We stayed overnight at Murdo last week. We stayed at the Range Country Hotel, which is where the Supercharger is. Cost us around $89 bucks. Nice hotel. Nice people. The guy at the desk said they see a few Teslas a day there. Good breakfast in the morning. The whole town shuts down around 10pm.
The owner beckoned me in for the free breakfast even though I was just passing through. This summer, a local who stopped to talk to me who is friends with the owner said they were averaging one a day, so things are picking up!
They are great people at that location. They told me about the park down the road, which I enjoyed with my family while my Model S was charging.
Robyn (front desk) was very kind. She was very interested in the car and seemed to know quite a bit already. Restroom also available for use too. One other Tesla charging the two times we stopped there this summer.
stopped here in early March when passing thru the state. About 9pm and it was dark and cold but the gal the hotel was super nice let us use the bathroom. Seemed very up on Tesla. I walked down the street to the Buffalo Bar a really cool old place. The bartender looked right out of Duck Dynasty but had a great time talking with him about Murdo as he has been there 30+ years. A real slice of americana. Population less than 600.
Has anyone driving through this route in the last few days? How is the weather and road conditions? I've done that route many times, just never in the winter with snow
I can tell you that it's been frigid here a few hours to the west-- negative 25F last night. Murdo actually looks relatively mild next week, comparatively. Efficiency in SD is amongst the worst in the country approaching 400Wh/m on decent days. In the summer, I allow for a 30%+ buffer, so plan on near range charging and favoring seat heaters. SafeTravel USA
Thanks so much. Yes even in good conditions I always get pretty high energy usage. It seems no matter if I go one way or the other I always have head wind or whatever it is, it's always higher than I would think it should be. Thanks for the link. That is a very useful website.
I was there two days ago and discovered that SC 2 had gone down in the previous 3 days. 1A gave 115 kW and 1B gave 24. Tesla central is aware and I emailed the regional SC program director as well. A stall in Rapid City also threw errors but I didn’t investigate.
In the mean time, they should list Murdo as "Reduced Service," that way people will know to charge to near full at Rapid City and/or Oacoma. They really need to get this fixed and/or open the Wall supercharger before winter or else those will be extremely difficult legs. Even someone driving a 100D would have trouble making it from Oacoma to Rapid City on a cold, windy winter day.
I barely made it at 90% from Murdo to Rapid last fall when it was raining and windy. 120 miles with a head wind is brutal. I was was down to 65mph for most of the trip, which is barely moving when the slow lane is 80. I hope to see Wall and NDs superchargers go up very soon as the last 4 winters haven't been fun at all!
Same here, although my last trip was in May, so I "only" had to slow down the last few miles. Plus, I'm used to draining my 70D down to 20-30 mi remaining (which is half of my 2011 Leaf's range)
1B definitely had some debris in the nozzle and was only putting out 20KW. I just moved over to the North and got 110 KW. Maybe on the return trip I’ll try to clean out the nozzle.
There were bugs in two nozzles that I was able to clean (visually) with a non-conductive stick. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get 110KW, so the cleaning probably didn't help much.