How Much Should You Charge Your Tesla

There’s an article in “The Drive” that’s been repeated in other media. Here’s a link if you want to read the whole article.

It’s not important in your day-to-day driving since few people use up all the electricity in their Tesla on a normal day. But, if you have lots of driving scheduled for a day, or if you’re taking a cross-country trip, you have to make allowances for this particularly Tesla problem.

The Results of the Tests

Edmunds, which does reviews on all cars, and which has rated the Tesla Model 3 as the number one best electric vehicle, found that none of the models of Tesla met the EPA range estimates as advertised by Tesla. None of the models. All the other electric cars easily went 20 to 50 miles past their EPA-rated ranges.

Tesla’s Response

Naturally, the Tesla engineers weighed in, but what they said was not very helpful. They said that the reason the Teslas failed to reach the EPA range is that Edmunds didn’t keep driving them until they couldn’t go an inch farther. Edmunds stopped driving when the range number on the screen went down to zero. So Edmunds repeated the testing and kept driving until the cars actually stopped. Tesla calls this a safety buffer.

Don’t Plan on Using the Safety Buffer

Don’t plan on using the safety buffer. It’s terrible for the battery. It’s just as bad as charging your battery up to 100% and then letting it sit overnight. Don’t do that either. Bad.

Be Kind to Your Battery

We want our batteries to last as long as the rest of the car. So, in my case, I charge to 80% every night. That way, I’m not damaging the battery, and I have more miles than I need for day-to-day driving. I do plan on taking the Tesla on road trips once this furshlugginer pandemic is over. I have the SR+ which, in theory, can go 250 miles on a charge. I won’t plan on 250 miles between supercharges. When my car was new, and I had 1,000 miles or six months of free supercharging, whichever came first, I didn’t actually need any supercharging. Not going anywhere. Pandemic y’know. The six months came first.

My Supercharging Experience

But, since supercharging was included in the price of my car, any time I needed to go somewhere near a supercharger, I went ahead and used the service. Here’s what I found. When the battery is low, the supercharger gives extremely rapid charging. I can’t tell you the exact rate of charge because different superchargers give different rates of charge depending on which generation of supercharger you’re using. But as a general rule, you’ll get extremely rapid charging when the battery is low. You’ll probably get to 80% in 30 to 40 minutes. That last 20% will take longer. A lot longer.

Suggested Strategy

You’ll probably do better in total trip time if you don’t wait around for the last trickle of energy to fill your battery to 100%. Between 80% and 90%, the charging goes painfully slowly. Between 90% and 100%, the charge slows to a trickle. You’ll stop a bit more often, but you’ll spend less total time on the chargers during your trip if you just charge to 80% each time you need to charge. When I take my trip, I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.

Public Health Advice

One last thought for car trips. Elon Musk gives you video games to entertain yourself during a supercharger stop. If you’re on a trip, don’t play the video games. Get out of the car and walk around. Sitting in a car for long periods of time can cause blood clots in your legs. Don’t let that happen.

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Will Tesla Launch a 'Robotaxi' Network With Tesla Drivers?

During Tesla’s Q1 earnings call, Tesla talked about its plan for its upcoming robotaxi network and even showed off a design for the app that would allow customers to request vehicles, much like Uber and Lyft.

While Tesla plans to unveil the robotaxi, officially now called CyberCab this August, a true autonomous taxi is at the very least, a couple of years away. So why is Tesla so eager to show off an app and start offering a Tesla taxi service?

in 2023 Uber had a revenue of 37.28 billion, while Lyft had a much smaller revenue of 4.4 billion. For comparison, Tesla’s revenue last year was 96.77 billion. A taxi service, even one operated by humans can be incredibly lucrative. While Tesla’s ultimate goal may be an automated taxi service, they may be itching to get into the space.

Tesla’s robotaxi was initially supposed to be a taxi service owners would lend their vehicles to. While that’s still the plan, Tesla wants their own vehicles to be a part of the service as well.

Will the Robotaxi Service Start With Tesla Drivers?

Tesla comparing themselves to Airbnb and Uber during their earnings call is intriguing. While Tesla can start producing robotaxis almost whenever they want, it’d likely be smart to wait until autonomy is solved so they’re not limiting themselves to current FSD hardware.

While full autonomy is likely several years away, Tesla seems to be eager to make this push toward a Tesla-owned service. Is Tesla thinking about operating their own Uber-like service? Tesla could be thinking about releasing their future robotaxi app and service in “beta,” letting current Tesla owners operate their own vehicles on the service.

This could result in several benefits for Tesla, not only letting them test their service but also opening up another revenue stream. This would allow Tesla to start operating their robotaxi network as soon as this year, and then slowly replace drivers and owner vehicles with Tesla-owned robotaxis.

Tesla Shows Off Robotaxi App

Tesla showed off it's robotaxi app

At the earnings call, Tesla also showed off a design of their robotaxi app. While it feels early to design an app for a service that could be years away, Tesla appears to be preparing itself for the future and getting customers excited about the prospect.

Tesla showed off five screens of the app, essentially showing how you’d request a robotaxi, how you can view its progress, and control certain features of the vehicle. Through the various screens, you can see most of Tesla’s Autopilot features coming to fruition in terms of autonomy, such as summon, self-driving and eventually Autopark.

Summon - Much like Tesla has re-thought the interior of a car and so many features, you can see the same mechanics applied to the app. To request a vehicle, you simply hold down a summon button and you’ll be presented with an estimate of when a vehicle will arrive.

Set Preferences and Destination - On the second screen, you can see the vehicle’s current location on a 3D map, possibly alluding to future FSD visualizations. It also lets you set your destination and set the climate temperature to your preference.

Trip Progress - While you’re traveling in the vehicle, you’ll be able to view trip information as well as set entertainment options.

Recap

Tesla had a lot to talk about during their earnings call and specifically about the Robotaxi — more information was revealed than ever before.

While there are various things at play to make a service like this come together, we can easily separate them out into separate components.

There’s the robotaxi itself, which Musk recently said would be similar to Tesla’s next-gen vehicle without a steering wheel. However, during this earnings call, he revealed that Tesla will save its new “unboxed” manufacturing process for the robotaxi and use a more traditional method for their next vehicle.

Then there’s FSD itself, while it’s crucial to operating a driverless robotaxi network, it’s not necessary to start a Tesla taxi service.

The last piece is the ride-hailing component itself and how it’s managed, and Tesla was happy to show this off, which makes us believe that it may be closer to reality than many think. While Tesla needs all three of these components to come together to operate a true robotaxi network, they piece them together separately, much like they’ve done with Autopilot. Initially, Tesla only released auto-steer then slowly added on summon, Autopark and city driving.

When we look back at Tesla five years from now, we may very well look back to this earnings call and say this was the pivotal moment when Tesla started transitioning to a services company.

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Tesla Reveals Robotaxi App and Names the Robotaxi the CyberCab

Tesla has invested billions of dollars over the years toward vehicle autonomy. The mission continues as Elon Musk and Tesla now prepare to unveil their ride-hailing product, Robotaxi this August. Or, as Musk called it on Tuesday, Tesla CyberCab.

Early Days

Five years ago, during Tesla’s Autonomy Investor Day in April 2019, Elon Musk said he felt “very confident predicting autonomous robotaxis for Tesla in the following year [2020]”. At the time, Musk added a bolder claim, predicting that Tesla wouldn’t even make cars with steering wheels or pedals by 2022. While timeliness may not be Musk’s strong suit, he has a track record for getting things done that others were unwilling to try or thought were impossible. Musk later admitted he can be overly optimistic and said “sometimes I am not on time, but I get it done.” 

Now, 5 years later, we have the robotaxi unveiling scheduled for August 8th. After the release of FSD v12, it’s clear that we’re much closer to autonomy than we were in 2019, although FSD v12 is still a far cry from full autonomy.

While Tesla still has the robotaxi unveiling scheduled for August, Tesla announced yesterday that it’d be prioritizing a simpler “next-gen” model that could be released by early 2025.

Latest Updates

On the conference call, Musk added that Tesla now has over 300 million miles driven with FSD v12 since it was launched just last month. He added that it's becoming “very clear that the vision-based approach with end-to-end neural networks is the right solution for scalable autonomy”.

Tesla said it has been investing in the hardware and software ecosystems necessary to achieve vehicle autonomy and a ride-hailing service. The company is confident that it can establish a scalable and profitable autonomous driving business by employing a vision-only architecture.

think of it [Tesla] as combination of Airbnb and Uber meaning that there will be some number of cars that Tesla owns itself and operates

Tesla = Uber + AirBnb

Later on, Elon Musk unveiled that the new service will operate and result in a mix between Uber and Airbnb where the Tesla driver decides if and when he wants his Tesla to be used and by whom. Tesla stated:

“We believe the Tesla software experience is best-in-class across all our products, and plan to seamlessly layer ride-hailing into the Tesla App.”

Tesla’s CEO clarified that the owners will be able to add or remove their car from the fleet “whenever they want” adding that it will be up to them to decide if they want to only let the car be used “by friends and family or only by five-star users or by anyone at any time”. The flexible program will, just like Airbnb, allow the owners to take the car out of the market when they want.

The upcoming ride-hailing service will enable users to easily request a Tesla vehicle, control the car's temperature, monitor its real-time location, and adjust the audio system. The only question is when.

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