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EV trip planner

Would you use such a tool?

  • Yes

    Votes: 35 89.7%
  • No

    Votes: 1 2.6%
  • Maybe

    Votes: 3 7.7%

  • Total voters
    39
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Now I recently discovered the site: EV Trip Planner

I am impressed, for an 18-19 year old CS undergrad, the site is really well built and helpful in general for EV trip planning.

I've interestingly been working on/off on a side project for the past 7 months related to optimizing EV trips. I'm kind of curious how much interest others would have in it... likely it will go on the back burner again since the Fall semester is quickly approaching (and as a CS professor teaching takes up my time while schools in session); however, if there is interest will definitely keep working on scaling it up for more than myself to use. Also, picked up some consulting work that starts next month, so working on things I get paid for takes precedence.

The biggest difference over the other planner will be it generates a path of which chargers to stop at (based on charger type and estimated charge rate) between start/end locations. I also had thoughts of then extending this to allow you to generate a computationally optimized road trip (multiple waypoints). Hope is it could be customized for different vehicle makes/models.

Current issues are speed as seemingly using free/open source mapping tools and trying to run the project on my laptop is not very feasible. Currently only working for US...
 
Nobody so far, as far as I know, has made a calculator that prioritizes chargers by speed: i.e. 1) Supercharger; 2) CHAdeMO; 3) Tesla HPWC; 4) L2 with amp/voltage priority, etc
 
Nobody so far, as far as I know, has made a calculator that prioritizes chargers by speed: i.e. 1) Supercharger; 2) CHAdeMO; 3) Tesla HPWC; 4) L2 with amp/voltage priority, etc

This calculates the path from point a->b based on a given vehicle range and factors a "charge penalty" of time for each charger (and how far it need to travel to get to the next charger) based on it's charge rate. This effectively doesn't prioritize but determines the optimal route in terms of total time including time to charge. There is still room for some tweaking here, but so far the results are promising.
 
It would good also if you could choose single charger or dual chargers. I have dual charges in both of my Model S's and when I use EV Trip Planner or any other it does not accurately show charge times. I know that it is approximately half the time, but it would be nice to have a more accurate time for charging.
 
It would good also if you could choose single charger or dual chargers. I have dual charges in both of my Model S's and when I use EV Trip Planner or any other it does not accurately show charge times. I know that it is approximately half the time, but it would be nice to have a more accurate time for charging.

I'll keep this in mind, the DOE data is very limited so only using a rough charging estimate... hence some of the tweaking needed. But once I start pre-calculating data for different EV models (what chargers they can use, charge rates, etc) will definitely need to remember that. Be good to get more accurate data for this as well.
 
Now I recently discovered the site: EV Trip Planner

I am impressed, for an 18-19 year old CS undergrad, the site is really well built and helpful in general for EV trip planning.

Keep in mind that he wrote the site when in high school… Its been avail for about 3 years now… He's made some changes along the way, but overall is pretty similar to the first release. Ands its been extremely accurate for me.
 
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Keep in mind that he wrote the site when in high school… Its been avail for about 3 years now… He's made some changes along the way, but overall is pretty similar to the first release. Ands its been extremely accurate for me.

Totally appreciate that, actually emailed him to see if he wanted to collaborate... as there are aspects/data in his that I hadn't gotten to. Mind you not sure if my approach is even possible without significantly more computational power than I have $$ to toss at it currently... I have an idea of how to make it run faster but basically requires pre-computing a lot... And that seems like it is likely going to take years to run for a single car on my old desktop computer that's running this currently :(

I did reach out to friends at Google to see if they could put me in contact with someone there as this seemed like something they might be interested in and have the computational resources to possibly make it run fast. So far none of them have responded.
 
Yes, it would be great to factor number and type of chargers in the car into the calculations. Note that this does not apply when DC charging, including superchargers
It would good also if you could choose single charger or dual chargers. I have dual charges in both of my Model S's and when I use EV Trip Planner or any other it does not accurately show charge times. I know that it is approximately half the time, but it would be nice to have a more accurate time for charging.
 
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There are many ways to optimize a trip planner and so many option you could include. I would think it would become a very big project trying to support different cars and different charging speeds of different charging stations.
One issue I see with sophisticated planning is that it gives you a sense of increased accuracy but it will fail to meet that accuracy in real life. Wind is a big factor in energy usage and cannot be predicted. Weather conditions also play a big role. These things are very hard to gauge. What I'm getting at is that you can spend a lot of time and effort on crating a sophisticated tool accounting for all the different chargers, but all these effort will not get you any near the real usage.

Frankly I also don't feel comfortable relying on anything but Superchargers when I travel. Other charging stations are just not reliable enough. Most CHADeMO stations have one charger. If there is another car charging, you are already 20-30 min off your plan. Almost all CHADeMos limit to 30 min, so you have to wait in the car and restart at least twice. L2 stations are very random in terms of reliability. Some are great, other are constantly taken or broken. I lost count how many times I arrived at a public L2 station and couldn't charge for various reasons. Out of more than 300 times I charged at Superchargers, only once was I not able to charge because of a huge storm that caused a town wide black out. Bottom line: I would not bother creating a trip planner that uses public chargers.
 
@David99 Curiously enough, my results for the couple of routes I've generated so far have almost exclusively used Superchargers. I think this has to do with the fact that no other charger options current available can charge near the same rate so not effective to charge with anything else currently.

But thanks for the insight/feedback!
 
When I leave the Supercharger supported routes, I usually go on PlugShare and manually look for chargers. Yes that's time consuming, but I specifically look at the rating and feedback each possible charging station has and based on that I decide if it's even a valid option.
 
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When I leave the Supercharger supported routes, I usually go on PlugShare and manually look for chargers. Yes that's time consuming, but I specifically look at the rating and feedback each possible charging station has and based on that I decide if it's even a valid option.

I was trying to get PlugShare to fund this project and provide me access to their API, as it's more complete and includes factors such as rating & feedback. They wanted a more fleshed out prototype before they would engage + wanted to eventually build routes that factored in rating. Their lead developer is the one that turned me onto the DOE data set, which has some flaws but was good enough to at least get me started and give me a better idea of the technical hurdles this project has.
 
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Including PlugShare rating would be an awesome option. I understand PlugShare is careful about letting other use their data. After all that's their asset.

Another thing I miss with EVTripplanner.com is the ability to put in different start or desired arrival times. For longer road trips I want to know where I am at what time of the day. It would help me customize my plans. Some Superchargers are great during the day, but everything is closed at night, not even a bathroom.
 
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Worked great on my pc planning my trip to Las Vegas last January. I could not get it to load in the car, but had memorized each stop and photos or street views so it was perfect. I also used it on the trip to Oregon last month. Was very accurate and adjustable. Will definitely use it again in the future.
 
Worked great on my pc planning my trip to Las Vegas last January. I could not get it to load in the car, but had memorized each stop and photos or street views so it was perfect. I also used it on the trip to Oregon last month. Was very accurate and adjustable. Will definitely use it again in the future.

This thread is about a new kind of tool I'm slowly working on, which is in no way related to or associated with evtripplanner. Nice to know an existing option is helpful/useful...
 
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