Tesla has consistently exaggerated the driving range of its electric vehicles, reportedly leading car owners to think something was broken when actual driving range was much lower than advertised. When these owners scheduled service appointments to fix the problem, Tesla canceled the appointments because there was no way to improve the actual distance Tesla cars could drive between charges, according to an investigation by Reuters.
I just get a 502 error on that link…
Sorry, I have to admit, I didn’t look exactly into what the EPA does, but I have some experience regarding NEFZ, NDEC and WLTP, all of which don’t care about stuff like heating or AC.
But EPA has it’s own bag of flaws. For starters, these tests aren’t done by an independent agency or something, they are done by the manufacturers. They also don’t test the real road vehicles, but usually just pre-production prototypes.
And to factor in all of:
they just multiply the lab test result by 0.7. Compared with the test results from ADAC, that’s a correct adjustment would be 0.6, which is a pretty massive difference. For e.g. the Tesla 3, that’s a difference from 415km -> 355km.
What’s also not part of either of these calculations is what percentage of the time these cars will have to be heated/cooled. There aren’t too many countries where the weather is 15-25°C for the majority of the year, yet still the EPA calculates that heating and cooling will only be used infrequently.