I did check to see what you bought :) It was useful feedback. That particular model isn't in my size, though.
I did check to see what you bought :) It was useful feedback. That particular model isn't in my size, though.
I like your quiver. I can't tell exactly what that is in your garage next to the Tesla but it looks like a fun garage.
It's an E39 M5. That's not even the fun garage :)
Keith Tanner said:About the only state level program for solar in CO is there is no change in property tax for having an array. No rebates, no free panels. I think a few cities might have some programs, and there's a federal tax credit available.
No idea about other states as I've never had need to look.
Minnesota doesn't give you the panels. They made a law that said by 2030 the generation of electrical power had to be from renewable sources.
The utility companies don't give you free panels, they arrange a contractor to install them at no cash outlay to you. You actually pay for them from the surplus energy you sell to the utility companies. In a sense the utility companies get "free" energy to sell at a profit once you're done paying for the panels.
The requirements are south facing roof clear of trees and other shade production . And a monthly bill of $100 or more.
I've seen something from the installer about commercial business but haven't followed up on it yet.
Keith Tanner said:Unfortunately, there's no spec for rolling resistance like there is for treadwear.
I wonder how much rolling resistance equates to noise? A lot of noise is basically airflow through the tread, and the tire is working to pump it. So is a quieter tire one that more easily evacuates air and therefore is doing less work? I need to make friends with a tire engineer.
Fun fact: tires in Europe are rated for rolling resistance. From A (most efficient, lowest resistance) to E (least efficient, highest resistance). They are also rated for noise. (more info here on European Commission website) So if you can find the equivalent of Tire Rack in England, and they sell the same model of tire there, you might get some guidance. I'm not seeing the DWS06 plus though...
And as a former tire engineer, rolling resistance and noise are loosely related as you suspect. However tire noise (at least as measured for the European labels above) is most directly controlled by how open the shoulder of the tire is to the circumferential grooves. More open tires (think mud-terrain or a good winter tire) are noisier than a closed shoulder tire (think 80,000 mile rated all-season tire). The downside to closing off the grooves in the shoulder for noise is that hydroplaning performance decreases: the tire can't effectively get water away from the contact patch to maintain grip.
And thanks for documenting your journey with this car. I have found it informative and it has encouraged me to look at BEVs for the next family car purchase. Especially as the market has expanded beyond just Tesla for acceptable options.
- Sean
In reply to ShawneeCreek :
Thank you, that was really interesting.
I have dws06+ on both of my cars now. Both were recent changes, I think 10k miles at most so I can't really speak to longevity or noise as they wear, but I really like them. I think I described them elsewhere as 80% of a summer tire combined with 70% of a snow tire.
Huge fan of the DWS06 and have run them on a bunch of cars. At this point they are my go-to for commuters and for any car I buy that might get driven in cold rain or snow but is not a dedicated winter daily. Thoughts:
-They're 'quiet enough'. Nothing out of the ordinary and they do not seem to get stupid loud when they get old like DW / ECS do, for example.
-I've run both these and green-x-rated tires on the same car and there is definitely a MPG difference. About 34 mpg vs 38 mpg highway in my case on a Fiesta. General Altimax RT43 on the same car yielded about 34 mpg too so I'd call the DWS06 normal/reasonable in this regard.
-They are great in the snow, truly an all-season tire when newer. Tread depth still matters - now that my current daily set is down to about 5/32" I am putting dedicated snows on for this winter. Then the DWS will be fine for another summer at least. On non-daily cars, it's great to be able to take them out in winter on a whim and not stress about snow capability.
-Longevity is hard to judge because i tend to drive a lot of spirited 30-60 mph back roads and nearly no highway. So any tire wears pretty quick, nothing is going to go 40,000 miles in these conditions. The DWS06 last as long as anything else i have run, fwiw.
-As a bonus, they'll handle an occasional autocross and feel like a proper tire while doing it. Of course they have much less grip than the good stuff but they're not a floppy greasy mess like some all-seasons.
Basically they are exactly what an all-season should be. They do everything 'well enough' and are actually useful in all 4 seasons, not just 3.
So anyway, as i assume you've driven even more tires on even more cars than me, I'm curious how you like them.
Most of my tire experience is within a very narrow range of both tires and cars :) All season on a big sedan is not within that range! I think I'll give them a shot. I'd hate to lose 10% of my range, but in all honestly it's unlikely to make much difference other than a run to Vegas. Thanks for the report.
In other news, this just arrived in the Tesla store: the official CCS adapter is now sold in the US!
https://shop.tesla.com/product/ccs-combo-1-adapter
That would let me use non-Tesla fast charging networks. I have a J1772 (level 2) adapter, but that's only for overnight charging. One small problem, though - my car was built just before they started installing the modem needed to support CCS :( So it's something that I could do in the future with a modem swap. I've been told the latter is a pretty simple install. There's certainly no need for us to do this, but it's good to know that we can increase our compatibility if required. It's a lot more expensive to make a gas car run on diesel :)
This picture really illustrates the size difference between the Tesla charger and the CCS. The amount of leverage on that Tesla plug is making me feel itchy.
An alternate tire challenger has entered the ring. I started the tire search again with a focus on efficiency, and up popped the Michelin PILOT SPORT ALL SEASON 4. Almost identical ratings to the Continental on Tire Rack, including some nerdy customer reviews from Tesla owners that include efficiency logging. Tesla owners are that kind of people :) Looks it might be slightly less capable in light snow but the tradeoff is better efficiency and slightly better ratings for dry traction/steering. Given our driving The differences are likely within the margin of error in the reporting system, with both tires having more than 3.8 million customer reported miles so it's a pretty big sample set.
The Tesla app shows "gas savings" which is an interesting metric. It assumes a 30 mpg car and is currently using $4.74 as an average fuel price. That's a bit high for around here today even for premium, but it's probably accurate for regular fuel a month or two ago. Had we purchased a Grand Cherokee instead of the Tesla (which would have been Janel's choice without me pushing for the weird car), we'd be getting 21 mpg according to the EPA and would have spent $138.57 in the last 31 days using that fuel price. That alone would have paid for 80% of the cost of the solar array for the month.
Janel and I were mentioning last weekend, while on a Westfalia road trip, that both of us had lost track of what gas prices were. It used to be something I'd do a quick eyeball on every time I passed stations on my usual route, including a check of the fuel gauge. I'm out of that habit now.
I had the Pilot Sport A/S 3+ on my GS430 and I really liked them. I did not drive on them in the winter; I had a winter tire set for that. They gripped well and were smooth and quiet. The GS430 probably isn't far off your Tesla in weight. I think it was about 3800lbs.
The A/S 3+ doesn't come in my size, alas. It was recommended by someone else as well.
So, breaking news. There's another recall (on top of the one for the rear wiring harness that can fatigue and take out the rear camera). This one is for "window automatic reversal system performance that had greater than expected variations in response to pinch detection" so it can be outside the NHTSA limits. It was discovered during testing, apparently there have been no owner complaints. It covers pretty much every Model 3 and Y ever built.
What makes it interesting is that it's a software patch, so it's going to be delivered OTA. They're still going through the full NHTSA recall procedure, but by the time the letter arrives it will have been fixed. Telsa decided to issue the recall on Sept 12th and the patch started getting rolled out on Sept 13th. Official owner notification will take place on November 15th.
I suspect that two month lag time is typical for recalls - you always hear about them long before the letter arrives - but it illustrates how the system was originally designed for physical defects that needed to be resolved with a dealer visit and production of new parts, like the wiring harness problem. A software patch that can be rolled out to the entire fleet? That's a very different thing.
I had considered the Michelin as 4, I think I passed due to a combination of $200 more for a set of tires and pretty much across the board lower scores in tire rack's testing (other than steering feel, which doesn't really bother me). I didn't care about fuel efficiency when I was shopping though. But fwiw both of my cars will still hit their rated fuel economy numbers on the continentals if I drive responsibly, so they're not that awful. For your application it's probably worth noting that tire rack scored the Michelin worse on road noise than the continentals. But that's only initial noise, they could get better as they wear in.
According to the customer surveys, the Michelin scores 8.7 on noise and the Continental scores 8.8. But the TR testing shows a much bigger difference based on some subjective harmonics. Meanwhile, the survey results give the Continental a lead in light snow traction while TR held the Michelin up as the winner. This is a difficult thing to evaluate :)
Ah, you can always count on the Germans.
Ah, wrong variants. Never mind.
Contis ordered. It was the subjective ride quality descriptions in the TR test that made the decision. Plus I get a pretty good deal through work :)
Three years! Happy birthday, car.
As a birthday present, I discovered that our car was very likely built with the big Performance rear inverter and was detuned in software - it was built in the early days of the non-Performance dual motor. A friend who has worked at Tesla forever said the Stealth Model 3 (the Dual Motor with the fully enabled Performance rear motor) was "peak M3".
In reply to ShawneeCreek :
I miss these, although I don't remember them as being especially quiet:
I still haven't managed to mount those tires. Tomorrow, I think. Other stuff got in the way.
But this post is due to a software update. There was a notable change to the "energy" screen, it's become really interesting.
Here's one of the pages. Note that it breaks down all the various things that have consumed energy. The altitude one is neat, you can tell that my house is about 500' higher than the vet's office where I took the picture, and going down gave me the equivalent of an extra 1.8 miles of range :)
This, of course, illustrates why it's so hard to predict range. I drove 2.1 miles, but only used 1.0 mile of range because I was going downhill. If it had been 72F and overcast, I'd have used even less. We understand it for ICE cars, but people seem to take it very badly when EVs don't match their predicted range at all times.
Heading back, the predicted range went the other way :) Climbing hills is hard work, as any cyclist or runner will tell you. I also got a driving tip to accelerate more slowly, but when you've gotta merge you've gotta merge. Note the HVAC hit from the car sitting outside for a while and having to warm up - that would have been a temporary cost, so it would have been a smaller percentage had I driven further.
This is going to be really interesting on a long trip, and by "really interesting" I mean Janel will get very sick of me playing with it. I'm particularly interested to see what the Elevation reading looks like in the high passes.
There are other screens, including this one that shows you consumption whilst parked. Screen time is watching Netflix etc while parked/charging - that came in very handy yesterday when Janel was trying to distract a 5 year old with a banged up thumb. Netflix gave the distraction needed to pull focus away from the injury. Preconditioning refers to preparing the battery for fast charging. Summon is something we don't have so it'll stay at 0 forever. Sentry is really power-hungry, it apparently is a bit of a hack job using the full self driving cameras.
I'm going to play with this a bit more as we keep driving. It's unlikely to affect our use habits at all, but it's just plain interesting.
Woody (Forum Supportum) said:In reply to ShawneeCreek :
I miss these, although I don't remember them as being especially quiet:
I have these on the Mini. Hard to tell if they're quiet or not, the car is a little rowdy :)
Keith Tanner said:...Here's one of the pages. Note that it breaks down all the various things that have consumed energy. The altitude one is neat, you can tell that my house is about 500' higher than the vet's office where I took the picture, and going down gave me the equivalent of an extra 1.8 miles of range :)
....
I was amused by the range tip. I think that's more of an observation or an analysis than a tip. It's not like you can use that information to improve range in the future.
You're not wrong, but on a drive that short on two lane back roads it might not have had much else to work with. Here's what I shot after Janel drove across town. Those tips are a lot more useful. Still, a long trip is needed to really get a feel for this.
This screenshot also shows the predicted consumption for a planned route instead of just compared to the EPA average.
I did find this software update note interesting - mostly because it says that it takes weather into account when calculating predicted range on trips. It probably should, but it's cool that it does. I know it takes elevation changes into account as well, which probably falls under "route".
In reply to Keith Tanner :
Don't get me wrong. I think the software is cool, I think that information should be included in the report, whatever you call it. I've also been in many hours of meetings debating UI and nomenclature with marketing folks in a variety of industries. That stuff is not easy. Although, it's not as hard as some manufacturers make it seem. Also, I'm not the typical consumer. One marketing manager I worked with would often point out in mid conversation that I'm not the target market or, if she was feeling less charitable would say "But Steve, you're just weird."
I think it was mostly struggling to come up with something to put in there :) We'll see how it does on longer drives. Janel has already told me to stop playing with it when she's driving, so I think it's fair to say that any driving suggestions will be ignored. The car does pop up an alert when there's something that's actually important, such as if regen is limited (cold weather or 100% state of charge) or if you're going too fast to reach your next planned charging stop on a trip.
I am going to be checking in on this screen in the future to see just how much power is used for HVAC in weather or Sentry, for example. It'll be interesting, but unlikely to affect our habits. Since we have so much more range than we usually use, extra consumption isn't really a concern.
Today was New Tire day. The new tires went on pretty easily - after years of fighting race tires on wide wheels, squishy sedan tires are a nice change :) I think it's fair to say I got full use of these. That's 30k worth of use, and Janel enjoying her car being zippy. I didn't rotate them soon enough, I won't make that mistake with the new ones.
It's also quite clear that I need to fix the toe. I remember seeing shoulder wear when I rotated them so this has been planned for a while. Since it's happening on both sides of the car at about the same amount, it's probably in the front. A friend who happens to be a Tesla chassis engineer gave me his recommendations so I'll set that tomorrow.
The stock tires have a cool feature: internal foam to cut down on noise.
The car's up on the lift while I swap tires, any requested pics?
New tires are SO much quieter and feel pretty comfy. No regrets so far.
I checked toe with my DIY toe plates and it looks okay. I'll have to take it to a pro because that tire wear is not right.
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