Tesla exaggerated EV range so much that drivers thought cars were broken

Tests show Tesla underperforms estimates

Despite his appointment being canceled, Ponsin brought his car to a service center in Santa Clara, California. He told Reuters that the visit "lasted 10 minutes" and that technicians "didn't even look at the car physically." A technician at the center told Ponsin his car was fine.

Reuters was told by a source that Tesla recently stopped using the Nevada-based diversion team and instead now has range cases handled by "service advisors in an office in Utah."

In April, Car and Driver reported that its testing showed Tesla "pursues an impressive figure for its window stickers, and ends up returning real-world results that are on average two times as far off the label value as most EVs." BMW, Mercedes, Audi, and Porsche "typically provide a relatively conservative range figure, allowing us to meet or even at times exceed the range numbers in Car and Driver's real-world tests." As a result, "400 miles of stated range for a Tesla and 300 miles for a Porsche is pretty much the same number at real highway speeds."

Car and Driver data was used in a recent study by SAE International. One of the study co-authors reportedly "told Reuters that three Tesla models posted the worst performance, falling short of their advertised ranges by an average of 26 percent."

In January, South Korea's antitrust regulator fined Tesla $2.2 million, saying the company exaggerated the "driving ranges of its cars on a single charge, their fuel cost-effectiveness compared to gasoline vehicles as well as the performance of its Superchargers." The South Korean agency said that in cold weather, actual mileage was "reduced by up to 50.5 percent compared to what has been advertised."

The US Environmental Protection Agency tests electric vehicles, and the agency's "audits resulted in Tesla being required to lower all the cars' estimated ranges by an average of 3 percent," according to EPA data obtained by Reuters through a public records request.

Tesla “good at exploiting the rule book”

In March 2021, car testers at Edmunds reported that four of the six Teslas tested fell short of the vehicles' EPA estimates. Edmunds had previously found that none of the Teslas hit their EPA estimates but redid the tests after Tesla complained that they didn't account for the "safety buffer"—meaning the miles a car can travel after the gauge reads zero.

"Our tests showed that there is no fixed safety buffer," the auto website wrote. "Even allowing for the additional miles recorded after an indicated zero, only two of the six Teslas we tested would hit their EPA figures in our real-world conditions."

Edmunds also argued that "the point is academic" because drivers are unlikely to expect a buffer range to be included in the EPA's range estimate. In contrast to Tesla cars, Edmunds reported that "most non-Tesla vehicles have surpassed their EPA estimates."

Edmunds testing director Jonathan Elfalan told Reuters that Tesla has "gotten really good at exploiting the rule book and maximizing certain points to work in their favor involving EPA tests." Other data cited by Reuters found that Tesla cars "almost always calculated that they could travel more than 90 percent of their advertised EPA range estimates regardless of external temperatures."

We contacted Tesla about the Reuters report today and will update this article if we get a response. The Reuters report said the news agency sent detailed questions to Tesla and Musk but received no response.