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UK to France road trip - how accurate is the ETA?

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Hi, new owner of Model 3 LR AWD here. Planning a road trip from North of England to Strasbourg taking the Eurotunnel.

Both the route planner from Tesla as well as abetterrouteplanner suggested a 6-7h drive from home to the tunnel and from Calais to Strasbourg, including 10-30 minute charging sessions.

I have seen blog posts from people who travel to the South of France or to central France (Loire Valley) and if the ETA says 7 hours then in reality it was more like 10 hours.

What had been your experience? I’d like to know as I’ve booked the tunnel on set departure times, also if the journey would be much longer then I would arrive very late in my relatives’ home and would have to depart very early on Christmas Day :(
 
I'm not in the UK or France, but the times don't pass the sniff test. Google Maps says Leeds to Dover is 5 hrs, and Calais to Strasbourg is also 5 hrs. Add in your 5 hrs of charging (10X30 mins) and you have a couple of days of driving. My experience driving in both UK and France, is that Google Maps under-estimates times. So, I would add 10% minimum to my expected times off Google maps. I've taken the train on the route you want to travel. It took 7 hrs from London (with a delay in Paris).
 
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Hi, new owner of Model 3 LR AWD here. Planning a road trip from North of England to Strasbourg taking the Eurotunnel.

Both the route planner from Tesla as well as abetterrouteplanner suggested a 6-7h drive from home to the tunnel and from Calais to Strasbourg, including 10-30 minute charging sessions.

I have seen blog posts from people who travel to the South of France or to central France (Loire Valley) and if the ETA says 7 hours then in reality it was more like 10 hours.

What had been your experience? I’d like to know as I’ve booked the tunnel on set departure times, also if the journey would be much longer then I would arrive very late in my relatives’ home and would have to depart very early on Christmas Day :(

Very accurate. Depending on how long your wife stops to shop. My wife and I drove our SR+ M3 from Ontario to Florida over the Christmas holidays which is about 2,500KMs. Google maps says it is a 24 hour journey but the ABetterRoute Planner App Navigation said it would take 29 hours with charging stops. We decided to take 3 days to do the drive to Florida and stopped 2 nights. Our first day took 11 hours stopping 4 times to charge at Superchargers and staying at a hotel in Lexington, KY that offered 4 Tesla destination chargers to charge over night. The second day was 4 stops and took 11 hours and got us to Tifton, GA in a similar hotel. That left us 7 hours on the final day to Naples, FL with 3 stops. The superchargers were GREAT. They were close to the highway, never full and always near food or shopping. After 5 days in Florida the return home was equally as easy to go 5,000KMs.

The auotpilot made driving these long distances less taxing. If anyone is doubting if an EV can be used for long road trips they shouldn't worry though only Tesla has made it easy with their fast charging stations. I had 7,500KMs of free supercharging to use up but RoutePlanner said it would have cost me $97 in charging. Last time I drove this trip in a gas car I spent over $400 in fuel! And best of all I did this trip without burning any carbon!
 
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I drove from Geisenfeld, (near Ingolstadt), in Bavaria, to Calais. (On the 28th December, the second day after I collected the car from Tesla in Munich).

This is 927km. Google says 9hrs 17 minutes and it took me 12 hours with 3 stops for charging and bladder maintenance. I got to Calais with 7% showing and a warning message about cold weather battery performance. I booked a slot on the Eurotunnel for next morning and crashed out in my hotel room. There are loads of chargers at Calais so by train time I was ready to go.

I was heading for Hellifield in North Yorks and that took me two more stops. Heathrow and Barnsley. As luck would have it the UK roads were choker and I could barely do more than 40km/hour. (which is very good for range.)

On the way back I drove from Hellifield to Hull and caught the overnight ferry to Rotterdam. I couldn't recharge before we boarded the boat. Leeds was the SC on my route and the two stalls there were occupied by people determined to top to the last 1%. I didn't want to miss the boat but I could see there were loads of SCs in the Netherlands so I left them to it and topped off as soon as I got off the boat. 783km to home and I think I made three stops. As much for bladder duration as car.

Since then I've been to Pardubice in Czech, Ceska Kubice in Czech and Kitzbuhl in Austria. Soon a trip to Venice. And one of the nicest bits is how quiet the car is which leaves one feeling not so tired.

So yes, you can do long road trips in an EV.
 
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Thread old but I'll add my 10 kronor:

1. ETA of long trip more dictated by personal factors like breaks, and unexpected errors like traffic and closures, than speed-based time that most nav system predicts.

2. I really couldn't get abrp to actively route and travel along the journey. I could search for a route with start and destination, but at the next step, i'd have to restart a new route with the new location and state of charge.

3. Even after fiddling with environmental factors and effciency numbers, I simply couldn't get it to match real life consumption.

4. Discovered that I didn't need abrp at all, as I could just trust the Tesla navigation system. There were sufficient superchargers along my route to conform to my trip on-the-fly, rather than perfectly optimize it ahead of time.

Typically charged from 10-20 to 75-80%. Charging speeds drops from 130kw to 50kw at 55% or above or thereabouts
 
4. Discovered that I didn't need abrp at all, as I could just trust the Tesla navigation system. There were sufficient superchargers along my route to conform to my trip on-the-fly, rather than perfectly optimize it ahead of time.

This is the key point - the car's NAV system does an excellent job of estimating total trip time.

Tesla's route-planning website ( Go Anywhere | Tesla ) does the same.
 
Hi, new owner of Model 3 LR AWD here. Planning a road trip from North of England to Strasbourg taking the Eurotunnel.

Both the route planner from Tesla as well as abetterrouteplanner suggested a 6-7h drive from home to the tunnel and from Calais to Strasbourg, including 10-30 minute charging sessions.

I have seen blog posts from people who travel to the South of France or to central France (Loire Valley) and if the ETA says 7 hours then in reality it was more like 10 hours.

What had been your experience? I’d like to know as I’ve booked the tunnel on set departure times, also if the journey would be much longer then I would arrive very late in my relatives’ home and would have to depart very early on Christmas Day :(

I go to luxembourg quite a lot. in my ICE it takes me 4-4.5 hours from eurotunnel to luxembourg with one stop. with my model 3 it adds about one hour.