Friday I ran into range trouble. Thursday & Friday I had a good experience at my first visit to Sunnyvale Service Center, until I was on my way home Friday and ran out of range in the mountains. I had a long day so bypassed my storage where I had temporarily kept my Chademo Adapter, so when I got to the summit EVGO, I looked in my trunk and realized my mistake. Reminder: always keep your Chademo Adapter with you, even if it means fumbling the thing in and out of loaners and such. What a pain. When will Tesla release their D.C. charging standard to third parties?
With estimated -2% arriving at home, I stopped with 2% at a newly built cult compound in a forested area that was on the ChargePoint map near Scotts Valley, and after getting a little freaked out by the odd activity there after +2%, I made my way down to a destination charger at the bottom of the hill at a hotel parking lot where I accidentally snoozed off in the driver's seat and came to with +10%, more than enough to get home.
Anyway, the other lesson is to confirm with Service Centers to plug in the car for overnight stays. The extra distance I had to drive to take the car to service was enough to put it beyond my normal daily commute range, and it's the first time a service center left the state of charge of my car so low.
Just because I make mistakes doesn't mean I should allow other people to make mistakes: I need to always confirm they have taken appropriate steps. I also should pay more attention to my charge level when I'm not in a very regular driving pattern. And I should remember to bring my Chademo into loaners and temp vehicles.
You could have topped off at Mountain View SC before heading south, no?
It's hard to say. According to Google Maps, it would have taken 15 minutes on a Sunday to get there. When I picked up my car, it was 3:41PM Friday, so rush hour was building, and going to MtV SC would have added about 20 minutes to the SC, 25 minutes to charge (assuming a line), then leaving at 4:56PM to get back to Los Gatos from MtV would have been around 45 minutes, and then at 5:41PM would have been about an hour from there home so around 6:41PM, but since I didn't even think to look at my state of charge, I was more interested in beating traffic, and would have made it home around 4:41PM if I had gone straight away and not had to charge (so a two hour benefit). Since I'm working 10 hour days 6 days a week right now, that is a lot of extra sleep I could catch up on and important to me.
Had I looked at my state of charge and remembered my Chademo was in my storage, I would have probably decided to go to my storage, get my Chademo, then use it as needed, most likely at the Campbell ChargePoint former headquarters (where is their new headquarters?), and that would have added about 30 minutes to my total commute, so I would have arrived home at 5:11PM. But, since I didn't even take the responsibility to double check my range (because I assumed Sunnyvale is close enough to my normal commute not to matter, and according to TeslaFi, I arrived at the SC with 51%), it all got messed up.
I arrived Thursday 3:04PM at Sunnyvale SC with 51% SOC. When I picked the car up at 3:41PM, it had 40% SOC. I thought that was enough to get home. I wonder what happened that it lost 11% at the SC; they drove it three times and it only took 1% to do that. Did they park it in the sun and not charge it? Thursday was a hot day and I left cabin overheat protection on, so perhaps that used up some battery. That's not a good thing for Tesla paint to leave it in the sun light like that on hot days especially, in case birds or bugs get on it.