Charging on Road Trips for Newbie

[MacO512]

For your first few trips to a super charger sure aim to get there with 20% while you understand the process and the range estimates.

Once you get comfortable with this you can push your target arrival to a lower %.

If you want to minimize time at chargers you really want to aim to arrive closer to a 5% state of charge. The MY charges super fast up to 250kw/h from 5%-30% but then starts charging slower. So ideally you want to always utilize the time charging at that very fast 5-30% area. You also want to depart with less charge.

Also you want to ideally target 250kwh v3 superchargers and less stops at 150kwh v2 or older chargers.

I usually aim to arrive as I said at about 5%. But I plan that for cruising very fast maybe 80mph so probably speeding 5mph or so. Keep an eye on your range as you complete that leg of the trip. If you get into trouble where your estimated arrival creeps to 0% then slow down. EV are much more efficient at slower speeds. If you got into a severe range issue you could slow down to 50mph and you'll probably be able to go 50% farther.

I really enjoy doing road trips in my Tesla. If you can work on eventually doing some of these strategies to arrive closer to 5% I've seen where I cut about half the time off my charging stops.

 

[AudreyHTX1]

I still aim for ~20% upon arrival because I’ve experienced too many cases where the arrival estimate dropped 10% en route, even though I wasn’t driving particularly fast. I’m sure my long distance legs (180-200 miles between charging stops) don’t help, but that’s kind of the way things are in the American inland West.

 

[MacO512]

I still aim for ~20% upon arrival because I’ve experienced too many cases where the arrival estimate dropped 10% en route, even though I wasn’t driving particularly fast. I’m sure my long distance legs (180-200 miles between charging stops) don’t help, but that’s kind of the way things are in the American inland West.

Yeah I have seen where the estimates can swing, it takes a bit to understand why they will and what to keep an eye on for those projections. Early in the drive I can usually tell if an estimate was poor. If I am going fast enough I can always slow way down to easily make it to the destination even with a poor estimate - but that certainly takes practice to get comfortable with.

This process takes more time to keep an eye on with the efficiency graphs, so some people might just prefer the simplicity of charge to 20% or whatever and forget it. But over a 1000-2000 mile trip all those extra charging stops and with lower KWH charging speeds adds up to a significant difference of hours.

 

[fholbert]

Someone posted last month.

At 80mph, figure 2 miles per 1% of charge.​

That‘s a tad rough but easy to figure in your head. I was driving the same 92 mile round trip daily using about 43% of my charge (not a long range model), so on an 200 mile trip at 80mph I’d arrive with about 10% reserve.

 

[hmadsen]

Yeah I have seen where the estimates can swing, it takes a bit to understand why they will and what to keep an eye on for those projections. Early in the drive I can usually tell if an estimate was poor. If I am going fast enough I can always slow way down to easily make it to the destination even with a poor estimate - but that certainly takes practice to get comfortable with.

This process takes more time to keep an eye on with the efficiency graphs, so some people might just prefer the simplicity of charge to 20% or whatever and forget it. But over a 1000-2000 mile trip all those extra charging stops and with lower KWH charging speeds adds up to a significant difference of hours.

To be fair if you go to the power tab it often tells you why it is performing so bad compared to what you expected.

I have seen messages about "Keeping below X mph would have saved you x percent", "x knots of wind from a direction cost x percent on this trip" and so on.

Another thing that seems to really cost you range is if it is raining a fair bit. It seems like rain really takes up extra range.

My car often misjudges the SOT at arrival in the first 10-20 miles of the trip.

Here it is not THAT big of a problem as SuC's are fairly close together, most places, if i would have had 20% SOT when arriving at a certain SuC, i can easily get to the next one with atleast 5%

 

[AudreyHTX1]

When superchargers are 150 miles apart you tend to pay attention to the accuracy of the arrival SoC estimate and keep an eye on it. 50 miles between superchargers on route? Doesn’t really matter.

I do use the energy graph quite a bit on long trips. It even has a few intermittent bugs but overall quite useful.

I really don’t care if I save a few minutes charging by arriving with 5% or 10%. After these long legs we tend to be busy catching up with things including restroom during the charging break.

On rain - I imagine air resistance increases significantly. Yes, I’ve seen driving through a thunderstorm cause a drop in estimated arrival SoC.