Recently I had a long day of traveling in my model X. I had to drive 125 miles to visit with family then completing my trip driving to the airport where the car would be left for a week. I used ABRP to plan the trip, but while it is infinitely better than the car's planner which can't do anything past one destination, it doesn't predict the future and has no idea of the actual usage that will be encountered.
In the end, the problem I ran into was about time. On the way to my first destination I checked the airport delays and they were up to 3 hours for TSA. I've never seen TSA take more than 30 minutes at this airport even traveling every week. So I bumped up my arrival time by an hour which means I'm now pressed for time.
On leaving my family, the car route planner said to drive straight to the airport with less than 10% remaining on arrival. I knew I would need to charge and there was an SC some 10 miles from the airport. So I selected the charger as the destination. I can't figure out why the car sometimes insists I charge well before my arrival and other times it doesn't recommend charging at all!???
On reaching the 250 W charger I could only get 80 kW into the battery. I have to assume this is due to the battery being cold. But why would it not have warmed the battery? Because the arrival charge was below 20% I assume. So driving 2 and a half hours in the morning, a 2 hour break and another hour of driving in the afternoon was not enough to enable a reasonable charging rate. This is the sort of stuff that will not endear people to owning and driving EVs.
The issues of driving ICE are well known after more than 100 years of use. The issues of owning and driving EVs are not nearly as well known by the typical person. Maybe in another 20 or 40 years EVs won't have the same problems, but for sure now they are much less convenient than ICE. Heck, this could have easily been mitigated by the car understanding these issues and suggesting that I preheat the battery while eating and charge when leaving my family (about 1 mile from a supercharger) so I could get the benefit of a faster charge. But the car has no concept of anything other than getting me to the immediate destination and provides no means of helping me see the problem coming.
Oh, someone remind me, how exactly do I preheat the battery? What do I turn on and what do I turn off and what are all the various preconditions to it actually working?
In the end, the problem I ran into was about time. On the way to my first destination I checked the airport delays and they were up to 3 hours for TSA. I've never seen TSA take more than 30 minutes at this airport even traveling every week. So I bumped up my arrival time by an hour which means I'm now pressed for time.
On leaving my family, the car route planner said to drive straight to the airport with less than 10% remaining on arrival. I knew I would need to charge and there was an SC some 10 miles from the airport. So I selected the charger as the destination. I can't figure out why the car sometimes insists I charge well before my arrival and other times it doesn't recommend charging at all!???
On reaching the 250 W charger I could only get 80 kW into the battery. I have to assume this is due to the battery being cold. But why would it not have warmed the battery? Because the arrival charge was below 20% I assume. So driving 2 and a half hours in the morning, a 2 hour break and another hour of driving in the afternoon was not enough to enable a reasonable charging rate. This is the sort of stuff that will not endear people to owning and driving EVs.
The issues of driving ICE are well known after more than 100 years of use. The issues of owning and driving EVs are not nearly as well known by the typical person. Maybe in another 20 or 40 years EVs won't have the same problems, but for sure now they are much less convenient than ICE. Heck, this could have easily been mitigated by the car understanding these issues and suggesting that I preheat the battery while eating and charge when leaving my family (about 1 mile from a supercharger) so I could get the benefit of a faster charge. But the car has no concept of anything other than getting me to the immediate destination and provides no means of helping me see the problem coming.
Oh, someone remind me, how exactly do I preheat the battery? What do I turn on and what do I turn off and what are all the various preconditions to it actually working?