ℬête Noire
Active Member
Freezing temps do up the stakes a lot.I took a long road trip over the Thanksgiving week this year (LA to Nashville and back) in my LR 3. The distance between superchargers from Minor to Springfield Mo. is 240 miles. I charged to 100% at Minor. On the way to Springfield we caught the south-end of winter storm that was hitting well to the north. The temps were below 30 and there was some freezing rain. We went from an expected 12% charge remaining to a "keep speed below 55" warning with nearly 100 miles to go. Around that time a semi doing between 70-75 passed me. I jumped in behind him and followed him at 70+ until about 4 miles to the supercharger in Springfield. Pulled in with 4 miles remaining. My wife was a good sport about it calling it "an adventure." Truth is, I was so stressed about it and became fixated on "making it" that it didn't even occur to me to just search for an alternative charging option. That was stupid but in hindsight, it's part of my paradigm shift of driving ICEs to driving (and surviving) EVs.
Yes, with a co-pilot to search plugshare.com it is a lot easier. You can [safely] locate some Plan B options without having to pull over. Spouse had never used it before so it was a learning experience. We had L2 options to be sure. About 40ish miles out I was feeling confident about having 2-3 miles buffer to work, this wasn't my first rodeo. However she'd located two L2 places and I was going to turn off because she was feeling the pressure a lot more than me. Only I miss read the road and missed the turn. It would have been about 2 miles extra driving, due to a divided highway that was fully split apart at that point. That's something of a risk of diverting for an L2, when you're cutting it close already turning off generally becomes a commitment to the new option due to slow-down/speed-up loses.
We passed another L2 turn-off option a little further down the highway but by then the spouse was more willing to just let me run with the initial plan. If we made it we made it, if I ran out of charge she'd have something to hold over me for years? Win-win I guess, right?
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