Good post. Since this was your first longish trip, how much if any of that 90 minutes could you attribute to charging more than necessary due to range anxiety and therefore have shaved off?
I'll put it this way. I used EVTripPlanner to get a feel for options before I left. That helped a lot with contingency planning and easing my initial concern. Without it, I wouldn't have been nearly as comfortable. I just don't want to sit in my MS to do that sort of planning I'd rather do at my desk. Plenty of charging options on the 1/3 of the trip nearest to my home, so I wasn't too worried, I'm just a planner, so like to have a worked-out Plan B in my hip pocket and a Plan C at least half-baked. The big CA storm was approaching and weather people were predicting the worst here, so I decided to travel half-way on Saturday afternoon to hopefully stay ahead of the storm (that didn't really come here, but hit me unexpectedly the next day.)
It didn't cost me any time or really much money to trip-charge to 100% before I left home... First leg of the trip went fine without a lot of weather, but had several challenges with traffic where Nav rerouted and I made it to my new overnight stay next to a SpC easily with more than 25% charge left. Plugged into the SpC, checked-in, unpacked, went to dinner, and came back to have charging at 90% just about done. Moved MS over to the hotel and parked.
Next morning, had unpredicted rain -- sometimes causing a slowdown on the freeway to see -- and 30-40mph crosswinds going, so I was more uneasy. Made it 2 hours later to the next SpC with that bad weather the whole time I was traveling 65-70 for the most part, took a nature break, bought another cup of coffee to allow my MS to finish charging to a full 90% just in case. It wasn't absolutely needed, but that was sort of a strategic decision to charge and know I'd have enough to get to my destination and return back to that SpC if I didn't get a charge while I was where I was headed to. The valet ended-up charging my MS while I was parked (they couldn't guarantee it, but they had IIRC 4 80A HPWC which is great with my dual-charger). I got the indication it was charging on both my Apple Watch and iPhone the day after I left my MS with the valet, so was pretty stoked to see it all working as designed.
Unfortunately, after several hours after my MS finished charging, they moved my MS out of LTE range in the depths of the garage somewhere, so I couldn't trip charge to 100% when I woke up this morning as I was going to do via my iPhone. Regardless, was able to pretty much skip the intermediate SpC on the at home (only plugged in while I was doing a little nature break and getting a cup of coffee since there were 8 open stalls, so why not opportunity charge for 20 mins?). At the 2nd stop, it took a little over an hour to put 90% back into my MS for the longer leg home while I had breakfast at Denny's and checked email. Made it home at 60-75mph and loads of stop-and-go traffic with about 25% charge left when I pulled into my garage... Plenty to then go pick up my dog from camp, have enough reserve should an emergency come up with family, and plug back in for charging at midnight.
Net is, trip worked-out fine. I bet maybe 30 minutes of each side of ~90 minutes could have been shaved off, but it's hard to estimate what weather will and won't do, and I'm still worried when I'm out in the middle of the desert vs going from metropolitan area to another where there is more infrastructure... Same deal e.g. with people I suspect in the Midwest and center of Canada... Cross winds seem to be the killer, rain didn't help. Amazing to watch the displays and impact on product range while all that wa going on and still needing to climb significant elevation. I had no anxiety with 25% remaining on the trip graph, but slowed it down a bit when it projected less. Great weather, I won't need to be as big of a buffer for sure. EVTripPlanner was very accurate (albeit using an 85D as the baseline), including accounting for very significant difference in altitude gain (3K'+) on the outbound leg vs return, and therefore difference in range per charge... Larger concern of course is what if one of the SpC I'm dependent upon 2+ hours away is offline when I get there, so I'm glad the later versions of firmware have some indication in that regard. Not completely trusting Tesla's attention to detail though, I admit to trying to double-check alternate sites before I left each place just to add to my confidence level. Yes, I'm paranoid about being stranded by myself in the middle of nowhere with speeding passer-bys that wouldn't stop if I did need help.
...and back to an adjoining tread topic, I'm also frankly still happy to have my supposed "16 miles"... It costs a lot, and I'll never really know of its all there, but it is one more thing to ease range anxiety for those of us that sometimes travel the wide open spaces in the wild and wooly West -- with only rattle snakes, semi's, and dead cow skulls between SpCs.
