Car & Driver hates Trip Planner

Car and Driver didn't enjoy their Tesla P85D Roadtrip

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Tesla Model S P85D Road Trip – News – Car and Driver | Car and Driver Blog

He followed the Tesla Nav too faithfully, and charged to 100% not knowing it takes longer to do so.

Glad the media is finally covering the sucky navigation in the Model S.

qwertzy said:

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Tesla Model S P85D Road Trip –Â*News – Car and Driver | Car and Driver Blog

He followed the Tesla Nav too faithfully, and charged to 100% not knowing it takes longer to do so.

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Good write up, seemed pretty even handed. He struggled with his first road trip, as do most. It's a quick learning curve & you get better. Spot on about the on board nav; its lousy and sometimes makes horrible recommendations. That could have been lifted word for word from several threads here.

OT...what's with the NHTSA complaint (suspension falling off) in the comment section?

Perhaps this article will help push Tesla to fix the fairly horrific nav bugs. That feature simply wasn't ready for release. Driving on I-95, it always wants to stop in Bethesda, which is almost always a bad idea.

Honestly, I can't see as there's much to like about the trip planner algorithm. Now, the addition of the "trip" screen to the energy app on the big screen? That's actually useful.

idoco said:

OT...what's with the NHTSA complaint (suspension falling off) in the comment section?

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That would be Jim5437532. He probably has a new handle since he is known under his other handles. He is a Tesla SuperTroll. He has actually filed a number of false NHTSA reports based on secondhand information he picks up here on TMC. I believe he is crazy or someone with a very well done agenda.

I have a thread on him in the Off Topic section:

Super Troll Jim5437532 and his campaign against Tesla

Actually, I just read the article (not bad) and saw the commenter is Keef Wiveneff. He is also a common troll for Tesla. His agenda is that all things "green" are scams and therefore Tesla is a scam. It's within the realms of possibility that they are the same person but I doubt it having commented with both of them. Keef is equally nuts but he has a clear agenda, whereas Jim has never given any justification whatsoever for his destructive campaign.

What I can say is that the NHTSA claim that Keef is referencing was created by Jim5437532. It has his fingerprints all over it. The complaint is being generated by a secondary party speculating on something they believe to be a safety defect. No reality is involved in the complaint.

That article is an absolute embarrassment. Although the guy writing the article seems to be a bit of a moron (or he was intentionally ignoring his own common sense to make a point in the article), he's absolutely right in that the Tesla's nav is crap right now.

I hope this lights a fire under Tesla to fix it. This beta nav crap has done absolutely NOTHING to help Tesla or the EV cause.

In Elon's over-inflated quest to "eliminate range anxiety", all he's done is made it worse.

C'mon Elon, I know you and your team can do MUCH better than this.

Yeah, having done a Bay Area - San Diego road trip over the long weekend and having used Trip Planner, I found it to be just as much of a comical, sorry mess. It wanted me to dog leg through the LA SCs several times when I had a full battery to get from SJC to Tejon. It tried to make me go back to the SC that I just left on multiple occasions.

The algorithms driving the Trip Planner are not properly taking into account the SoC, direction of travel and (elevation- and weather-adjusted) distance to the next SC in the direction of travel.

Well that was a bizarre read. It lost me at this sentence: "the average driving range per battery charge staffers had seen in the long-term Model S was just over 130 miles". That can't be right. Does Car&Driver not know how to charge the car and drive it?
Some of the comments posted on that article page were equally delusional. And the one about the NHSTA complaint of the "rear suspension sheared off" sounds like made up nonsense.

Lump said:

We've been saying it more months!

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Tesla Model S P85D Road Trip –Â*News – Car and Driver | Car and Driver Blog

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I think the forums and some Tesla die hard is just a bit too harsh on Tesla in general regarding this Trip Planner. Keep in mind that this is a software based car that gets better with release. Plus the planner is their first release version or so. I don't expect it to be excellent. It is usable and for those who live in the area it tries to map around, I can use my local knowledge of the area to compensate where it lacks. But at least it gives me something to think about and decides through.

Well, my experience is different. We road tripped from Toronto to New York (see thread in Canada forum) and back in our first week with our Tesla (last week by the way).

The trip was rapid and comfortable. Never waited for the car to charge, as I planned the trip in advance, just like normal people do for road trips of >500 miles. I did experience one case of the navigation pointing me back to my previous supercharge, but that was due to my personal choice on speed for a particular part of the journey, and I made it with 7% charge remaining, which was 30km of range to spare. That is a lot of spare range, let me tell you, my Smart ED has 120km on a good day, so I'm perfectly comfortable charging just enough to get where I'm going, and no more.

To each their own, but yes, Tesla should work a bit more on the navigation, even though it wouldn't benefit me, others may get value out of it.

ecarfan said:

Well that was a bizarre read. It lost me at this sentence: "the average driving range per battery charge staffers had seen in the long-term Model S was just over 130 miles". That can't be right. Does Car&Driver not know how to charge the car and drive it?
Some of the comments posted on that article page were equally delusional. And the one about the NHSTA complaint of the "rear suspension sheared off" sounds like made up nonsense.

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Reading the article to the end is what has it make any sense. It is really an article about unreasonable range anxiety and how using Tesla's program doesn't really help. I appreciate that the author admits that he had a lot of unfounded fear and how simple reasoning can remove them. The reality is that almost every real owner loses range anxiety very quickly. The guy made a number of mistakes including his fear that range charging would damage the battery, so he wouldn't do it. Going on a long distance trip is exactly the correct time to do 100% charges. These type of articles really show that we have a long way to go. The general public, and even car guys, just have no clue as this article illustrates.

As for the sheared off rear suspension, it is made up nonsense. I'm sure the car was in a serious accident where such a thing could occur. These lunatics would take a car driven off a cliff and turn it into a "serious safety issue" just to further their agenda. Whatever that agenda might be. The crazy guy should get into trouble for filing false reports.

smilepak said:

Keep in mind that this is a software based car that gets better with release.

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Well, the number 1 thing that needs to happen for software to get better with each release, is that it actually has to get better with each release...

Tesla took a problem that really didn't exist in the first place, and made it worse.


If all they did was nothing, it would have had no impact on sales or pre-orders, and this negative review wouldn't have existed.

I went on a road trip yesterday into the Supercharger Desert. Essentially north of my home where there are no Superchargers. Because I was going to be cutting things close, I used the nav app to map my route and ensure I could do it as planned. When I plugged in the destination address, it routed me due south instead of north, to the next Supercharger. And apparently not to my destination. Once I went into the options and removed charging stops, the route went north.

A complete logic fail IMHO... routing south to the next Supercharger, than back to my departure point for another Supercharge and not to my desired destination seems more than a little silly.

The energy consumption graph that is charted after a destination is set is extremely useful (and quite accurate), but the rest of the trip planning is pretty feeble.

I wish evtripplanner.com would display properly on the web browser...

This guy is the anti-Broder - erring to a ridiculous extent on the side of excessive charging.

I think most of us that have driven the car home from the factory did not turn it into an ordeal like this.

I really wish these guys would do these drives with an owner sitting in the back not saying anything for the first leg of the trip and then watch them drive on the return trip. Would make a much more balanced and informative article.

The nav really is bad now. I used to use it, and had no problem with it. Now it is pretty much useless. Even for short trips with no supercharger routing I get nonsense suggestions, rerouting with no notice for no reason, and other generally weird suggestions, like getting off the freeway only to get back on at at same ramp.

It is going to turn off a lot of new buyers to how good the Model S is for road trips, and introduce a lots of unnecessary fear and range anxiety to new owners not familiar with the car or EVs. Seems like this is exactly what happened to Car and Driver. Without my experience driving the Model S for the last 2+ years, and many thousands of miles of roadtrips, I think the nav would have really thrown me for a loop if I was still getting familiar with the car and how EVs and Superchargers worked. That said, the C&D person made some pretty weird decisions on his own.