Running Out of Power in a Tesla on the Side of a Highway

From the article: &quot;We&#x27;re just about fully charged, and the car estimates it can travel 247 miles before we need more juice.&quot;<p>And then &quot;The estimated 265-mile range of a fully equipped Tesla Model S has allayed some concerns about having enough juice to get where you want to go.&quot;<p>So they left on a long trip with a 93% charge knowing that it was going to be close and fell short by 3 miles... why is this news or article worthy?<p>I don&#x27;t own a Tesla and don&#x27;t plan on owning one any time soon, but articles like this really annoy me, as they don&#x27;t provide any meaningful substance. The estimated ranges for gas cars are affected in the same way by driving conditions and the driver.<p>The person they refer to who did a CA to VA trip seems to have a much more pragmatic approach to this and as the result has a mostly uneventful trip. His good experience has nothing to do with being a Tesla fanatic. He&#x27;s just charging the car all the way and makes sure the distance he needs to go is reasonably doable.

As someone who has made that same drive - from Barstow to Kingman, I can&#x27;t imagine attempting that stretch in an electric vehicle.<p>There&#x27;s a neat part of the trip on the reverse route, when you&#x27;re coming down the mountains and into CA. You can basically mark (in your head) a landmark across this enormous valley in your head. And then you drive towards it, cruise control at 85, (unless you&#x27;re in a Tesla!) for roughly the next hour until you reach that spot.<p>You can just see so far and there is absolutely nothing. Except for that little oasis travel center &#x2F; truck stop in that valley, which is almost exactly the halfway point between the two cities.<p>I bet they&#x27;ll have a supercharger station there sometime soon.

&quot;In any effort to save battery life, we turn off the stereo and dim the huge touch screen control panel.&quot; The radio and lights use order of mangnitudes less than the drivetrain. This reminds me of all the people that unplug their TV when not at home, afraid of the standby electricity usage.

So my first instinct when I saw this was to immediatly classify this guy as a tesla detractor just trying to get some publicity by bashing the EV. However its a well written piece, I imagine we have all been in a similar situation with gas cars and there is nothing in particular about this that is negative, he never blames tesla and describes how after this instance of being stranded he was able to complete the return trip successfully. I think it paints a good picture of how I expect I will be once I get my first EV, I will probably run out of juice on a long trip at least once or twice ( I have come pretty close in conventional cars ) and its good to know that there are still some things I might not have thought about ( the towing situation in particular )

I didn&#x27;t realize that so many towing&#x2F;roadside assistance companies won&#x27;t help you if you&#x27;re in an exotic&#x2F;expensive car. Another interesting factor to weigh into the idea of owning a Tesla, at least for now.

What about useing technology to solve this problem? Right now if you run out of petrol, they send a tow-truck or a flat-bed with a 5 galon tank of gas. Why not have some sort of truck-with-a-battery than can provide ~30miles (10%ish) recharge.<p>It&#x27;s a legitimate issue that you may take a detour--forced or by erroneous navigation--and so you might end up a bit short for whatever reason (that&#x27;s not an issue specivic to ev&#x2F;tesla). And it seems unrealistic to call the driver (any driver) &#x27;stupid&#x27; &#x27;ignorant&#x27; &#x27;not worth of the car&#x27; ... which are basically lazy ad-hominem attacks. The issues is well understood by peole of experience in actual long-distance navigation.

I hadn&#x27;t realized the cost of the superchargers stations was more or less known. If I&#x27;m honest, even the high-end estimate ($175,000) seems like a bargain for a largely self-sustaining station that&#x27;s a major selling point for your vehicle platform. They may even get little communities around them, coffee shacks and the like. I would have guessed they cost half a million each, personally.

I&#x27;m surprised that the author didn&#x27;t mention or try to draft. As Mythbusters showed, drafting can save quite a bit of fuel, might have been a better idea than trying to pass the trucks.<p>&quot;drafting behind an 18-wheeler truck was tested and results showed that traveling 100 feet (30 m) behind the truck increased overall mpg efficiency by 11%. Traveling 10 feet (3.0 m) behind the truck produced a 39% gain in efficiency&quot;<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drafting_%28racing%29" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Drafting_%28racing%29</a>

The bigger problem is that an electric car can not take along a &#x27;spare gas cannister&#x27; to get you to the nearest gas station.<p>As charging stations become more common this will be less of a problem but somehow I can&#x27;t envision the future equivalent of a gas station that processes a few hundred cars per hour when doing the same thing electrically with everybody waiting for much longer times. Also, a few hundred cars concurrently recharging their batteries will require significant power infrastructure, gas stations can be put up just about anywhere where roads go (and that&#x27;s not always where the power lines are), in a pinch you can power a whole gas station off a small genset.<p>I&#x27;m sure smarter people that me have thought this through :)<p>Would a gas car running out of fuel get similar coverage?<p>Range anxiety at the time that gas stations were few and far between would have been a comparable item.

&quot;He foresees a greater variety of hybridizations combining oil, natural gas, electric batteries, hydrogen fuel cells and maybe some as yet undeveloped alternative fuel options.&quot;<p>Surely engines that combine multiple energy sources are more expensive and less efficient than engines that use a single source? My understanding of the current hybrids is that they exist because one energy source (petrol) can be quickly and easily replaced, whereas the other (electric battery) takes time to replace and isn&#x27;t as easily available. Best I can tell, that makes hybrids a temporary solution to the lack of widely available better energy sources. Once most cars have settled on a non-petrol energy source, I can&#x27;t see why hybrids would continue to exist.

I was trying to do some searches on google maps to figure out whether they were specifically aiming for supercharger stations, or are there really no electric chargers on the way. With the cities by the end of the route and standard gas stations on the way, I was hoping to see some &quot;electric char chargers&quot; or similar point. Are they really missing, or am I looking for the wrong thing?<p>I&#x27;m used to seeing them in almost every mall &#x2F; bigger parking these days so it looks unlikely they&#x27;re missing completely. Basically I&#x27;m trying to decide if this article is simply anti-tesla (they seem to really concentrate on superchargers only), or is it describing poor availability of charging points in general.

&quot;The seemingly random parking lots I&#x27;m traveling between are sites of a new nationwide network of fast battery charging stations for drivers of Tesla&#x27;s Model S.&quot; If I am reading the article correctly, the journalist driver is trying out a trip between Supercharger stations, for which the mileage estimates on a Tesla as shipped from the factory would be quite relevant.<p>The article has a good discussion of the trade-offs between having a lot of charging stations and not having so many at the beginning of the electric car era. This paragraph especially caught my eye:<p>&quot;Tesla won&#x27;t offer any details about how much it costs to build and operate these Supercharger stations, but according to internal documents obtained by TechCrunch, they&#x27;re an expensive effort, marketing or no. Each Supercharger station is estimated to cost between $100,000 and $175,000, and Tesla is picking up the entire tab — from installation to maintenance to the cost of providing the large amount of energy needed to charge their cars so quickly. Nicholas says Tesla is internalizing this cost and adding it into the price of the Model S, which can range from about $70,000 to more than $100,000.&quot;

Can the Tesla charge off a regular 120V outlet? If so I&#x27;d probably carry around a gas generator for insurance. Might take a while but it could probably charge up enough range to get to a supercharger. Bonus points for the wonderful gasoline smell in the cabin.

In my normal car, if I run out of gas and get stranded, I can at least listen to the radio for several hours while I wait for help. Do electric cars reserve any power for the radio when they run out of drive power?

Should be running out of energy.

I hope the Tesla team write another blog article blasting this story.<p>It is unbelievable that this is expected to be newsworthy.