Studio711.com – Ben Martens

teslatuesday

Buy Another EV?

In December, EV and hybrid vehicle sales hit another record (this happens regularly because the numbers keep growing.) 8.9% of all vehicles sold in the use were battery electric and 10.6% were hybrids. EV skeptics sometimes will brush aside those numbers saying that people are dumb once but won’t be fooled twice. But check out this study of over 23,000 EV owners which states that 92% of battery electric vehicle (BEV) owners would buy another one and 4% would switch to a plug-in hybrid. Now, I take that with a grain of salt given that this group specifically exists to promote EV ownership, but we can at least take away that maybe there are a lot of people who really do love their EV and would not want to go back to a gas engine.

I often think about this for our situation. We’ve already put 55,000 miles on our Model Y in just 2.5 years of ownership and it is a perfect fit for our situation. In these posts, I repeatedly refer to making the switch because it was going to save us money over a Ford Escape. I do not mean to imply that it would automatically save everyone money over a Ford Escape, but in OUR situation, it’s a great fit. I would definitely replace it with another EV and it would probably be another Model Y. The price has come down since we bought it so the math is even easier. The only difference is that if we replace it after our son moves out then I might consider downsizing to a Model 3 instead of the Model Y, but we’ll probably want to replace it before then anyway given the 20,000+ miles/year that we’re putting on it.

But we also own an F150. Would I replace that with an EV if it died? Probably not. It is still nice to keep one foot in the gas world. We drive it very infrequently and only use it when the other person is already using the car or when we need the utility of the truck. But it’s still nice to know that we could use it if the EV wouldn’t quite work yet. For example, we’re planning a trip to Yellowstone, and it has been nearly impossible to find a convenient AirBNB with a good charging setup. I’d have to rely on the supercharger right outside the park. With the amount of driving we’ll be doing in that giant park, that might still be a place where we prefer to have the truck with us.

I suppose the skeptics would disagree, but I believe that the EV scenario is only going to get smoother and simpler from here on out. We intend to keep that truck for a very long time so maybe in 10 years the pro/con list will look a little different, but as of right now, we’re already in the “yes, we’d replace our BEV with another BEV” camp.

benmartens December 17, 2024 Electric Vehicles No Comments

Tesla Efficiency Update

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

As you know if you’ve read these posts before, I have a lot of data and math about the efficiency of our car. Our purchased was because I believed we could tie or beat the price of the internal combustion car we would have purchased instead (a Ford Escape.)

I’ve had to update my calculations a bit. Since mid September (right at the point when our main warranty expired), the car stopped going into sleep mode. That means we lose a couple percentage points on the battery charge overnight. It’s not a huge deal and I imagine that many people don’t have their cars configured correctly to go into sleep mode anyway so I’m not expecting any major impact. If it was still under warranty, I think I’d press them for a fix, but I’ve had a couple (free) chats with their service team and they agree that it’s not worth looking into.

After the big storm, the cell connection from our car didn’t work for a week. It had been long enough that I thought all the area towers were back up and it still wasn’t working, so I scheduled an appointment. I decided I’d have them diagnose the sleeping issue too. But the next day, our cell connection was working again so I canceled the appointment.

Our car has actually gone to sleep a couple times in the last few weeks so who knows, maybe it will come back again, but for now, that efficiency gain I had been getting from our new tires is now roughly being offset by this lack of the low power sleep mode overnight.

We’re still on track to break even around the 100k mark but this is the point where one big repair bill could set us back. For now, at 54,000 miles, that service total is happily sitting at $0, we’ve already spent $8600 less on electricity than we would have on gas, and our total cost per mile for the Tesla is less than for our F150.

benmartens December 10, 2024 Electric Vehicles No Comments

Hankook Tires for Model Y

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

Earlier this year, we replaced our OEM tires with Hankook iON evo SUV tires. Efficiency and longevity were two big analysis points in my research. I can’t speak to longevity yet (though I’m tracking tread depth with every tire rotation), but I can give an update on efficiency.

First of all, I’ll say that it’s quite difficult to get objective research about efficiency. So many of the random posts online do a very poor job of analyzing the data. For example, they’ll make a post of their efficiency after 100 miles or they’ll show a month of snowy winter driving compared to the previous 2 years of all-season driving. To avoid some of these issues, I’ve waited until we had 10,000 miles on the new tires before making this post.

  • Over 40,000 miles with the original tires (Continental ProContact RX), we averaged 262 Wh/mi.
  • Over 10,000 with the new tires, we’ve averaged 259 Wh/mi!

The tires area already performing slightly better than the OEM tires and that’s even when they’re relatively new. Over time, traction decreases but efficiency increases due to less rolling resistance.

A lot of the recommended tires for this car are high performance which makes sense because the cars can be driven hard. However, we are more interested in overall efficiency and those high performance tires can easily use 10% more energy. This makes a big difference over time, or even on specific trips where you’re pushing the limits of your range.

Shortly after we purchased these tires, Tire Rack came out with an in-depth review of EV tires and they agreed that the Hankooks were much more efficient than other tires while still having good performance: Tire Test Results : Are EV-Specific Tires Better than Popular Non-Ev Tires? – 2024 Test 1 (tirerack.com)

We’ll see how long these tires last, but assuming they hold up ok, I’d happily buy them again.

benmartens October 8, 2024 Electric Vehicles

Data Logging Changes

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

I’ve been running the TeslaMate service since the first day we got our car. I have data points from our cars complete life at a resolution of multiple data points per minute. There are dozens of sensors recorded in every data point. It’s a mountain of data and the TeslaMate dashboards do a great job of making use of that data. For a data nerd like me, it has been amazing.

One of the key takeaways I get from it is the ability to get an extremely accurate measurement of what a gas car would have cost me because I take my daily miles and the cost of gas at the local gas station every day. I can compare that with my energy cost and voila, I know my savings over the life of the car.

There are also some fun aspects like seeing a map of every road we’ve ever driven, calculating exactly which counties we have visited, knowing our longest stint without stopping for the bathroom, and the list goes on and on.

But for the last week I’ve had the data logger turned off. It’s gotten to the point where background work of keeping it running, making sure the data is backed up, etc just doesn’t feel worth it anymore. Plus, our car has never done a great job of falling into its low power sleep state and I wonder how much of that is related to TeslaMate (even though the devs say it’s highly unlikely to matter.) The Tesla app has slowly improved over the two years of ownership to the point where, other than the data logging, all my scenarios are covered by the app.

Furthermore, I’ve noticed that while I initially learned a lot from the data, it’s not really teaching me anything new now. I’ll still keep track of daily gas prices and even with fewer recorded mileage checkpoints, I’ll still be able to get a very accurate estimate of our total cost savings. Barring a major repair bill (so far our total is still $0), I’m highly confident that this car will end up being cheaper than what we would have got instead. I liked having the data to really prove it to people who don’t believe me, but meh, it’s not my job to change their minds, and if they hate EVs, my data isn’t going to convince them anyway.

As a data hoarder, it’s hard to let this go, but I’ve gotten to the point in life where I feel the need to simplify. Some of that is physically getting rid of stuff and some of that is letting go of commitments and projects. Maybe this is a healthy step in the right direction, or maybe I’ll reget it in the future! I’m going to leave everything hooked up and I’ll turn it on every once in a while so I still have some data points, but for the most part, this will free up some head space.

benmartens August 27, 2024 Electric Vehicles

Tesla FSD Review

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

Every Tesla comes with “Autopilot” which I roughly explain to people as cruise control for steering. It will keep you in your lane, keep you at the speed limit unless traffic slows, etc. In contrast to other car manufacturers, this works on any road in a variety of conditions.

There’s a step up from Autopilot called “Full Self Driving (Supervised)” which expands the capabilities to give you end to end self-driving. It will navigate, obey stop lights and stop signs, change lanes on the highway, etc. All Teslas are capable for this, but you must pay a $12,000 fee to enable it. As you can imagine, very few people are willing to pay that much, so they also offer a $200/month subscription that you can turn on and off. That was almost low enough to get me to try it out on our big road trip, but it was still too much to justify. (As I was working this draft, Tesla lowered the price to $100/month!) So I was happy when Tesla gave all Tesla owners a free month of FSD in April! We’ve put over 40,000 miles on our car without the FSD package so it has been interesting to see the differences.

The obvious question is: is it worth $12,000? And to that I immediately say “Nope.” It’s certainly more than a party trick, but I cannot fathom paying that much for it in my current situation. I’d probably pay $1000-2000 for it, or I would pay a bit more if the FSD capabilities stayed for future Tesla purchases.

With that said, this works shockingly well. Elijah’s school is 18 miles away and I literally had it drive us from our driveway to the school parking lot without me ever disengaging it. This included a mix of interstate, two lane highway, and side streets in rush hour traffic. This feature is no joke.

Note that they make it clear that you are still responsible for the car. You have to always keep your hand on the wheel and be ready to take over if something is incorrect. Once you’re in the car, it will scream at you and even pull over and stop driving in the extreme case where you really stop paying attention.

It’s not all roses though. While it will get you there safely and legally, it does make some awkward decisions. On our road trip to Oregon, it would change lanes when I would have been more polite and waited for a bigger gap. Or if someone is waiting to pull out of a side street in slow traffic, I might tap the brakes a bit to let them in. Or if the speed of a side street was 35, it might not speed up to 60 on the highway until the end of hte onramp. There are a few tuning options and I found “chill” with “minimal lane changes” to be closest to my driving style. I preferred it to be dumber and let me hint at things like lane changes (by turning on the turn signal.)

The FSD package also includes a couple extra goodies.

  • Automatic Parking – As you drive through a parking lot, it will see open parking spaces. You can tap one on the screen and it will back into the spot. This does work but sometimes it takes a couple attempts to get in straight. I would expect it to just nail it on the first time, especially in a wide open parking lot.
  • Smart Summon – Let’s say it’s raining when you come out of the store and you’re debating running to the car. With Smart Summon, you just press a button on your phone and your car will come to you. This only works on private roads and it drives awkwardly slow, but it does work. It’s a bit creepy to see your big investment driving itself with nobody behind the wheel. This one definitely feels like a party trick, but supposedly there is an improved version coming which they call “Actually Smart Summon”.

So yes, this technology is mind-blowing. I have no doubt that this will work flawlessly in the future. But for now, I’m quite content with the default Autopilot capabilities. The price for the full package is very aspirational right now. However, now that the monthly price is $100/month, I’d strongly consider doing that for a long road trip.

Here’s a short demo of it in action in our car. If you get bored with the regular driving part, you can skip towards the end to see the self-parking and the smart summon features in action.

benmartens April 16, 2024 Electric Vehicles

Telsa Model Y – 40,000 Mile Review

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

We just crossed 40,000 miles on our 2022 Model Y after almost exactly two years of ownership. I’ll use a similar format to the 20,000 mile review.

Cost

While I’ve always been interested in EVs as technology, I was never willing to pay extra to get it. The key reason we jumped into the Tesla was because I believed we could break even on the cost. I have a detailed data pipeline set up to track everything I can about our costs. By tracking the prices of gas stations around my home daily and comparing it to how many miles we drove each day, I can calculate that we would have spent $8,047 on gas using the Ford Escape that we would likely have purchased instead of the Model Y. Instead, we have spent $1,722 on electricity for charging.

  • 91% of the charging was done at home for $0.11/kWh
  • 7% of the charging was done at super chargers on road trips for around $0.40-0.45/kWH
  • 2% of the charging was done at free chargers like Airbnb’s

Based on the prices of the Model Y and the Escape when we bought our car, I estimated that we would need to save $18,000 to break even. The bulk of that savings is going to come from not buying gas which means that the more gas costs, the faster we break even. Here’s a chart showing the daily gas prices for the half dozen stations closest to our house (which includes a Costo gas station.)

Based on the data so far, I estimate that we’ll save about $15,000 in gas in the first 100k miles if gas prices stay in the same range.

A big chunk of the rest of the savings should come from reduced operating and service costs. There are no oil changes or brake replacements and there are a lot fewer moving parts to wear out. Up until a few weeks ago, we hadn’t bought anything more than windshield washer fluid for the car. But we did buy tires so that was a major purchase. As a quick update to that tire post, the new tires have been working out well. Efficiency was a major part of my research and while it’s difficult to tell over just the first couple thousand miles, I’m not seeing anything that indicates a measurable decrease in efficiency.

I do think that state registration fees are hurting us more than I expected. Our area keeps voting in more and more taxes so, for example, we spent $939 to register the Tesla in 2023. A large portion of that price is based on how much the state says your car is worth so having the extra value in the car does mean it’s $100-200 more/year than Escape would have been.

A major repair bill with the Tesla could change everything, but at this point we’re on track to “break even” even with pessimistic calculations. For example, my $18,000 goal assumes that we the Tesla and the Ford would have lasted the same number of miles and would have sold for the same amount of money. I’m hoping our Tesla will last longer than the Ford would have and I also expect it to sell for significantly more given the longevity of EVs.

Stats

I’m not going to redo all the stats that I did in the 20k update, but I’ll share a new stat: Battery Health. The TeslaMate software which gives me so much of the data I use to track these costs has a new calculation for battery health. It tries to estimate the actual capacity of your battery against the capacity it had when it shipped. This is not an exact measurement, but it shows that we’re right on track with the expected degradation curve. After 40,000 miles we’ve lost 3.6% of our usable capacity. I did notice during our trip to Utah that there was more degradation, but the numbers have bounced back. I’m not sure if that’s something due to us doing lots of rapid charging or driving in extreme heat at high speeds, but it doesn’t look like anything to worry about. Tesla says that batteries lose about 5% in the first 25,000 miles on their way to losing 12% over the first 200,000 miles.

Experience

The best way to explain our thoughts about this car is that if something happened to it today, I’d pull out my phone and buy another one without much thought. We love this car! Yes, it’s a bit annoying looking like so many other cars on the road, but other than that, it’s a fantastic car to own and drive. We drive this almost exclusively now and I must keep track of the last time I drove the truck so it doesn’t sit too long.

I’ve probably said this before, but I underestimated how wonderful it is to walk out to a “full” car every morning. I always thought that filling up with gas didn’t take that much time so it wasn’t a big deal, but you know what takes even less time? Doing nothing! We pull into the garage, plug in the car and that’s it. It’s full every morning.

I also love the “golf cart” nature of the car. I just hop in and go. There’s no consideration about whether I’ve run the gasoline engine long enough to recharge the 12v battery, burn off the moisture I’m generating in the exhaust system, get all the engine parts fully lubricated, etc.

Consluion

The EV market has changed a lot since we bought our car. The Model Y is now the best selling car of any kind on the planet. It sold 1.23 million units in 2023 beating out things like the Corolla and the Rav4. Not only that, but it was an increase of 66% over the previous year. Tesla factory capacity continues to expand, but estimates for 2024 are all over the place as they are seeing slowdowns like (but smaller than) the rest of the auto industry. 1 in every 12 cars sold in the US is full battery electric. Furthermore, prices on the Model Y have decreased significantly since we purchased and there are federal tax credits at play too. At this point, we love the car so much we’d probably pay a premium to get it, but it’s nice to know that the EV/gas comparison will be more lopsided in the EV’s favor. And it’s even nicer to know, that given our flawless track record with the car so far, we hopefully have a ton of miles left before we start thinking about the next car.

benmartens April 2, 2024 Electric Vehicles

Model Y Tire Research

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

After almost 40,000 miles, the time has come to break the streak of spending $0 on service and maintenance (other than windshield washer fluid.) We’re probably replacing the tires a tad bit early, but they’re down to under 5/32″ in some places and at that point the tire shops stop doing repairs, etc. And since I regularly watch my wife and child drive off in the car, I feel better knowing they can stop quickly when they need to. 40,000 miles seems light to me for tire wear, but reading experiences from other users, it sounds like we did average/well on the stock tires. The cars are heavier and very sporty so it’s easy to burn through the performance tires.

Shopping for tires on our Tesla Model Y was an interesting experience. For example, I’ve never really considered rolling resistance of a tire before. Sure I know that some tires are marketed as more efficient than others, but since Teslas have such detailed economy measurements, I was able to find specific percentage differences in various tires. The challenge is that those measurements were mostly self-reported and varied widely in believability.

The second surprise was being reminded that we are effectively drive a sports car. It can do 0-60 in 4.7 seconds (or 4.2 if you swipe your credit card) and those tires are more expensive than what we bought for our Escape or Impreza.

The third surprise was just how much prices have increased since we last purchased tires in 2019. As I was shopping, I kept getting sticker shock at the total installed price. I got the idea to look up our receipt from 2019, find those exact same tires, and then compare the price. It turns out that the same set of tires from 2019 would have cost 27% more if we bought them now. So add that to the fact that these sportier tires were more expensive than the previous tires (an extra ~$90/tire) and that explains the sticker shock. I did check out Costco and was initially going to use them, but I ended up picking a tire that they didn’t offer. I found their tire prices similar but their installation and warranty was much cheaper.

In the end, I chose the Hankook iON evo SUV tires. They’re less performant than other popular options but offer longer tread life. I also got an alignment done because the initial tires were more worn on the inside than on the outside.

Time will tell how well these new tires hold up. It will come as no surprise to you that I was have an absurd amount of data to eventually compare their efficiency with the stock tires.

benmartens March 12, 2024 Electric Vehicles

EV and ICE Efficiency

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday! Maybe this is more of “EV Tuesday” but we’ll go with it.

Let’s talk about energy efficiency. We know that 30-40mpg is good for an ICE (internal combustion engine) vehicle. But how good is it when you consider all the available energy in the gasoline? The EPA says that a gallon of gasoline is equal to 33.7 kWh. That’s a huge amount of power but the engine only converts 25-30% of that into useful energy. The vast majority of the energy in gasoline is lost to heat.

To put that amount of energy into perspective, there’s theoretically enough energy in a gallon of gasoline to power our house (minus EV charging) for 1.5 days. When full, my F150 has almost a megawatt of power in the gas tank!

EVs on the other hand are more like 80-90% efficient. That can vary more widely though because, for example, in cold weather, heat isn’t free like it is in an ICE vehicle, so you have to use extra energy to generate heat. In an ICE vehicle you’re generating way too much heat year-round whether you want it or not.

Our Model Y LR is one of the most efficient EVs you can buy, and over the first 37,000 miles, it has averaged 278 Wh/mi (Watt hours per mile) or 3.59 miles/kWh. With the energy in one gallon of gas, it could go 121 miles.

This is exactly how the EPA generates their MPGe metric. It’s a bit of a silly calculation because you’re never going to build a car that can extract 33.7 kWh from a gallon of gasoline, but I think it is useful to understand how all those calculations work. And when you hear about how efficient a particular car is, remember that 70% of the energy it’s consuming is lost as a byproduct.

benmartens February 27, 2024 Electric Vehicles

Cybertruck

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

The Tesla Cybertruck was released last week. It was announced all the way back in 2019 and now customers are finally taking deliveries. Let’s start with the positives…

The truck is an incredible feat of engineering. The AWD version does 0-60mph in 4.1 seconds and the “Cyberbeast” model does it in just 2.6 seconds. It does all that while having almost as much payload and towing capacity as my maxed-out internal combustion F150. As a visual to help explain how wild it is to cover both ends of the speed/towing spectrum, Tesla released this video of a Porsche losing a drag race to a Cybertruck… while the Cybertruck is also towing the same Porsche model.

There’s a video showing it in winning handily in a pulling competition against other EV trucks and a diesel F350. There’s also a video of the truck being “bulletproof” or at least bullet resistant. During development it was claimed that the truck would also be able to cross open water though I haven’t seen that independently tested yet.

So yes, it’s a technological marvel, but (and this is a big but)… yuck. It looks like a Pontiac Aztec had a baby with a kindergartener’s drawing of a truck. Teslas have extremely low coeffecients of drag and I’m sure that factored into the design, but still, I know that design is subjective, but I have zero interest in driving this eyesore.

When it was announced four years ago, I disliked it so much that I worried it would sink the whole company. Now we’re in a world where Tesla is probably going to claim the title of best selling vehicle on the planet of 2024. They will probably be ok even if the Cybertruck is a flop.

But will it be a flop? I doubt it. It might level out to be the lowest selling of their models after the initial hype, but I think they’ll sell enough of them to cover their development costs. Tesla incite a fan reaction only seen in companies like Apple. They can make anything they want and people will line up to buy it and rave about how great it is.

If I was replacing my internal combustion F150 today, I’d probably end up buying another gas truck. Rivian is good but their trucks are small for what I want. The electric F150 is intersting but I don’t trust the traditional manufacturers to make a good EV or back it up with a good ownership experience. We’ll get to a point where big trucks make sense as EVs, but I think today the best we can do is smaller trucks like the Rivian R1T.

benmartens December 5, 2023 Electric Vehicles

Don’t Buy an EV

These Tesla Tuesday posts usually talk about experiences with our Model Y and reasons why I’m happy with our decision. Tesla has the highest brand loyalty, but that doesn’t mean I recommend them to everyone or that I’d buy one myself in every situation. So who would I NOT recommend get an electric car?

  1. If you live in an apartment, it’s unlikely that you’ll have a lot of charging options. Landlords are quickly realizing the importance of this amenity, but if I couldn’t charge where I normally park, that would remove a lot of the convenience for me. Even if the complex had a few chargers that people could share, I still probably wouldn’t go for it. I love coming home, plugging in the car, and then ignoring it until the morning when I walk out to a full charge.
  2. If you have expensive electricity, it can change the math a lot. We pay $0.11/kWh hour here in the Seattle area, but in New Hampshire it’s $0.29/kWh! That’s getting close to Supercharger rates which are around $0.45-0.55/kWh. While all of those are still a lot cheaper than gas, it’s a wide range and needs to be part of your math if you’re doing this to save money. Then again, California has the most expensive electricity in the country but they’re also gaga for electric cars so there are more factors at play than just electricity costs.
  3. If you get a new phone and spend the next six months grumbling about how everything changed, this probably isn’t for you. Electric cars usually get the fanciest new tech.
  4. If you’re thinking about getting anything other than a Tesla, I wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re literally never going to take it on a trip that would require you to charge away from home. The non-Tesla charging networks are unbelievably horrible and I wouldn’t take a road trip if I had to rely on them. If you think I’m exaggerating, watch this fantastic comparison video or the many videos like it. Once all the non-Tesla muggles can charge at Superchargers, this becomes a non-issue, but then we’ll have to see what kind of crowding problems we have and see which of the other companies die off in the shakeout.
  5. If you hate electric vehicles because… just because, then obviously I wouldn’t even be talking about this to you. Multiple times, even in this area, I’ve had some truck get in front of me and purposely “roll coal” to cover me in exhaust. Maybe they still wouldn’t want one if they had more info, but so many people blow off all EVs due to talking points from 24-hour cable news that simply aren’t true.
  6. If you’re an expert car mechanic and you enjoy the work, there won’t be much that you can do on your EV. Being able to do most/all of your own car work also changes the math when considering how much an EV could save you.
  7. If you drive more than 200 miles a day, you probably wouldn’t want an EV. I wrote a long post about choosing an EV with enough range, but the takeaway was to consider the high end of your common daily use case and then multiply that mileage by 1.5 or 2 to get the target EPA range to have stress free drives in all conditions.
  8. If you take a lot of road trips and you don’t want to do any extra planning, an EV is probably not for you. While the car will tell you exactly where to stop and for how long, our trips go a lot smoother when I have tweaked that plan a bit for stops with good bathrooms, restaurants, etc. A long road trip feels like hopping between islands so there’s not a ton of flexibility if you’re trying to be efficient with your time.
  9. If you’re going to do a lot of towing or hauling, a gas/diesel truck is still your best bet. Rivian makes an electric truck and Tesla has something sort of truck shaped coming out soon, but despite what the marketing materials say, you’re not going to be asking a front-end loader to dump a yard of gravel in the back. And even if you could tow your camper with it, you’re going to stop so often for charging (and you’ll have to unhook every time) that it’s silly.

One thing that’s not on this list is “if you don’t live close to a charging station…” The area within 75-100 miles of my house is the area where I care least about charging stations. In fact, I think that living far from a charger could be a good reason to get an EV because you’re probably live away from a city and getting anything (including gas) requires a significant amount of time. Instead, you could wake up every morning to a full charge. The only time I care about public stations is when I’m on a long road trip somewhere.

As I wrap this up, my text editor is complaining about all the uses of “probably” in this post, but I’m going to leave them in because there really are a lot of factors. However, I do think that the list of reasons to not get an EV is shrinking as the years go by. Millions of people are making the switch, but it will take time for to cover everyone’s unique scenario.

benmartens October 24, 2023 Electric Vehicles