Tesla had ‘secret team’ cancel EV range complaints: Reuters

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Tesla programmed its range readouts to show drivers they had potentially more driving range than the vehicles actually had, and then assembled a team that cancelled owners’ service appointments for the issue—that’s the conclusion of a new investigative report from news agency Reuters.

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The report said that about ten years ago, according to an unnamed source, “Tesla rigged the dashboard readouts in its electric cars to provide ‘rosy’ projections of how far owners can drive before needing to recharge,” at the direction of Elon Musk.

Reuters said the automaker received so many driving-range complaints last year, it created a special team, based in Nevada – where Tesla has a vehicle component and battery factory – that cancelled appointments involving complaints about vehicle range. “The team often closed hundreds of cases a week and staffers were tracked on their average number of diverted appointments per day,” the report said, adding that managers said each cancelled appointment saved the automaker US$1,000, and took pressure off Tesla service centres where customers had to wait a long time to book service visits.

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While the automaker created an algorithm for the dash display that had a “rosy” projection of how far the vehicle could go on a full charge, Reuters said that when the battery fell below 50 per cent, the readout would show a more realistic driving distance, and included a buffer of about 24 km of range when the battery indicated it was depleted.

The initial programming affected the only two models Tesla sold at the time: the Roadster, now discontinued; and the Model S. Reuters said it does not know if the automaker still uses the algorithm, but earlier this year, regulators in South Korea fined Tesla for false advertising and required it to reword its local website there, on the grounds that its cars “delivered as little as half their advertised range in cold weather,” which they said was not disclosed to consumers.

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Recurrent, an electric-vehicle analytics company based in Seattle, said it examined data from more than 8,000 Tesla vehicles in 2022 and 2023, and found that the range estimates on the dash readout did not change to reflect hot or cold outside temperatures, or other conditions that can affect range. The company also tested other EVs, including the Ford Mustang Mach-E, Chevrolet Bolt, and Hyundai Kona, and “found them to be more accurate.”

Reuters noted that Tesla is not the only automaker that falls short of advertised range, and in a study published by SAE International in April of 2023, a test of 21 different brands of EVs showed that, on average, they were short of their advertised highway-driving range by 12.5 per cent. While the other brands weren’t named, the study’s co-author told Reuters that three Tesla models fared the worst, missing their advertised range by an average of 26 per cent.