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MX 100D Trip from NJ to Florida in winter

Do I trust the tesla navigation and drive OR should i really be doing something else?


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Hi Guys,

Here is my dilemma. I used to get 340-380 Wh/mile but in winter, it has been hovering around 460-490 wh/mile. I have a trip to Florida (NJ to Fort Lauderdale) - now the trip planner tells me to make about 10 charging stops but I am nervous.

What do you guys think? Please help.

PS: This would be during spring break so the weather maybe a bit warmer, but still....

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If the road conditions are dry, over the course of this long of a trip your consumption will be closer to your summer driving. It’s the cold car in the morning that especially gets you in the winter, along with wet and/or snowy conditions and winds.

I’d plan out a few places to eat in advance. These would be your longer stops where you’ll have time to charge closer to 100% and skip the best supercharger. But other than that, the onboard computer has been excellent at predicting destination chargers this winter! Way better than last winter.
 
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I find on trips to Florida (from eastern PA) the trip planner likes to run the battery as far down as possible then charge up to 80%+ before beginning the next leg. When routing keep in mind the other superchargers not included in the calculated route will no longer appear on the map. To see them the trip will need to be cancelled.

I manually route from supercharger to supercharger as I go instead of inputting the start in PA and destination in Florida. Then use the energy graph to make certain the cars consumption is staying within the limits needed to reach the next SC. If I see I’m consuming too much, I can pull back to a closer location. If the chart is showing better than expected consumption I may elect to press on to the next SC. Remember charging from low to 60% takes much less time than 60% to full. More frequent charging stops with shorter drive time in between at faster travel speed will make for a shorter total trip time vs less frequent charging stops, driving slower and charging longer. Best argument for this fact is the car can charge at over 350 mph but can’t drive that fast. Bjorn did a full analysis.

In winter stay above 20%. Sometimes the auto routing will allow below 20%. One traffic jam from a wreck or volume and you could be in trouble. When a 100D stops moving in extreme cold the battery will start to chill as it’s no longer receiving waste heat from the motors. This can cause the “my car shut off at 17%” posts seen more commonly in winter on the forum. Low state of charge + cold battery = cell voltage potentially dropping below safety limits if a sudden draw of power happens (acceleration). Battery management shuts the car down, bad time.

Try to trip plan to the largest SC installations. In winter the smaller locations though remote will be full of smaller battery Teslas charging to 100% especially down in the Carolinas due to the longer distance between locations.
 
It is definitely going to be warmer, so the further you go, the better. Just slow it down a little bit at the beginning to try to stretch it out.

Look for Superchargers with good food and plan some longer stops there.

This is a 1200 mile trip and is 22 hours with no stops. So don't expect to do it in one day.
 
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Thank you guys. This helps a lot.

EVSteve,
Your point about the shut-off at 17% thing is invaluable. I will be cautious. Also, the fact that I have to cancel the trip to see other SCs is another thing I didn't think of :(

So should I be using something like google maps for routing and then just keep an eye on the tesla nav for SuperChargers and stop whenever I am touching say 25 ~ 30% ?
 
It is definitely going to be warmer, so the further you go, the better. Just slow it down a little bit at the beginning to try to stretch it out.

Look for Superchargers with good food and plan some longer stops there.

This is a 1200 mile trip and is 22 hours with no stops. So don't expect to do it in one day.

Thanks, yeah I have about 2 days to do this (one way). I was thinking of leaving early am, drive for about 12~13 hours , stop overnight and then continue the next day.
 
Thank you guys. This helps a lot.

EVSteve,
Your point about the shut-off at 17% thing is invaluable. I will be cautious. Also, the fact that I have to cancel the trip to see other SCs is another thing I didn't think of :(

So should I be using something like google maps for routing and then just keep an eye on the tesla nav for SuperChargers and stop whenever I am touching say 25 ~ 30% ?

Still use the onboard nav to route between superchargers so the energy graph will provide the needed relevant info but yes I would use google maps for the trip route. It’s fairly straightforward just follow i-95 all the way south to Florida.

Basically pick from the list, see which shows arriving with around 25% state of charge. Then watch the energy graph as you drive to make certain the car will have enough. If it starts to drop below 25 then reroute to a closer station.

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Your point about the shut-off at 17% thing is invaluable. I will be cautious. Also, the fact that I have to cancel the trip to see other SCs is another thing I didn't think of :(

I can't stress enough how that entire "shuts off at 17%" thing has happened, but it's as rare as "I drove the car, and I got a flat tire!" I have no stats to back it up, but considering how often we hear about worst case scenario stories, the chance the car runs out on a charge that high is insanely low.

I do charge longer at SCs in the winter, or at least I did last year. Last year's version of the software was always off by about 8%-10% in the winter time. This year's version has gotten everywhere within 1%, sometimes at even a higher state than predicted. I'm way more confident in the onboard computer to plot things out correctly.

And really, truly, don't worry about the car shutting off at 17%. Tesla Bjorn has some great videos about what happens when the car runs low on power. He's had the car shut-off above 0%, but there were warning signs, and it was at like 2 or 3 percent.
 
You're going to get what you are going to get. It's not so much that the weather is cold but on how you drive in it. Had to go to Baltimore from McLean the other day. OAT was about 37 °F. It's a couple of miles from my garage to the beltway (with its heavy but not too heavy as USG is shut down) traffic, then up 95 and into Baltimore traffic to the destination (Johns Hopkins). 49 miles, 331 Wh/mi. Parked on the roof of the parking garage and a couple of hours later left from there to the Baltimore Super Charger. That's 5.7 miles (including the missed turns) and temperature had dropped to 36 °F. Consumption for that little leg was 503 Whr/mi. Not so good. From the charger I was right back on 95 and ran home to McLean logging 47.5 mi at 306 Whr/mi. Now that's more like it. So why so much variability? Here are a couple of things to think about.

1. A big factor in the consumption numbers you see in the Trip data is that when you first start out everything the car has used since you woke it up is logged in the first 10th mile. Thus if you, as I did at Baltimore, set the car to be toasty warm when you get to it 10 - 15 minutes later, all the energy the heater used whilst waiting for you to arrive gets assigned to the first 10th mile of the drive. If you look at the trip data as you go you will see Wh/mi numbers that are often well over 1000 in the first tenth and staying high in the hundreds for the first mile or two then gradually tapering off as that initial bolus averages down.

2. The motors are very inefficient at low speeds. To get starting torque that magnetic field is whipping past that stator to develop the large currents needed for the large starting toque. Power dissipated goes as the square of the current. Looking at data gathered by ABRP it appears that whereas the car will deliver a mile for 320 Whr at around 40 mph (the sweet spot) it takes 395 at 20 mph and 600 at 10. Thus if the early part of your drive involves stop and go in city traffic you mileage is going to be pretty poor.

3. If the battery has gotten cold soaked because you have left the car out overnight or parked it exposed to wind on a cold day the battery's performance will be limited. In moderately cold weather (30's) it appears that the only effect is that there is a limitation on regeneration. But this can be an appreciable effect on mileage. Whenever you use the brakes the heat they dissipate is lost to the surrounding air whereas with regeneration a substantial portion of it is recovered. In more extreme weather the battery heater may come on. It is reported to draw as much as 4 kW. That's quite a bit of energy per unit time and clearly will effect mileage. The strategy with respect to this is to keep the car in a heated garage or, if you are on travel consider charging the car (at a super charger) in the morning prior to departure as opposed to in the evening when you arrive with the idea being that some of the charging current goes to warm the battery rather than charging it. I'm not hopeful that this is going to help much. The only supercharge for which I have data indicates 99.7% efficiency. Home charges, by comparison, run 87 - 91% efficient meaning more of the charging power goes for production of heat but, of course, some of that is dissipated in the transistors in the OBC - not in the battery and the charging power level is lower.

Summary of the first 3 items: Longer trips at average speeds near 40 mpH are going to show better mileage that shorter trips at lower speed or with lots of stop and go.

4. Wind is a huge factor. Driving 65 mpH into a 20 mpH headwind requires the energy per mile that driving 85 mpH does and that energy increases, theoretically, as the square of the airspeed (speed + headwind) and, according to the ABRP data, to the 2.52 power.

5. Load increases bearing forces, deformation of the tires and deformation of the roadway. These result in increased power consumption.

6. Road surface. It should be obvious that it takes more power to plow through mud or snow than to zip along smooth, dry concrete.

7. How much of the trip is up and down hill. Even if you leave from sea level and arrive at sea level you will use more energy if you go through hilly terrain than if the whole trip is at sea level. This is because energy recovery from regeneration isn't 100% efficient.

You are trying to predict what's going to happen on your long trip to Florida presumably using ABRP or something like it and for now that is about the best you can do. But you must tell ABRP what you consumption is, whether it is going to be raining on the day you go and what kinds of winds you will encounter. Clearly there are questions as to what to enter for the first number and it is impossible to predict the weather weeks in advance.

What I would suggest is that you get some data on how you drive your car and the best way I know of to do that is TeslaFi. After letting it log data for you over a few dozen trips you will have a pretty good picture of what to expect under broad categories of driving conditons e.g. urban, suburban, freeway. This will give you better numbers to put into ABRP and give you a plan to take (or send) to the car. But monitor the available information from the car as you go a prepare to modify the plan according as to what that information tells you. You are actually having to think more like the pilot of an airplane. He can't just check his fuel and pull over anywhere when he thinks it's getting low. He has to always be sure he has enough to get to an airport (and under IFR flight rules to an alternate airport and then half and hour beyond that). You must always be able to get to a Super Charger (and perhaps one beyond the one you are planning on or at least a ChaDeMo). I think this may be upsetting to some but it seems sort of fun to me.

Note that the use of TeslaFi has implications on range as it is constantly pinging your car for status information which keeps it awake and consuming power. You can configure it to sleep to minimize this and, of course, on shore power it doen't matter.
 
I find on trips to Florida (from eastern PA) the trip planner likes to run the battery as far down as possible then charge up to 80%+ before beginning the next leg. When routing keep in mind the other superchargers not included in the calculated route will no longer appear on the map. To see them the trip will need to be cancelled.
This is about the most important thing, and it's the thing that makes the built-in onboard trip planner still a stinking pile of garbage with its charging recommendations.

You don't need a separate tool. You can just use what's in the car easily, but double check what it's recommending and work around it sometimes. The trip planner seems to have this preference for the longest segments of driving with the fewest and longest charging stops possible. That is a frustrating, irritating way to do long trips, because it's doing these 50 and 60+ minute charge stops that feel extra boring and are getting way up into the 90%+ slow tapering of the charge level.

It bit me in the ass on a long 5,000+ mile trip I took in February. I was letting it plot the route, and it was having me charge up a ridiculously long time to nearly 100% in Grand Junction, CO to drive non-stop to Silverthorne, CO, showing that I would arrive with 7% remaining!! I looked along the route to see if there was any Supercharger along the way to make that safer, and it looked like there wasn't (because it was hiding them!!). I just barely made it, running very little heat, and only then found out that there was a perfectly placed Supercharger halfway in between in Glenwood Springs, CO that it hid from me because it thought skipping it was a good idea. So from that point on, at each stop, I would just zoom out on the map a little bit to see the next couple of Superchargers, and then just pick the one that was about the right distance as my next destination, rather than risk it giving me a bad suggestion. You can disable the onboard Beta Trip Planner, too, by the way, which is not all that bad an idea. But as long as you know not to blindly trust it, it can be kind of nice just to get a quick overall trip time estimate where it includes charging time.
 
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