New MY first road trip: Supercharger ?s

[hammick]

Thinking of taking our '21 MY LR on a road trip from Kansas City to Trinidad, Colorado this weekend. I've located the Superchargers using the Tesla planner as well as ABRP. I will be taking I-70. Below is my charging plan using ABRP. I have 1,000 free Supercharging miles that came with the purchase of the car. I assume the Supercharger will recognize my car automatically and use up the 1,000 free miles automatically? Anybody know of any issues with the Superchargers listed below being down or having issues? I have range anxiety and it probably shows in my charging plan. Is taking the car down to 26% within the margin of error of getting stranded? I will have our 11 month old Lab pup with us so we need to stop often. Plus having an off grid solar home with LifePO4 batteries I know the benefits of not charging above 90%. Thanks for any advice.

Departure Kansas City SOC: 80%

Topeka, KS SC: 51% to 80% SOC (15 minutes)
Salina, KS SC: 35% to 80% SOC (20 minutes)
Hays, KS SC: 39% to 80% SOC (19 minutes)
Colby, KS SC: 34% to 90% SOC (29 minutes)
Limon, CO SC: 26% to 90% SOC (31 minutes)

Arrive Trinidad SOC: 31%

 

[Bigriver]

I assume the Supercharger will recognize my car automatically and use up the 1,000 free miles automatically?

That 1000 miles is actually 400 kWh that they credit you, which will allow travel of at least 1000 miles in all Tesla models. Yes, it will automatically subtract off as you use it.

Your plan of minimum of 26% is way more than adequate to not get stranded.

 

[alexgr]

Thinking of taking our '21 MY LR on a road trip from Kansas City to Trinidad, Colorado this weekend. I've located the Superchargers using the Tesla planner as well as ABRP. I will be taking I-70. Below is my charging plan using ABRP. I have 1,000 free Supercharging miles that came with the purchase of the car. I assume the Supercharger will recognize my car automatically and use up the 1,000 free miles automatically? Anybody know of any issues with the Superchargers listed below being down or having issues? I have range anxiety and it probably shows in my charging plan. Is taking the car down to 26% within the margin of error of getting stranded? I will have our 11 month old Lab pup with us so we need to stop often. Plus having an off grid solar home with LifePO4 batteries I know the benefits of not charging above 90%. Thanks for any advice.

Departure Kansas City SOC: 80%

Topeka, KS SC: 51% to 80% SOC (15 minutes)
Salina, KS SC: 35% to 80% SOC (20 minutes)
Hays, KS SC: 39% to 80% SOC (19 minutes)
Colby, KS SC: 34% to 90% SOC (29 minutes)
Limon, CO SC: 26% to 90% SOC (31 minutes)

Arrive Trinidad SOC: 31%

Get into your car and simply enter your destination in the Navigation. The car will show you all the charging stops. For nearby superchargers (Topeka and Salina for sure) the car will show how many charging slots are currently available. Tesla will not count out of service chargers as available, so you can rely on it.

In 2 years of driving Tesla I saw 3 broken supercharger stalls. And once the car told me that a supercharger station is down, so I need to charge a bit more to get to the next one.

If you feel some anxiety, please drive to a supercharger in KC and charge the car for a few minutes to see how it works. When I picked my car (in KC) two years ago, my first supercharger on the way home was a broken supercharger, and I could not plug it in the car. I was scared and panicking as I thought that something is wrong either with the car or with me. Then I changed the charging stall and everything worked perfectly fine. As I later learned, the odds of your first supercharger being broken are super small.

The Superchargers are Super easy to use and they are Super reliable. Don't panic. Good luck on your trip.

Edit: and yes, 1000 free miles will be calculated and billed automatically. You should be able to see the remaining free miles on your phone app. Later the supercharger use will be billed directly to the card on your Tesla account, so you never ever have to worry about doing anything else but plugging in your car and paying your normal credit card bills once a month.

 

[RTPEV]

10% SOC safety margin is usually sufficient, but I get it that as a new owner you may not be comfortable with that, so for your first trip (or your first leg of the trip anyway), set it higher until you get more confident in its ability to predict arrival SOC.

This is a personal decision, but I recommend giving ABRP an access token to your Tesla telematics so that it can monitor your car's battery in real time. This has a number of benefits. First, it will be able to calibrate battery consumption to YOUR driving style. This will significantly improve it's predictions. Second, you will be able to get a display such as the following:

This will give you a nice visual representation of the planned SOC (blue line) versus actual (green line). As long as the green line is above (or close to) the blue line, you know you are in good shape. And after you've done a leg or two of your trip, you'll quickly realize that the prediction is actually quite good and will feel more confident about letting it plan down to 10% or so.

The second thing you will get is the stall availability for the next Supercharger stop. This picture is a bit old--the graphics are a bit different, but the key information displayed above are the green bars next to where it says SuC 150kW. This is showing that 8 out of 8 stalls are shown as available. If you are traveling to a busy Supercharger or one that might be down, it will display red (unavailable) or gray (unknown--possibly down). Again, if you see lots of green, you can have confidence that the site is up and you will be able to get a good charge. If you don't see that, you might want to look at alternatives.

You can get this information without using ABRP, although it's not quite as front and center. For example, you can go to the Energy Trip display in the car and get the same type of graph:

or, you can simply keep your eye on the arrival SOC in your navigation directions.

And you can retrieve live Supercharger status from the nav map, but it's a bit kludgy in that you have to pan the map to the next Supercharger, whereas with ABRP, if you run it on the car's browser, it is constantly right there and updating live.

One other piece of advice is that you should check out those Superchargers on plugshare.com. If there have been any problems or concerns at those Superchargers, you will probably see some recent negative checkins, although in general, Superchargers are usually very reliable. That said, there is a Supercharger in my area that is listed as "Temporary Closure" in the car, but ABRP will happily route you there. It did display as "grey" in ABRP, so it's not like it was a complete surprise, but as @alexgr mentioned, the car would not route you to that Supercharger anyway.

 

[OlderThanDirt]

What alexgr said!! Everything you need for planning a road trip is already built into the car. Use the energy use screen until you get more comfortable with the car. Download the PlugShare app for your phone. Gives you a plan B if ever you would need it.

Enjoy the trip. This is what Tesla’s were built for!!

 

[hammick]

This is a personal decision, but I recommend giving ABRP an access token to your Tesla telematics so that it can monitor your car's battery in real time. This has a number of benefits. First, it will be able to calibrate battery consumption to YOUR driving style. This will significantly improve it's predictions. Second, you will be able to get a display such as the following:

Guys thanks for all the great advice. Once I allowed ABRP to access my Tesla telematics my arrival SOCs went down quite a bit as listed below. Anyone know why? My car is brand new July build so I can't believe the battery is degraded.

Topeka arrival SOC: 45%
Salina arrival SOC: 27%
Hays arrival SOC: 31%
Colby arrival SOC: 26%
Liman arrival SOC: 14% (this one worries me)
Trinidad arrival SOC: 20%

 

[alexgr]

Guys thanks for all the great advice. Once I allowed ABRP to access my Tesla telematics my arrival SOCs went down quite a bit as listed below. Anyone know why? My car is brand new July build so I can't believe the battery is degraded.

Topeka arrival SOC: 45%
Salina arrival SOC: 27%
Hays arrival SOC: 31%
Colby arrival SOC: 26%
Liman arrival SOC: 14% (this one worries me)
Trinidad arrival SOC: 20%

The car is more accurate in calculating the energy use as it takes into account the road profile (elevation changes) and current temperature. I don't know how good the ABRP is on that. Anyway, I would trust the car. I have looked at ABRP once but I have never used it, no need. I am not a travel planning "junky" and I don't try to super maximize travel speed of hypermile. Again, you CAN trust your car, don't speed too much, plan to have 10-20% extra over what the car predicts, and you have nothing to worry about. Really.

 

[KG M3]

Guys thanks for all the great advice. Once I allowed ABRP to access my Tesla telematics my arrival SOCs went down quite a bit as listed below. Anyone know why? My car is brand new July build so I can't believe the battery is degraded.

Topeka arrival SOC: 45%
Salina arrival SOC: 27%
Hays arrival SOC: 31%
Colby arrival SOC: 26%
Liman arrival SOC: 14% (this one worries me)
Trinidad arrival SOC: 20%

The car charges at a higher rate up to about 50% of battery capacity, then begins to taper the charge rate as it gets over 50%. So you charge faster and spend fewer minutes charging if your arrival SOC is lower.

 

[RTPEV]

Guys thanks for all the great advice. Once I allowed ABRP to access my Tesla telematics my arrival SOCs went down quite a bit as listed below. Anyone know why? My car is brand new July build so I can't believe the battery is degraded.

Topeka arrival SOC: 45%
Salina arrival SOC: 27%
Hays arrival SOC: 31%
Colby arrival SOC: 26%
Liman arrival SOC: 14% (this one worries me)
Trinidad arrival SOC: 20%

It's almost certainly not your battery, but rather an extreme lack of calibration data available to it. I gather you just recently provided access, and maybe you haven't even had a chance to take a drive with it active, much less a highway drive which will likely give better efficiency than around town driving.

To help understand what may be going on, open up the ABRP settings and look at the reference consumption section of the display (circled in red here):

If you have calibrated reference consumption, the number I've circled in red will indicate what ABRP thinks your consumption is. You can toggle it on and off to see how it compares to the default. Lower numbers are better. The default consumption for my model car is 263 Wh/mile, and as you can see, I get 223 Wh/mile with my driving style, so ABRP gives me more optimistic predictions. As they say, Your Mileage May Vary!

To see how much confidence ABRP has in your consumption based on the data it has, click on the bar graph I've circled in green. You'll get a display like this:

Those are my confidence numbers, which are pretty good. I'm guessing that your numbers are probably very low if you just recently gave ABRP access to your data. You will need to let it monitor your driving for awhile (preferably on highway trips) before you will get accurate predictions. Until then, just use the default consumption numbers.

As for the accuracy of ABRP versus the car, they are both very good, but in my experience the car is usually off by 5-10% (on the pessimistic side in my case, so when the car says I may not make it to my destination, I don't get overly worried unless the arrival SOC is less than -5%). ABRP is usually within 2-3%, so much more accurate. I have a premium account, so it takes weather and traffic into account, as well as the ability to add extra cargo and passenger weight, which really improves the prediction quality. In fact, I just went on a trip this past weekend and while looking at my ABRP energy display, I saw an unexplained flat part of the curve, without a corresponding downhill section that would explain that. And the Tesla energy graph did not show this flat section. It was a mystery to me until we got to that section and found that traffic had slowed to a crawl, and voila, the consumption almost perfectly tracked because we had slowed down from highway speed to about 20 mph. It really is VERY accurate!

 

[v8eater]

I also like to use plugshare to look are what is around the SC. I try to time my stops with bio breaks. Having driven cross country, I think you will find charging a non issue.

I always look around on plug share for other charging solutions in case of an emergency or charging opportunities if you stop for lunch or dinner. Given your going on 70, the SC network is robust.

Report back after the trip.

 

[Rocky_H]

Is taking the car down to 26% within the margin of error of getting stranded?

That is really high and not even close to worrying about getting stranded.

10% SOC safety margin is usually sufficient

That is the worst case bare minimum I would ever tolerate, but also a lot of my interstates around here are 80 mph, so that needs bigger buffer.

but I get it that as a new owner you may not be comfortable with that

I've been doing it for over 7 years, and I'm just determined to never ever be "that guy" who ran out of juice and got his Tesla stuck on the side of the road, thereby giving the EV movement a black eye to the public.

So I shoot for somewhere around 15-20% to have decent comfortable margins--if winter and close to freezing, more like 25%.

I have range anxiety and it probably shows in my charging plan.

And as a note on this, here is what comforts this. The car gives you TONS of information well in advance and all along the way of how you are doing. And you have very significant control to respond to that to address it. The Navigation will show an estimated arrival percent. That is updating in realtime every few seconds, taking into account all your energy consumption. If that % starts to dip a little bit that's making you uncomfortable, turn your cruise control down a couple mph. Then wait a minute or so. It will figure that in, with the reduced wind resistance projected out over the remaining hour or two of your drive, and that arrival % will probably stabilize or start creeping back up. If not yet, drop another couple mph and check for it again.

You will learn you have very good control on how your margins are as long as you pay some attention and adjust to it a bit early on in your drive. That will make it less stressful.

 

[Jccope64]

I usually wait for it to tell my that my arrival Soc is around 13% and then fluctuate speed based of what it’s estimating , if it ever gets to 5% because I’m running 90 I’ll slow down to the speed limit and it will start going back up. Trust what the car tells you , if worst comes to worst just slow down you’ll make it to the charger , I’m not scared one bit pulling in to a charger with 5%. You’ll get used to it. Also charge longer when it’s really cold out your efficiency will definitely be worse

 

[hammick]

Thanks guys. ABRP has my reference consumption at 304wh. I'm assuming that will come way down as the car gets driven more.

Any reason to think a 25quart 12v car cooler will have any noticeable effect on range?

 

[hammick]

Sorry meant 12v refrigerator/freezer. Not sure why there is no edit function on these forums. Maybe I am too new to edit.

 

[v8eater]

Sorry meant 12v refrigerator/freezer. Not sure why there is no edit function on these forums. Maybe I am too new to edit.

Max amp draw is 15 amps. Assuming it's between 12-13 amps while running (156 watts or so), no real decrease in range. Speed and wind are the two biggest things.

With that, if your comfortable, you can experiment staying behind a semi and watch the estimated range climb. On a clean road, and distance set to max, you still get a bump in rated range. I think you will find semi's clipping along at close to 80 mph when there aren't any cops around.

I made a recent day trip up into the mountains. Departed at 100% and got home at 6. I had an opportunity to SC on the way home but didn't need it.

 

[hammick]

I made a recent day trip up into the mountains. Departed at 100% and got home at 6. I had an opportunity to SC on the way home but didn't need it.

Very ballsy.

 

[RTPEV]

Very ballsy.

Those that never had the pleasure of driving a first-gen Nissan LEAF will probably never understand the pure luxury of a long range Tesla with "only" 6% battery remaining. That is almost 20 miles of range, or about 50% of my original LEAF's winter-time range before I finally traded it in!

 

[GregD60]

Max amp draw is 15 amps. Assuming it's between 12-13 amps while running (156 watts or so), no real decrease in range. Speed and wind are the two biggest things.

With that, if your comfortable, you can experiment staying behind a semi and watch the estimated range climb. On a clean road, and distance set to max, you still get a bump in rated range. I think you will find semi's clipping along at close to 80 mph when there aren't any cops around.

I made a recent day trip up into the mountains. Departed at 100% and got home at 6. I had an opportunity to SC on the way home but didn't need it.

Drafting off of a semi can make a huge difference, especially if you're fighting a headwind. Heading west between Needles and Barstow in the California desert on a day with 30+ MPH headwinds, tucking in behind a semi reduced my consumption by 40%. I went from being iffy to make it to Barstow to having 15% left when I arrived. I didn't even have to follow very close and I was only drafting for about 50 to 60 miles. Semis really punch a big hole in the air.

 

[GregD60]

Very ballsy.

More like experienced. Once you get comfortable and lose the range anxiety, running it down to 10% is nothing to worry about and if you're getting close to the charging station, kicking the speed up a bit to get more usage of the battery can help shorten the trip.