The trip planner in the car not performing as I would expect

[davewill]

I've been trying to use the trip planner in the car, but it's behavior seems broken. I knew I didn't have enough battery to get home in north San Diego county, but figured that if I set my destination as home anyway, it would direct me to the very nearby Temecula Supercharger. It instead just told me that I would arrive at home with a negative battery level and I might want to charge. Huh? Of course I could and did set the SC as my destination and proceeded.

After I got home, I tried a few distant destinations to test. I was charged to about 130 miles at this point. I chose Mammoth as a destination, and everything seemed OK, with the first stop in San Bernadino. Then I tried setting Joshua Tree as my destination. The system wanted me to head a half hour in the wrong direction to the Carlsbad SC, then drive all the way to Joshua Tree arriving with less than 10% battery. It ignored a Supercharger just two miles from my location, and 2 or 3 along the route that it plotted all of which would have made much more sense.

It seemed to me that some Superchargers were not considered to be possible charging locations by the internal route planner.

 

[davewill]

I guess it works better for everyone else then...

 

[kavyboy]

I guess it works better for everyone else then...

Sorry, but yeah. I don't doubt you, but I have not experienced nor heard of it being quite that bad. It will plan to get you to your destination with not enough charge to get anywhere if you don't have destination charging there.

 

[gecko10x]

We took our first road trip this past weekend, and it was giving some dumb suggestions to us as well.
But as it was our first, I could not tell you if the behavior has changed. Also, since I obsess and frequent this forum, I was already well aware that aBetterRoutPlanner would give me better directions, so we just set the car trip to the next charger destination.

 

[kavyboy]

I haven't seen EVTripPlanner, ABetterRoutePlanner, or the in-car nav be consistently perfect, but they're all usually reasonable. Usually.
For long trips, it really does help to use each, along with plain old Google maps, and figure it out. For example, from where I am north of Houston, the best route according to most of these is through downtown Houston at rush hour to save at most 10 minutes versus taking some nice country roads. Houston... downtown... rush hour... um, no.
I usually do Google maps first to find the optimal route. Then ABetterRoutePlanner to see if it matches. If it looks like there are potentially multiple good routes, then EVTripPlanner, then common sense. Then in the car, enter it in the nav and see what it says. It sounds more onerous than it really is.

 

[swaltner]

It seems to me like the on-board trip planner ignores the lower powered 72 kW “Urban” Supercharger sites. Were the stations that it ignored these 72 kW sites or were they the 150 kW or even 250 kW variety?

The nav will let you directly select these urban sites as your destination, but doesn’t seem to offer them up as charging options.

 

[davewill]

It seems to me like the on-board trip planner ignores the lower powered 72 kW “Urban” Supercharger sites. Were the stations that it ignored these 72 kW sites or were they the 150 kW or even 250 kW variety?

The nav will let you directly select these urban sites as your destination, but doesn’t seem to offer them up as charging options.

Yeah, the one two miles away was a low power station, but there were full power stations on route and in range that it didn't offer, either. It's not a big deal, I can obviously use other tools, I was just disappointed that it didn't work better.