[halviti]

I've read all the arguments on both sides, and while both have made good points, there is one that stands out.

This reporter clearly barely made any attempt at recharging his empty vehicle in Norwich, and then attempted a drive well beyond the car's capabilities, then made the "running out of fuel" his headline.

If he would have done this on gasoline, the result would have been the same, and I think that is getting lost in the clutter of all of the other points being made on this subject.

[lawdawg]

Did you (or 99% of HN) read the NYT article?

"When I parked the car, its computer said I had 90 miles of range, twice the 46 miles back to Milford. It was a different story at 8:30 the next morning. The thermometer read 10 degrees and the display showed 25 miles of remaining range"

"I called Tesla in California, and the official I woke up said I needed to “condition” the battery pack to restore the lost energy."

Looking back, I should have bought a membership to Butch’s and spent a few hours there while the car charged. The displayed range never reached the number of miles remaining to Milford, and as I limped along at about 45 miles per hour I saw increasingly dire dashboard warnings to recharge immediately. Mr. Merendino, the product planner, found an E.V. charging station about five miles away.

But the Model S had other ideas. “Car is shutting down,”"

---

Sounds like he was in constant contact with Tesla and they incorrectly stated that the ~65 miles lost overnight would magically return, and Mr. Broder, unfortunately, took them for their word and left the charging station with the dash showing less than the amount needed to make the trip.

Who is the real "liar" here?

[genghy]

You're missing a part of the article (that supports your point) - here's a paste of two paragraphs straight from the article

---

Tesla’s experts said that pumping in a little energy would help restore the power lost overnight as a result of the cold weather, and after an hour they cleared me to resume the trip to Milford.

Looking back, I should have bought a membership to Butch’s and spent a few hours there while the car charged. The displayed range never reached the number of miles remaining to Milford, and as I limped along at about 45 miles per hour I saw increasingly dire dashboard warnings to recharge immediately. Mr. Merendino, the product planner, found an E.V. charging station about five miles away.

---

He clearly states that the displayed range never reached the distance to Milford, and that he (essentially) ignored warnings to recharge. Nevertheless, the Tesla employee he spoke to cleared him to resume the journey.

There's a lot of nonsense being thrown around here, but THIS is where the stall occurred. It would be great to see a call log, if one was available - did Mr. Broder clearly state when he was cleared that the displayed range was not sufficient to meet Milford and did the Tesla employee clear him to go despite this? Was he cleared, with the Tesla employee assuming mileage was sufficient, and Mr. Broder chose not to correct this assumption?

I've seen a lot of people drive around with their 'check engine' light permanently lit up. This is because somebody told them it's ok, that it means their fuel cap is a little loose but it's not a problem, or whatever other reason that isn't serious. If the Tesla employee was aware of the displayed range and still cleared Mr. Broder's departure, then the 'correct' party in this case seems obvious, and his behavior is not in any way unusual.

[beedogs]

If the data clearly shows that he never "limped along" at 45 MPH, there's really nothing in those two paragraphs I can believe.

[tfigment]

Mr. Broder's reply in the other thread was "I cannot account for the discrepancy, nor for a later stretch in Connecticut where I recall driving about 45 m.p.h., but it may be the result of the car being delivered with 19-inch wheels and all-season tires, not the specified 21-inch wheels and summer tires."

I dont know how it measures speed whether GPS or wheel rotation or both and if that would make a difference. Anyone care to fact check?

[testing12341234]

Looking at the Tesla Model S website[0] both 19" and 21" wheels (not tires) are available. The 19" wheels have 245/45R19 tires and the 21" wheels have 245/35R21. Punching that in to a tire size calculator[1] shows the following:

Tire Size Comparison

Specification Sidewall Radius Diameter Circumference Revs/Mile Difference

245/45-19 4.3in 13.8in 27.7in 87.0in 729 0.0%

245/35-21 3.4in 13.9in 27.8in 87.2in 727 0.3%

Which is a 0.3% difference in total circumference. Which is not a significant source of discrepency.

[0] - http://www.teslamotors.com/models/specs [1] - http://www.miata.net/garage/tirecalc.html (I used the non-java form at the bottom of the page)

[Devilboy]

The 19 / 21 inch is not the outside diameter of the tires, it's the inside diameter. Outside diameter would be about the same and would not make much of a difference.

[gamblor956]

The NYT upgraded their paywall this week, so there is a good chance that most of HN did not in fact read the NYT article before commenting on it.

Also, there is a disturbing amount of herd mentality in these comments; people are instinctively shielding/supporting Elon Musk, a fellow techie, rather than the "interloping" journalist, even though even a cursory Google search of other reviews of the Model S, the Roadster, and other manufacturers' EVs will show that they all suffer from the same battery charging/status problems.

It should also be noted that Elon Musk has made public misrepresentations in the recent past about competitors to SpaceX, in particular, about the cause of Boeing's battery problems, and he had a history of making similar remarks about credit card companies while he worked at Paypal.

[stcredzero]

> It should also be noted that Elon Musk has made public misrepresentations in the recent past about competitors to SpaceX, in particular, about the cause of Boeing's battery problems

Really? As I recall, he speculated that improper isolation between cells allowed for failures to cascade to adjacent ones. Turns out, that's what it was.

[pbreit]

Can you provide a citation for the mis-statements about the Boeing battery situation? I couldn't find any.

[astine]

He's probably refering to this incident :http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/elon-musk-boeing-7...

[alanctgardner2]

Nothing in that article implies that Musk was wrong. It's just Musk's public statement that the battery design is faulty.

[pbreit]

I am of course familiar with the incident and that article, all the rest, suggest that Musk probably is correct. An MIT professor confirms and a Boeing engineer does not dispute.

[001sky]

there is a good chance that most of HN did not in fact read the NYT article before commenting on it

== yikes

[damoncali]

Chrome incognito... not that I advocate that sort of thing.

[aptwebapps]

My recollection is the same as stcredzero's on the battery comments. What are the cc company comments to which you refer? (Google results seem saturated with more recent events).

[joe_the_user]

Well, if Broder's headline was "Tesla Employee Let My Car Run Down", he'd have been telling the story you can extract out of the text.

However, "Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway" somehow tells a story where blame is a lot more fuzzy.

Broder told a complicated story and put a poetically negative spin on it. It is entirely understandable that Musk would want to simplify this down to negative claims he could refute. This might seem unfair but I don't think it is because the New York Time reader isn't going say "well, either the driver, the Tesla employee or the car made some mistakes or just couldn't understand each other, what does this prove?", a reader in these days of simplification will just get "Tesla doesn't work in the cold" and so Musk is correct to refute this arguably false claim.

[mirkules]

"Broder told a complicated story and put a poetically negative spin on it."

I will never forget when my friend and I released an iPhone app, and two years later Apple comes out with a product of the same name. My friend got contacted by a reporter asking these innocuous questions, for instance "do you expect Apple to remove your app from the App Store?". He said he doesn't expect any problems, but that we're willing to talk about it with Apple.

The headline? "Indie developer braces for legal battle over app named ###"

Looking back on it, the questions the reporter asked were absolutely leading questions to suit his own (anti-Apple) agenda. This is why anyone talking to the press needs to be very careful what they say.

[danielweber]

Just so you know, journalists typically have no control over headlines. They are often incredibly surprised by them.

EDIT: it may be different on blogs

[yk]

I think "Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway" is actually a defendable claim, if we see the entire thing as a test of the current state of Tesla's recharging network. But claiming that their current recharging station network is not a drop in replacement for gas stations and gasoline fueled cars is of course a hugely unfair spin of a story about Tesla and electric cars in general.

[codex]

This is consistent with other quotes from Broder:

"When I parked the car for the night at a hotel, the range meter showed 90 miles remaining, and I was about 45 miles from the Milford Supercharger. As I recounted in the article, when I awoke the next morning the indicated range was 25 miles. The rest of that story is told in the article, including a Tesla official’s counsel, which I followed, that an hour of charging at the Norwich, Conn., utility would restore much of the range lost overnight, which had disappeared because of what he called a “software glitch.”"

[halviti]

Nobody is lying, but if you get in your car and it tells you that you can only you can only go 25 miles, do you really think it's ok to drive over twice that?

[lawdawg]

In my own car during day to day driving? Of course not. If I was reviewing a car and was told that it was OK? Of course! Don't curious minds want to know if the missing miles will actually return on their own? It's not like his life was in any real danger, or that he was late for work or something.

[correctifier]

Well remember that the car "lost" 60 miles of range overnight. If the Tesla people told him that charging it for a bit would restore the range it is conceivable that he would think that the whole 60 miles would come back. Remember that not everyone has a detailed understanding of how cold temperatures affect lithium ion batteries.

[whyenot]

Maybe. It's an electric car. I don't have a lot of experience with electric cars and I already know that the range estimate can be off by a lot. I'd probably call up Tesla and ask them, which is exactly what Broder says he did.

"Tesla’s experts said that pumping in a little energy would help restore the power lost overnight as a result of the cold weather, and after an hour they cleared me to resume the trip to Milford."

[damoncali]

My car says zero miles left with three gallons in the tank. It's not all that unreasonable to assume.

[AlexeiSadeski]

Of course it is. Stop at the gas station for five minutes, fill 'er up, and go on my way.

[killerpopiller]

it actually does work. Cars usually have a fuel reserve and thus range up to 50km (5 litres) when it already shows 0km.

[rz2k]

Just to be clear, there is a very reasonable case to be made about the miles that did not "magically" disappear. Unless the battery was giving off heat all night, where else did the energy go?

The "conditioning" sounds like a explanatory shortcut to explaining that ambient temperature affects measurements, and therefore also estimated range.

Without really understanding the details, I think two things: The NYT should have more sophisticated reviews, Tesla should have better QA over its support services to make sure fewer people are given unreasonably optimistic assessments about their range.

[dublinben]

Tesla and every other EV manufacturer recommend charging overnight. The author wouldn't have been able to produce his catastrophic breakdown if he'd followed this simple precaution.

It's also pretty clear from the data that he lied about the speed he was driving at.

[danielweber]

Tesla says you don't have to plug in the vehicle overnight -- that you can leave it at the airport for a week. Maybe their marketing team overruled their technical team, but holding Tesla to something that Tesla claims to do isn't horrible.

[gamblor956]

Other Tesla owners have reported this exact problem (inaccurate charging gauge) in the Roadster; other reviewers have noted this problem in the Model S. Moreoever, this problem is endemic to all pure-electric vehicles in cold climates, such as Nissan Leafs and Chevy Volts. (Google for references)

Ergo, the likelihood of (1) the reporter not fully charging his car's battery and (2) the fuel guage inaccurately reporting a fully charged battery is the realm of more likely than not.

[beedogs]

got any sources for "other reviewers" regarding the Model S? The roadster isn't really part of this discussion.

[niggler]

You haven't read the arguments carefully:

If the car tells you it has half a tank left, and if you find out 10 miles later that the car is almost empty, who do you blame? Do you blame the driver for not having filled the tank or do you blame the car for potentially misreporting the levels?

In context, I wonder if the data recorded by the tesla is indeed the same data reported on the dashboard. What would be cool and definitive is if they could present "screenshots" of what was displayed.

More general, what I would like to see, given the detail Tesla kept on the car, is a log of the phone calls that Broder made to Tesla during the journey.

[halviti]

If you assume that at no point during the journey did the gauge correct itself, and that the reporter was right to just drive past fueling stations until he "had to be towed", then you assume the vehicle has serious operational problems.

I will wait for more evidence before I believe that to be the case.

[niggler]

Here is my thought on the matter:

The reporter's behaviors are indeed consistent with what he claims he was told by Tesla when he called them during the journey. If the car manufacturer told me that regenerative braking can help extend the mileage, as dumb as it sounds I absolutely would repeatedly brake the car. I'm not an expert in electric vehicles, and if the company is telling me this is good for the car I wouldn't be in a position to refute it (especially under duress).

This is why I want to see the logs of the conversations. If the guy is running low, calls tesla and they say its not an issue, I can't blame him for malice. If he intentionally misdiagnosed the situation and presented it in a way that he would have received the advice he got, then we could blame him for malice (and it would be apparent from the log)

On the driver side, I'm surprised he didn't stop and take photos of the dashboard showing the range drop (especially if he thought it wasn't normal). I do this all the time (taking a picture of the dash, including odometer and fuel level) because I park in garages and I've noticed that, every once in a while, I'll come back and see the gas levels fall much more than expected.

[stcredzero]

> If the car manufacturer told me that regenerative braking can help extend the mileage, as dumb as it sounds I absolutely would repeatedly brake the car.

Wow. Just Wow!

[kamaal]

Sorry, but what are you trying to imply.

The default way in which any user thinks before acting is to trust the customer support guy. Just like how you trust your doctor, or lawyer, or your teacher.

Besides no ones studies chemical engineering before buying an electric car just to use it.

[Natsu]

Nothing works with perfect efficiency thanks to entropy. The energy recaptured during braking is less than that expended while accelerating in the first place.

In other words, crazy maneuvers like that are only going to drain your battery. The lost energy will go into things like friction heating up your brake pads as you wear them down pointlessly.

[scarmig]

I agree that that's the weirdest part of the journalist's story.

Why doesn't Musk focus on that? Instead of trying to discredit the reporter by saying he maliciously lied about when he turned the heat on or off by a couple miles, or whether the car had actually run out of juice at the very end.

[lawdawg]

Because focusing on that would be admitting that:

1. The Tesla lost ~65 miles worth of range overnight 2. That their staff told Mr. Broder that the lost miles would return on their own.

[danielweber]

#1 seems a UX problem, not a tech problem. Clearly Tesla's fault, but nothing that will endanger the company.

#2 has been denied by Tesla. I'm not saying I believe them, but right now both sides say something different happened at that key point.

[demallien]

I have a question for you. Knowing that Broder definately misrepresented the facts, based on what we do see in the logs, why should we then believe his recounting of the conversations that he had with Tesla support staff?

[makomk]

If he had done this on gasoline, he could have got a full top-up in under 10 minutes rather than the 10+ hours it would have taken to do a full charge at Norwich.

[danso]

Just for reference's sake:

> After making arrangements to recharge at the Norwich station, I located the proper adapter in the trunk, plugged in and walked to the only warm place nearby, Butch’s Luncheonette and Breakfast Club, an establishment (smoking allowed) where only members can buy a cup of coffee or a plate of eggs. But the owners let me wait there while the Model S drank its juice. Tesla’s experts said that pumping in a little energy would help restore the power lost overnight as a result of the cold weather, and after an hour they cleared me to resume the trip to Milford.

Looking back, I should have bought a membership to Butch’s and spent a few hours there while the car charged. The displayed range never reached the number of miles remaining to Milford, and as I limped along at about 45 miles per hour I saw increasingly dire dashboard warnings to recharge immediately. Mr. Merendino, the product planner, found an E.V. charging station about five miles away.

So if you read just Musk's piece, you get the perception that Broder lied about not knowing that he was under-juiced. To paraphrase:

Broder: "I should've stayed at the diner and charged for more hours"

Musk: "Broder is an idiot who should've stayed at the diner and charged for more hours"

OK, no argument there. But if Broder is trying to show what a lemon the Tesla is, he's sure doing about it at a roundabout way (which I guess I what we'd expect a well-heeled Big Oil secret agent to do).

So Broder is a professional journalist at the Times, but as far as I can tell, his role is to not describe what it's feels like to be a tech-expert who owns a Tesla. His scenario is not at all alien to anyone who's driven a gas-powered car and skipped "just one more" off-ramp even as the fuel meter hovers at 0.

Irresponsible? Sure. But this is how an average car owner might act. Not every car owner has, on a given day, the ability to wait around an extra hour after breakfast at a diner for the car to keep charging. If the charging stations are as commonplace as the map Musk produced indicates, then Broder may have thought (and misjudged) that he could make it to the next public station.

I think a passage from earlier in Broder's review is a good insight to what he was thinking:

> I drove a state-of-the-art electric vehicle past a lot of gas stations. I wasn’t smiling.

Instead, I spent nearly an hour at the Milford service plaza as the Tesla sucked electrons from the hitching post. When I continued my drive, the display read 185 miles, well beyond the distance I intended to cover before returning to the station the next morning for a recharge and returning to Manhattan.

The success of Tesla depends on the electric infrastructure improving dramatically. Until that comes about, there is apparently a lot of babying and thinking ahead that a Tesla owner has to do even when the car is running just fine.

I find it funny that so many people here are so quick to jump on Broder for not being so patient and tech savvy. While not everyone here is a huge Apple fan, I think most would laugh at a hardware manufacturer who delivered a high powered laptop that performed with variable results depending on the conditions of the day: it's powerful, and cutting edge, you'd just have to remember to plug it at night remember that the battery's decline won't be at a constant rate for more than the usual range of reasons.

It's not Tesla's fault that charging stations aren't ubiquitous, and Tesla deserves a lot of credit for trying to change it. And it's not Tesla's fault that people are sometimes dumb, impatient, and not constantly vigilant. But that's the reality of the market Tesla is selling its $100,000 vehicle for, and this is the market that the media writes for.

[mieubrisse]

I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that people need to put a little more thought into a car that's fundamentally different than standard cars today.

Your last paragraph is making a bad comparison to try and put down this point: a laptop operates off of all one reservoir, while the current ICE car uses gas to drive and a battery to operate the "other stuff". We watch the gas gauge and see that it drops in a direct correlation with our driving and for the most part ignore the battery charge gauge.

When an EV starts pulling both driving and "other stuff" power from the same reservoir, we're surprised because we weren't aware before of the usage of the other things. Thus, a bit more mind needs to be paid to aspects that we didn't care about before. Though it's not the best comparison either, travelers switching from horses to cars had to start thinking about things like fuel reservoirs; it can just be the nature of disruptive advances.

[kamaal]

No, if something is different than you need make is stand out.

Its something like this, before mechanical vehicles came in you could ride your horse cart even if the horse was a little hungry. When cars came along it was the responsibility of the car maker to provide with an accurate fuel gauge so that the customers could refuel when needed.

Very clearly Tesla's charge indicators have a bug. They don't take into consideration or in correctly calculate mileage when temperatures change.

[jzwinck]

That's not quite right. Traditional cars have batteries, but those batteries are just to smooth out energy usage so you can start the car a few days after stopping it, power the radio for a few hours, etc. But of course the charge used fundamentally comes from gasoline, via the engine's alternator.

[kamaal]

To assume that your customer must be intelligent is the biggest mistake you can ever make.

I worked at the Dell technical support call center some years back and our training said very specifically until you ascertain the caller actually knows what he is doing, you need to assume they are dumb. This saves a lot of trouble.

There are countless times when some one calls and I have to explain them they can get internet on their computer only if they a internet connection. It takes a lot of patience, to explain to someone that the the CD needs to be put in the CD drive with the shiny side facing down. Many people don't understand that they need something like VLC player or a codec to play a video.

Many people would view a computer as something similar to a TV. They simply expect things to work out of the box. There are times when I have assisted the elderly in creating email id's and teaching how to use email. There was one elderly woman who had literally become friends with me, I had to call her everyday and practically tutor her. The managers were OK, because many times this sort of calls bought in sales.

And this is beyond real issues that we would solve.

You can't adopt a programmers approach of RTFM or get lost approach or act like 'I know it all' with ordinary people.

In this case not everyone will understand enough chemistry behind how batteries work. That is simply too much to ask from an ordinary user. Your product automatically needs to check for the temperature around, do the magical calculations and tell the user EXACTLY what they need to do. And when someone calls you for help you need to first ensure they are safe before beginning to do any trouble shooting. At the call center, we would specifically instruct the customers to shut down their machines before trouble shooting for any thing more than a trivial software install. In this case the guys at Tesla should have asked him to get this batteries to be charge to 100% before investigating or advising him any further.

And yes customer support is a part of the product not something apart from or outside it. Its all a part of the package. If you a sell a great car with bad customer support, you are ideally selling a bad car.

[ju2tin]

>To assume that your customer must be intelligent is the biggest mistake you can ever make.

It's not about customers being less intelligent than you; that's an arrogant stance to take in these kinds of situations. Lots of people are intelligent enough to understand how batteries work -- or how computer programs work -- if they should choose to spend the time and effort it would take to do so.

But they're not choosing to do so. They're not your R&D team. They're your customers, and they're paying you big money for something that will make their lives easier.

In this case, they're paying for a car that's going to get them from point A to point B with no hassles, so they can focus their intelligence on problems of their choosing, not on problems with your product.

[Retric]

Except, he would need to wait around at the next charging station anyway. So, taking a risk more or less stupid behavior.

As to people doing the same thing, of course they do. Do you have any idea how many people run out of gas despite how common gas stations are and the standard reserve capacity?

[kamaal]

>>Except, he would need to wait around at the next charging station anyway. So, taking a risk more or less stupid behavior.

Your new car's fuel indicator says you have more than half tank full of fuel in the night. You sleep, when you get up in the morning it says you only have something like 4 liters left. Something like half tank worth fuel vanishes overnight.

What will you do? Will you suspect fuel leakage, faulty fuel gauge or something else. Since the car is new, you are likely to call the dealership. The guy there says, just add an additional liter and fuel gauge should be pushed enough to show the last night's reading.

Clearly the customer is at no fault here. A bug in the fuel indicator due to temperature is not his problem.

>>As to people doing the same thing, of course they do. Do you have any idea how many people run out of gas despite how common gas stations are and the standard reserve capacity?

Its one thing to have a empty fuel tank out of absent mindedness and totally a different thing when your fuel indicator says you can go 90 miles before parking for a night and then 45 miles in the morning.

You are confusing the user.

[makomk]

The Supercharger is a hell of a lot faster than the charging station in Norwich he set off to get to it from, though. As in, it can do a full charge in the amount of time it'd take him to get any kind of meaningful additional top-up at Norwich .

[ZoFreX]

The reporter didn't really use the car correctly, agreed. There were other factors involved as well though: the poor performance in bad weather conditions, the weather conditions, and Tesla not providing good customer support. If Elon wants to stop this happening again, perhaps he should look to the factors he can control?

[dclowd9901]

No, what's getting lost is that it takes an hour to fill up that fucking car. Thanks but no thanks; 10 minutes at a gas station is enough to make me want to chew my own arm off.