Can’t really blame Tesla for this. There just isn’t a good way to test mileage for the average user. My Accord is supposed to get 29 city and 35 highway. In my daily mix of 70% city and 30% highway I average between 23 and 26 combined MPG. Before Covid, when we were driving into DC more, I saw tanks under 20 MPG in the winter. This is just because my “city” driving is more “city” than the EPA test considers.
Explain than how what VW did with diesels is any different? The car was made to cheat a specific test. Tesla doesn’t behave the same on the street as it does in the test. The only supposed difference is that there is no way to prove that Tesla car cheats the test. Also I’m fairly sure that EPA didn’t even test Tesla cars but used the “simulation data” provided by Tesla themselves.
I think there’s a difference between cheating at a test and designing the vehicle to excel at the test. I haven’t seen any evidence that tesla is actually cheating, but they certainly appear to know how to work the system in their favor.
What’s more important, in my opinion, is consumer education that epa ranges are complete horseshit. There’s a reason why multiple independent tests have tesla underperforming the epa ratings by the largest margin of any EV offered.
Here’s an interesting discussion of the topic if anyone is interested: The Adjustment Factor Tesla Uses to Get Its Big EPA Range Numbers
Seems I was incorrect and it’s a 30% adjustment factor, not 20%.
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That’s splitting hairs already, but fine I’ll give you that.
Nice find. Love how much bullshit goes into just getting a completely fake number from EPA.
Because one is criminal and the other isn’t. Tesla’s EPA range estimates are not wrong because they have software that detects when an EPA employee is driving the car and does something to make the vehicle drive differently/more efficiently. They are wrong because the EPA test isn’t realistic of real world use. VW had software that knew when the car was on a dyno and completely changed how the engine worked.
And the scope of the harm was dramatically different. Increased air pollution for billions of people is many orders of magnitude worse than someone getting 30% less eMPG than advertised. As noted above, I usually get 30% worse MPG than the EPA estimates in my Accord.
This is probably the answer. We need MPG estimates for CAFE standards but likely the EPA should explicitly state that info is not to be represented as accurate to consumers.
A better plan would be to get a statistically significant number of new car buyers every year to agree to some sort of tracking of their driving and fuel consumption. For CAFE standards the EPA could than say the median Camry/Outback/X5 driver gets X MPG combined.
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You know this how? Tesla is a sOfTwArE company that makes cars last I heard the shpiel. And noone drives anything in those tests, the cars are on dynos, which is not that difficult to detect especially in a car that has enough computers and cameras.
Billions upon billions of subsidies and carbon credits is the same thing. If their cars aren’t as green as they claim then they wouldn’t be able to sell as many credits, so environmental damage could be the same, less or worse.
Technically since Tesla collects all data on their cars already they could be forced to fork it over, but that will never happen.
All possible yes. But the simplest answer is that the tests are just completely unrealistic. Look at this summary of the tests performed. Max average speed on both highway and highspeed highway is 48ish MPG.
These tests are just right in an electric cars wheelhouse. Some EV makers choose to be conservative with range for various reasons but it doesn’t really surprise me Teslas do great on these offical EPA tests. If the EPA did a test that was driving at 80 MPH for 120 minutes it would probably get results like we see in real world tesla reviews.