> After making arrangements to recharge at the Norwich station, I located the proper adapter in the trunk, plugged in and walked to the only warm place nearby, Butch’s Luncheonette and Breakfast Club, an establishment (smoking allowed) where only members can buy a cup of coffee or a plate of eggs. But the owners let me wait there while the Model S drank its juice. Tesla’s experts said that pumping in a little energy would help restore the power lost overnight as a result of the cold weather, and after an hour they cleared me to resume the trip to Milford.
Looking back, I should have bought a membership to Butch’s and spent a few hours there while the car charged. The displayed range never reached the number of miles remaining to Milford, and as I limped along at about 45 miles per hour I saw increasingly dire dashboard warnings to recharge immediately. Mr. Merendino, the product planner, found an E.V. charging station about five miles away.
So if you read just Musk's piece, you get the perception that Broder lied about not knowing that he was under-juiced. To paraphrase:
Broder: "I should've stayed at the diner and charged for more hours"
Musk: "Broder is an idiot who should've stayed at the diner and charged for more hours"
OK, no argument there. But if Broder is trying to show what a lemon the Tesla is, he's sure doing about it at a roundabout way (which I guess I what we'd expect a well-heeled Big Oil secret agent to do).
So Broder is a professional journalist at the Times, but as far as I can tell, his role is to not describe what it's feels like to be a tech-expert who owns a Tesla. His scenario is not at all alien to anyone who's driven a gas-powered car and skipped "just one more" off-ramp even as the fuel meter hovers at 0.
Irresponsible? Sure. But this is how an average car owner might act. Not every car owner has, on a given day, the ability to wait around an extra hour after breakfast at a diner for the car to keep charging. If the charging stations are as commonplace as the map Musk produced indicates, then Broder may have thought (and misjudged) that he could make it to the next public station.
I think a passage from earlier in Broder's review is a good insight to what he was thinking:
> I drove a state-of-the-art electric vehicle past a lot of gas stations. I wasn’t smiling.
Instead, I spent nearly an hour at the Milford service plaza as the Tesla sucked electrons from the hitching post. When I continued my drive, the display read 185 miles, well beyond the distance I intended to cover before returning to the station the next morning for a recharge and returning to Manhattan.
The success of Tesla depends on the electric infrastructure improving dramatically. Until that comes about, there is apparently a lot of babying and thinking ahead that a Tesla owner has to do even when the car is running just fine.
I find it funny that so many people here are so quick to jump on Broder for not being so patient and tech savvy. While not everyone here is a huge Apple fan, I think most would laugh at a hardware manufacturer who delivered a high powered laptop that performed with variable results depending on the conditions of the day: it's powerful, and cutting edge, you'd just have to remember to plug it at night remember that the battery's decline won't be at a constant rate for more than the usual range of reasons.
It's not Tesla's fault that charging stations aren't ubiquitous, and Tesla deserves a lot of credit for trying to change it. And it's not Tesla's fault that people are sometimes dumb, impatient, and not constantly vigilant. But that's the reality of the market Tesla is selling its $100,000 vehicle for, and this is the market that the media writes for.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that people need to put a little more thought into a car that's fundamentally different than standard cars today.
Your last paragraph is making a bad comparison to try and put down this point: a laptop operates off of all one reservoir, while the current ICE car uses gas to drive and a battery to operate the "other stuff". We watch the gas gauge and see that it drops in a direct correlation with our driving and for the most part ignore the battery charge gauge.
When an EV starts pulling both driving and "other stuff" power from the same reservoir, we're surprised because we weren't aware before of the usage of the other things. Thus, a bit more mind needs to be paid to aspects that we didn't care about before. Though it's not the best comparison either, travelers switching from horses to cars had to start thinking about things like fuel reservoirs; it can just be the nature of disruptive advances.
No, if something is different than you need make is stand out.
Its something like this, before mechanical vehicles came in you could ride your horse cart even if the horse was a little hungry. When cars came along it was the responsibility of the car maker to provide with an accurate fuel gauge so that the customers could refuel when needed.
Very clearly Tesla's charge indicators have a bug. They don't take into consideration or in correctly calculate mileage when temperatures change.
That's not quite right. Traditional cars have batteries, but those batteries are just to smooth out energy usage so you can start the car a few days after stopping it, power the radio for a few hours, etc. But of course the charge used fundamentally comes from gasoline, via the engine's alternator.
To assume that your customer must be intelligent is the biggest mistake you can ever make.
I worked at the Dell technical support call center some years back and our training said very specifically until you ascertain the caller actually knows what he is doing, you need to assume they are dumb. This saves a lot of trouble.
There are countless times when some one calls and I have to explain them they can get internet on their computer only if they a internet connection. It takes a lot of patience, to explain to someone that the the CD needs to be put in the CD drive with the shiny side facing down. Many people don't understand that they need something like VLC player or a codec to play a video.
Many people would view a computer as something similar to a TV. They simply expect things to work out of the box. There are times when I have assisted the elderly in creating email id's and teaching how to use email. There was one elderly woman who had literally become friends with me, I had to call her everyday and practically tutor her. The managers were OK, because many times this sort of calls bought in sales.
And this is beyond real issues that we would solve.
You can't adopt a programmers approach of RTFM or get lost approach or act like 'I know it all' with ordinary people.
In this case not everyone will understand enough chemistry behind how batteries work. That is simply too much to ask from an ordinary user. Your product automatically needs to check for the temperature around, do the magical calculations and tell the user EXACTLY what they need to do. And when someone calls you for help you need to first ensure they are safe before beginning to do any trouble shooting. At the call center, we would specifically instruct the customers to shut down their machines before trouble shooting for any thing more than a trivial software install. In this case the guys at Tesla should have asked him to get this batteries to be charge to 100% before investigating or advising him any further.
And yes customer support is a part of the product not something apart from or outside it. Its all a part of the package. If you a sell a great car with bad customer support, you are ideally selling a bad car.
>To assume that your customer must be intelligent is the biggest mistake you can ever make.
It's not about customers being less intelligent than you; that's an arrogant stance to take in these kinds of situations. Lots of people are intelligent enough to understand how batteries work -- or how computer programs work -- if they should choose to spend the time and effort it would take to do so.
But they're not choosing to do so. They're not your R&D team. They're your customers, and they're paying you big money for something that will make their lives easier.
In this case, they're paying for a car that's going to get them from point A to point B with no hassles, so they can focus their intelligence on problems of their choosing, not on problems with your product.
Except, he would need to wait around at the next charging station anyway. So, taking a risk more or less stupid behavior.
As to people doing the same thing, of course they do. Do you have any idea how many people run out of gas despite how common gas stations are and the standard reserve capacity?
>>Except, he would need to wait around at the next charging station anyway. So, taking a risk more or less stupid behavior.
Your new car's fuel indicator says you have more than half tank full of fuel in the night. You sleep, when you get up in the morning it says you only have something like 4 liters left. Something like half tank worth fuel vanishes overnight.
What will you do? Will you suspect fuel leakage, faulty fuel gauge or something else. Since the car is new, you are likely to call the dealership. The guy there says, just add an additional liter and fuel gauge should be pushed enough to show the last night's reading.
Clearly the customer is at no fault here. A bug in the fuel indicator due to temperature is not his problem.
>>As to people doing the same thing, of course they do. Do you have any idea how many people run out of gas despite how common gas stations are and the standard reserve capacity?
Its one thing to have a empty fuel tank out of absent mindedness and totally a different thing when your fuel indicator says you can go 90 miles before parking for a night and then 45 miles in the morning.
The Supercharger is a hell of a lot faster than the charging station in Norwich he set off to get to it from, though. As in, it can do a full charge in the amount of time it'd take him to get any kind of meaningful additional top-up at Norwich .
> After making arrangements to recharge at the Norwich station, I located the proper adapter in the trunk, plugged in and walked to the only warm place nearby, Butch’s Luncheonette and Breakfast Club, an establishment (smoking allowed) where only members can buy a cup of coffee or a plate of eggs. But the owners let me wait there while the Model S drank its juice. Tesla’s experts said that pumping in a little energy would help restore the power lost overnight as a result of the cold weather, and after an hour they cleared me to resume the trip to Milford.
Looking back, I should have bought a membership to Butch’s and spent a few hours there while the car charged. The displayed range never reached the number of miles remaining to Milford, and as I limped along at about 45 miles per hour I saw increasingly dire dashboard warnings to recharge immediately. Mr. Merendino, the product planner, found an E.V. charging station about five miles away.
So if you read just Musk's piece, you get the perception that Broder lied about not knowing that he was under-juiced. To paraphrase:
Broder: "I should've stayed at the diner and charged for more hours"
Musk: "Broder is an idiot who should've stayed at the diner and charged for more hours"
OK, no argument there. But if Broder is trying to show what a lemon the Tesla is, he's sure doing about it at a roundabout way (which I guess I what we'd expect a well-heeled Big Oil secret agent to do).
So Broder is a professional journalist at the Times, but as far as I can tell, his role is to not describe what it's feels like to be a tech-expert who owns a Tesla. His scenario is not at all alien to anyone who's driven a gas-powered car and skipped "just one more" off-ramp even as the fuel meter hovers at 0.
Irresponsible? Sure. But this is how an average car owner might act. Not every car owner has, on a given day, the ability to wait around an extra hour after breakfast at a diner for the car to keep charging. If the charging stations are as commonplace as the map Musk produced indicates, then Broder may have thought (and misjudged) that he could make it to the next public station.
I think a passage from earlier in Broder's review is a good insight to what he was thinking:
> I drove a state-of-the-art electric vehicle past a lot of gas stations. I wasn’t smiling.
Instead, I spent nearly an hour at the Milford service plaza as the Tesla sucked electrons from the hitching post. When I continued my drive, the display read 185 miles, well beyond the distance I intended to cover before returning to the station the next morning for a recharge and returning to Manhattan.
The success of Tesla depends on the electric infrastructure improving dramatically. Until that comes about, there is apparently a lot of babying and thinking ahead that a Tesla owner has to do even when the car is running just fine.
I find it funny that so many people here are so quick to jump on Broder for not being so patient and tech savvy. While not everyone here is a huge Apple fan, I think most would laugh at a hardware manufacturer who delivered a high powered laptop that performed with variable results depending on the conditions of the day: it's powerful, and cutting edge, you'd just have to remember to plug it at night remember that the battery's decline won't be at a constant rate for more than the usual range of reasons.
It's not Tesla's fault that charging stations aren't ubiquitous, and Tesla deserves a lot of credit for trying to change it. And it's not Tesla's fault that people are sometimes dumb, impatient, and not constantly vigilant. But that's the reality of the market Tesla is selling its $100,000 vehicle for, and this is the market that the media writes for.