Posts by JRowland

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

In the forest of the deaf, the one eared tree knows when you start vomiting.

New Windows 10 will STAGGER to its feet, says Microsoft OS veep

Same old large corporation dysfunction

Microsoft seems to be far too focused on internal goals to credibly address those of their customers.

Windows 8 was close to a perfect execution of this inversion, so 10 can hardly help but be less egregious. I still don’t like what I see, though.

Musk: 'Tesla's electric Model S cars will be less crap soon. I PROMISE'

Seems I called it

Range Assurance and Trip Planner.

The much-requested Valet Mode has also appeared, along with a couple of new driver aids for cars with the Autopilot hardware and a relaxed speed limiter for the P85D.

The news release is already up at teslamotors.com/presskit

To be fair to Tesla, that's not quite the situation for Model S owners in the UK today - unless they live in Scotland.

At any road legal speed, the 85kwh models will run for at least three hours' driving from a full charge. If it stops at a supercharger station, it gets another 170 miles of range in about 30 minutes.

(As an aside, you should be stopping by three hours anyway - unless you are some kind of robotic being immune to fatigue. The DfT recommends a 15 minute break every 2 hours for us mere humans.)

There's actually a lot more supercharger stations in the UK than there were even a few months ago - over 20 sites now. There aren't many places south of the Scottish border still inaccessible via superchargers. The network has some way to go, but Tesla have two years to work on it while they get the Model 3 ready. This might actually work...

Probably not a range improvement as such

I'd guess this is the promised improvements to navigation: Automatic routing via charge stations (perhaps even with live status updates) for long journeys, and more accurate range estimation - accounting for weather, traffic, elevation etc.

The much-vaunted (and somewhat underwhelming) "torque sleep" feature is already released and only affects the dual motor vehicles, not the whole fleet.

I seriously doubt much more efficiency can be had from their PEM tech - which they've been improving for nearly a decade now - with just a software update. Besides cycling the batteries harder (which could be a really bad idea), I'm not expecting any major range improvement without hardware changes.