Go to a BMW dealership, take an M5 for a test drive, when the car says it was 32 miles left try to drive it 60.

It's a 100k car and it won't make that feat either.

What if I'm in the car and it says 32 miles and I ask the BMW sales guy if we'll make it 60mi. He says, yeah, it is a 100k car and has a new engine you've never used before, it's just the cold weather which as it warms up will cause the reading to show more range.

Still my fault?

I mean, I've never driven a car with a digital gas meter before, but on all the cars I've driven they always have tens of miles when the gas light comes on.

EDIT: To be clear, it is extremely stupid to do so.

All cars, including the Tesla, will run for awhile after the meter tells you "zero." But when you nonetheless run out of gas at some point after hitting that mark, you blame yourself not the car.

Similarly, the car traveled 19 miles past it's projected range, and still has reserve power when it claims to be empty.

I'm not trying to claim that it doesn't, but perhaps the tester was a little optimistic about the mileage he would get after it emptied.

My Volkswagen has it, and I've gotten it down to 5 miles remaining before, but at that level they fluctuate pretty heavily based on how you're doing with MPG.

I never try to play that game though because I don't want to dry out my fuel pump.

Doesn't it damage the engine to run completely out of gas? If no, are you sure about it? Really sure? So sure you would take your brand new $100k car and run it out of gas just to see what happens? :)

If you read the article, Broder ignored repeated warnings to stop and use a charging station...

> Go to a BMW dealership, take an M5 for a test drive, when the car says it was 32 miles left try to drive it 60.

Leave that same BMW overnight in a parking lot and it's range wont go from 90 miles down to 32 either.....

I think we all know that batteries and battery gauges work quite differently from gas. Or do we?

Very much related: https://hackernews.hn/item?id=5124170 "We don't know why lithium batteries work"

Measuring usable capacity left in a battery is much more art than science still. You can model the drain rate and change your estimates based on historic usage and do all kinds of fancy FFT and other signal processing, but in the end it's still an estimate, batteries are not immune to physics, and li-ion batteries won't save the world (but they will create lots of hazardous waste in creation and disposal).

Tesla S is 50k.

That's the base model $52,400, smallest battery, one charger, no moon-roof, no scotchguard, no undercoating, no pinstriping, or roof-rack.

The model tested was not.