ℬête Noire
Active Member
Autopilot is huge. Having traveled with it now I expect I'd have a very hard time to returning driving long distance without out it. I use fairly extensively locally but I could easily give that up. It's nice, makes slow moving and/or very heavy traffic a lot less stressful and tedious. For anything over 2 hours on the highway, though, it leaves you physically and mentally in so much better shape during and at the end of the trip.Autopilot user I assume. That is a factor here: you can usually spend more time on the road without needing to stop because you are tired.
I mentioned prior a 1600 mile trip. Specifically it was Adrmore, OK to Warren, NJ via Nashville, TN route. A hair under 1600 miles, in 32.5 hours total time. That was including some non-trip related stuff and also a rookie oppsie on my part in the first leg**. That's one driver plus a passenger. Power napped in a couple places, temps across the trip ranging starting out in the low 30's up to the low 50's.
The only meaningful stretch eastbound I drove manual was some of the upslope and nearly all the extended downslope sections coming out of Nashville area. The road was wet in places, there was light fog shifting in and out, and I felt more comfortable being full manual incase of weirdness. On return Birmingham to Jackson was very heavy rain, I used a mix of EAP, TACC and full manual there. Pretty much everything else was EAP. It saves so much longterm exertion on you arms, and eyestrain flipping close-up to long vision I suspect, along with brain activity.
I could have done better on time, maybe hit that 50mph total trip average. Really it took me until into TN to find the rhythm of SC hopping, as I was trying out different approaches to see what really worked in real world. At the end though I sat down at a family friends' place for a light supper catching up with them, then caught a train into NY and finally checked in around midnight. Without any of the normal wrung-out, thousand-yard-stare feeling I've always experienced with prior drives of this sort of nature.
That's a 48mph average, including overnight sleeping, on the way out. Not as good on the way back but that's because I started out late day and checked into a hotel fairly early in the trip. Phenomenal. I've hit that before with ICE but only being very on-point with methodology (diet, bio-breaks, no passenger, planned out, etc) in optimal weather, and being hit for near a day afterward recovering from the wrung-out toll. I played this very loose, I hadn't even chosen the major route I'd take until the morning of, and just played it as it went using the car's nav to guide it.
** The battery was cold soaked from freezing temps the prior night, with no plug-in, and I rushed out of the slow charging in Ardmore SC, not letting the car get the safety padding it wanted. I would have "made it" but it was very tight and I needed to slow down enough that I decided I might as well pull into an L2 anyway, run out of the back of an insurance office by a really nice 2015 Model S owner. That probably cost me 1/2 hour...by the time I got done talking with the Tesla owner.
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