Except...260 Wh/mi consumption stated was for the round trip, not just from Kingsland, GA to Knoxville, TN. OP mentioned “all charges were similar” to the Columbia to Asheville stint... which was likely even higher around 270-290 Wh/mi.
240-260 is normal for an SR+ when loaded and going interstate speeds. I’ve averaged 250 Wh/mi from Atlanta, GA to Orlando, FL traveling at 75 mph fully loaded.
Hmm. Ok. Fair point. Unfortunately we lack further details, so I'll have to continue blaming the wind (which I think is a fair thing at this point).
Thanks for all the replies. I will be making this trip a lot more in the future. I will not be able to make it in the winter. I guess I rent an ICE for winter trips.
I plugged your route with winter conditions (32F, snowing) into ABetterRoutePlanner.com. It's fantastic for Winter route planning and route planning in general, but you do need to adjust the settings (it's part of what makes it "better", the fact you can adjust things like temperature and weight).
You can absolutely make that trip but you need to take a different route. Like
@Rocky_H pointed out, you can also stop in Greenville but this is a bit too long of a stretch even in winter. Instead, if you take the route via Atlanta, there are better-placed chargers on the route and you can have a comfortable amount of range left at each stop, even in Winter.
Now, whether or not you
want to go that way is another thing. But it is both faster and less anxious with the Tesla due to the charging availability.
Ah, I think this is another one of those examples of how the "Beta Trip Planner" is a horrible pile of $#it and screws over new owners who don't know not to trust it. It seems that it was programmed with the parameter of FEWEST STOPS and all else be damned. If it thinks it's just barely possible, that's what it will recommend, even if it's skipping Superchargers and stressing you out. So it frequently recommends awful things like the example you gave:
And here's the thing it does that is utter B.S. When it comes up with a recommendation of what Superchargers it thinks you should use, it HIDES the others in between!! That's just evil. I'm always a little bit skeptical of any routes in the lower 48 states really not being doable now, so I checked this segment. Yep, sure enough:
(Arrgghh. Errors uploading my map picture in either jpg or png. Oh well.)
Columbia to Asheville does not have to be a straight through with no charging. You can go right through the Greenville Supercharger right there in the middle, so this is easily doable. I'm sure the car hid that from you, though. So if the car is trying to recommend some terrible charging strategy of going above 90% and arriving with a single digit %, that's generally nonsense, and I would cancel the navigation route and just display the map of Superchargers to see what it's not showing me.
So for this route at least, no, you wouldn't need to use a gas car. It's easily covered with closely spaced Superchargers and no really long gaps. I'm sorry you had to discover this this way, but it's good to know about this bad software design for next time.
I don't know if I've ever agreed with a post more.
My problem hasn't been the technical ability of the EV to make the trip (well, sometimes), but discovering the path and charging stops. The Tesla route planner is not just not ideal, it's
far from ideal and can leave you stranded in winter (I had the CHAdeMO adapter, which I had to use twice to travel a leg between Supercharger the car actively said it could make) due to these minimised-stops decisions.
Tesla really needs to work on that for common adoption. ABRP is great, but still fussy and complicated and just
way more effort than driving a gas car.
I am going to guess that this OPs question / concern isnt "Where can I stop to charge" but more along the lines of all the other "Why isnt my car getting rated range" threads. I say this because OP makes a point of saying that his car only gets "160 miles on a charge" in the opening statement (when driving 75 with people and items in the car, uphill).
So, I believe OPs actual "concern" is "My car isnt working correctly because I am only getting 160 miles on a full charge!" (based on this and other similar posts OP has made about being "disappointed with the range").
All the same, it's a fair criticism of range marketing of EVs in general. The max range is not practically achievable unless you charge to 100% overnight (too slow otherwise) and perfectly line up with a charge station at 0% (
incredibly unlikely). 260Wh/mi vs. the ~200 they're rated to get is indeed the larger problem, but unlike a gas car
this efficiency-per-distance number is
not the primarily displayed EPA/rating agency number, so they don't have any sort of feedback on 260 being a "bad", "expected", or "really good" efficiency. What some of the agency websites and data
do show if you look it up are confusing, because they're "AC" numbers which include charging losses (good for calculating total cost of running it, but doesn't match the car's efficiency during travel! [which would be "DC" efficiency]).
