While it's still fresh in my mind I thought I would post my observations of driving our Model X in some winter driving conditions over the last week. Note that I am a fairly new Tesla owner (since March) and we have about 8k miles now on the car (90D - see sig). We live in the foothills of the Sierra NV but rarely see more than a few inches of snow a year. I do venture into the snow more than 30 times a year, but admittedly I try to avoid the times when its coming down.
Our trip involved temperatures from 26-44F, heavy snow for about 4 hours, chain controls, 150 miles of snow driving, heavy winds, large amounts of thick frost on one morning and some heavy rains too. All the typical stuff of winter driving, but luckily compressed into a few short days that I don't have to live with day by day like many of you that live away from the west coast.
I am posting my observations here. Some of them may be tempered by my lack of knowledge of how the car should work and for that I appreciate any feedback. Hopefully you can help me get more value from my car and at the same time, this post could be helpful for others that might experience the same situations.
First off the car performed pretty well overall, and at times stellarly. There are some issues that need to be resolved though, so everything was not perfect from my standpoint.
Handling in snow - IMHO the car excelled here. It was very pleasant to drive in the snow. We varied from freshly plowed roads, to roads with 3-4" of packed snow to about 6" of unpacked snow. Did not try any icy roads so have no opinion here. The car tracked very well. Speeds were up to 45 mph and never felt I had any loss of control. Once when it was clear in all directions on a slight incline with a 5 mph rolling speed, I punched it to see how it handled. It accelerated smartly and never lost traction or direction. Very impressive (standard 20" wheels and Conti tires and no traction devices). I might add at the one chain inspection station we passed they wanted to know if I had chains. I just stated AWD and M&S tires. The guy probably had never seen a Model X before so he looked at me funny and said to proceed. They were being very meticulous though as about every third car was being turned around.
Handling in Cross Winds - Here we experienced about 20 mph head and cross winds. The car was very stable but I can tell you winds really effect efficiency. On one 150 mile leg we were supposed to finish at 17% SOC and actually finished at 12%. And that is only because I got behind a semi for 75 miles and drafted. I put on TACC with the spacing of 1. Had I not done that we might have not made it at all. We were will into the 500 Wh/mi where normal for us is 330 Wh/mile. Drafting got it down to the low 400's/high 300's. There was a bit of a grade (1000 feet) and speeds were at 65 mph. But a 20 mph headwind was like 85 mph at 65 mph actually, with none of the quick travel time love. So the Model X IMHO is prone to wind conditions more than you might expect. Plan accordingly. BTW while not my first choice for travel of safety, we did end up using the drafting technique a number of times to make sure we arrived at over 10% SOC.
Defrosting - This was an area I had a lot of problems with and can use some help here. Note we have the Winter Package on our Model X. The day we had to leave and had a 170 mile segment with a 1700 foot uphill elevation change on two lane highways with a 20 mph headwind, we naturally wanted to charge to 100%. For some reason we could not get the car charged to higher than 98% on 110 volts (we charged for 4 days). I tried resetting it a number of times the day before. Anyway this day we woke up with about 1/8" of frost on the entire car. My first concern was to clear the windshield with the car plugged in so I would loose as little of my SOC as possible. It was 26 F outside in an overcast sky but high humidity, but no fog.
I got in the car and turned on the windshield defroster. After serveral minutes I could not feel any warm air even though the fan was at 11. I tried different settings on the cabin temp from 75, 60, Lo etc but there was no change. I never got any warm arm that I could detect and the windshield did not defrost. I ended up heating up the cabin which seemed to have more effect and combined that with using the windshield wipers and the wiper fluid to soften the frost enough were the cabin temp could clear the rest. Interestingly the area around the camera cleared almost immediately.
The rear window heater seemed to work pretty fast. It defrosted the window in about 5 minutes. The mirror heaters worked well too but I could only operate one at a time. If you turned one on and then selected the other mirror, the first mirror heater turned off. I have not read the manual to see what it has to say about this but I suspect its normal.
Seat heaters - In order to try to save energy we kept the cabin temp off or real low for much of one leg. Being that it was 28 F out, we needed some extra warmth. We tried the seat heaters (front) and found that a setting of 1 was very noticeable for longer periods. They felt warm enough to us. We we by ourselves so we did not try the 2nd or 3 row seats. I also say no need for using the heated steering wheel and I needed the energy, so that did not get tried out.
Cabin warmth - Overall it was acceptable but not stellar. I usually find a temp of 75F to be good winter and summer. I just could not stay warm at this setting. In fact as the temperature outside fell to around 40 degrees or less, this was more pronounced. Another annoying thing was that my legs on the drivers side were always cold. I really could not feel a draft there, but the console felt cold. Even turning up the temp to 78F did not really help. We encountered another Model X in Elko, NV and they complained about the same thing when I mentioned it. Just seems to be on the drivers side. I also have a bit of a gap in my drivers window at the rear that gets some intrusion during cross winds which does not help either.
Pro tip: If your passenger is getting warm and you are still cold, I un-synced the temps and jacked mine up to 78 while decreasing the passenger side to 73 F. She was happy about that and the load on the car was actually much less. Go figure.
Efficiency - Twice we made a few short trips into town. Less than 5 miles each way with a 500 foot elevation change. Temp was around 32F on one trip and 28F on another. In both cases we were greeted by the lack of regen, which was to be expected. However we lost 8% of our SOC for each of these two 10 mile round trips. I suspect that was the battery having to heat itself but that was a pretty big impact IMHO.
Charging - There was no option to charge at our destination other than 110V. We were there for 4 days so it worked out OK even at 3 mph. See my comment about about not getting above 98% for some reason, even when I slid the bar all the way over. BTW it really wants to snap back to something less than 100%. I wish they would let you select Max and 90% as buttons as well as the slider. Anyway the cold did not seem to hamper the slow charging. Not sure what would have happened if we had a higher charger. And of course whenever we got below 15% during the trip we were warned to charge soon.
Windshield Wipers - They were not to die for but acceptable. I don't have as much streaking as others do. I tried the wiper heaters but just for a few minutes. They never really stuck on my so that was not a good test. As far as clearing rain of different rates it was acceptable but never really seemed to be the 'right rate'. I might need to read the manual a bit more on the settings but it was not intuitive. I found myself clearing the windshield manually way more than I should have. In snow it was worse. I basically just had to turn them on to the first click and let it swipe once or twice. It cleared the snow pretty well and pushed it off to the side. Never had it pile up. The snow rate was about 2-3" per hour from my estimate.
Accumulation of Snow - We were always driving and I never had a chance for much snow to accumulate. It seemed to either move off the upper windshield or melt from the cabin temp (temp outside was 29-32F). When we got to a lower elevation I did notice more slush coming down onto the windshield in the wiper area.
Intrusion of Rain - Nothing while driving. Did not stop in the rain to try the FWD. Others have reported their experiences on TMC.
Our trip involved temperatures from 26-44F, heavy snow for about 4 hours, chain controls, 150 miles of snow driving, heavy winds, large amounts of thick frost on one morning and some heavy rains too. All the typical stuff of winter driving, but luckily compressed into a few short days that I don't have to live with day by day like many of you that live away from the west coast.
I am posting my observations here. Some of them may be tempered by my lack of knowledge of how the car should work and for that I appreciate any feedback. Hopefully you can help me get more value from my car and at the same time, this post could be helpful for others that might experience the same situations.
First off the car performed pretty well overall, and at times stellarly. There are some issues that need to be resolved though, so everything was not perfect from my standpoint.
Handling in snow - IMHO the car excelled here. It was very pleasant to drive in the snow. We varied from freshly plowed roads, to roads with 3-4" of packed snow to about 6" of unpacked snow. Did not try any icy roads so have no opinion here. The car tracked very well. Speeds were up to 45 mph and never felt I had any loss of control. Once when it was clear in all directions on a slight incline with a 5 mph rolling speed, I punched it to see how it handled. It accelerated smartly and never lost traction or direction. Very impressive (standard 20" wheels and Conti tires and no traction devices). I might add at the one chain inspection station we passed they wanted to know if I had chains. I just stated AWD and M&S tires. The guy probably had never seen a Model X before so he looked at me funny and said to proceed. They were being very meticulous though as about every third car was being turned around.
Handling in Cross Winds - Here we experienced about 20 mph head and cross winds. The car was very stable but I can tell you winds really effect efficiency. On one 150 mile leg we were supposed to finish at 17% SOC and actually finished at 12%. And that is only because I got behind a semi for 75 miles and drafted. I put on TACC with the spacing of 1. Had I not done that we might have not made it at all. We were will into the 500 Wh/mi where normal for us is 330 Wh/mile. Drafting got it down to the low 400's/high 300's. There was a bit of a grade (1000 feet) and speeds were at 65 mph. But a 20 mph headwind was like 85 mph at 65 mph actually, with none of the quick travel time love. So the Model X IMHO is prone to wind conditions more than you might expect. Plan accordingly. BTW while not my first choice for travel of safety, we did end up using the drafting technique a number of times to make sure we arrived at over 10% SOC.
Defrosting - This was an area I had a lot of problems with and can use some help here. Note we have the Winter Package on our Model X. The day we had to leave and had a 170 mile segment with a 1700 foot uphill elevation change on two lane highways with a 20 mph headwind, we naturally wanted to charge to 100%. For some reason we could not get the car charged to higher than 98% on 110 volts (we charged for 4 days). I tried resetting it a number of times the day before. Anyway this day we woke up with about 1/8" of frost on the entire car. My first concern was to clear the windshield with the car plugged in so I would loose as little of my SOC as possible. It was 26 F outside in an overcast sky but high humidity, but no fog.
I got in the car and turned on the windshield defroster. After serveral minutes I could not feel any warm air even though the fan was at 11. I tried different settings on the cabin temp from 75, 60, Lo etc but there was no change. I never got any warm arm that I could detect and the windshield did not defrost. I ended up heating up the cabin which seemed to have more effect and combined that with using the windshield wipers and the wiper fluid to soften the frost enough were the cabin temp could clear the rest. Interestingly the area around the camera cleared almost immediately.
The rear window heater seemed to work pretty fast. It defrosted the window in about 5 minutes. The mirror heaters worked well too but I could only operate one at a time. If you turned one on and then selected the other mirror, the first mirror heater turned off. I have not read the manual to see what it has to say about this but I suspect its normal.
Seat heaters - In order to try to save energy we kept the cabin temp off or real low for much of one leg. Being that it was 28 F out, we needed some extra warmth. We tried the seat heaters (front) and found that a setting of 1 was very noticeable for longer periods. They felt warm enough to us. We we by ourselves so we did not try the 2nd or 3 row seats. I also say no need for using the heated steering wheel and I needed the energy, so that did not get tried out.
Cabin warmth - Overall it was acceptable but not stellar. I usually find a temp of 75F to be good winter and summer. I just could not stay warm at this setting. In fact as the temperature outside fell to around 40 degrees or less, this was more pronounced. Another annoying thing was that my legs on the drivers side were always cold. I really could not feel a draft there, but the console felt cold. Even turning up the temp to 78F did not really help. We encountered another Model X in Elko, NV and they complained about the same thing when I mentioned it. Just seems to be on the drivers side. I also have a bit of a gap in my drivers window at the rear that gets some intrusion during cross winds which does not help either.
Pro tip: If your passenger is getting warm and you are still cold, I un-synced the temps and jacked mine up to 78 while decreasing the passenger side to 73 F. She was happy about that and the load on the car was actually much less. Go figure.
Efficiency - Twice we made a few short trips into town. Less than 5 miles each way with a 500 foot elevation change. Temp was around 32F on one trip and 28F on another. In both cases we were greeted by the lack of regen, which was to be expected. However we lost 8% of our SOC for each of these two 10 mile round trips. I suspect that was the battery having to heat itself but that was a pretty big impact IMHO.
Charging - There was no option to charge at our destination other than 110V. We were there for 4 days so it worked out OK even at 3 mph. See my comment about about not getting above 98% for some reason, even when I slid the bar all the way over. BTW it really wants to snap back to something less than 100%. I wish they would let you select Max and 90% as buttons as well as the slider. Anyway the cold did not seem to hamper the slow charging. Not sure what would have happened if we had a higher charger. And of course whenever we got below 15% during the trip we were warned to charge soon.
Windshield Wipers - They were not to die for but acceptable. I don't have as much streaking as others do. I tried the wiper heaters but just for a few minutes. They never really stuck on my so that was not a good test. As far as clearing rain of different rates it was acceptable but never really seemed to be the 'right rate'. I might need to read the manual a bit more on the settings but it was not intuitive. I found myself clearing the windshield manually way more than I should have. In snow it was worse. I basically just had to turn them on to the first click and let it swipe once or twice. It cleared the snow pretty well and pushed it off to the side. Never had it pile up. The snow rate was about 2-3" per hour from my estimate.
Accumulation of Snow - We were always driving and I never had a chance for much snow to accumulate. It seemed to either move off the upper windshield or melt from the cabin temp (temp outside was 29-32F). When we got to a lower elevation I did notice more slush coming down onto the windshield in the wiper area.
Intrusion of Rain - Nothing while driving. Did not stop in the rain to try the FWD. Others have reported their experiences on TMC.
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