Miami to Boston

[EdA]

ThosEM. I am planning on going straight from Milford and recharging overnight at the Boston hotel. That should do it.

Whether you take I95 "all the way" or I91->I84->I90 you are going to encounter HILLS which suck range, something you may not be familiar with in FL.
This is an interesting route to take in the winter where you not only have the hills but decreasing temperature!

So a full (or near full) charge is recommended...

 

[JohnQ]

Whether you take I95 "all the way" or I91->I84->I90 you are going to encounter HILLS which suck range, something you may not be familiar with in FL.
This is an interesting route to take in the winter where you not only have the hills but decreasing temperature!

So a full (or near full) charge is recommended...

Not that it matters much now but Milford to Boston via 91/84 is a piece of cake. Darien to Boston is easily doable by the same route. My monthly trip from Fairfield Cty to Boston is the same distance as Darien and I've made it at 70 mph in below zero weather.

 

[mgodfre3]

This is one concern I have, I live in orlando and would like to travel to Hilton Head Island sometimes, the problem is I am buying a 60kwh. Does anyone think I can make the trip from St. Augustine to Savanah at 70mph? Or is that probably not possible.p, I noticed only those with 85kwh are attempting the trip.

 

[xhawk101]

This is one concern I have, I live in orlando and would like to travel to Hilton Head Island sometimes, the problem is I am buying a 60kwh. Does anyone think I can make the trip from St. Augustine to Savanah at 70mph? Or is that probably not possible.p, I noticed only those with 85kwh are attempting the trip.

Probably doable at 65 mph with Max charge +_ for headwind

 

[kvietor]

This is one concern I have, I live in orlando and would like to travel to Hilton Head Island sometimes, the problem is I am buying a 60kwh. Does anyone think I can make the trip from St. Augustine to Savanah at 70mph? Or is that probably not possible.p, I noticed only those with 85kwh are attempting the trip.

I just got back from DC. Charged up at Savannah to 238 miles rated and arrived at St Augustine with about 56 miles remaining. I set the cruise control to 68. Hope that helps. BTW we had some real heavy rain that slowed us down but didn't seem to affect the miles much.

 

[NigelM]

This is one concern I have, I live in orlando and would like to travel to Hilton Head Island sometimes, the problem is I am buying a 60kwh. Does anyone think I can make the trip from St. Augustine to Savanah at 70mph? Or is that probably not possible.p, I noticed only those with 85kwh are attempting the trip.

The answer is "probably"; however, with a 60kWh pack you'll probably need to be under 70mph and keep an eye on you average mileage use on the energy graph. Weather is definitely the biggest factor when it comes to impacts on range.

Note that the Savannah charger is at the airport and not in the city so you have 171 miles between superchargers. Also bear in mind the paucity of charging opportunities on Hilton Head; it's doable but needs a little planning.

 

[Chas F]

This is one concern I have, I live in orlando and would like to travel to Hilton Head Island sometimes, the problem is I am buying a 60kwh. Does anyone think I can make the trip from St. Augustine to Savanah at 70mph? Or is that probably not possible.p, I noticed only those with 85kwh are attempting the trip.

I've done the Savannah-St Augustine stretch both ways in my MS 60 earlier this summer. I had somewhat ideal conditions each time (which is not unusual in FL). At 70+ mph, range mode, 92 deg temps, no rain, charged to 195 rated range...I was able to keep my wh/mi at around 290... Sometimes better. This got me between Superchargers with about 10 mi to spare. I know this seems close, but I could have easily controlled my speed to cherry-pick how much buffer to arrive with. You just have to keep an eye on your projected range. It was easier to do than I expected. I chose 10 mi rr and hit it on the money both times.

 

[julioalonso]

I ended not going to Boston and staying a bit more in NYC and didn't blog the way back. But, I have updated the google spreadsheet I used for planning and that I carried with me on the trip with actual figures for all the trip, so you can see what I was planning and what actually happened. No planning for the way back since we changed our plans all together.

You can find the spreadsheet here: Tesla Miami - New York, August 2014 (shared) - Google Sheets

What I have learned:

1. No need to try to charge as much as possible each time, just what you need to the next stop plus a safety margin. For us that was typically something between 30-40 miles. A couple of times we had some miscalculations and were happy we had the extra miles.
2. It always takes longer than you had planned. Specially charging, unless you arrive with very little left.
3. We prefer more stops and faster average speed.
4. Don't know why, but I always got to drive the segments where I had to control the speed and make sure we had enough miles or where there was heavy rain or traffic jams, and my wife always got the short segments with plenty of miles and no worries. And we were taking consecutive turns, not choosing.

I hope it is useful.

 

[DJ Frustration]

Awesome spreadsheet!

 

[Brit4864]

I've done the DC trip from here in South FL via Superchargers and a couple of times to SC/NC before and found it was perfectly ok. As others have said, the longest stretch is St Augustine - Savannah. I even did it to SC without Superchargers north of St Augustine last October. Gets fun trying to find places to charge!

 

[paulkva]

I recently made a similar trip in reverse - DC to Ft. Lauderdale and back - and I found that evtripper.com was great at predicting how much buffer to add to each leg. I wrote its predictions for each leg on the back of a business card and kept it in the cubby under my center screen, and simply referred to it each time I stopped. I never used more range than its predictions, and I usually used only a little less. And I was not at all conservative with speed - I easily kept up with traffic.