A lot of comments are discussing the difficulty in estimating range accurately or how all EPA estimates are inflated. But the article claims Tesla knowingly uses an algorithm with inflated numbers and swaps the rost estimate out for a more accurate estimate at 50% charge. That's different than a good faith attempt at estimating range and a dark pattern.
I was trying to interpret what that means. I'm guessing they aren't factoring current conditions above 50% and instead rely on average conditions. I'd be surprised if this is actually worse than what the EPA views as average given the truth-in-advertising requirements they put on Tesla.
This isn't entirely unreasonable. Most people whose battery is at 80% aren't going to be depleting it in the next few hours, so say factoring the present cold morning might produce overly pessimistic guesses.
They are being aggressive for sure, but this article strikes me as pretty biased against Tesla. The article concedes that most of these customers have no range problems -- they are probably driving in cold at 80 MPH blasting their heat to 70 degrees wondering why their range is so poor -- even though it is entirely expected behavior.
> This isn't entirely unreasonable… factoring the present cold morning might produce overly pessimistic guesses
It’s always unreasonable in something like this to present knowingly inaccurate data when accurate data is available. As others have pointed out, Teslas do seem perfectly capable of doing this based on their performance when estimating a particular route. It’s also something other brands do better, so even if there was an argument to be made that Tesla didn’t have the data, it would still be the case that they should have it.
It is also not pessimistic to give an estimate in the conditions you outline: It’s accurate. Whether you’re going to be driving that long is irrelevant because Tesla should not be defaulting to some probabilistic behavior guess prior to even starting the car or entering a route. It should default to “hey, I see you’re driving your car. If you keep driving this is your range”. It shouldn’t default to “I don’t know how long you’ll be driving so I’ll just give a range estimate that assumed you’ll drive for a short time now and then more later and maybe later the conditions will provide better range, so let’s use that number”
I’m not sure why Tesla would be defended in this point by anyone when other EV’s do this more accurately and consistently. If it was a general problem and no one could do it any better then by all means it would be unreasonable to complain about Tesla, it would simply be a limit of the technology. But it’s not.
