I encountered a case of range failure. Now I get the issue of range anxiety.
I left the last Supercharger with my destination set and the remaining charge at my destination at 5%. As often happens that number rose as I drove until it was about 11%, so I thought I didn't need to stop at any more until the one near my destination. Typically secondary roads with lower speed limits yield lower consumption numbers and the last 65 miles of this trip would be on secondary roads. However on leaving the highway, the projected final State of Charge (SoC) dropped and dropped until I still had some 35 miles to go and the projection dropped below zero!
I had already looked for other chargers using the car navigator and not found much, with even destination chargers not much closer than the Supercharger. The in car browser has never run plugshare worth a damn so I had to rely on my phone. It pointed me to the nearest J1772 charger and I followed. That one crapped out because the business had recently moved and didn't take the charger with them. They said the old one might be working still so I back tracked the few blocks, but it wouldn't work. There was another further along but the plugshare reports were not encouraging with some old reports of it not working.
The second charger did work, so 25 miles from the next nearest charger and only 3% left on the car, I was able to charge for a half hour or so to be able to make it to the charger.
It is scary to think that the car would screw up the range estimate enough to drop more than 11% off the actual range. While Blanche Dubois may have always depended on the kindness of strangers, it's not how I want to plan trips in my Tesla.
Another point is that every time I changed my destination to different chargers it would appear that the car was less and less optimistic about my range. With some 11% projected for reaching the house, I switched to the closer Supercharger (it was not an intermediate destination at this point) and got a final estimate of only 8%. Switching back to the house gave 5% since that is 10 miles further. As I neared a decision point of route I switched to a number of slightly closer destination chargers and saw the final estimate drop to zero. At one point the tool told me I would not reach any of these chargers and I needed to turn around and go back to the highway where a Supercharger was some few miles back up the road!!!
What could have happened that the range estimate would continue to drop like this? This was the worst possible place for this to happen. Once off the highway there is a big, black hole of charging for quite a few miles. Not a pleasant experience.
I left the last Supercharger with my destination set and the remaining charge at my destination at 5%. As often happens that number rose as I drove until it was about 11%, so I thought I didn't need to stop at any more until the one near my destination. Typically secondary roads with lower speed limits yield lower consumption numbers and the last 65 miles of this trip would be on secondary roads. However on leaving the highway, the projected final State of Charge (SoC) dropped and dropped until I still had some 35 miles to go and the projection dropped below zero!
I had already looked for other chargers using the car navigator and not found much, with even destination chargers not much closer than the Supercharger. The in car browser has never run plugshare worth a damn so I had to rely on my phone. It pointed me to the nearest J1772 charger and I followed. That one crapped out because the business had recently moved and didn't take the charger with them. They said the old one might be working still so I back tracked the few blocks, but it wouldn't work. There was another further along but the plugshare reports were not encouraging with some old reports of it not working.
The second charger did work, so 25 miles from the next nearest charger and only 3% left on the car, I was able to charge for a half hour or so to be able to make it to the charger.
It is scary to think that the car would screw up the range estimate enough to drop more than 11% off the actual range. While Blanche Dubois may have always depended on the kindness of strangers, it's not how I want to plan trips in my Tesla.
Another point is that every time I changed my destination to different chargers it would appear that the car was less and less optimistic about my range. With some 11% projected for reaching the house, I switched to the closer Supercharger (it was not an intermediate destination at this point) and got a final estimate of only 8%. Switching back to the house gave 5% since that is 10 miles further. As I neared a decision point of route I switched to a number of slightly closer destination chargers and saw the final estimate drop to zero. At one point the tool told me I would not reach any of these chargers and I needed to turn around and go back to the highway where a Supercharger was some few miles back up the road!!!
What could have happened that the range estimate would continue to drop like this? This was the worst possible place for this to happen. Once off the highway there is a big, black hole of charging for quite a few miles. Not a pleasant experience.