"In any effort to save battery life, we turn off the stereo and dim the huge touch screen control panel."
The radio and lights use order of mangnitudes less than the drivetrain. This reminds me of all the people that unplug their TV when not at home, afraid of the standby electricity usage.
Yeah and in the very next paragraph, he gets intimidated by a truck driver being annoyed that they are driving 63 mph, so decide.... to slam on the accelerator and go so fast they no longer see the truck's headlights on the flat desert highway. Much better alternative then just letting him pass you.
It's almost like they wanted the trip to fail to write this article.
Given that every bit of energy gets the driver closer to their destination, your comparison seems a bit unfair. Sure, it may be a small difference in the big picture, but that small difference could be the difference between making it and having to call a tow.
And 50 meters can be the difference between a tow and making it, which is my point. Yes, I am aware it is a small amount. But given the drastically different experiences between "make the charger" and "not make the charger", I would hardly compare it to a person saving fractions of a penny by unplugging electronics when they leave the house.
I would hardly compare to a person saving fractions of a penny by unplugging electronics when they leave the house.
I will. Let's see…
I just ran down http://standby.lbl.gov/summary-table.html and added up typical phantom loads at my house. It comes up to about 50 watts. 36 kilowatt hours per month. I use about 1500 kilowatt hours in a month, so thats 2.4% of my power consumption.
The Tesla has a 425km range. Our 50 meter savings works out to 0.01%, but to be fair that was for one hour of savings, so lets quadruple it to cover the whole battery trip… 0.04%
Unplugging all your phantom loads is 60 times more important to your electric bill than the backlight and stereo is to the Tesla's range.
Lets think about how tiny 50 meters is a different way… The probability of turning off your backlight and stereo making a difference in running out of power in the last 50 meters of your journey is 1 in 8500, once every 2.2 million miles (if you never plan your trip to have enough range). In 2009 there were 74 crashes with injuries per hundred million miles traveled, or 1.3 million miles per crash.
So you are more likely to be injured or injure someone else than to make any difference by turning off the console and stereo, but wait! If you do turn them off, you will likely be less distracted and may spare someone an injury.
(Um, I should confess that I played more than a little loose with the "running out in the last 50 meters" thing. It would require extensive modeling. One would probably never plan a 3000 mile trip on a single charge, likewise a 200 mile trip is never a problem, and realistically after the first few dozen times they ran out of power by cutting it too close, surely a driver would learn something and change their planning. I just calculated "given you ran full distance and ran out of charge, what is the probability that 50 more meters would have helped".)
50 meters is the difference between making it and having to push the car to make it. It'd make for a funny story, but you're not going to be kicking yourself for leaving the display on.
Perhaps the willingness of the software to allow the battery to bleed itself out should increase as you close in within a few miles of a super-charger.
Energy consumption per mile increases as the square of speed, because it's dominated by aerodynamic drag. So you only get half as far going 85 as going 60.
If you're going to turn down the brightness on the screen to save energy/fuel, you might as well throw your clothes out the window to reduce the weight. Every little difference helps, right? :)
There are 115 Million households in the US. If every household has a 2W device running, they consume roughly 2 billion kWh a year. Producing that much energy in the US releases 1.4 megatons of CO2...
