ABRP Tips & Tricks

[Rotarybuddy]

I am still waiting for my car to be delivered, but I wanted to get to know ABRP now since it seems like a helpful tool. I have only used the app on my iPhone, but it seems really buggy. So far my process is to route to an area, select if I want to charge more or less, and then look at a couple of individual stations to see if I want to change them to a more agreeable location. I find that the app jumps around a lot or closes everything and you need to go back several screens and almost start over.

Is this really meant to be used on a desktop or loaded into the car and then you can make adjustments? I feel like it is really hard to compare travel times and make small changes to the route without having to almost start over. Do folks just load a whole trip but reload it at each charge stop? I find that it will often suggest several under 10-minute charge stops so I like to see how much time it would add if I opted for fewer longer stops.

I'd love to hear how to make the most of this and get some tips from old pros with ABRP.

 

[Watts_Up]

I find very useful to play with ABRP before my trip to localise all the Superchargers locations, as you can set what SoC you want to get. Something you cannot do with Tesla Navigation.

In areas with a lot of superchargers I prefer to charge from 10% to 60% which will be fast.

But in areas with few Superchargers I prefer to charge from 40% to 90% which will take longer but will be safer in case of a detour or heavy wind.

During the trip I use the Tesla Navigation but most of the time I prefer to use the Superchargers that I already think about instead to let Tesla decide which one to use.

Also I prefer to use 250 kW Superchargers indtead of the older 150 kW one that you have to share.

 

[Transformer]

I have a premium ABRP subscription but am not an expert in using it. Anyone with better tips, please speak up! There are user forums and YouTube videos but no manual.

I typically use desktop Google Maps to compare routes on the broad scale. You can drag the route line and add points to it. You can ask it to find Superchargers and add them as "favorites" so they show up as green markers on the map.

I usually use ABRP on my phone to plan the day's trip and charging stops, then I ask the car to navigate to the next stop. When navigating to a Supercharger, Tesla preconditions the battery to arrive with the optimal fast-charging temperature. I might well stay and charge up more than needed. No hurry, and it's good to prepare for contingencies.

Before leaving a stop I might use Google Maps to pick restaurants and parks to visit, then ABRP to re-plan from there, then ask the car to navigate to the next stop.

(I should let the Tesla navigate to waypoints now that it can. It can switch Supercharger stops while en route if one of them is getting busy.)

Tips:

• You can adjust a slider in ABRP to pick the fastest route, or longer legs with fewer stops, or shorter legs with more stops. I pick the latter since my anatomy is more limiting than the battery.
• When the day's destination (e.g. a motel) does not have charging, it's no good to arrive there with a low battery! So I find the next Supercharger further along the route and tell ABRP that's my day's destination. Then it will get me to the motel with enough charge to get to the next Supercharger the next day.
• You can connect ABRP to your Tesla account so it can read the car's location and battery level. I haven't figured out how to override that when planning a trip the night before departure while the car is yet to charge.
• You can configure ABRP with additional time overhead per charging stop.
• You can configure ABRP with the minimum charging levels you're comfortable with.

 

[GtiMart]

ABRP is a great tool with all the right configuration options (in advanced) and a wonderful computation engine. The user interface on the other hand is fragile and has always been. It's better than it was but still not up to par. My biggest suggestion is to be gentle with it. Don't rush it, don't work with it like you're a monkey trying to push all buttons at once or desperately try to crash it. Instead, be gentle to it, one thing at a time, give it time to refresh etc. Assume your 8 year old kid made it and is proud to show it to you and you don't want to break it I know these are silly images but hopefully they convey what I'm trying to say.

 

[Watts_Up]

Tips:

• You can adjust a slider in ABRP to pick the fastest route, or longer legs with fewer stops, or shorter legs with more stops. I pick the latter since my anatomy is more limiting than the battery.
• When the day's destination (e.g. a motel) does not have charging, it's no good to arrive there with a low battery! So I find the next Supercharger further along the route and tell ABRP that's my day's destination. Then it will get me to the motel with enough charge to get to the next Supercharger the next day.
• You can connect ABRP to your Tesla account so it can read the car's location and battery level. I haven't figured out how to override that when planning a trip the night before departure while the car is yet to charge.
• You can configure ABRP with additional time overhead per charging stop.
• You can configure ABRP with the minimum charging levels you're comfortable with.

I never find a way to set the starting time or to set the arrival time.
So I always get the current time when printing out my itinerary.
- I wonder if there is a way to change the default clock time?

 

[hgmichna]

ABRP has a wonderful algorithm to calculate optimal charging stops, but sadly it also has a swarm of defects that makes using it awkward. On top of the functional defects it is a load of user interface defects that make things worse.

Its real-time navigation is so bad as to be unusable, at least with my car, a Model 3 with the 60 kWh battery. I have not found any safe way to let it use the Tesla API, and it should not be necessary, as ABRP can obviously estimate consumption very well. But while navigating it doesn't. It seems to think that I use 500 Wh/km, rather than the realistic 150 or whatever I have set in the ABRP settings. So I would have to correct the dynamically changing state of charge all the time, which is nearly impossible, because of a related user interface defect. It reacts to taps on the battery + and - symbols with a very long and inconsistent delay.

ABRP has all the speed data and could not only calculate very good estimates of the actual consumption, it could even learn from the user's corrections and come up with even better estimates. Alas, it doesn't.

I have given up on the real-time navigation and tried to use a different method to recalculate the next charging stops. When approaching a pre-planned charging stop, I recalculate the entire route from the place where I am to check whether I could reach another charger farther down the road. But doing this while driving is dangerous to impossible, in part because of another user interface defect. I have to enter a new starting point at the current location and then enter the current SoC. But whenever you enter a digit into the SoC field, it jumps out, the data entry field disappears. You need a two-man crew to do this, one driver and one navigator, like an aircraft crew many years ago. You could make an extra stop, but that would defeat the whole purpose of travelling faster.

Another nasty trap is that ABRP forgets the global settings, like type of car, charger preferences, etc., when you create a new route. The seemingly global settings aren't truly global, they are connected to each route. A workaround (not thoroughly tested) seems to be to step back until you have no calculated route, but only a dashed straight line in the map from waypoint to waypoint. Then enter your global settings (again). That way they seem to stick, but only to this new route.

Please report more defects and workarounds here.

I think it is about time that ABRP gets repaired or someone writes a better ABRP (ABABRP ;-) .

Just in case someone asks why I use ABRP at all and don't simply rely on the built in navigation, I currently use Bonnet and pay 30 €-cents per kWh, i.e. roughly half the price of what I'd have to pay at the Superchargers in Germany, 58 €-cents. But Bonnet can only use four of the charging providers, Ionity, Fastned, and with lots of limitations Allego and some local providers (Ladenetz). So I set ABRP to prefer Ionity and Fastned and thus save half the money. Cannot let such a good offer pass.

As to the preceding message by Watts_Up, tap the pencil icon in the starting point description. There you can enter your starting date and time and also (awkwardly, see above) your starting state of charge. I wonder though what purpose printing might serve. Driving a route is not static. The optimal charging stops can change while you drive. That is why both the built-in navigation and (awkwardly, with defects) ABRP have the ability to recalculate while you drive.

 

[CapsEngineer]

- I wonder if there is a way to change the default clock time?

Yes. Click the pencil icon next to any location on a route and you can change lots of options, including leaving date/time and SOC. As stated above, the UI is finicky and entering time in the fields is no exception. It’s doubly hard on a mobile device.

Ive used the edit to see what different overnight charging does on a trip.

 

[RTPEV]

So here is my evaluation of ABRP. It's strange, because my experience differs so greatly, especially from @hgmichna's experience in not getting the app to "safely" use Tesla's telematics API (although maybe the concern is "safe"--I don't have any serious concerns with generating a Tesla API token and passing that to ABRP, but maybe @hgmichna does). It really is great to have the app learn my own personal consumption/efficiency and dynamically read the current SOC from my car, so I consider this a key feature. Sure, it works without it, but it's tons better with it.

And I'm also surprised by @Watts_Up 's difficulty in setting departure times. Other's have described how it's done, so hopefully that is helpful. I use this feature all the time at waypoints when I am setting up a trip. For example, I just had an entire 10 day trip mapped out in ABRP. I had a planned stopover at my son's house on the first day, so I put in my noon departure time, let it calculate the arrival time at his house, then I put in a 9:00am departure time the next morning with 1kW (120V) charging and let it automatically figure out how much charge I would get overnight and use that as part of the plan the next day. Similarly I put in an overnight charge at my in-laws the next night, followed by an 80 mile side trip the following day, arriving back at my in-laws. This was important so that ABRP could accurately estimate how long I needed to charge at the Supercharger preceding my arrival at my in-laws so that I would have enough charge to make it to my in-laws, make the 80 mile side trip, and then make it back to my in-laws to plug into their 120V outlet again. That part always works great for me.

One other nicety of having the app access the Tesla API is that as it is charging, I can be monitoring the next leg of the trip as the car is charging. So for example, if I had to unplug now, would I still have a viable trip? How would my trip be affected if I did that? Not a critical feature, but gives you a warm fuzzy to know that you can at least make it to the first Supercharger in case the power goes out or something.

But yes, I do most of this planning on my desktop. But the nice thing is that when I load up the app, most of the time it just brings up the same plan I've been working on in the app on my phone as well, so I can plan on the desktop. That's may just be me though--I don't like using my phone for anything detailed like that.

I do find that at times, especially when on the road and in an area with a less than ideal signal, when you click on certain things, you have to be a bit patient. While ABRP is pretty responsive on the desktop, it's not so much on the phone, and definitely not on the car browser. It usually eventually responds to clicks, but you have to be patient.

Speaking of the car's browser: ABRP doesn't run well on the Tesla browser. It's had its ups and downs over time. It used to work great. Now it almost always crashes after 20-30 minutes. I don't know if this is ABRP or the browser that's the problem, but it basically renders it useless. What I liked about using it in the browser in the car is that with the detailed view, you get a (better) version of the trip energy graph, and indication of the upcoming charging stop's Supercharger utilization (i.e. how many stalls are in use vs. free -- I like to keep an eye on this to see if it's filling or emptying), and much more detailed arrival and travel times than the Tesla nav gives you). However, I agree that the ABRP navigation map is very bad. I basically ignore that.

So as a result, I usually run ABRP on my phone while in the car to keep an eye on the next Supercharger, although I'll occasionally pop the browser up as well (it usually recovers well enough that it accurately shows where I am on the current trip, but occasionally it gets "confused" and I need to "replan"). I always have Tesla nav running as well, at least to the next Supercharger, so that I can get the in-car nav working, and pre-conditioning the battery.

Another feature I use is the Alternatives feature. Usually this comes up when we need to stop earlier than recommended for a bathroom or food break. It's great to see what other options there are and how they affect the overall trip time.

Speaking of that, the OP was asking about shorter vs. longer stops. Yes, ABRP typically recommends many short stops, but this is actually what you want most of the time. It may seem counter-intuitive, but because you get so much faster charging at low SOC, you generally want to avoid overstaying a Supercharger stay any more than you need to to arrive at the next stop with a fairly low SOC. So it is usually more time efficient to take more shorter stops than just a few longer ones. It does take getting off and on the highway into account, and you can even program in an additional "overhead" time to account for extra time searching for the Supercharger and actually plugging in/unplugging.

I'll probably think of additional tips after I hit "post", but I guess that's enough for now.

 

[hgmichna]

As to safely allowing ABRP to read live Tesla car data, consider how you did that. I guess you give your Tesla account password away, to an entity you do not know well. I call that highly unsafe. I don't do that, but I wish everybody luck, so the password never gets into wrong hands. I just know, if I wanted to steal Teslas, I would either work for or hack places that have Tesla passwords.

I have also already explained why this would not be necessary if ABRP were well designed.

Here's another bug in ABRP. When I attempt to plan a route that barely requires one charging stop, ABRP seems to choose a charging point in the middle of the route.

This is far from optimal. If I cannot charge at the destination, I would obviously drive as far as possible and recharge at the last opportunity to arrive at the destination with more remaining charge. If, however, I can and want to charge at the destination, I would also charge late, because that allows me to save time by more precisely minimizing the required charge time and save even more time by allowing me to charge quickly at a low SoC.

ABRP is not as good as many users think. It needs more work. It looks very good at first sight, but the more intensely you try to use it, the more you stumble over its shortcomings. This is a pity, because its potential is huge. I am definitely hoping for improvements, but so far it has not reached a level at which I would consider sending in bug reports. There are still too many obvious flaws and defects which the author would already know if he seriously strove for high quality.

I'm currently testing Chargemap, but so far it seems to be unfinished and has some rather strange characteristics like a charge card with very bad prices. Not convincing either, unfortunately.

These days I tend to use a semi-manual method for long-distance driving. I sometimes use ABRP to give me a rough idea what might be possible. I use the Tesla navigation to see which Superchargers it recommends. If I see possibilities for optimization, I program additional charging points as waypoints into the Tesla nav, so I can see while driving at which states of charge I would arrive at these possible charging stops. Shortly before each possible charging stop I decide whether I should charge there or whether I can safely proceed to the next stop. While charging I sometimes check the rest of the route and, if there is something to gain, I recalculate quickly and possibly add another possible charging stop as a waypoint. This does not take too much time, but can save quite a bit of money if the prices differ.

I guess it will take more years until we get a navigation assistant that truly optimizes charging, including not only the time, but also the price of charging. Obviously such an assistant would have to ask you first how much you care about your time and your money, because optimal charging depends on your individual price of your time. To put it bluntly, if you don't know where to spend all your excess money, you will go for the fastest charging regardless of price. If, however, you are on a tight budget, you might well accept more time for charging, if that saves a few bucks. Most of us are somewhere in between.

I also guess though that we are still far from a navigation app that truly optimizes all this. Mathematically the task is a relatively simple optimization, well inside today's technological capabilities, but dynamically getting and updating all the required data is not simple. The dynamic occupation of charging points comes to mind.

 

[RTPEV]

As to safely allowing ABRP to read live Tesla car data, consider how you did that. I guess you give your Tesla account password away, to an entity you do not know well. I call that highly unsafe. I don't do that, but I wish everybody luck, so the password never gets into wrong hands. I just know, if I wanted to steal Teslas, I would either work for or hack places that have Tesla passwords.

Okay, that's a fair enough reason. However, I consider it an acceptable risk, given the reputation of ABRP (which is well beyond a back-alley outfit) and the exposure that having the token compromised entails. It's not necessary to expose the password itself--a token is sufficient. Having the token does give access to the vehicle's data and could be used to minimally control the car (locking/unlocking, rolling down windows, starting or stopping charging). Sure, it's not completely secure, but as I said, an acceptable risk for me. I certainly feel more confident about that than I do handing my credit card to a stranger at a restaurant, or even using some online shopping sites.

I have also already explained why this would not be necessary if ABRP were well designed.

Actually it's Tesla themselves that need a redesign (or rather an enhancement) to improve security. They could provide a complete oauth solution where third parties could request a third-party-specific token, separate from the one used by the Tesla app (which is how all these third-party sites work today) that could be set up with a limited set of permissions. I.e. ABRP would only be able to retrieve SOC and position information, and not be able to do anything else, and access could be revoked independently of all other third-party apps.

Here's another bug in ABRP. When I attempt to plan a route that barely requires one charging stop, ABRP seems to choose a charging point in the middle of the route.

I have noticed this as well. You can click on the stop and specify that you want to not use that charger, and it now gives you the choice of whether to ignore it forever, or just for the current trip. Depending on the situation, I suppose you may have to do this several times, so it still is a hassle.

This sort of happened to me on the trip I just took. It preferred to route me to a V3 Supercharger still 2.5 hours from my destination rather than a V2 Supercharger only 1.5 hours away. Maybe it figured that the V3 was a better choice given the possibility of charge sharing, or maybe it's just a routing bias it has.

 

[hgmichna]

It's not necessary to expose the password itself--a token is sufficient.

How do people produce that token?

 

[RTPEV]

How do people produce that token?

I personally have some PHP code that I run to generate a token (because I have dabbled in writing software to access and control my car through my Google Assistant), but there are many other ways as well. Google 'tesla api token generator' for plenty of ideas.

You may get into a similar quandary about trust if you are highly mistrustful of third-party apps (i.e. even though most of the token generators run locally on your device and only communicate with the genuine Tesla oauth server, how do you really know that they aren't doing something illegitimate?)

 

[abax]

I'm having a strange problem with ABRP trip planning via browser on my windows 10 PC. It seems my newly saved trips won't show up under the Saved Trips list anymore.. this just started happening since couple of days ago. I'm logged into my account . Anybody else see this with a new trip plan? I have the standard version of ABRP.

 

[hgmichna]

The user interface is a bit peculiar there. Check carefully which icons you tap; first the heart symbol, then the blue button to save the plan, then one of the buttons to save as a new plan or to overwrite an existing one. Only then is the plan actually saved.

I have a few times inadvertently loaded a saved plan by mistake, rather than saving the displayed plan.

 

[CKwik240]

So I was given $100 in Google play store credits with my phone and I'm definitely not going to use it all before they expire for the my Google drive subscription so I paid for the premium version of ABRP. It said something about live traffic data, but I don't see any adjustments currently. Maps is telling me 2:17 hours to get to a destination I'm planning to drive to later today if I leave now. If I set the departure time to 4pm, maps tells 2-3:20 hours. ABRP is saying 1:17 hours regardless of departure time and I don't see any indication that it is considering traffic. This trip probably won't require charging but I noticed the same thing with 2 longer trips but I didn't have time to play around with the app. Am I incorrect on winning it should be estimating drive time with traffic with a premium subscription?

 

[Transformer]

Am I incorrect on winning it should be estimating drive time with traffic with a premium subscription?

They claim it will factor in real-time traffic given a premium subscription, but I'm not seeing it do that right now for a future route.

Maybe it can only do it for a route starting now, or (worse) only considering traffic right now along the entire route.

Be sure to turn on Settings / Advanced Settings / Speed / Real-time traffic. Then go back to the route display and tap the button to plan the route again.

 

[RTPEV]

So I was given $100 in Google play store credits with my phone and I'm definitely not going to use it all before they expire for the my Google drive subscription so I paid for the premium version of ABRP. It said something about live traffic data, but I don't see any adjustments currently. Maps is telling me 2:17 hours to get to a destination I'm planning to drive to later today if I leave now. If I set the departure time to 4pm, maps tells 2-3:20 hours. ABRP is saying 1:17 hours regardless of departure time and I don't see any indication that it is considering traffic. This trip probably won't require charging but I noticed the same thing with 2 longer trips but I didn't have time to play around with the app. Am I incorrect on winning it should be estimating drive time with traffic with a premium subscription?

Not sure if that's what the "live traffic" feature does, or whether it's simply that while en route it will re-route if necessary to avoid a traffic jam. I've been assuming the latter. If I'm looking for the former, I'll usually use Waze/Google to estimate the effect of traffic at a future time.

 

[CKwik240]

Not sure if that's what the "live traffic" feature does, or whether it's simply that while en route it will re-route if necessary to avoid a traffic jam. I've been assuming the latter. If I'm looking for the former, I'll usually use Waze/Google to estimate the effect of traffic at a future time.

Except when I indicate leaving now, it still doesn't have the same to time as Google maps. I feel as though this would be a the only reason to pay for the app as it really doesn't make for a good "planner" app then.

 

[RTPEV]

Agreed, if you are using it to plan. I'm not even sure the real-time traffic is all that useful en-route (for re-routing). I trust Waze more for that aspect of it, but I haven't found a single nav app that I trust completely (I typically will run 2 or 3 in parallel to see if any one of them recommends a detour).

For traffic planning (i.e. choosing a specific route based on historical/predicted traffic), well, not really a big deal for me. If I'm looking for a tool to suggest major route changes to avoid predicted slow traffic, I'll just Google/Waze for that and use waypoints in ABRP to more or less follow the route. Yes, it would be nice to have ABRP be able to more accurately predict arrival times (due to heavy expected traffic) during the planning phase, but for my trips anyway, predicted arrival times in the planning phase vary significantly from reality anyway to make that a less useful feature. Once you're on the road and the live traffic data is consulted, arrival times are usually pretty accurate (although again, get thrown off when you stop for a bathroom break anyway!)

For me, the main benefit of premium (other than just wanting to support a very useful tool) is the live charger availability display (and forecast). Real-time weather is helpful to adjust the plan, but the Tesla nav system can do that now as well, so not strictly necessary.

 

[CKwik240]

Just seems like a lot of work to have to go back and forth between apps, which is really a benefit of a planning app. I feel as though if I need live data, I can just tell on Tesla's Nav. For a subscription to be worthwhile, it seems that being able to use just the one app would be most useful. I'll reach out to the developer when I have more time. Thankfully, I paid with Google play store credits that would likely go to waste, but I doubt I'll renew in it's current state of I'm paying out of pocket.