2y ago

Tesla’s secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints

www.reuters.com

From the article: "About a decade ago, Tesla rigged the dashboard readouts in its electric cars to provide “rosy” projections of how far owners can drive before needing to recharge, a source told Reuters. The automaker last year became so inundated with driving-range complaints that it created a special team to cancel owners’ service appointments."

55 comments

And no one was ever surprised, except for people stupid enough to buy anything from Muskmelon in the first place.
- Musk is a great salesman and a terrible engineer.
  
  That's honestly an insult to terrible engineers.
  Musk is barely on par with a 9-year-old with crayons and construction paper.
I can't be the only one who read this and wondered what problems Teslas were causing to golf courses.
- why? I don't get it.
  
  In golf you start a long way from the hole, so when you first start a hole you're probably not trying to make it exactly, you're just trying to get the ball to go a long way to get near the hole. That's known as a drive. A driving range is a place to practice doing that.
- LOL Not me
- Third Year Letterman was right. These things are just imported golf carts.
- Yep
My Tesla never ever got close to the advertised range. Usually 200 miles a charge. I went back to an ICE.
- If you have no life a PHEV is the best of both worlds. I went all of COVID without ever getting gas because I was able to just use the battery. And PHEVs have been increasing in range too. I got mine in 2019 and it only has 26 miles range, but the RAV4 prime gets 42 now. Maybe there is even something better, haven't really been paying attention cause I don't need a new car.
- Nah. The world’s burning; going back to build more fires ain’t the way.
  (Edited as I no can grammar)
  
  Unfortunately EVs aren’t in a place where they can be used by everyone. I owned a Model 3 LR and never got anywhere near the range it claimed. It was constantly recalculating my next stop to charge.
  On long drives the range is a real problem. A 9 hour drive turned into 12 because I had to stop every 2 hours to charge for 20 minutes. I actually had to turn around go backwards an hour because it decided I couldn’t make it to the next charger. This wasn’t during extreme cold or heat.. it was beautiful outside I was doing the speed limit without the AC on.
  The range issues plus the dozens of phantom braking incidents on that trip caused me to trade it in for an ICE car as soon as I got back home. EVs are great for around town daily driving, but if you ever take long trips they are not ready yet. I want to own an EV and will certainly have one as my next car, but today is not that day.
  
  Correct, and with better batteries or cheaper electricity, we can move forward. The current state of EVs is not useful for all people. Personally, I'm 5 years away from never needing a car again. In the meantime, I must commute.
  
  Lithium mining is very bad for the planet. ICEs are bad, but battery EVs are also horrible.
- Good for you. EVs have a place in most households for quick trips and short errands. But that’s it. They have a huge set of issues that the anti ICE car brigade don’t wish to discuss. Face it, batteries are not a viable way to power the vehicles we all rely on and enjoy driving. Maybe as a second vehicle, yes but forget some big takeover. It’s so stupid.
Elon pulling numbers (which happen to be what the markets want) out of thin site is nothing new. Delivery time of cyber truck? Price points?
He, like jobs before him, has morphed from a brilliant engineer to ruthless marketer. And like jobs before him justifies it versus his internal stunted moral compass
Appreciate him for fostering the electric car economy, admire his work ethic (space x), but hate the guy
- Except he never was a brilliant engineer, he was fired for engineering incompetence at one point, and he's been lying about having an engineering degree.
  
  Yup. He knows enough for an interview with someone who knows even less, but that's about it. Like Steve Jobs, he's a salesman.
- Both electric cars and spacex are government subsidized industries. He's not competing on the free market. Elon excels at getting the government to make his business for him.
  
  He's not competing on the free market.
  Those subsidies are exclusively available only to Elon's companies?
  Come on, he's a massive douche; but Tesla/SpaceX are in the same market as all their competitors. They're not special, they just chose to do things others weren't. Why didn't GM build BEVs sooner to suck up all those subsidies? Why didn't ULA land their boosters to reduce launch costs and secure more launch contacts and grants?
  
  Totally agree but they would have been subsidized for anyone. It was Elon who did it
  Reminder: I really hate him
  But people saying that anyone could have done what he did IF they were born with money or IF government subsidies could somehow apply to them too. Plenty of born rich people out there who didn’t.
  He’s a smart guy. Emotionally a child, sociopath and narcissist. But he actually deserves some credit.

55 comments