It is late 2021. Why is the "Beta Trip Planner" that is built into navigation still so awful at choosing Superchargers?! Here's what just happened today.
I am on my way home from a large 1,800 mile vacation trip. I dropped my wife off at the Los Angeles airport this morning, since she hates road trips and didn't want to sit through the two days of driving back from Los Angeles to Boise. So she gets to be done with it while I enjoy my road tripping. Bear in mind here, that I couldn't pre-plan the exact first Supercharger stop ahead of time, since I didn't know what my state of charge would be when I got to the airport this morning, so I figured I would just throw in Carson City, NV, where my stop tonight will be, and let the Nav pick the first place. That part should be easy enough, right? Instant fail.
As I pulled away from the curb at departures, with about 50% battery, I put it in, and it said to drive straight to the Mojave, CA Supercharger, arriving with 4%. Are you F'ing KIDDING ME?!?! There should be NO excuse now for EVER recommending someone to skip Superchargers to arrive with 4%. Period. This should have been fixed YEARS ago!
That insane route is passing by six Superchargers along the way to make me white knuckle and clench to barely make it to Mojave. And I was driving at this point, so I could only take small glances to find something closer to reroute to. I went to Grenada Hills to fill up for a while first.
But this makes me really angry. A new EV owner wouldn't necessarily know how pointlessly terrible that recommendation is, or that there are much better options, and that they need to cancel/override what the car is recommending to make this trip work reasonably. This is the kind of thing that hurts the reputation of EVs and intentionally produces range anxiety when there is no reason to.
It is because of this programmed-in setting of using the least number of stops possible, but it takes that to these kinds of ridiculous extremes that are really bad for new owners. A fairly straightforward setting they could make available to the users is just a minimum threshold %. If it tries to pick a route that arrives with less than XX%, no-go. Redo it to make larger arrival margins that meet the minimum user threshold. We should be able to set that at something reasonable, like 10-20%.
I am on my way home from a large 1,800 mile vacation trip. I dropped my wife off at the Los Angeles airport this morning, since she hates road trips and didn't want to sit through the two days of driving back from Los Angeles to Boise. So she gets to be done with it while I enjoy my road tripping. Bear in mind here, that I couldn't pre-plan the exact first Supercharger stop ahead of time, since I didn't know what my state of charge would be when I got to the airport this morning, so I figured I would just throw in Carson City, NV, where my stop tonight will be, and let the Nav pick the first place. That part should be easy enough, right? Instant fail.
As I pulled away from the curb at departures, with about 50% battery, I put it in, and it said to drive straight to the Mojave, CA Supercharger, arriving with 4%. Are you F'ing KIDDING ME?!?! There should be NO excuse now for EVER recommending someone to skip Superchargers to arrive with 4%. Period. This should have been fixed YEARS ago!
That insane route is passing by six Superchargers along the way to make me white knuckle and clench to barely make it to Mojave. And I was driving at this point, so I could only take small glances to find something closer to reroute to. I went to Grenada Hills to fill up for a while first.
But this makes me really angry. A new EV owner wouldn't necessarily know how pointlessly terrible that recommendation is, or that there are much better options, and that they need to cancel/override what the car is recommending to make this trip work reasonably. This is the kind of thing that hurts the reputation of EVs and intentionally produces range anxiety when there is no reason to.
It is because of this programmed-in setting of using the least number of stops possible, but it takes that to these kinds of ridiculous extremes that are really bad for new owners. A fairly straightforward setting they could make available to the users is just a minimum threshold %. If it tries to pick a route that arrives with less than XX%, no-go. Redo it to make larger arrival margins that meet the minimum user threshold. We should be able to set that at something reasonable, like 10-20%.