Surprise! Some of Tesla's "highly technical customer base" just don't GET efficiency

[MetroMPG]

Tesla posted an interesting engineering blog entry on their site recently that estimates the car's energy consumption with speed, aero & rolling losses, etc.

Worth a look: Tesla Motors - Engineering

The engineer's quote that got me was this (relating to the electric Roadster's range):

One clear driving “tip” to take away from this is if you are ever nervous about making it to a given destination: you will do much better to slow down instead of speeding up. I’ve talked with many people who intuitively think that minimizing time to the destination will also minimize the energy usage, but just the opposite it true!

Now he doesn't explicitly state whether the people he's talking to are members of Tesla's "highly technical customer base," but you'd have to think that's likely.

Big forehead slapper, that one!

[MetroMPG]

Aside from that there's some interesting stuff in the piece, like this chart of range vs. speed for the Roadster:

[NeilBlanchard]

D'oh!

[Christ]

Interesting... at a steady 17MPH, you could go 400 MILES!!!!

At that rate, it would literally be all day before you got there. But, hey! You could say your EV runs you around the whole day!

[MetroMPG]

Yeah, that's quite the graph, isn't it?

Or you could do this, slightly faster: http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...rge-10776.html

[gone-ot]

Originally Posted by MetroMPG

Aside from that there's some interesting stuff in the piece, like this chart of range vs. speed for the Roadster:

...beyond 17 mph, it's basically (but not perfectly) a constant power curve, ie: miles = K / time.

[alohaspirit]

Originally Posted by MetroMPG

Aside from that there's some interesting stuff in the piece, like this chart of range vs. speed for the Roadster:

graphs like this are great but its all based on 0 degrees flat ground


wish they did one of these for hills

[gone-ot]

Originally Posted by alohaspirit

graphs like this are great but its all based on 0 degrees flat ground


wish they did one of these for hills

...as my college professor would say: "...the answer is left to the student as an exercise in learning."

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Christ

Interesting... at a steady 17MPH, you could go 400 MILES!!!!

Or at the other end of the scale, my friends' ranch is about 65 miles from here. I could drive that flat-out, plug in and recharge all day, then go flat-out all the way home :-) Though the last half mile of dirt down into the canyon might be a bit of a problem in the winter. Steep, and packed snow/ice when it's not mud.

[Christ]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

Or at the other end of the scale, my friends' ranch is about 65 miles from here. I could drive that flat-out, plug in and recharge all day, then go flat-out all the way home :-) Though the last half mile of dirt down into the canyon might be a bit of a problem in the winter. Steep, and packed snow/ice when it's not mud.

1/2 mile = 2,640 feet... That'd be an awfully large extension cable, eh?

I don't think the ~4 inches of ground clearance would really like the mud/snow/ice, either. Seems like a Tesla might not be the ideal vehicle for that situation?