You know the same things affect endurance in standard cars as well, right?
Of course. Heater might be not a problem, but A/C would be, and headlights, and some power-hungry accessories. But, as you imply, most gasoline cars have twice the range of the Tesla. Any gasoline car could easily make a 160 miles trip without refueling, and none of the fuel would be lost ovenight (except in a ghetto :-)
but the estimation of range is actually easier (electricity doesn't vary in octane, for instance.)
I disagree. You buy the same fuel and you get about the same performance. Admittedly, the modern diluted gasoline is not as good as the pure one, but that is politically driven, and it is common to the large area; it's not something that varies from station to station. A tankful of gasoline is a known quantity.
On the other hand, an electric charge is hard to measure, especially when it is stored not in a single capacitor but in billions of molecules. There is no mechanism by which you can reliably tell how much juice the battery has left. You only have indirect measurements, such as the electromotive force and the internal resistance of the cell. And you also have the records, how many coulombs went in and were taken out. You cannot shove a dipstick into the battery and look at the level; a gas tank allows you that, if you need to. (You are required to do that on airplanes.)
On top of that, the battery has unpredictable charging and discharging patterns. When you fuel a gas car you know that once you are done the tank is physically full (the level reached the cutoff tube in the handle.) When you fuel an EV you cannot be even sure if the battery is fully charged; even the definition of "fully charged" is debatable. Look at the reporter's numbers - he got "remaining miles to empty" all over the place, from 240 to 185, after a charge at the supercharger, all under computer control. This variability is not good.
Then there is yet another factor. The battery has self-discharge. It may be a huge current; combined with thermal issues, the reporter's car lost 65 miles of range just after being parked for 8 hours. This is not easy to take into account because people are not used to care for their cars that much. A gasoline car will not lose energy - not overnight, and not even after being parked at the airport for two weeks. (An EV would be scrap after two weeks without charge, as other Tesla owners found out after their Roadsters got bricked.)
There is yet another small factor. Battery's capacity is a function of the discharge current. If you drive faster you get far fewer miles than if you drive slower, or with the wind, or downslope. This is an issue that is independent from losses of efficiency due to drag or due to suboptimal mode of the engine. A gas tank will deliver power regardless of how much of it you want, whether it is a drop per minute or a gallon per minute. A battery doesn't work like that, and those losses are harder to calculate.
Experience of this reporter proves it. I am sure the guy is perfectly capable of driving a gas car. But he failed with this one, because the car has too many quirks. You have to make caring for this car into your second, if not the first, goal in life. Only then it will be usable. You cannot run an EV with the same lack of care that we practice with gas cars. An EV is a very fragile toy, and for that reason it is not very well suited for majority of drivers. If I may use a computer analogy in a discussion about cars, an IBM/370 mainframe is not a good alternative to a smartphone, even if it is faster. A mainframe requires trained operators to run it. So is this Tesla car.