Several days ago, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk tweeted that he was going to “end range anxiety” with an over-the-air software update affecting all existing Tesla Model S vehicles. The Internet speculation machine exploded (with some people possibly believing that Musk was going to literally beam newer, bigger batteries into the cars), but we had to wait until this morning’s Tesla press conference to hear exactly what he meant.
Musk took the (virtual) stage at 9am PDT to announce that in approximately 10 days, Tesla would be releasing its 6.2 Model S software update, which will include a drastic change to the car’s awareness and understanding of its own range. The new feature, called “Range Assurance,” will remain running continually in the background and will actively communicate with both Tesla’s network of Supercharger charging stations and non-Tesla charging stations. Even when not actively navigating the car to a destination, the system will continually calculate the car’s remaining range and warn the driver when they begin to pass out of range of a charging station.
Range Assurance
Musk explained that the software will favor Supercharging stations (which can bypass the car’s on-board charging system and dump juice into a Model S’s battery pack much faster than even a high-power standard connector), and it will do its best to not only prevent a customer from ever passing out of range of a charging station but to also send users toward charging stations with the shortest wait. According to Musk, the Range Assurance feature polls the Tesla Supercharger network once every 30 seconds, keeping a near-realtime list of Supercharger status. This means that new charging locations are automatically integrated into the system as they’re added—and Musk said that Tesla will be adding more Superchargers in 2015 than in all its previous years.
The Model S’ existing range estimation software didn’t always do a good job of taking into account altitude and temperature in range estimation, leading to oft-repeated anecdotes of Model S owners in cold and mountainous regions experiencing drastic range reductions once they set out on a trip. However, Musk explained that as of the new update, the Range Assurance feature will properly take into account “height changes and weather” when figuring out the car’s operating range. Musk said that the new ability to estimate range is “incredibly good” and characterized its accuracy as “within one percent.”
“It’s basically impossible to run out unless you to it intentionally,” Musk said. “And you’ll have to say ‘I’m sure’ twice,” he added, referring to the warnings that the vehicles will display when passing out of range of a charging station.
Self-driving Teslas
Musk also teased future updates to software and to hardware. The biggest thing he mentioned was that Tesla’s work on fully automated driving is proceeding apace—according to Musk, the Model S can “almost” drive an entire trip from San Francisco to Seattle without a driver touching a single control. Further, a feature set teased at the P85D announcement—self-parking and “summoning”—will also be available “soon.” This would be where a Model S driver can tap a button on their phone and their Tesla will open its garage door, pull out, and navigate to the front door to pick up the driver (though Musk stressed this feature would only function on private property, in order to comply with the law). Additionally, future updates will bring a new emergency braking function as well as blind spot and side collision warnings.
These features will likely show up at or around the 7.0 software update; additionally, when the Model X crossover SUV is released (which Musk said would be “this summer”), it will be at feature parity with the Model S. Any feature available on the Model S—like Range Assurance—will also show up on the Model X.
In our October 2013 review of the Model S P85+ (which was at the time the top-spec version of the car), we found that normal driving yielded considerably less than the rated 265 miles of range: “A mixed bout of interstate and surface street driving with the air conditioning running yielded us around 200 miles of range on a full charge,” we wrote. However, one person’s normal driving is another person’s hot lap at Suzuka, and the range of a Model S ultimately depends heavily on how hard you are on the accelerator.
Several reporters at the press conference asked Musk if an increase in range to the Model S was in the cards; Musk responded that if Tesla wanted to, it could build a 500-mile Model S “today.” However, he said that research has shown that the “sweet spot” for electric car range appears to be between 250-350 miles—any more than that and the cost becomes enormous and the car ends up carrying around extra weight for capacity that might only rarely be called upon.
Absent from the call was any discussion of Tesla’s ongoing legal battles with various states in order to be allowed to continue selling cars directly to consumers instead of relying on dealerships. Just yesterday, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie reversed that state’s ban on direct sales; Tesla is still expressly prohibited from selling its vehicles to potential customers in Texas, Virginia, Arizona, and Michigan.
Source: Arstechnicarstechnica
