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

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2014/04/what-running-out-power-tesla-side-highway-taught-me-about-road-trip-tomorrow/8978/

by yiransheng • 12 years ago

46 71 12 years ago

theatlanticcities.com

etep• 12 years ago

Should be running out of energy.

viraptor• 12 years ago

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 "electric char chargers" or similar point. Are they really missing, or am I looking for the wrong thing?

I'm used to seeing them in almost every mall / bigger parking these days so it looks unlikely they're missing completely. Basically I'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.

jurassic• 12 years ago

I don't know for sure that there are no other places to charge, but there's not much in the Mojave desert so it would not surprise me. It's easy for me to imagine no chargers between Barstow and Kingman, because there is basically no civilization out there between cities. I haven't driven the AZ segments, but Mojave towns like Ludlow are basically a single gas station, a single diner, maybe a church and nothing else. If I thought I wasn't going to make Kingman I might have turned toward Havasu City, but it's only ~20 miles closer.

waterlesscloud• 12 years ago

Needles is good pit-stop town, but if Tesla put a station in Kingman (to catch Vegas bound traffic, no doubt) then it might take a while to fill in Needles.

tormeh• 12 years ago

Normal chargers can take tens of hours to charge your car. Until batteries get better a pure electric car won't be as versatile as a petrol/diesel one. There's been some talks of cars with batteries, all-electric drivetrains and a petrol/diesel turbine that can generate electricity really efficiently (since it doesn't need variable speed). Unfortunately, I haven't heard anything more about those kinds of cars.

coin• 12 years ago

"In any effort to save battery life, we turn off the stereo and dim the huge touch screen control panel." 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.

c2• 12 years ago

Yeah and in the very next paragraph, he gets intimidated by a truck driver being annoyed that they are driving 63 mph, so decide.... to slam on the accelerator and go so fast they no longer see the truck's headlights on the flat desert highway. Much better alternative then just letting him pass you.

It's almost like they wanted the trip to fail to write this article.

vacri2• 12 years ago

They were passing the truck, not the other way around. The truck driver was aggressive and possibly not safe to be around.

Kylekramer2• 12 years ago

Given that every bit of energy gets the driver closer to their destination, your comparison seems a bit unfair. Sure, it may be a small difference in the big picture, but that small difference could be the difference between making it and having to call a tow.

jws3• 12 years ago

A backlight is something like 3 watts, a car stereo is consuming something like 10 watts. Running them for an hour is 13 watt hours.

A model S uses 237.3 watt hours per kilometer.

If you turn them completely off for an hour, you can go an extra 50 meters.

throwawaymsft• 12 years ago

If you're going to turn down the brightness on the screen to save energy/fuel, you might as well throw your clothes out the window to reduce the weight. Every little difference helps, right? :)

tlb2• 12 years ago

Energy consumption per mile increases as the square of speed, because it's dominated by aerodynamic drag. So you only get half as far going 85 as going 60.

adrianN• 12 years ago

There are 115 Million households in the US. If every household has a 2W device running, they consume roughly 2 billion kWh a year. Producing that much energy in the US releases 1.4 megatons of CO2...

devindotcom• 12 years ago

I hadn't realized the cost of the superchargers stations was more or less known. If I'm honest, even the high-end estimate ($175,000) seems like a bargain for a largely self-sustaining station that'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.

001sky5• 12 years ago

Makes you wonder if they included the lot/real-estate.

maxerickson2• 12 years ago

I bet it's a cheap lease, it's a no brainer for the restaurants, wealthy people with time to kill showing up in their parking lots.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

That's why hydrogen cars can't compete with electric cars. Even at $100,000 per charger, electric car infrastructure is still appearing pretty slowly. Now imagine how much it's going to take when a hydrogen charging station is more like $1.5 million - but for some reason the states want to fund those instead of electric chargers. It makes no sense.

Not to mention that with such chargers you can charge you car for free, while hydrogen will still cost quite a bit (probably not much less than gas).

magic_haze• 12 years ago

1. You won't have to wait for an hour for your tank to fill up. 2. The supercharges aren't free: you're paying for them when you buy the car. And it's proprietary: you can't use it with other electric cars.

vonklaus• 12 years ago

Hydrogen is a loss-leader put out there to buy Energy companies to buy a few more years of their incumbency and rent-seeking behaviour. It is just publicity and marketing. I am not a physicist, but I am pretty sure that the process of chopping up CH4 (methane; an already efficient source-fuel) and converting it to hydrogen to run in sub-optimal conditions in a small engine without any nationalized distribution method; is nothing more than posturing. Hydrogen is a relatively dangerous element and is pretty difficult to transport.

It IS the most abundant element in the Universe. Unfortunately, just not on Earth....

ams6110• 12 years ago

I didn't realize that so many towing/roadside assistance companies won't help you if you're in an exotic/expensive car. Another interesting factor to weigh into the idea of owning a Tesla, at least for now.

toufka• 12 years ago

The flip side is that if you're in an exotic/expensive car people will pay for you to get help. The rental car companies will help you, the dealers will help you, and when you find someone finally willing to take their money, they'll help you gladly and kindly for that nice payday they're getting.

sologoub3• 12 years ago

From the article: "We're just about fully charged, and the car estimates it can travel 247 miles before we need more juice."

And then "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."

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?

I don't own a Tesla and don't plan on owning one any time soon, but articles like this really annoy me, as they don't provide any meaningful substance. The estimated ranges for gas cars are affected in the same way by driving conditions and the driver.

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's just charging the car all the way and makes sure the distance he needs to go is reasonably doable.

funkyy• 12 years ago

Yeah, its like going uphill constantly and maintaining some good speed is not going to decrease the range. ANY petrol or diesel car will get decreased range. Usually range is estimated based on previous rides - what they should do is - just reset the range estimate. They would get up to date data within 15 minutes of drive.

Estimated range is not fool-proof. Common sense should be applied to everything - even technology packed car.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

many electrics and hybrids systems don't seem to encourage hypermiling, like very aggressive off throttle regeneration and such. Not owning a Tesla, nor interested in one, I would like to know just how possible hypermileing is?

Can you toggle the regenerative effect when you lift off the pedal? Like just when your about to crest a hill, they quickly toggle it on once you get + over the speed limit on the downhill side?

I can hit some pretty astounding numbers in my TDI Beetle vert with really simple tricks but that does rely on the fact that I can pretty much stay in high gear so engine braking isn't a factor, only danger being stalling. Engine uses no fuel without throttle input unless you put the clutch in.

cracell• 12 years ago

I really wonder if they purposely did this to try and make it close and get a good article. Had the car not ran out of juice they would have a very boring article.

hadoukenio• 12 years ago

Like most Top Gear episodes, it's the story not the car that makes viewers tune in. Everyone knows that the races are scripted.

rogerbinns2• 12 years ago

What I don't understand is why the car didn't use route information in range estimates (assuming they entered their destination). It would have known about elevation changes. If getting map information from Navteq then it could also know about average speeds and historical traffic patterns.

It could also have given more driving guidance. I didn't see how they came up with 63mph, but the car itself should know about energy-speed tradeoffs could have told them a more appropriate speed to go.

And if knowing they wouldn't reach a charger it could have had them stop closer to somewhere that could help, or direct the AAA equivalent to them for the moment they ran out.

People keep mentioning the mental effort of electric cars for these issues, but the car itself can address those and do so far more effectively.

XorNot• 12 years ago

Even if you did all this, you can't predict everything in advance especially on a long trip.

Trying to drive anywhere cutting it this close, in any car, is likely to leave you stranded.

sologoub3• 12 years ago

Had no idea a Tesla could do that! A really good question then...

jws3• 12 years ago

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?

The next time the writers need to make a story I can loan them my Transit Connect. It never gets within 10% of its "distance to empty" for a full tank, even in optimum conditions.

Boom! Byline.

IvyMike• 12 years ago

articles like this really annoy me, as they don't provide any meaningful substance

If you've thought about owning an electric vehicle, one of the first thoughts that pops into your head is "what happens if I run out of juice in the middle of nowhere?" Including questions like "How does the car behave? Does it just shut off?" to "How does AAA handle it?" to "How hard is it to get going again?" A lot of other commenters are raising points that the author was kind of a dumbass. But as it turns out, I too fuck up every so often, so I'd like to know what happens when I do.

The article goes a long way towards answering those questions. I'm probably not going to get an electric car anytime soon but I don't see anything in the article as particularly anti-Tesla or even anti-electric.

sologoub3• 12 years ago

I guess being a car enthusiast, I am not surprised a tow company refused to tow an expensive car they are not familiar with. When the 350Z just came out and was relatively rare, some tow companies refused to deal with them because they required a flatbed and special care due to super low clearance.

This is relatively common, though not in issue in most large metro areas.

wglb• 12 years ago

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?

Exactly. And this is through the desert. This approaches the darwin award threshold.

Also, the article neglects to mention the number of chevrolet cars that caught fire during his trip.

vacri2• 12 years ago

I don't understand. The fully-charged range is 265. They're mostly-charged and have an estimate of 247 miles. The actual path they want to take is 209 miles. Having a range only 80% of estimated is newsworthy, in a car which doesn't have a lot of infrastructure around to give it juice.

The article also wasn't just about the range; it covered several other topics as well. One of those topics is the difficulty of getting towed. It doesn't matter how many times you say "well, duh, use it according to spec", humans are humans, and they will run out of juice in their vehicles, particularly in limited-range vehicles with little refueling infrastructure. They couldn't even get the car onto the truck without a Tesla guy to power it enough to shift it into neutral, so even if they had found an earlier towing service that didn't fob them off, not being able to be put in neutral is still a problem in regards to towing.

There's plenty of newsworthy stuff in this article, it talks about one experience of when things go wrong. There's also plenty of articles talking about how great the car is - should we say that they're also not newsworthy, because there have already been glowing reviews?

zaroth3• 12 years ago

I don't think it's safe to assume the car was at 93% charge based on the reported 247 mile estimated range. It's not clear to me that the car will always show estimated range to be 265 when charge is 100%.

Range estimation is a lot more complicated than 'percent of max power stored' * 265. Obviously Tesla's algorithm was too optimistic in this case, even though there seemed to be some 'safety margin' at the start.

I'm sure Tesla has a great deal of data on the variance of miles covered on a full charge over all sorts of terrain, climate, traffic, driving patterns, etc. and I would assume they use that data to build a decent range predictor. Probably the hardest part is not so much getting a good prediction from given set of inputs, but actually getting decent inputs to feed into the predictor. Driver enters the destination address, but after that... is the car pulling temperature, wind speed/direction, elevation delta, statistical traffic patterns, live traffic, etc...

OK... After considering all that, maybe we just implement 'percent of max power stored' * 265 and call it a day. (It's like the 80/20 rule has become the 80/1 rule -- so often now I feel like you can make something 80% as good, for 1% the effort.)

001sky5• 12 years ago

724 PM PDT TUE APR 29 2014

...WIND ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 3 PM PDT THURSDAY...

WINDS...NORTHEAST WINDS 15 TO 25 MPH WITH GUSTS TO 40 MPH WILL INCREASE TO 20 TO 30 MPH WITH GUSTS TO 50 MPH LATE TONIGHT THROUGH WEDNESDAY. ISOLATED DAMAGING GUSTS NEAR 60 MPH WILL BE POSSIBLE IN THE FOOTHILLS. WINDS ARE EXPECTED TO BE SLIGHTLY WEAKER WEDNESDAY NIGHT INTO THURSDAY.* ==============

Accurate range prediction in this neck of the woods also needs to account for the weather.

Sustained 30-40mph gust 60 is not uncommon in so-cal/desert.

Point your EV into that for an hour on i-5 and ...

You will lose some range for sure.

theatraine• 12 years ago

I'm surprised that the author didn'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.

"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"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drafting_%28racing%29

rbobby• 12 years ago

And is very dangerous. People always forget the dangerous part.

bennyg• 12 years ago

Exactly. A tap of the brakes at 70mph means a fraction of a second to match or best that at 10 feet distance. You're gonna' die if you try that.

001sky5• 12 years ago

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.

It'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's not an issue specivic to ev/tesla). And it seems unrealistic to call the driver (any driver) 'stupid' 'ignorant' 'not worth of the car' ... which are basically lazy ad-hominem attacks. The issues is well understood by peole of experience in actual long-distance navigation.

giulianob• 12 years ago

I was thinking the same. Why can't you hook it up to a running car and get some charge in the battery to get to the nearest charging station?

maxerickson2• 12 years ago

You only have a couple of kilowatts of power output from a large alternator. So you would have to run the car for quite a long time to get much charge (I guess it wouldn't be so bad to get 10 miles of range that way though).

bri3d3• 12 years ago

Terrible back-of-the-envelope math disregarding any kind of loss or inefficiency, and assuming a magical DC->DC power system which would convert a car's 14.4V alternator source to something suitable to charge a Tesla without losing anything:

A "normal" modern car's alternator can put out ~100 amps at 14.4VDC. That's a maximum of about 1.5kW, which will charge a Tesla at a rate of about 2 miles of driving per hour of charging, again assuming a magical efficiency.

The reality is that the car's own systems take at least a few hundred watts and alternators aren't built to run at maximum load all the time and are likely to fail after a while running near capacity. Plus, the Tesla doesn't, to the best of my knowledge, contain any sort of DC->DC hardware capable of bringing 14.4V up to the necessary charge voltage, and even if it did losses would be at least on the order of tenths.

So, even with a good, running car and a theoretical alternator, you'd be waiting a very long time next to the running car (and burning a lot of gas) before your Tesla would go anywhere.

Obviously it would be possible to build, for example, a tow truck with much greater charging capacity and as time goes on we'll probably see at least a few of those in real life. But the fact remains that gasoline provides an excellent energy density in a convenient liquid form and that for certain edge cases, its conveniences will be hard to beat.

dkhenry• 12 years ago

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 )

NDizzle• 12 years ago

As someone who has made that same drive - from Barstow to Kingman, I can't imagine attempting that stretch in an electric vehicle.

There's a neat part of the trip on the reverse route, when you'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're in a Tesla!) for roughly the next hour until you reach that spot.

You can just see so far and there is absolutely nothing. Except for that little oasis travel center / truck stop in that valley, which is almost exactly the halfway point between the two cities.

I bet they'll have a supercharger station there sometime soon.

jacquesm3• 12 years ago

The bigger problem is that an electric car can not take along a 'spare gas cannister' to get you to the nearest gas station.

As charging stations become more common this will be less of a problem but somehow I can'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's not always where the power lines are), in a pinch you can power a whole gas station off a small genset.

I'm sure smarter people that me have thought this through :)

Would a gas car running out of fuel get similar coverage?

Range anxiety at the time that gas stations were few and far between would have been a comparable item.

userbinator• 12 years ago

The bigger problem is that an electric car can not take along a 'spare gas cannister' to get you to the nearest gas station.

I think if electric cars become more common and commoditised, mostly standardised things, extra battery packs will become popular.

jacquesm3• 12 years ago

Storing large numbers of battery packs safely would be a challenge, and they still would need to be recharged.

A single 50K liter fuel drop is the equivalent of 1.75 TJ, that's 486111 KWh (one liter of gasoline is 35 MJ). If a typical car has a 60 liter gas tank that's 850 cars give or take. A busy gas station will go through that in a few hours. Say 200 cars / hour, that's a bit over 4 hours. So the electrical equivalent of that 50K liter fuel drop delivered over the space of 4 hours (assuming equal efficiency, which probably is not correct) would require 125 MW of electrical input. As a check: One Tesla super charger is about 100 KW, running 200 of them in parallel would require 20 MW.

So it appears that even at roughly 5 times the efficiency of a gasoline engine the power requirements of a filling station capable with such volumes would be quite significant. You're talking high voltage distribution to the stations at a minimum to reduce the losses, even at 10KV that's still 2K amps.

Pretty sleepy here so apologies ahead of time if I messed up too much on the calculations.

tokenadult• 12 years ago

"The seemingly random parking lots I'm traveling between are sites of a new nationwide network of fast battery charging stations for drivers of Tesla's Model S." 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.

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:

"Tesla won'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'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."

zaroth3• 12 years ago

Read the Better Place expose posted recently for more on this kind of approach. Here's hoping it works out better for Tesla.

jfoster• 12 years ago

"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."

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'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't see why hybrids would continue to exist.

mattkrea2• 12 years ago

I hope the Tesla team write another blog article blasting this story.

It is unbelievable that this is expected to be newsworthy.

mattkrea2• 12 years ago

At least please provide some explanation for a downvote. Did I not give enough reason behind my feelings?

jpatokal• 12 years ago

I didn't downvote you, but the article is not some obvious hit job. As a potential future Tesla owner living in a country with a whole lot of empty space (Australia), I found it quite interesting and surprising that getting the Tesla towed even a short distance would be such a problem.

foobarian• 12 years ago

Can the Tesla charge off a regular 120V outlet? If so I'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.

tlb2• 12 years ago

Yes. You gain 2.5 miles/hr charging from 120V 15A, or 25 miles/hr charging from 240V 50A.

tzs• 12 years ago

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?

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

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