According to TSLA, it takes into account elevation though...

If you tell it where you're going it will.

and that should be obvious right? Let's say you're familiar with how fast your car eats gas and you drive around on flats all the time.

When you take it into the mountains, it's not surprising that your gas gauge goes down a bit faster when you're pushing that gas pedal a little further than usual.

Perhaps the takeaway is that EVs shouldn't so prominently display the range as part of the "gas" gauge the way they tend to do.

I have it show percent, not range. Tesla defaults to percent on the main display. I'm not sure about other cars. When you use navigation then Tesla will show you the expected charge at your destination and it's been pretty accurate.

I drove my wife's Model 3 on a short trip from Sacramento, CA to Santa Cruz. 3.5hrs if you factor in traffic (2.5hrs without).

When we left, estimated range was 45% on arrival. We arrived with 27% range. Granted, we did encounter a crapload of traffic, but the Nav system took that into account because the time was accurate.

I don't fully fault Tesla for the range inaccuracy; an ICE car would probably have had a similar issue. But it's not as smart as I thought it was, which is a shame.

I obviously don’t have a reason why it was so off. We regularly drive from near sac to Santa Cruz and it’s within a few percent with plenty of speeding. I commute 100 miles a day on the freeway, so maybe it knows my freeway driving habits very well.

Doesn’t it know where it is ?

This goes to the optimistic/ exagerated calculation

It knows where it is. It can’t very well know which direction you want to go if you don’t tell it, can it.

Could it not take an elevation rate measure though?

Related to my other comment, it may be more difficult if it’s relying on weather station data rather than local car sensors though.

Yeah. I’ve never had the car not know where it is.

"unless you chart a specific trip"

So the implication is it's getting it's data from local weather stations and not from the vehicle itself, no?

If anyone know, I'd be interested in the more details and what led to that decision.

It can’t know you are planning to drive over a mountain unless you put that in the nav system.

He did chart a trip.

Using the trip counter isn't the same as entering the destination in navigation. If you tell navigation your destination it will tell you if you're going to make it or not. If you start driving like a madman halfway through it will reevaluate and start navigating you to a charger. I rented one for a week and took it up into the mountains, far from a charger. It was scary, but we made it back with 17% charge once I stopped passing everyone every time there was a dotted line.

I'm aware - pretty sure they did chart the trip in autopilot though from my reading. Telling the autopilot system you are headed to a supercharger also starts pre-warming the battery.

That's a bit annoying to me to be honest. It's a cool feature, but sometimes I want to plan out a trip without having to prewarm, or I want to prewarm without having to navigate. I can imagine why it's automatic instead of manual (imagine if someone prewarmed their battery but forgot to charge or something) but it'd be a nice "advanced" thing to have.

I kinda agree. But why would you want to go to a supercharger and not pre-warm? It already doesn't pre-warm if it thinks it will prevent you from making it. I can't think of any other reason.

Wanting to prewarm without planning a trip I understand. It would be use to be able to prwarm for regular charging or non-supercharger charging too.

To be clear, I meant me hiking up a mountain. I thought I might have gotten signal up there (wasn’t too high up, just a fairly far walk), but I was also thinking of stories about people dying when they leave their cars to go for help and figured it’d be smarter to wait for someone to pass by.