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In-Car Nav & Bike Rack

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ammulder

3,X,FSD Beta
Supporting Member
Apr 11, 2019
1,585
6,307
Philly area
I'm about to take my first Tesla road trip with a hitch-mounted bike rack & 4 bikes. I assume there will be a range hit on account of it.

Will the in-car nav plot supercharger stops well enough with the bike rack? I mean, I'm guessing starting out it will plan for the first stop to be somewhere I can't actually reach due to the range hit from the bikes. Will it adjust quickly enough based on my actual range/energy use? Or will it constantly be over-predicting how far I can get such that I need to use something else to plan charging stops?
 
It won't take the extra drag into account at all, and 4 bikes should provide quite a bit of extra drag. You can use third party planners like a better route planner to up your "reference efficiency" if you want to compare against the in-car nav. How much you bring that up from reference due to the extra 4 bikes, I don't know. Maybe 20-30%? Whatever you choose (or go for a significantly long enough drive to test your efficiency but route and current weather will sway that test), benchmark your numbers against actual efficiency use at the first stop and adjust accordingly.

Here's a thought where you can run a few scenarios...on your PC/Mac....setup ABRP as you are comfortable with the upped reference efficiency and note the first supercharger stop and expected arrival SOC. Then walk out to the car and setup the in-nav to navigate to the first supercharger ABRP suggests and note the difference in destination SOC.

On the trip, I would suggest putting in the ABRP supercharger suggestions as your destinations so you can take advantage of battery prep (especially useful in winter but good recommendation even in the summer).
 
Yeah. I guess I was hoping the nav would "notice" the new average efficiency after a while... say, after the 30 miles it shows on the energy screen... and base its estimations on that (until the bikes are gone and I've gone another 30 miles or whatever). But it sounds like you're saying that's not the case.
 
Well, you bring up a good point and I'd have to think about that. I have no experience or confidence saying it wouldn't do exactly what you're saying you hope it will. I know it does take into consideration driving style in the energy app so maybe that's applied to future stops but I'm skeptical. Maybe someone else who has put bikes on their back can give a first hand experience.
 
Bike rack on my X I barely noticed change. On my Refresh S it added maybe 30-40 wh/mi.

As discussed car won’t know anything. And it won’t account for access to SuperCharger. If you pull in really really tight it might reach.

If nobody is around just pull up sideways to plug in.
 
@mswlogo has a great point that you are going to have to deal with, charging. Those supercharger cords are crazy short, almost just long enough to reach if you back up to the concrete parking stop. Whether or not your hitch carrier will clear the parking stop or, since it's 4 bikes you're carrying which means it has a pretty long length, allows you to back up enough without hitting the supercharger itself, is something you might want to check and plan for.
 
Yeah, as I see it there are 3 options:
  1. park sideways if location is not busy
  2. take off bikes while charging
  3. hope that the locations I end up at are the kind where one unit is on the side of the parking spot instead of at the rear... I've seen a number of sites like that but sadly never recorded *where*
I would be shocked if I could get close enough to one of the back-of-parking-spot units for the cable to reach -- I feel like usually the cable barely reaches with nothing on the back. I'll try it once, though, to be sure. :)
 
Yeah, as I see it there are 3 options:
  1. ...
  2. ...
  3. hope that the locations I end up at are the kind where one unit is on the side of the parking spot instead of at the rear... I've seen a number of sites like that but sadly never recorded *where*
I would be shocked if I could get close enough to one of the back-of-parking-spot units for the cable to reach -- I feel like usually the cable barely reaches with nothing on the back. I'll try it once, though, to be sure. :)

I charged at the Lumberton, NC, supercharger yesterday, and noticed that another car was able to back a 2-bike rack up without hitting the post, and they were charging.
 
OK, update after actually making a drive with the bike rack:
  • I was able to squeeze into all the supercharger spots I tried, though sometimes only by backing up until a bike tire gently touched whatever post was at the back of the parking spot (with the help of one of my kids as a spotter). It was never the structure of the supercharger itself that was in the way as they're in-between spots enough, it was the posts saying "Tesla charging only" or the equivalent. One time at a pretty lightly used location I tried angling across two linked v2 spots, and that made it much easier.
  • 4 of 6 supercharger locations we tried had a spot with the charger structure on the side instead of the rear, which was ideal (one had two such spots). It would, of course, be nice if people *without* a trailer or hitch mounted item didn't use those spots -- ask me how I know. :)
  • Best of all, the in-car nav adjusted to our reduced efficiency (the energy screen showed 380-450 Wh/mi for the Model X with 4 bikes, on the high end during the more mountainous sections). For the first supercharger the in-car nav initially predicted 55% on arrival and we were actually at 43%, yikes. After that one, I just put in the final destination and let it pick chargers along the route and it was much more accurate (within perhaps 3%, seeming to depend mostly on whether I drove faster or slower than expected for that leg). So that was a pleasant surprise -- if anything I would only have needed to manually pick the first charging stop and then it adjusted. (Unfortunately, I didn't try resetting the trip after an hour to see how quickly it made the adjustment.) I don't think it said I was ready to continue the trip until there was at least 15% predicted for the next supercharger stop, so that seemed plenty accurate.
Finally, I was happy to discover that the big state park a mile from our destination now has a number of free level 2 chargers, hardware courtesy of Rivian and energy courtesy of others. It's $10 to get into the park for a day, but then you can leave the car there as long as you need. Nice!
 
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