My friends think I'm dowdy. Until recent years, I was very conservative about estimates. Every "event" in a trip adds 5 minutes, no matter how "nothing" it seems. I was often too early, but never late.
A Tesla S with the 260 mile battery, I would treat like a car with 130 miles range. Plenty for an around town commuter and errand vehicle. A Leaf, I would treat like a 50 mile range car.
Also, why don't those things come with a propane heater? Electric heat makes no sense.
Having to put a propane heater into a shiny, high-tech electric car would be a marketing disaster: it would emphasize that battery capacity was something that drivers have to worry about under normal driving conditions. Plus, Tesla could no longer claim that their car had zero CO2 emissions.
Knowing nothing about heaters, I'm curious: why does electric heat make no sense? My intuition would be that an electric heater would require far fewer components (especially considering the battery is already in place), be less dangerous, and require less maintenance. What is the relative efficiency of electric heaters to propane heaters?
This blog post states the obvious: early adopters better know what they're in for and what they're doing. The author isn't an experienced early adopter and doesn't know what they're doing, and rightly concludes that the technology isn't ready for universal mainstream use. Unfortunately, the article entirely fails to address the point and is aimed squarely at an audience that won't get it either. It will be used as ammunition against electric vehicles for months. This subtle, yet thorough, misrepresentation is irresponsible and quite annoying.
The article seemed totally fair to me. I'm not sure how you can conclude that the author is not an experienced early adopter and am also not sure how relevant that is when discussing a new automobile on the market. What was mis-represented? How is the article irresponsible?
You could probably say the same thing for the first gasoline cars on the road or even the Model-T. I'm sure there were people saying things like "Well, if you run out of gasoline you're stuck. I can just stop at a field and let my horse eat some grass and I'm back on the road."
Early adopters in any age will have a rough time, that's kinda the definition of early adopter. However, in a hundred years people are going to be as familiar with this technology as we are with liquid fuel. They'll probably look back at us and chuckle about how primitive we were with our "battery" technology. :)
Underestimate the remaining miles. Even if that makes you look bad up front. Its an eerie form of cognitive dissonance when your reserves are dropping faster than you consumption and the wheels in your mind spin wondering "will I have enough". You never forget this feeling. Even if its just a test drive, you'll associate Tesla cars with that feeling forever after.
This is why electric cars are not magical fairies and can't solve the structural problems around transportation in the USA. They suck for long-haul travel, but nobody should have to have their own car for long-haul travel. It should be possible to travel around by train, using a rented car for only the last short leg of the trip, if it happens to be rural, or local public transport otherwise. Electrics would be just perfect hired cars if you only needed to go ten miles and back or something like that.
Is there anything to be gained by making the parking brake electrically actuated? Such parking brakes are becoming increasingly common in cars of all types and it bugs me. From an engineering perspective, it seems like it's just introducing a complex dependency that can fail to a critical part of the car.
I used to be excited about electric cars, but lately I've been wondering if it wouldn't be better to use the power source to manufacture fossil fuels using an environmental source of carbon and ship that to customers. That would make the fuel carbon neutral.
Because the world understands completely how to store and handle and deal with liquid fossil fuels.
There's also something elegant about the technology. If you compare the complexity and expense versus the energy density of a lithium-ion battery pack and a metal can, there's no comparison.
However, in an ideal world, I would think that carbon neutral hydrocarbons would become a niche fuel for things like long haul trucks and bulldozers. (And for auxiliary space heaters in people's electric cars.)
Why did the reporter have to rope Steven Chu into the article? Even if all the facts are 100% right, it seems lame to try and make this a political issue.
I know people who have done family road trips with the Tesla S already and didn't have those problems in normal weather. One could surmise that pushing the edges of the range AND pushing extreme weather conditions might be risky, and in an EV it is certainly riskier than in a gas car, but like the Top Gear "driving a roadster on a race track drains the battery horrendously", it somewhat reads like an attempt to intentionally push an EV to the breaking limit, and then write a negative article about it. The political angle of trying to make Tesla look like a Steve Chu/DoE failure increases my suspicions.
Could you imagine a reporter writing an article about a gas car that he intentionally drove at the limit of its mileage, got stuck on an interstate, and then turned around and roped in government loans to General Motors?
The Tesla S deserves criticism in order to shake out bugs and improve the software to reduce customer surprise, to better predict battery life, no doubt about that. But this should not be used by the anti-EV crusaders who have an axe to grind to score points against ex-Obama administration officials.
I agree with your comments about the politics, but I have one nitpick. 30F does not sound like extreme weather. Where I grew up, below freezing is normal for half the year. I am really curious how they are going to solve the problem of making electric vehicles work at -40F.
The weather described in that article is not extreme. It's normal. Driving at much slower speeds than traffic and not using heat in the winter is the extreme part. Cars that require extreme conditions to drive have problems.
In a rational world, every one of the gas stations he passed would have had a rack of fully charged swappable batteries, ready for installation in less time than it would have taken to fill a conventional gas tank.
Why nobody seems to understand how stupid charging an EV in real time is, is something that I find astonishing.
(To clarify: I can understand why most people don't understand why non-swappable batteries are stupid, but I can't understand why someone like Elon Musk doesn't understand that. I'll admit that it makes me wonder if I'm missing something.)
The battery for the Model S is the entire base of the car. It's over seven feet long, weighs more than half a ton and costs about $12,000 to make. I'm sure they would have loved if it could have been swappable, but getting there from the current technology would mean a lot of compromise that would almost certainly not be worth it.
To some extent there is a standards problem: there is not a common battery pack (like there is a gas tank fill point). But even if there were, the batteries would continue to run down after delivery (unless supplied with a non-trivial amount of power). And the space required to physically store these batteries would occupy a lot of volume. After all, gasoline/diesel is far more energy-dense than modern batteries.
I think you are missing something: where do you put the replaceable batteries?
Tesla's battery packs are distributed throughout the car, both to allow for cargo space (not having a trunk would be something of a minus) and to distribute the weight of all those batteries. I am having a very hard time envisioning a way to achieve both of those goals while making the batteries replaceable.
The article mentioned that the top-end battery weighs in at half a ton --- not exactly hot-swapping material. Also, when it comes to safety, center of gravity, chassis rigidity, etc --- I'm sure there were a myriad of engineering decisions beyond weight that go against hot swapping. And that's not even getting to added cost and logistics of maintaining a network of skilled battery swap experts, "ownership" over the batteries (e.g. who is responsible for replacing failing units if they are shared around the community of Tesla owners).
I'm probably just scratching the surface with a minute of thought. I'm sure that the folks at Telsa have been over this ground, and much more.
The thing you are missing is that currently, batteries are built in to the structure of the vehicle. To do otherwise would necessarily reduce the size of the battery significantly, as now the battery needs to fit in a convenient to remove location, and all the parts necessary to enable insertion/removal of the battery would take up space. Not to mention that the batteries are wickedly heavy, too heavy to be lifted by a single person, so there would need to be a machine to swap them, which takes up real estate at the gas station, and just generally complicates things.
Maybe there will be swappable batteries eventually, or one part of the battery will be swappable, but as far as I understand thats not coming soon.
Filling up a Toyota Camry with gasoline (say 15 gallons) adds about 90 pounds of fuel. A lithium-ion battery with the same energy content would weigh about 5,800 pounds. Clearly electric vehicles will have a difficult time competing with gasoline vehicles no matter how much charging times are reduced or how much better the software gets. It seems that without some breakthrough the sweet spot for battery-electric vehicles is urban driving done after charging overnight at home.
It sounds as though the problem is simply that the car loses range unexpectedly depending on the weather, so you can't necessarily count on the range you thought you had the next morning, and the degree of mile loss can be extreme. I imagine this is a problem for road trips, the occasional camping trip or overnight at a friend's house, or even when using an outdoor parking lot for eight hours (e.g. when at work or at an offsite). However, for daily commuting, it's not an issue, because presumably there is sufficient buffer if you charge every night.
What's a bit disturbing about this article isn't the laws of physics, but that he was being coached directly from Tesla. If Tesla HQ can't coach a reporter 1:1 out of a devastating result, what hope does the average early adopter have? Either the reporter twisted the facts, or the car has horrible temperature problems, or the Tesla coaches seriously screwed up.
I hope it's not a real issue. A hotel manager might be able to let one Tesla plug in overnight, but there isn't infrastructure to let ten or twenty Tesla owners do the same--yet. However, just as wifi became a competitive advantage to offer at hotels, so will EV charging stations. Perhaps even pay parking lots will begin to offer them.
Electric cars are second cars - the commuter one, not the road trip one. They currently don't make sense for road trips, absolutely. But they make a ton of sense for commuting, most likely even in cold climates.
It's an interesting and broadly relevant article, but it feels like we're having the wrong discussion - we might be single males, but the target market for the time being is well off families considering a new second car... ;)
It seems like the charge right before he stalled was the issue. I know he wasn't at a super charging station but he probably should have spent a couple of hours re-charging it instead of an hour.
Cold weather and running something that is power intensive (the heater) will drastically effect your mileage if you are relying on a battery to power your car.
Tesla probably should do a better job of communicating this but it doesn't seem like a flaw with the car.
If the battery meter can't cope with typical American temperature ranges yet it being sold in these areas, yeah, it's a flaw. If it says 100 miles left and after 10 miles now tells you 50, yeah, it's a flaw.
Can the flaw be corrected? Maybe, maybe not. But it's still a flaw.
If you're staying somewhere, plug it in. Even a 110V will be able to keep the battery warm enough to avoid these losses.
No, its not perfect. Neither is the choke on your motorcycle or the people in siberia waking up every 2 hours to start their combustion engines because blowing up what was generated in thousands of years refuses to happen in a cold engine block.
But I guess everyone with a modicum of knowledge has by now realized that a) we can't keep blowing up that stuff and b) there won't be another magic energy material like oil, ever again.
I just drove by some dude who was running down a pitch-dark freeway with a small child at his side. They were carrying a can of gas to refill at the station a couple miles ahead.
Damn gasoline engines - so unreliable! You'd think after 100+ years of development they'd have sorted this stuff out.
[+] [-] nlh|13 years ago|reply
This article is _exactly_ why we're not getting one for the fleet anytime soon, and it's basically the answer I've been giving people since the Roadster came out (and the questions started).
Tesla is an awesome, awesome company. I'm a fan. I'm thinking of getting a Model S for myself. I think (and hope) they're going to be huge.
But they're not ready for the truly mass-market quite yet - and car rental customer (even luxury car rental customers) are the mass market.
I could see the exact scenario outlined in the article happening to renters constantly - except for one difference: We would be yelled at by the customers, not Tesla ;) ("Why is my car saying 'battery dead'? I did nothing wrong. Send a truck to pick me up or I'm writing a bad review about you guys.") Sigh.
Anyway, I'm still a fan despite the headaches - and I know they'll grow out of it.
[+] [-] bengl3rt|13 years ago|reply
Luxury car rental company? Please tell me more (like do you have a website??)
I ask because I know of a couple of luxury car rental companies, but there is one ore more things about each of them that make them exceedingly unpleasant to deal with. I would be interested to try doing business with a luxury car rental company that is run by people who also read HN - seems to be a good signal for not-totally-fucked-up business practices.
[+] [-] ilaksh|13 years ago|reply
The car works great.
The problem is that there are very few places to charge it.
If there were more than two cities in the whole area to charge, he could have stopped sooner at one of those.
[+] [-] tokenadult|13 years ago|reply
I remember back when I used to have a travel-intensive job that I was flying into airports all over the United States and getting into unfamiliar models of cars rented on the corporate account. That was sometimes no fun at all. But all of those cars fit everyone's familiar mental model of displaying fuel remaining. The Tesla Model S, by contrast, reports miles still able to drive in a dynamic model that can rapidly get out of touch with reality. And of course it takes a good bit longer to fully recharge a Tesla, even with high-speed recharging, than to pump gasoline into any other kind of car. This will take some major getting used to for most drivers.
[+] [-] jfb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] purplelobster|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peteforde|13 years ago|reply
And that sucks.
However, I'm annoyed that Tesla's UX people let a car with this much design intelligence leave without connecting range estimations to a simple thermometer.
I understand that to HN readers batteries in the cold is "simple physics" but if the battery indicator jumps around like a BitTorrent download time estimation, people will quickly learn to not trust what the car tells them.
Consumers that are highly neurotic about the road trip problem are much more likely to remember these sorts of horror stories when making a purchasing decision.
[+] [-] CamperBob2|13 years ago|reply
Would you trust your laptop or cell phone's battery life estimate to that extent?
[+] [-] __--__|13 years ago|reply
Full disclosure, I own a Zero motorcycle. The thing is amazing in SF city traffic. It's less amazing on the highway. You should read up on Terry Hershner. He's taken a Zero motorcycle cross country by driving for 45 minutes and charging for 45 minutes. So, it can be done, but road trips are not the optimal use case for an electric vehicle. yet. :)
[+] [-] fernly|13 years ago|reply
The question I'd have is, how much current would they have to divert to keep the batteries warm? It seems like the juice expended to hold the battery pack at 20C might be less than the capacity lost by letting the batteries go down to an ambient -5C.
Or, they could provide what a lot of east-coast cars have, a built in engine-block heater that you plug in to a 110V extension cord overnight. Except in this case it would be a battery pack warmer, but the same idea, keep the important bits toasty over a cold night.
[+] [-] stcredzero|13 years ago|reply
A Tesla S with the 260 mile battery, I would treat like a car with 130 miles range. Plenty for an around town commuter and errand vehicle. A Leaf, I would treat like a 50 mile range car.
Also, why don't those things come with a propane heater? Electric heat makes no sense.
[+] [-] greenyoda|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michael_miller|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saulrh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbreit|13 years ago|reply
nb: I am a huge Tesla fan.
[+] [-] malloreon|13 years ago|reply
Would he have been able to get where he wanted to go, or would he have not tried to go as far as the car said he could go?
[+] [-] Corrado|13 years ago|reply
Early adopters in any age will have a rough time, that's kinda the definition of early adopter. However, in a hundred years people are going to be as familiar with this technology as we are with liquid fuel. They'll probably look back at us and chuckle about how primitive we were with our "battery" technology. :)
[+] [-] noonespecial|13 years ago|reply
Underestimate the remaining miles. Even if that makes you look bad up front. Its an eerie form of cognitive dissonance when your reserves are dropping faster than you consumption and the wheels in your mind spin wondering "will I have enough". You never forget this feeling. Even if its just a test drive, you'll associate Tesla cars with that feeling forever after.
[+] [-] rogerbinns|13 years ago|reply
I suspect they already do, hence the comment that he'll still have some range even when it says zero.
The problem is what number to display after a full charge. If it doesn't strongly resemble the specification range then people won't be happy.
[+] [-] CamperBob2|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrownaway2424|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agwa|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielweber|13 years ago|reply
Because the world understands completely how to store and handle and deal with liquid fossil fuels.
[+] [-] stcredzero|13 years ago|reply
However, in an ideal world, I would think that carbon neutral hydrocarbons would become a niche fuel for things like long haul trucks and bulldozers. (And for auxiliary space heaters in people's electric cars.)
[+] [-] cromwellian|13 years ago|reply
I know people who have done family road trips with the Tesla S already and didn't have those problems in normal weather. One could surmise that pushing the edges of the range AND pushing extreme weather conditions might be risky, and in an EV it is certainly riskier than in a gas car, but like the Top Gear "driving a roadster on a race track drains the battery horrendously", it somewhat reads like an attempt to intentionally push an EV to the breaking limit, and then write a negative article about it. The political angle of trying to make Tesla look like a Steve Chu/DoE failure increases my suspicions.
Could you imagine a reporter writing an article about a gas car that he intentionally drove at the limit of its mileage, got stuck on an interstate, and then turned around and roped in government loans to General Motors?
The Tesla S deserves criticism in order to shake out bugs and improve the software to reduce customer surprise, to better predict battery life, no doubt about that. But this should not be used by the anti-EV crusaders who have an axe to grind to score points against ex-Obama administration officials.
[+] [-] goodcanadian|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cromwellian|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonlotito|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CamperBob2|13 years ago|reply
Why nobody seems to understand how stupid charging an EV in real time is, is something that I find astonishing.
(To clarify: I can understand why most people don't understand why non-swappable batteries are stupid, but I can't understand why someone like Elon Musk doesn't understand that. I'll admit that it makes me wonder if I'm missing something.)
[+] [-] chc|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bwhite|13 years ago|reply
To some extent there is a standards problem: there is not a common battery pack (like there is a gas tank fill point). But even if there were, the batteries would continue to run down after delivery (unless supplied with a non-trivial amount of power). And the space required to physically store these batteries would occupy a lot of volume. After all, gasoline/diesel is far more energy-dense than modern batteries.
[+] [-] eropple|13 years ago|reply
Tesla's battery packs are distributed throughout the car, both to allow for cargo space (not having a trunk would be something of a minus) and to distribute the weight of all those batteries. I am having a very hard time envisioning a way to achieve both of those goals while making the batteries replaceable.
[+] [-] bpc9|13 years ago|reply
I'm probably just scratching the surface with a minute of thought. I'm sure that the folks at Telsa have been over this ground, and much more.
[+] [-] DrewAllyn|13 years ago|reply
Maybe there will be swappable batteries eventually, or one part of the battery will be swappable, but as far as I understand thats not coming soon.
[+] [-] toddasmith|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codex|13 years ago|reply
What's a bit disturbing about this article isn't the laws of physics, but that he was being coached directly from Tesla. If Tesla HQ can't coach a reporter 1:1 out of a devastating result, what hope does the average early adopter have? Either the reporter twisted the facts, or the car has horrible temperature problems, or the Tesla coaches seriously screwed up.
I hope it's not a real issue. A hotel manager might be able to let one Tesla plug in overnight, but there isn't infrastructure to let ten or twenty Tesla owners do the same--yet. However, just as wifi became a competitive advantage to offer at hotels, so will EV charging stations. Perhaps even pay parking lots will begin to offer them.
[+] [-] evck|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobn|13 years ago|reply
It's an interesting and broadly relevant article, but it feels like we're having the wrong discussion - we might be single males, but the target market for the time being is well off families considering a new second car... ;)
[+] [-] jswanson|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zdgman|13 years ago|reply
Cold weather and running something that is power intensive (the heater) will drastically effect your mileage if you are relying on a battery to power your car.
Tesla probably should do a better job of communicating this but it doesn't seem like a flaw with the car.
[+] [-] freehunter|13 years ago|reply
Can the flaw be corrected? Maybe, maybe not. But it's still a flaw.
[+] [-] jfb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revelation|13 years ago|reply
No, its not perfect. Neither is the choke on your motorcycle or the people in siberia waking up every 2 hours to start their combustion engines because blowing up what was generated in thousands of years refuses to happen in a cold engine block.
But I guess everyone with a modicum of knowledge has by now realized that a) we can't keep blowing up that stuff and b) there won't be another magic energy material like oil, ever again.
[+] [-] uslic001|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andyl|13 years ago|reply
Damn gasoline engines - so unreliable! You'd think after 100+ years of development they'd have sorted this stuff out.
[+] [-] CamperBob2|13 years ago|reply