My wife and I had such a good time on our first Model S road trip to Las Vegas (Road Trip: Post your trip experiences - Page 4) that we decided to do it again. But this time I wanted to do a better job logging data from the car. I signed up for PureAmps' tripography website and this logged the mileage from each day of the trip (tripography.com/wraithnot). But he hasn't had a chance to enable his road trip logging feature yet so I decided to see if I could figure out how to take advantage of all the amazing work people on this forum have done on the model S REST API. I'm not a programmer by training, but I was easily able to install Hans' great node model S software (hjespers/teslams · GitHub) on my iMac and then with a bit of googling I was able to figure out how to automatically run the script every five minutes and dump the output to a text file.
We left our house (161 miles north of Harris Ranch) at 9 am on Friday and then stopped to charge at Harris Ranch, Tejon Ranch, and Barstow. I really disliked the route from Tejon ranch to Barstow that we took last time so this time we went north on 99, turned on bear mountain road, and then took 58 to Barstow. This was MUCH better than taking the more southern route the nav system recommended. Another difference with this trip is that it was MUCH hotter. It was 108 F when we pulled into Barstow to charge and it got even hotter between Barstow and Vegas. At one point, it was 113 F and I got the yellow power limiter line on the power gauge on a particularly steep part of the journey about 50 miles from Vegas. Luckily we hit the downhill portion before too long and the yellow line went away and didn't return for the rest of the trip.
As luck would have it, we arrived in Vegas just as they were having a torrential downpour. This clogged up traffic a bit and added a few minutes to the drive. We were staying at Excalibur this time to save a bit of money and part of their parking lot floods when it rains. Luckily with the air suspension set to the highest setting the car waded through about a foot of standing water without incident. The rain was starting to let up at this point, but we parked on the second floor of the parking structure just to be safe and checked into our room. Since Excalibur doesn't have any charging facilities, we then drove to the Venetian for dinner in the hope that at least one of their J1772 chargers would be free. As luck would have it, only one of their J1772 spots was occupied so we plugged into the other spot and began charging. After dinner we came back to the car to grab a few items we forgot and I noticed a third model S had arrived and was charging from the 120 V outlet by the roadster charger. I scrawled my contact info on the back of the dinner receipt and left it on my dash in case the new arrival wanted to coordinate things and grab the J1772 when we were done charging.
We then took a long walk along the Vegas strip back to our hotel so the car could charge over night. Vegas isn't designed for rain so the escalators to all the elevated pedestrian walkways quit working when they get wet and portions of the sidewalk flood. At one point, everyone was trying to walk along the curb next to a particularly soggy bit of sidewalk to keep their feet out of the water. The amusing part was that about half of the people were so drunk they couldn't maintain their balance on the curb. It was like a real-time sobriety checkpoint for pedestrians
We walked back to the Venetian the next morning for breakfast and retrieved the car. We spent most of our time Saturday and Sunday playing poker at Excalibur and eating fantastic meals at the MGM, but we did stop by the Venetian for lunch on Sunday to top the battery off.
We headed back Monday morning and the weather was a lot cooler than for the trip out. We passed a white 60 kWh Model S on the way to Barstow and once we got to Barstow, I was disapointed to see that two other Model S's were already charging in spots 1B and 2A. I pulled into spot 1A, but noticed the driver of the car in 1B was near his car so I asked him how much longer he planned to charge. He said he just got there so I quickly moved to spot 2B and started to charge. Unfortunately the car in 2A was getting most of the power and I got a paltry 60 amps and 71.5 mi/hr. The white 60 kWh car pulled up and started charging at spot 1A and it turns out this was the same car that was charging at the 120 V outlet at the Venetian. My wife and I then walked over to Starbucks for breakfast and then walked over to the outlet mall to kill some time while the car charged. I was monitoring the charge status and after about an hour, I noticed the charge current jumped up to 150 amps. Even though the reported charging speed only increased marginally, I assumed the other car had unplugged and we were now charging much faster. We walked back to the car and sure enough, the car that had been in 2A was gone and had been replaced by a silver model S. The range increased quite quickly after that (even though the reported charging speed didn't increase much) and soon we had enough range to safely make it to Tejon ranch.
We ran into the white Model S at Tejon ranch and again at Harris ranch. It turns out the driver is Chriz on this forum and he lives in San Jose. While we did get further and further ahead of him at each stop, I was pretty impressed with how capable a 60 kWh car is on road trips.
Here are the range and mileage stats for the trip:
Home to Harris (161.5 miles): used 190 rated miles
Harris to Tejon (116.5 miles): used 154 rated miles
Tejon to Barstow (142.6 miles): used 167 rated miles
Barstow to Vegas (158.6 miles): used 189 rated miles
Vegas to Barstow (156.5 miles): used 173 rated miles
Barstow to Tejon (149.8 miles): used 163 rated miles
Tejon to Harris (116.4 miles): used 131 rated miles
Harris to home (161.4 miles): used 193 rated miles
The 579 mile trip to Vegas took 11 hours and 22 minutes (8:39 driving and 2:43 charging) and the return trip took 11 hours and 53 minutes (8:53 driving and 3:00 charging).
Here is a graph of the rated range over time (I was planning to log the range charge before the trip, but I forgot to keep the keep the iMac from going into power saving mode until I checked the results in the morning).
And this is a graph showing the results of all six supercharging stops. The 108 F temperature at the first Barstow stop didn't slow things down too much, but being the second car to plug into a pair of superchargers on the second stop at Barstow REALLY slowed things down.
The datalogger was incredibly simple to run. All I had to do was make the following file called crontab.txt in my user folder (I redacted my Tesla username and password):
contents of crontab.txt:
*/5 * * * * date >> tesla_data.txt
*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/node /usr/local/bin/teslacmd -c -u ********@gmail.com -p ********** >> tesla_data.txt
And then start the job with: crontab ~/crontab.txt
I then wrote a simple script to parse the data in tesla_data.txt
If anyone is interested in looking at the actual data, I posted it here: REST_data_dump.txt - Google Drive (It's a simple tab-separated text file so you'll have to download it and use excel rather than google docs)
We left our house (161 miles north of Harris Ranch) at 9 am on Friday and then stopped to charge at Harris Ranch, Tejon Ranch, and Barstow. I really disliked the route from Tejon ranch to Barstow that we took last time so this time we went north on 99, turned on bear mountain road, and then took 58 to Barstow. This was MUCH better than taking the more southern route the nav system recommended. Another difference with this trip is that it was MUCH hotter. It was 108 F when we pulled into Barstow to charge and it got even hotter between Barstow and Vegas. At one point, it was 113 F and I got the yellow power limiter line on the power gauge on a particularly steep part of the journey about 50 miles from Vegas. Luckily we hit the downhill portion before too long and the yellow line went away and didn't return for the rest of the trip.
As luck would have it, we arrived in Vegas just as they were having a torrential downpour. This clogged up traffic a bit and added a few minutes to the drive. We were staying at Excalibur this time to save a bit of money and part of their parking lot floods when it rains. Luckily with the air suspension set to the highest setting the car waded through about a foot of standing water without incident. The rain was starting to let up at this point, but we parked on the second floor of the parking structure just to be safe and checked into our room. Since Excalibur doesn't have any charging facilities, we then drove to the Venetian for dinner in the hope that at least one of their J1772 chargers would be free. As luck would have it, only one of their J1772 spots was occupied so we plugged into the other spot and began charging. After dinner we came back to the car to grab a few items we forgot and I noticed a third model S had arrived and was charging from the 120 V outlet by the roadster charger. I scrawled my contact info on the back of the dinner receipt and left it on my dash in case the new arrival wanted to coordinate things and grab the J1772 when we were done charging.
We then took a long walk along the Vegas strip back to our hotel so the car could charge over night. Vegas isn't designed for rain so the escalators to all the elevated pedestrian walkways quit working when they get wet and portions of the sidewalk flood. At one point, everyone was trying to walk along the curb next to a particularly soggy bit of sidewalk to keep their feet out of the water. The amusing part was that about half of the people were so drunk they couldn't maintain their balance on the curb. It was like a real-time sobriety checkpoint for pedestrians
We walked back to the Venetian the next morning for breakfast and retrieved the car. We spent most of our time Saturday and Sunday playing poker at Excalibur and eating fantastic meals at the MGM, but we did stop by the Venetian for lunch on Sunday to top the battery off.
We headed back Monday morning and the weather was a lot cooler than for the trip out. We passed a white 60 kWh Model S on the way to Barstow and once we got to Barstow, I was disapointed to see that two other Model S's were already charging in spots 1B and 2A. I pulled into spot 1A, but noticed the driver of the car in 1B was near his car so I asked him how much longer he planned to charge. He said he just got there so I quickly moved to spot 2B and started to charge. Unfortunately the car in 2A was getting most of the power and I got a paltry 60 amps and 71.5 mi/hr. The white 60 kWh car pulled up and started charging at spot 1A and it turns out this was the same car that was charging at the 120 V outlet at the Venetian. My wife and I then walked over to Starbucks for breakfast and then walked over to the outlet mall to kill some time while the car charged. I was monitoring the charge status and after about an hour, I noticed the charge current jumped up to 150 amps. Even though the reported charging speed only increased marginally, I assumed the other car had unplugged and we were now charging much faster. We walked back to the car and sure enough, the car that had been in 2A was gone and had been replaced by a silver model S. The range increased quite quickly after that (even though the reported charging speed didn't increase much) and soon we had enough range to safely make it to Tejon ranch.
We ran into the white Model S at Tejon ranch and again at Harris ranch. It turns out the driver is Chriz on this forum and he lives in San Jose. While we did get further and further ahead of him at each stop, I was pretty impressed with how capable a 60 kWh car is on road trips.
Here are the range and mileage stats for the trip:
Home to Harris (161.5 miles): used 190 rated miles
Harris to Tejon (116.5 miles): used 154 rated miles
Tejon to Barstow (142.6 miles): used 167 rated miles
Barstow to Vegas (158.6 miles): used 189 rated miles
Vegas to Barstow (156.5 miles): used 173 rated miles
Barstow to Tejon (149.8 miles): used 163 rated miles
Tejon to Harris (116.4 miles): used 131 rated miles
Harris to home (161.4 miles): used 193 rated miles
The 579 mile trip to Vegas took 11 hours and 22 minutes (8:39 driving and 2:43 charging) and the return trip took 11 hours and 53 minutes (8:53 driving and 3:00 charging).
Here is a graph of the rated range over time (I was planning to log the range charge before the trip, but I forgot to keep the keep the iMac from going into power saving mode until I checked the results in the morning).
And this is a graph showing the results of all six supercharging stops. The 108 F temperature at the first Barstow stop didn't slow things down too much, but being the second car to plug into a pair of superchargers on the second stop at Barstow REALLY slowed things down.
The datalogger was incredibly simple to run. All I had to do was make the following file called crontab.txt in my user folder (I redacted my Tesla username and password):
contents of crontab.txt:
*/5 * * * * date >> tesla_data.txt
*/5 * * * * /usr/local/bin/node /usr/local/bin/teslacmd -c -u ********@gmail.com -p ********** >> tesla_data.txt
And then start the job with: crontab ~/crontab.txt
I then wrote a simple script to parse the data in tesla_data.txt
If anyone is interested in looking at the actual data, I posted it here: REST_data_dump.txt - Google Drive (It's a simple tab-separated text file so you'll have to download it and use excel rather than google docs)
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