Hello All. Me and my son (Ben, now 16) put together
EVTripPlanner after I picked up my car (12/19/12) and drove it straight to Vegas from the Hawthorne (LA) design center and saw how bad the in-car energy tools were (despite the car being awesome). A few comments on the site and this topic:
* we don't have an iPad and so we don't test on that platform - sorry...but let us know about problems. The in-car browser is actually pretty crappy compatability-wise. Our primary target browser is Chrome. Of course, this is an unpaid project for the benefit of Tesla owners, so we just do what we can. Email
[email protected]
* we tried integrating with live wind data...but wind changes so much over just a few hundred feet and the course of an hour that it didn't make sense to use the numbers. That is why we just show the range of what to expect. Headwinds are a real killer - the only thing you can do is monitor the situation and reduce speed (or follow a trucker...but they won't be happy!)
* elevation data was down for a few days - MapQuest had changed their API and we didn't notice. It should all be working again.
* we have checked the accuracy of our Route Energy Planner and it looks quite good (if you enter the correct speed, of course). At first, we were comparing our predicted Wh/mi to the Trip Meter in the car and thought we were off - but it turns out the value reported in the car under-reports actual consumption quite a bit. See my writeup
here. About predicting your speed: Google does a pretty good job with current average speeds on the different segments - most of the time I thought I went faster than Google predicted, I was wrong (on average). The trick is to update the energy plan close to when you're actually travelling.
* I've done the Thousand Oaks-Vegas route 4 times and never had a problem. Have also gone to bay area and beyond 5 times or so without issue (other than a software update glitch that broke supercharging temporarily). You just can't cut it too close if you don't like that kind of avoidable stress. I generally charge to whatever
EVTripPlanner says and add 30 miles or so. If it looks like you're using up too many miles, just slow down a little.
* we figured out a way to do in-car updates while you're on the road, but since the browser doesn't support location (duh!) and Tesla hasn't opened up an API, the only way we could do it was with the
Tracker - what a Rube Goldberg machine that would be. The Tracker runs on your PC right now (not our server), since we don't want to collect/save your login to the Tesla web site. Anyway, we figured that Tesla would integrate Energy planning and Nav pretty soon (double duh!).