Over the last few days, hurricane Matthew knocked out the supercharger in Lumberton, NC. The one in Warsaw, NC also went dark.
I drove from Charleston to NJ Thursday night, and had no problems. Returning Sunday was a very different story.
Starting with a positive note, my Tesla knew that the Lumberton SC was out. It was not a case of surprised on arrival, as many folks were during the Newark DE supercharger outage earlier this year.
BUT...
...the trip planner in the car did NOT take into account highway closings when calculating my route or energy needs estimates (I'm sure at some point that will come).
Having a 90D, I was able to amass enough charge in Rocky Mount NC to reach Santee SC - barely, and in standard conditions. The day was not at all standard.
Once I reached Dunn SC, we learned that I-95 was closed southbound. Then we learned that US 301 was closed. Proceeding south would require a detour that would require more range that I had left. I had no choice but to divert and recharge at a painfully slow level 2 charger in Fayetteville SC.
After collecting about 35 miles worth of additional electrons (nearly two hours at the charger), we once again had enough energy to get to Santee - we thought. Turns out that the route the navigator planned out used a road that was closed (again). We had to divert all the way up to Burlington NC to fully charge to complete an alternate route into Santee.
All in all, it took us an extra eight hours to complete our journey back to Charleston - six of it on the road, five of that simply to get to and from the Burlington supercharger. If we had a smaller battery it would have been much worse. The extra 30 or so miles of range in the new P100's would have been very welcome, believe me!
The Lumberton outage, and the earlier Newark outage, serve to illustrate just how fragile our Tesla long distance travel ability really is. One dark supercharger can effectively sever one part of the country from another for many, if not most, Tesla drivers.
The solution is simple - more superchargers. One in Benson NC, halfway between Rocky Mount and Lumberton, and one in Florence SC, halfway between Lumberton and Santee, would have allowed me to make a much shorter detour than the 250+ mile route I had to take.
Looking at a couple other parts of the country - suppose Goodland KS goes dark. The I-70 artery is essentially severed, forcing detours of hundreds of miles to get to I-40 or I-90. Or suppose Shamrock TX is hit with an outage. The only choice now is to divert - again, hundreds of miles - to I-70.
Once the main routes are all basically completed, it seems to me that Tesla will need to start "filling in" with additional superchargers to eliminate at least some of the multitudes of single point route failure modes that currently exist.
I drove from Charleston to NJ Thursday night, and had no problems. Returning Sunday was a very different story.
Starting with a positive note, my Tesla knew that the Lumberton SC was out. It was not a case of surprised on arrival, as many folks were during the Newark DE supercharger outage earlier this year.
BUT...
...the trip planner in the car did NOT take into account highway closings when calculating my route or energy needs estimates (I'm sure at some point that will come).
Having a 90D, I was able to amass enough charge in Rocky Mount NC to reach Santee SC - barely, and in standard conditions. The day was not at all standard.
Once I reached Dunn SC, we learned that I-95 was closed southbound. Then we learned that US 301 was closed. Proceeding south would require a detour that would require more range that I had left. I had no choice but to divert and recharge at a painfully slow level 2 charger in Fayetteville SC.
After collecting about 35 miles worth of additional electrons (nearly two hours at the charger), we once again had enough energy to get to Santee - we thought. Turns out that the route the navigator planned out used a road that was closed (again). We had to divert all the way up to Burlington NC to fully charge to complete an alternate route into Santee.
All in all, it took us an extra eight hours to complete our journey back to Charleston - six of it on the road, five of that simply to get to and from the Burlington supercharger. If we had a smaller battery it would have been much worse. The extra 30 or so miles of range in the new P100's would have been very welcome, believe me!
The Lumberton outage, and the earlier Newark outage, serve to illustrate just how fragile our Tesla long distance travel ability really is. One dark supercharger can effectively sever one part of the country from another for many, if not most, Tesla drivers.
The solution is simple - more superchargers. One in Benson NC, halfway between Rocky Mount and Lumberton, and one in Florence SC, halfway between Lumberton and Santee, would have allowed me to make a much shorter detour than the 250+ mile route I had to take.
Looking at a couple other parts of the country - suppose Goodland KS goes dark. The I-70 artery is essentially severed, forcing detours of hundreds of miles to get to I-40 or I-90. Or suppose Shamrock TX is hit with an outage. The only choice now is to divert - again, hundreds of miles - to I-70.
Once the main routes are all basically completed, it seems to me that Tesla will need to start "filling in" with additional superchargers to eliminate at least some of the multitudes of single point route failure modes that currently exist.
