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Having owned a Tesla and non-Tesla EV the approach to range is entirely different.

Tesla - I literally never achieved the advertised range once. BMW - I exceed the advertised range during low-speed highway cruises in ideal summer conditions.

Tesla - the range it shows me in car (not in nav) is the never-achievable EPA range. BMW - the range it shows me in car (not in nav) adjusts ride to ride based on efficiency on most recent trips. So in the depths of winter it's showing me something 20% lower than in the peak of summer. This means it's factoring in driver behavior, drive mode used, speed, and temperature effectively.

It is reasonable to assume that your range on a trip is most similar to the range in your recent trips.

I can get in my BMW, look at the range meter, guesstimate the range on arrival and be correct to within 1% 9 times out of 10.

In my Tesla, I would constantly be doing mental math to discount the range it was showing me, to what I typically got, the weather, to see how big a delta it would be.

Sure, the nav range in Tesla got smarter over time and factored things in.. but this doesn't help on long round trips. It might tell me that I'm going to reach my destination with X% left, but I now have to do mental math to figure out if I am going to make it back or not.

With Tesla, I can't simply get in the car, see 300mi range on dash.. know I am making a trip 100mi each way so I'll be fine. Instead it's like - 300mi range, NAV says I'll have 58% remaining at destination.. OK so that means it's estimating X burn rate, which means I will make it home with... 17% instead of 33%.



Exactly. Doing all this math when the main estimator says X is exhausting. Obviously I use percentage now but there is a problem with that estimate and a lot of people just want to pretend everything is fine.


Right, make it a toggle in menu - dashboard range estimator: [spec/pessimistic/optimistic].

Include weather, recent trips, lifetime consumption rates, type of road currently driving, etc.

Do anything other than the absolute simplest, laziest, most optimistic estimation which is "hey I bet you'll get the almost impossible-to-meet spec consumption rate!".




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