I'm about to take a road trip from NYC to Boston, this will be my first EV road trip ever. From what I can tell there is no charge stops on the way up there, on the way back I think i'll charge the night before so the next morning I don't have to torture my wifey with stopping and hearing for 30 minutes how annoying this is lol
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NYC to Boston?
- Thread starter Fazooley
- Start date
There are plenty of Superchargers between New York City and Boston. If you just need somewhere, anywhere to charge, maybe you can pick a place with something interesting to do nearby, so you and your wife aren't just sitting there in the car watching the clock tick away. (Food is a common theme for my family.) Or if it's possible to charge where you're staying, that makes the whole charging thing pretty invisible to you.
I don't know that part of the country very well, but other people here might have some recommendations for interesting stopping/charging points.
Bruce.
Yea it was super smart of them to put these superchargers near things to do. I took a look at ABRP for the trip from NYC to Boston and didn't see that many SC, I wonder if that was because I didn't need a stop. Gotta take a look on the tesla navigation and try to familiarize myself with it. I put in a few mock trips and it always seems to want me to stop @ like 50%, not sure why I guess I gotta figure out where to change it to try and get it in with the lowest SOC. When my car is low I've seen 258kw but once I'm over 50% maybe 152-158kw at best. Still respectable speeds no doubt, but a 10-80% one time would be enough to get me back home. Really looking forward to this first trip more so then anything to drive the Tesla. My other car is much better suited for a road trip but I don't think it'll be half as fun lol
ABRP (depending on how you're using it) might not show Superchargers if you don't need to charge.
You can use Tesla's "find us" map (Find Us | Tesla) to find all of the Superchargers in an area.
Bruce.
Ha. I go back and forth between the Big Apple and Beantown several times a year.
There’s tons of SCs between the two. Look at supercharge.info for a view. You’d be hard pressed to run dry anywhere.
A LR Tesla can make it there in one go without stops… in the summer, maybe. A better bet is just go until one is hungry, then pick one off the NAV screen. The only place I wouldn’t recommend would be the SC on Jennings Road outside of Hartford: the food’s not great and there’s no good place to sit.
When you get close to town there’s SCs all over, pick your poison.
And if you haven’t used the NAV before now, now’s the time. Unlike ABRP, the Tesla NAV will definitely route one away from busier SCs that might have a line. Not to mention preheating the battery. And routing one away from traffic jams, that last being a real consideration.
There’s tons of SCs between the two. Look at supercharge.info for a view. You’d be hard pressed to run dry anywhere.
A LR Tesla can make it there in one go without stops… in the summer, maybe. A better bet is just go until one is hungry, then pick one off the NAV screen. The only place I wouldn’t recommend would be the SC on Jennings Road outside of Hartford: the food’s not great and there’s no good place to sit.
When you get close to town there’s SCs all over, pick your poison.
And if you haven’t used the NAV before now, now’s the time. Unlike ABRP, the Tesla NAV will definitely route one away from busier SCs that might have a line. Not to mention preheating the battery. And routing one away from traffic jams, that last being a real consideration.
Last summer I drove with my family in our MYLR from Nassau/Suffolk border to Boston. Charged to 100% the night before and arrived at our hotel without needing to stop to charge. Our hotel had a complimentary destination charger so I was able to charge up there. We drove around town and went to a restaurant in Chestnut Hill, so on the way home we needed a short charge at Meriden, CT. By the time we all went to the bathroom and grabbed some Dunkin the car had enough juice to get us home. There are SC on the 95 rest stops in Fairfield, CT both directions and we did stop in Charlton, MA to use the restrooms but did not need to charge there. From NYC you should be able to get to Boston on a full charge even with the lowest range Tesla. I believe there is a SC near Fenway.
RichAZ/CapeCod
Member
Yea I took a look, tons of 150KW stations. They have destination charger spots at our hotel but I think i'd rather goto the SC and see how the Boston ones are. Plus im trying to desensitize my wife to the whole charging thing. She already is asking me, please tell me we dont have to stop on the way there to charge this thing lol. I haven't brought her over to the dark side yet lol
Really? I mean I was going to say that this seems to be going about it in kind of a backward and unwise way. That is torturing my wife to make her sit still in a car going stir crazy for three hours straight at a time.
The thing that usually makes people dislike things and get bored is WAITING. You will be more likely to have waiting if you are taking a long charge. But a small quick break doesn't involve any waiting. I think it makes more sense to go into this with an intentional plan of taking one break each way to get a coffee or snack. You take the 10 or 15 minutes grabbing what you need and get back to the car and go, with no time at all waiting on the car. And then that's two segments of an hour and a half or so each, so it is a little less just boring sitting time.
I remember some friends of ours when we were talking about this a while back, and the husband was of that mindset of, "I just wanna GET THERE!" (Grit your teeth and clench with no stops) But his wife blurted out, "Well SOME people like to get OUT of the car to eat." She was not very keen on his harsh long distance driving style.
So I would recommend like @Tronguy said and check out www.supercharge.info to see what places are along the way. Find a couple that have coffee shops or something next to them and offer a couple of suggestions for grabbing a drink, and let your wife choose.
So, as I type, I'm sitting in a motel north of Boston on the north side of the latest back and forth trip.
As may have been previously noted, I currently get around in a 2018 M3 LR, a car decidedly without a heat pump. We've been pulling about 350 W-hr/mile, considerably above the 225 W-hr/mile that the car does in the summer. Which meant that leaving NJ with a little over 220 miles of range definitely meant that we weren't making it all the way to Boston without stopping at a SC on the way.
Problems? Nope. There are lots of SC's between NJ and Boston. As usual, we just put the destination into the NAV and let fly. Also, as usual, after fifteen miles or so, started flipping back and forth between Rocky Mount and Meridan, and finally settled upon Hamden. We got there with 10% charge; there's a Panera Bread, a burrito place, an Italian joint, and a couple of others in that plaza; across the street, if one would be so inclined, were a few other restaurants including a Chinese one. Not overly crowded; set the charge to 100% and went and ate. We were done in 35 minutes, the car was ready to go in 25.
Range anxiety? Never heard of it. You could have a car with a max 100 mile range and still have a surfeit of choices. Except that I still don't like the Supercharger at Leibert Rd in Hartford. One place to eat, the food's not great, and there's no good place to sit. Even Charlton on the Mass Pike is better than that.
I had to charge at Meridan, CT. It's in the Dunkin Donuts parking lot. Nothing else there. I also stopped at Charlton to use restrooms, not to charge. It's a typical highway rest stop.
Yeah, Meridian at least has 250kW Superchargers. And there’s a burger joint with decent shakes 30 yards further down. And restaurants in view both on the other side of the highway and a couple hundred yards further down the main drag. The last are within walking distance, but that’s when one runs into the other problem: it only takes 20-30 minutes to charge and a 10 minute one-way walk doesn’t leave much time to eat something before having to walk back and get the car disconnected before idle charges accrue
.This is also what im very curios about. When I put the trip into the nav it shows no stops, but I honestly I think like most don't even think about how to conserve the most energy and have the heat blasting, yoke heating and seats on max anytime i'm in the vehicle lol. Very curios to see how many real world EV miles it actually takes to get there over the 200mile trip. I'm looking more forward to road tripping the Tesla then actually going to boston lol
First off: I used to drive a Prius on this trip. A full gas tank on that car, winter or summer, would get one one way or the other without stopping for gas.
But the SO and I would stop anyway. From NJ, it’s 4, 4.5 hours without traffic jams. Meals. Bathroom breaks.
With the Teslas, if one wants to arrive with more than 5% charge, then stopping somewhere, once, to do a little SC-ing fixes that. And takes care of the other needs as well. In the winter, what with the reduced range, that’s enforced a bit, but only a bit.
As to “additional” mileage? C’mon, there’s tons of SCs on the potential routes, on and off the interstate rest stops themselves. It’s no worse and possible better than going for gas when driving an ICE.
And, from a larger perspective, this supulerfity of SCS over the landscape, at least in the Eastern half of the US where I’ve been driving over the past five years, is pretty much like that. Throw one’s destination into the NAV and up pops the SCs, if any, that one needs to stop at. If one wants to get fancy, one stares at the route on the map and says, “Y’know, given the time, it’d be better to stop for lunch/dinner/overnight there rather than here.” and adjust the route accordingly. There’s more than enough info on NAV (times, states of charge, etc.) to make intelligent decisions with a few seconds of thought and without a degree in rocket science.
As I said, not much difference than with doing it on an ICE car, and probably better. (A certain incident where was running on fumes on a ‘71 VW Bug in the middle of Wyoming comes to mind..)
In the end: put in your destination and let fly. If the SOC is too low for your liking at the destination, then take a coffee/potty break at some SC halfway there. The ten of fifteen minutes it’ll take will boost up your destination SOC and, well, you’re done. Easy peasy.
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