Tesla Cybertruck Owners Who Drove 10,000 Miles Say Range Is 164 To 206 Miles
Tesla Cybertruck Owners Who Drove 10,000 Miles Say Range Is 164 To 206 Miles

Tesla Cybertruck Owners Who Drove 10,000 Miles Say Range Is 164 To 206 Miles

Tesla Cybertruck Owners Who Drove 10,000 Miles Say Range Is 164 To 206 Miles::Also, the charging speeds are below par, but on the flip side, the sound system is awesome and the car is “a dream to drive.”
Sigh. Not this again. Look, I personally really don't like the Cybertruck. I think it's ugly and pointless. But as someone who likes EVs in general I have to call out the usual "the range is so bad lol" BS.
The range you get when not fully charging the battery is meaningless. It's like partially fueling an ICE and complaining it doesn't deliver the maximum range. Good for a clickbait headline though.
Driving aggressively, at high speed, in relatively cold weather is the perfect trifecta to make any EV underdeliver in range. Those are real downsides of EVs (and weather and speed are factors with ICE cars, just more so for EVs) but it's nothing new or specific to this vehicle. And it is not the scenario the EPA uses to come up with range numbers. Perhaps they should, but they don't.
80% is a full standard charge. You only actually full charge immediately before a road trip, because it wears the battery faster to charge to 100%, and wears even more of you hold the charge before using it.
Do for someone charging their car over night for normal operations, 80% is a functionally full charge.
While that is true, it's not fair to say "see they lied! In completely different circumstances you only get a fraction of the range!" Even for ICE vehicles they use ideal conditions to measure their MPG/range even though most people aren't driving in ideal conditions.
It's a truck that's meant to tow and haul loads. Using it for that purpose is a much larger drain on the battery than aggressive driving, and significantly reduces its useful range. If it's getting these numbers just being driven, you can expect a sub-100 mile range per charge when towing. Imagine having to stop to recharge for 30+ minutes for every hour and half of towing you do. Woof.
A pickup truck towing and hauling loads? What a bizarre idea. I'm pretty sure it's only meant to go to the office, and maybe to the maul on weekends, once in a while.
Now that is a good point. It's been repeatedly shown how towing drains EV batteries. Then again I'm not sure most buyers of EV trucks plan actually use it as a useful truck... Another reason why I don't like this whole segment.
The great news is we have Zac (JerryRigEverything) to test exactly that:
https://youtu.be/yk_u9fbkoKM
Towing at around its maximum rating in the cold, the range was indeed below 100 miles.
According to my Tesla driving neighbor most people do not charge their Tesla to 100% in order to extend the battery lifespan. I don’t understand it but apparently Tesla recommends it.
Yeah Lithium batteries stay healthy for much longer if you keep them roughly between 20%-80% charge. Many laptops and phones now use similar management strategies to avoid wearing out the battery.
That's common for lots of batteries. My laptop has a setting to not charge between 50-70% because it lives on a dock and doesn't need max life in travel. Batteries are stored between 40 and 80% usually. So it makes sense that a car with the same battery chemistry recommends the same thing. It's only different in regards to a car being important in an emergency, but realistically, an emergency is unlikely to be both sudden and require long distance driving. So 100 miles of range is probably as good as 400 in common usage.
Your phone does the same thing just without communicating it. Samsung phones let you change the percentage of the battery is "100%" charged.
As mentioned, lithium batteries are happiest charged around 20-80%. No shame in going higher if you need it, but typical day to day I drive less than 50 miles in a day. If I'm using 20% of my battery capacity, I don't care if that means I go from 100% down to 80% or 80% down to 60%. I'll plug it in at the end of the day and charge back up to whatever I want by the next morning.
Put another way, how many times have you woken up thinking you need to stop at a gas station because you only have 3/4 of a tank?
70 is aggressive? In California ppl will be passing you on both sides at that speed.
The word aggressive is from the article, so I don't know. Anyways driving 70mph consistently is going to deliver you less than the advertised range with EVs, which I believe is a blend of driving types not just constant highway speed. Consider while ICE cars have awful efficiency in city driving (stop/start) so highway driving is preferred, with EVs it's actually the other way around thanks to fewer mechanical losses and battery regen braking.
Aggressive doesn’t mean fast. It means more abrupt changes, more acceleration/deceleration
For example, with the frigid weather I notice I use a lot of brake when regen isn’t effective
I read aggressive as in accelerating aggressively. Possibly to get around people?
It's below the recommended average on German roads (stands at 130kph / ~81mph).
Didn't they just get obligated to report a lower range for many models because they were reporting unrealistic figures?
They probably did. However it doesn't make these articles less annoying. Someone posting on a forum isn't a newsworthy testing result. Did everyone suddenly forget "Your Mileage May Vary" was always true even for ICE cars?
My understanding of this article is that Tesla's range estimates were based on assuming they were being driven in it's range-maximizing, low-performance "chill mode", while the new EPA rules require reporting the range in the car's default mode.
Tesla apologist