The Seattle Times this morning has an interesting article (reprinted from the LA Times) based on a report from Rueters. Short summary:
For years, Tesla reportedly has exaggerated the maximum range of the electric cars it sells. When customers’ range complaints overwhelmed the company’s service team, according to Reuters, Tesla created a special team to cancel those appointments and tell drivers that nothing was wrong with their cars’ battery data.
The mission of the “Diversion Team” was to cancel as many range-related appointments as possible to relieve the service team’s load as they were overwhelmed with demand AND Tesla had “bent” their range algorithms to give drivers a “rosy” idea of how far the car could travel on a charge. The Tesla algorithms also switched to a more honest calculation at the point where the battery charge was half depleted. (Hmmm — Tesla and “honest calculation” in the same sentence. Ugh!) The Diversion Team also used readings from their remote diagnostics to claim that everything was working fine — “nothing to see (t)here”.
This wasn’t just a minor tweak — one customer bought a used 2021 Model 3 with an advertised range of 353 miles. In cold weather it (according to the customer) got as little as half that range. The article does note that cold weather can reduce the range of an EV, but my Leaf only loses less than 10% of it’s range, and most of that is from using the heater to warm up the passenger compartment. If I turn off the heater, range jumps back up a good bit. Battery performance doesn’t drop all that much in winter here in northwest WA. FYI, the Leaf gets quite a bit more actual range than the EPA rating — with a minor tweak to our charging technique I can get between 250-260 miles range — 40-50 miles more than the last EPA range I saw — so I’m not at all bothered to lose a bit — it’s still overperforming official expectations. (Plug in the Leaf to charge overnight, in the morning start a short charge cycle after the battery has cooled back down — adds a nice top up to the charge while we have our morning coffee.)
Anybody remember the report some years ago where a reporter (NYT?) reported a Tesla model S getting a lot less range than advertised and Tesla going hysterical and claiming that their “remote diagnostics” showed the reporter had driven the car a lot further than he claimed? I wonder if those remote diagnostics actually were consulted or even had the claimed capability.
The article closes with mention of the fact that Tesla is under investigation in CA for calling its driver assist SW “Full Self-Driving” and the CA AG is investigating as well. I wonder if the AG should expand to investigating the range claims to see if Tesla is doing a VW here.