Tesla's "Secret" Battery

That’s what i was thinking, and that doesn’t even include any sort of charging network to make long distance trips, just the basic commuter car.

People feel like they must have an unlimited travel range, but what’s the reality of how far they actually drive every day, starting and ending at home? 40 miles, 50, 60?

Case in point. I have 2 cars. I drive about 20 miles per day average, my wife drives the other more. That would work with an EV, but I need 2. Now say I want to take off for the weekend or for several days into the boonies, I might drive over 100, maybe 200 miles. I drove over 200 miles one way last summer to SE Oregon with my Subaru wagon fully loaded with camping gear and my two kayaks on top. This was driving up steep hills (over Santiam Pass, up the Cascade foothills). Could a Tesla do that? I doubt it. Putting any kind of extended load on battery drains it fast (anyone who owns a high power flashlight kknows this).
If it could, how would I recharge it in the woods? An RV hookup maybe? What if one’s not available? So you see the conundrum of owning an EV. For a family, it almost means owning 2 or maybe 3 vehicles…a EV (or two) for around town, or a getaway vehicle with a gas or diesel engine for longer trips. That’s pretty expensive since you need to register, insure, store/park, maintain, etc. I think some folks would do really well with an EV. I know it wouldn’t work for me (at least now).

With a Tesla with extended range battery you may well be able to but you need to plan ahead to “top off” your charge before heading up hill. Tesla does have route planning apps/maps. A stop at the Woodburn outlet or down to Eugene before heading up Santiam should get you up and over the cascades. On long down hill runs your regenerative braking will help top off the battery. :stuck_out_tongue: Not the most ideal but will work.

I went with a friend in their Tesla through the north Cascades highway, and you do get range anxiety when battery goes down. Even if the trip planner says you can make it. We took longer routes just to hit the superchargers. Think of it as an “extended” road trip. Also even without superchargers, many places do have AC power to connect and charge. Much slower than supercharging. Out in the boonies, you will be out of luck short of bringing a power generator and gas. :slight_smile: LOL.

Depending upon if these weekend trips occur every weekend (52x a year) or a some lesser frequency, it might work out to just rent a suitable recreational vehicle, such as a van for trips to the beach, a jeep or suv for mountain trips, a large luxury diesel for cross country cruising, etc. You can even rent a truck at home depot for hauling stuff for home projects. Compared to the convenience, selection and ownership cost, an occasional rental is a good deal.

Tesla is a nice car but too rich for me, i’m driving a Mitsubishi iMiEV and my daughter drives a Nissan Leaf, lots of value left in used EVs (BLF forum after all). i use a 40V lithium pack for the lawn mower, weed eater, leaf blower, chainsaw. Don’t really miss the mess and smell of watered-down alcohol-diluted gasoline gumming up carburetors.

i’d love to get a solar roof, but the first thing BoneSpurs did when he got into office was put a 25% tariff on solar panels, then went to sword dance with the saudis.

This x100. When I worked at a Toyota dealership I HATED driving Prius Primes for this reason. You can’t set your cabin temp, fans, etc. without looking over at the center touchscreen. With physical controls you can do it solely by touch.

Not just annoying, but downright dangerous because stupid people will look at it while driving. OTOH, the fact that more controls like audio, bluetooth, etc. have buttons right on the steering wheel is probably my favorite feature that most newer cars have.

People do this all the time, rent trucks, cars, motorhomes, boats, jet skis, etc. It gets expensive though long-term. A guy I know has a Leaf (1st gen I think from 2012?). It goes realistically 65-75 miles before needing charged. The regen brakes are nice though when we drive up a mountain with steep hills going back down. The battery will be 39% at the top (hills kill the range), but back to like 50% at the bottom. Downside is it gets cold in there in the winter since the heater is used for mostly defrosting the windows. It eats the battery quite a bit!

Since few separate Tesla Motors from Elon Musk, let me start with stating I don’t agree with everything he says, but he knows how to build a killer car company.

I’ve owned a Model 3 from Tesla Motors for about a year and half, and it is the best engineered and best driving car I have ever owned, by FAR.

A Home Depot employee asked me last week “how long it takes to charge that”. The correct answer would have been, how long did our phones take to charge last night? Hell if we know, we just plug them in. At home.

As far as people’s fears the grid can’t handle them, you should know that you can set how fast they pull power. If you want it to sip power at 5 amps, no problem.

How many miles in a year and a half?

Until a vehicle has shown me it’s maintenance needs for 60,000 miles it means nothing.
Then the true cost of ownership becomes clear.
When they hit 150,000 it separates the men from the boys.
Yes, I pound the miles.

I didn’t know that this was a similar problem with the Prius. Thanks for letting me know. Hopefully Toyota & Tesla have done some focus group testing & learned about this usability flaw. Electronically mapped physical controls would be possible.

BTW, Elon Musk launched a huge cooperative to have many locations around the country install charging stations. It’s a very long way to go for a comprehensive coverage, but then so was PAVED ROADS! That took a long, long while. Many people tried to stick with horses. People forget…

8500 miles so far. From Tesla Warranty Protection (2024)
They all come with a 4 year/50,000 mile warranty
you can upgrade to a 8 years/120,000 miles
Body Rust Limited Warranty: 12 years or unlimited miles

It is well known that newer vehicles (made in the last 5 years) are designed to be throw away. They are engineered for efficiency, not longevity. Engine tolerances are increased to reduce friction inside the engine (and lighter oil, 0W-20 for example) so they wear out faster (start burning oil). They use complicated and expensive cvts instead of torque converter automatics or manuals. Again, more efficient. All the plastic parts (intake manifolds, valve covers, oil pans, throttle bodies, breather hoses, etc) may get you to 125k without cracking or warping, but maybe not. They’re putting the ECU and PCMs in the engine compartment now so if you get in a fender-bender and damage it, they total your car because it’s crazy expensive to fix. Not to mention all the computers controlling the interior/exterior lights, windows, seats, gauges, radio, safety stuff, stability control, brakes etc. New cars are nice and tech is cool, but I don’t like automakers forcing you to buy a new car every ten years because it’s really expensive to repair off warranty, or is falling apart. I think Tesla offering such a generous warranty is nice. I wonder what the limits are?

And especially nowadays that to be “green”, cars are being built with biodegradable(!) parts, panels, etc.

Mercedeses from the ’90s had biodegradable wiring. Yah, after a few years in the steamy hot under-hood environment, the insulation starts to crack open and crumble, letting now-nekkid wires to short out.

Wunderbar…

Oh yeh, I used to keep a set of plastic funnels for additives in the gas-tank, etc., and inside the car, not even in sunlight, they turned from a nice red flexible plastic into pale sickly pink “stuff” that crumbled at the slightest touch.

Now imagine your airbox or similar goodies behaving the same way.

Plastic has come a long way and is better than ever, but living at 150 or 200 degrees or more for years takes a toll. Not to mention being exposed to hot coolant, old acidic oil, solvents, and gasoline. If a mechanic or DIY’er isn’t careful, it’s easy to crack a screw hole or mounting point. That can cause vaccum leaks or coolant leaks or oil leaks. Hit a big bump and you might crack that plastic pull pan or transmission pan. I get lighter and cheaper, but should be better…

Right on. I was super impressed to discover my car has Cabin Overheat Protection, so if it’s cooking in a sunny parking lot, it will protect itself by running the A/C just enough to not become a solar cooker and destroy shit. That might have been a feature added after I bought it… Oh, and you can ‘vent’ the windows from the phone app instead if you don’t think it will rain.

I didn’t know what I thought about them taking all my buttons and putting them in a computer, but it only took about 10 seconds before I loved it. The stuff like temp control and radio volume is right on the driving screen. You can simply swipe the icon right to increase and left to decrease. Genius. And even the ‘deepest’ settings are just inside tabs. It’s not at all like an iPhone where the settings screen leads to more screens.

As for the screen, it did not power on one time. I was nervious, but I simply put the car in drive and was impressed everything worked and it was safe to drive home. After I got home I read how to reboot the computer if that ever happens again. It’s just pushing the break and two buttons on the steering wheel.

Actually, those with more than one car might be the ideal case to own an EV. Consider replacing one of your vehicles, and leaving the other as the “getaway” car. If you’re gone for the weekend in the gas car, the wife can take the EV. Or whatever. Yes there are all kinds of trip planning things that have already been mentioned, but it’s just not as convenient as refueling a gas-powered automobile.

In my area, I feel like I’m in the minority as a single-car family. Almost every adult I know has 1 car per adult in the family.

I didn’t know the Primes had this issue. My (2005) Prius kind-of has the issue, but it also has extensive steering wheel controls. So I almost never use the center touch-screen, and especially not while driving. If it’s hot, I set the air to vent just from the dash before I drive. If it’s cold, I set it for dash/feet, again before driving. Defroster and windshield vent are toggled on the steering wheel, as is the recirculate setting. I can fully navigate the radio from the steering wheel. The biggest annoyance is that to pull up the GPS, I have to hit an “I agree” button on the screen before I get the map - some safety warning about using it while driving. It would be safer without that screen!

For road trips over 266 miles, yes, it is not as convenient. As you mentioned, taking the gas vehicle makes sense. Too bad our Ford Fusion has shit for power compared to the Tesla :frowning:
But don’t think of recharging like pumping gas. You don’t need to find a charger when the battery gets low. I haven’t had our car to a charger in over a year. We just plug it into the garage outlet once every few weeks when we get home. We get the notification it’s done charging before we even go to bed, but we do nothing and just unplug it in the morning when we come out to the garage to drive it.
So yea, charging stations don’t need to be part of your life with electric. I sure don’t miss standing out in the F*ing heat or F*ing cold and trying to tell a half-broken touch screen that I don’t have a rewards card, want to use credit not debit, and then enter my zip code. And then decline the car wash. :person_facepalming:

This reminds me of a forum discussion I read one time about the Jeep Grand Cherokee. People were upset because their infotainment system quit working, and thus there was no way to run the heater. And the dealerships didn’t have the parts in stock; long waits.

Actually, I see nothing wrong with cars feeling like fancy tech gadgets.

The real problem is when fancy tech gadgets designers make unnecessary functional compromises to follow a trend.

Touch screens are functional compromises. In some applications, like smartphones, those compromises are a very worthwhile tradeoff to enable what is otherwise not possible. Smartphones need to fit a lot of features in a very small package. That includes a flexible interface, and they need to get your inputs out of the way when you’re not actually inputting in order to maximize screen real estate.

Cars, on the other hand, have room for tactile controls. They don’t need to make the compromise of putting commonly used controls on a touch screen. Unfortunately, it’s probably going to continue to be common not just because its trendy, but because I suspect we’re at the point where a touch screen is cheaper than the individual parts plus assembly and wiring labor of dedicated controls. And if there is already going to be a screen in the car for a backup camera, and if it’s going to be a touchscreen for more complex functions like navigation, then it becomes easy to look at removing buttons as a cost-saving exercise, not a user interface optimization.

That said, it should be observed that the study linked above was specifically about distracted driving. It compared using a touch screen to focusing entirely on driving. It didn’t compare using a touch screen to doing the same task using dedicated controls. I’m sure the latter will affect driving performance less, but it will have some effect.

That said…weren’t we talking about batteries?

Reminds me of how vehicle tech puts a hurt on the consumer. My cars are both almost 20 years old and easy to work on (mostly). No need to go to a dealer or “factory trained” technician since my Dad was a mechanic for almost 30 years. Aside from major work requiring engine or transmission removal, etc or needing special tools/equipment, we do work ourselves. Now for modern cars made after 2015 or 2017, it’s become increasingly difficult for the DIY because it’s all computers and drive by wire and software controlled electric motors for steering, AC, ABS, any of the 20 airbags, stability control, tpms, suspension, cameras, radar, etc. All controlled by software. Any work you do on those safety systems or adjacent systems that may affect the systems has to be tested, checked and any warning lights reset or systems calibrations done by the dealers since they usually hold the software and tools/test equipment from the car manufacturer. The farmers have been hit hard by this too when they were encouraged (forced) to upgrade their tractors, combines, harvesters, etc to newer ones. They got fancy sophisticated machines with fancy sophisticated computers that only dealers (John Deere, IH/Ford, Case) had access to. If a part broke or some th ing went wrong, the only way to get it fixed amd corrected was to take it to the dealer, wait for them to get to it, then pay big bucks for them to re flash a computer or reset or calibrate a motor, actuator, sensor, etc. That’s the price we pay for our tech convenience and safety. Before personal computers became a cheap, easily accessible thing, IT was an obscure profession confined for big companies. Now IT techs are everywhere and big business.

The problem isn’t that it’s alien technology, the problem is companies like John Deere, Ford, etc, have been fighting for years to claim you have no RIGHT to repair “their” copyrighted system, even after you “bought” it. The movement to undo what they have done to us is called “Right to Repair”, have a look into it. The real problem is they have already won a legal war over the years to say you can buy their stuff, but you never really own it.