I just got back from a long road trip from San Diego up to Sun Valley ID and Jackson WY and I thought I'd share some things I learned.
Time estimates: I averaged about 50 mph including charge times. This seemed to be a good rule of thumb over the trip. Charge time wasn't the big delay, we hit some bad weather in Northern Utah on New Years day that ground us to a halt in Tremonton UT. Also on the 3rd, we drove From Sun Valley to Jackson, this ended up being a very long leg due to icing on the roads, limiting our pace to 40-45 mph on roads posted as 80 zones.
Even with the 60's limited range, the only time this was a real issue was traveling from Sun Valley to Idaho Falls. Instead of taking the direct route (155 miles) i decided to go around and take the highway via Twin Falls. This added some time to the trip but added a lot of piece of mind. This is probably the only time I wold consider a 75 and it's kind of an edge case unless you live in the area or if I regularly did this with a ski-box. If I'd been more confident in the road conditions I might have just slow-steamed it there to stretch the range since the Highway was slow anyway, but there was no room for error.
I still haven't figured out the optimum point at which it is quicker on average to charge shorter and drive slower. I did some back of the envelope estimates of this but it came out to being only about a 5-10 net gain per 100 miles so I don't even know if there's much point in worrying about it. Since the 60 still charges fast near the top of it's limited capacity I found it better to just way over charge and then not have to worry about possibly slowing down or turning down the climate control in sub-zero temps.
Consumption / Range: The trip planner in the car is very overly optimistic in cold weather. Once the temperatures dropped below 40 consumption went way up, and on one leg from Pocatello to Tremonton i was pulling down 450 wh/mile at 70 mph in -17F. I noticed as the temperatures dropped that the tire pressures dropped about 5 psi. I added some back but didn't notice a big difference, but conditions were variable so this is hardly a good experiment.
I tended to have better luck just taking whatever the consumption was on the last leg, multiplying it by the length of the next leg, then dividing by 56.5 kWh (accessible battery capacity estimated by me, may be wrong) and adding 20% to that. I played a bit with the Windity app for estimating headwinds but I haven't reached the level of Bjørn-fu where i know how much the headwinds and elevation changes add.
Autopilot: Really helps with fatigue on a trip like this. We did 800 miles a day with 2 drives and not too much trouble. For some sections where I couldn't use AP I really felt the difference of having to drive manually for hours.
Chains: I tried out the Traks tire chains heading over the pass into Jackson, they worked great but I didn't end up needing them so I took them off after a few miles. as the road was actually better cleared than it looked at the bottom. Keeping them in the frunk simplified things quite a bit.
Other Notes: The Twin Falls Supercharger has an amazing view of the Snake River Canyon where Evel Knievel made his attempted rocket jump.
Plug share misses some chargers that the chargpoint app has. I found out after 2 days in Jackson that there's charger near the lifts. Even my hotel concierge and valet didn't know about it and it was 1/2 burried by the plough, but it did a great job charging to 100% and warming up the car before I got off the slopes.
Overall I'm glad I drove instead of flying. I haven't seen that much of the American west, and it saved me about $300 versus flying. Taking regular breaks really helped me control fatigue as prior to this I'd set my limit around 500-600 miles with an ICE, having done Michigan to DC several times and feeling no desire to continue further afterwards.
Time estimates: I averaged about 50 mph including charge times. This seemed to be a good rule of thumb over the trip. Charge time wasn't the big delay, we hit some bad weather in Northern Utah on New Years day that ground us to a halt in Tremonton UT. Also on the 3rd, we drove From Sun Valley to Jackson, this ended up being a very long leg due to icing on the roads, limiting our pace to 40-45 mph on roads posted as 80 zones.
Even with the 60's limited range, the only time this was a real issue was traveling from Sun Valley to Idaho Falls. Instead of taking the direct route (155 miles) i decided to go around and take the highway via Twin Falls. This added some time to the trip but added a lot of piece of mind. This is probably the only time I wold consider a 75 and it's kind of an edge case unless you live in the area or if I regularly did this with a ski-box. If I'd been more confident in the road conditions I might have just slow-steamed it there to stretch the range since the Highway was slow anyway, but there was no room for error.
I still haven't figured out the optimum point at which it is quicker on average to charge shorter and drive slower. I did some back of the envelope estimates of this but it came out to being only about a 5-10 net gain per 100 miles so I don't even know if there's much point in worrying about it. Since the 60 still charges fast near the top of it's limited capacity I found it better to just way over charge and then not have to worry about possibly slowing down or turning down the climate control in sub-zero temps.
Consumption / Range: The trip planner in the car is very overly optimistic in cold weather. Once the temperatures dropped below 40 consumption went way up, and on one leg from Pocatello to Tremonton i was pulling down 450 wh/mile at 70 mph in -17F. I noticed as the temperatures dropped that the tire pressures dropped about 5 psi. I added some back but didn't notice a big difference, but conditions were variable so this is hardly a good experiment.
I tended to have better luck just taking whatever the consumption was on the last leg, multiplying it by the length of the next leg, then dividing by 56.5 kWh (accessible battery capacity estimated by me, may be wrong) and adding 20% to that. I played a bit with the Windity app for estimating headwinds but I haven't reached the level of Bjørn-fu where i know how much the headwinds and elevation changes add.
Autopilot: Really helps with fatigue on a trip like this. We did 800 miles a day with 2 drives and not too much trouble. For some sections where I couldn't use AP I really felt the difference of having to drive manually for hours.
Chains: I tried out the Traks tire chains heading over the pass into Jackson, they worked great but I didn't end up needing them so I took them off after a few miles. as the road was actually better cleared than it looked at the bottom. Keeping them in the frunk simplified things quite a bit.
Other Notes: The Twin Falls Supercharger has an amazing view of the Snake River Canyon where Evel Knievel made his attempted rocket jump.
Plug share misses some chargers that the chargpoint app has. I found out after 2 days in Jackson that there's charger near the lifts. Even my hotel concierge and valet didn't know about it and it was 1/2 burried by the plough, but it did a great job charging to 100% and warming up the car before I got off the slopes.
Overall I'm glad I drove instead of flying. I haven't seen that much of the American west, and it saved me about $300 versus flying. Taking regular breaks really helped me control fatigue as prior to this I'd set my limit around 500-600 miles with an ICE, having done Michigan to DC several times and feeling no desire to continue further afterwards.
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