[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.

[Someone]

Regenerative braking should not use the brake pads.

More importantly: battery chemistry is weird and differs widely between technologies (for example, should you completely empty lithium ion batteries every now and then, or is that disastrous for the batteries? How is that for NiMh batteries? Does the memory effect exist? Etc.).

That overnight loss likely was (mostly) not a loss at all, but due to the difference in mileage you can get out of a warm vs a cold battery pack, or maybe even out of one that had recently seen small charge cycles due to regenerative braking vs one that hadn't (IMO unlikely, but as I said, battery chemistry is weird)

If Tesla told me that regenerative braking would improve available range in this situation, I think I would take them for their word.

[lutusp]

> If Tesla told me that regenerative braking would improve available range in this situation, I think I would take them for their word.

Think about what you're saying.

Thesis: periodically pressing on the brake pedal and allowing some of the car's energy to be captured by flywheel generation actually improves battery life and vehicle range compared to simply driving along at the same average speed. True or false?

In order for the above to be true, and given that acceleration takes battery energy and regenerative deceleration delivers battery energy, to argue that pressing on the brakes improves battery life is to argue that braking produces more energy for the battery than acceleration requires from it -- in other words, that the car is a perpetual motion machine, free of all natural constraints and scientific laws.

But the second law of thermodynamics -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics -- says one cannot get more energy out of a system than you have put into it, in fact, you always get back less than you put in.

Beyond the above-quoted thermodynamic law, there is the energy conservation law, to wit: energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed in form (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_energy_conservation). Therefore it is impossible for the car to deliver more energy by decelerating than it acquired by accelerating.

Therefore if someone at Tesla actually offered the advice that stop-and-go driving actually increases battery life and vehicle range, that person needs remedial physics education before being allowed to speak to customers again.