You know the folks who are amazed you drive an EV, and ask about how long it takes to charge, and can you really do long-distance travel? Then they say it's just not for them. They lack the confidence or whatever. Don't tell those people this story. It won't help.
Friday we drove from Sacramento to Arroyo Grande, CA for the weekend. We arrived with about 50% on the battery. We had some outings over the weekend that drew that down further. Yesterday about noon we headed for home, knowing our first stop would be a Supercharger. So off we went to the Atascadero Supercharger. We arrived with 39 miles of range showing. In the yellow zone. We got the last open stall, and plugged in. Got the happy clunk as charging began, and started munching our burritos we'd picked up on the way into town.
Then I noticed the range was showing 42 miles. What? Why isn't the display updating? We were getting 6kW. That is not a typo. Not 150. Not 120. 6! 25mi/hr of range being added. We do better than that in our garage with our 14-50. People were wandering from car to car complaining about the very low charge rates. I think ours may have been the worst, but others were talking about only getting 40 or 50 mi/hr of range. I considered trying another stall as soon as one opened, but by this time a line had formed. I tried unplugging and restarting, just for fun. No better.
We considered backtracking to San Luis Obispo, but the map showed it as full, and there's no way to know how long its line was. Our choices for next charging stations were Salinas (101 miles) and Kettleman City (66 miles). (Either route works to get home to Sac.) So Kettleman it was. We did the Sunday NYT crossword. One hour and seven minutes--better than our average for a Sunday. We took a bio break in the adjacent Denny's. We walked along the line of six Teslas awaiting stalls and talked to them all so folks would know what the situation was.
Finally we left with 79 miles of range, and headed to Kettleman City, with the car warning us about speed. I kept it at or below the speed limit the whole way. There are several ranges to cross. I kept watching the difference between the miles on the battery and the miles left to travel. It hovered around 13 most of the way, but dipped to about 5 after a range climb. Then we'd get most of that back on the descent. We rolled into Kettleman in the red zone with 12 miles. That 141 kW charge sure looked pretty!
So, do any of you electrical engineers know what was going on in Atascadero? If the thing was outright broken, I could understand it delivering zero power. But everyone seemed to be getting power, just weaker than anyone had ever experienced before. Way weaker.
Oh, this was comical. There was a Tesla sign saying charging time is limited to 40 minutes. It took us well over an hour and a half to get enough to limp to Kettleman City.
