Imagine you're on a lonely Minnesota or North Dakota highway in your Tesla when it's 20 below, and you find out the hard way that your batteries won't get you to the next town. Multiple lawsuits now allege that Tesla's range calculation algorithm is giving needlessly rosy estimates of available range until battery capacity is well below 50%.
Now I am not an expert on how to calculate the available charge in a battery, but it strikes me that this is very similar to the age old problem of a gas guage not working well--except you're starting, when it's 20 below, with 150 miles of range instead of 300 or 500. The government's desire to replace our real car fleet with electrics seems to be running aground on the hard shores of chemistry and physics.
2 comments:
We skipped a step.
Step One: Develop Cool New Technology
Step Two: Develop Tech to the point of reliability & produce a network around new tech to make it easy to make, break down, & maintain
Step Three: Roll it out to the hoi polloi.
Where is step 2????
I would argue that because of physics and chemistry, we are unlikely to ever create an affordable, safe, electric car that will have reasonable range at 20 below. We're already using the lightest metal for the electrodes, so the path to getting light enough batteries that will work at extremely cold temperatures is obscure at best.
So it's more or less "we need to skip step 2 to preserve the narrative".
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