> . He sees 50 miles. On a digital display at a hotel at night, he misreads the 5 as a 9, and this fits with his expectation
Actually, I don't think he misread anything, I think it genuinely did read 90 miles exactly like he said it did. Look at the graph on the blog post: http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/r... At the 400 mile mark, right where he stopped for the night, there's an abrupt vertical drop from 90 miles remaining to 20 miles remaining, which exactly matches the journalist's claims.
Yup. Musk didn't explain the biggest issue here, which was the drop in mileage overnight. There has to be a perfectly reasonable explanation, but Tesla doesn't seem willing to explain it.
The .6 mile circle in front of the charging station is completely irrelevant, because it's in front of a freaking charger, which is the best place to see if 0 is actually 0.
Musk certainly didn't explain the drop in mileage. As I understand it, that drop results from temperature management of the battery. When stopped in very cold weather, the car uses power to generate heat in order to maintain the battery within safe operating temperatures. In addition, when the battery is at the low end of that range, it under-reports the available mileage. That's what generated the Tesla tech's suggestion that it might regain some mileage while driven that morning. (You can see this in the graph. The slope of the graph in the little section from miles 400-411 is less than at any other point, and the section after the Norwich charge is also lower, although speeds were also lower here) However, after some time of driving or charging, the batteries will have risen to optimal operating temperature, and the range projection is correct. Mr. Broder may have assumed that he was going to recover all of the energy lost overnight, not just the little bit of error in projection. That may be why he convinced himself to leave with insufficient range to reach his destination. However, that argument fails Occam's razor in light of his earlier attempts to drive the car to failure and his departure expressly against the advice of the Tesla tech he talked to at that time.
As you can see, there is nothing special about his night stop. The night before, it predicted 79 miles. He ended up going 60 miles before it was out of juice. That's 25% shorter than the prediction, so the car must have lost charge during the night or due to cold weather, right? Well, if you look at the day before, the full charge predicted a range of 242 miles, but he only got 196 miles, which is 20% less than the prediction.
In other words: The predicted range is consistently higher than the actual range.
I thought the point of the NYT article was to review the Supercharger network, not the car itself. Plugging into a regular charger unnecessarily (and it would have seemed unnecessary at the time) would defeat the point of the article.
If you're being at all conservative, and your estimated range is that close to the wire, it doesn't seem unnecessary, especially when the standard usage pattern with EVs is to plug them in every night. The Model S seems to be doing a much better job of estimating its battery life than any laptop I've ever owned.
Also unexplained, ignored, or deliberately misrepresented by Tesla is the state of the car when it was being towed. The towing company itself verified that the Model S was "completely dead" when it came to pick the car up, and moreover that the car couldn't easily be moved because the electrical emergency brake was stuck in place.
To emphasize "deliberately misrepresented by Tesla", this is Musk's relevant statement:
As the State of Charge log shows, the Model S battery never ran out of energy at any time, including when Broder called the flatbed truck.
It obliquely suggests the car wasn't dead on the road. But it clearly was (or else Musk would be loudly calling it out). It's not the responsibility of the reviewer to figure out whether his car bricked because of an empty battery, or buggy software which mimicked an empty battery (displaying zero range, automatically shutting down).
Actually, I don't think he misread anything, I think it genuinely did read 90 miles exactly like he said it did. Look at the graph on the blog post: http://www.teslamotors.com/sites/default/files/blog_images/r... At the 400 mile mark, right where he stopped for the night, there's an abrupt vertical drop from 90 miles remaining to 20 miles remaining, which exactly matches the journalist's claims.