Drive Sustainable!

Drive Sustainable!
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Saturday, January 23, 2016

My range experience traveling from Colorado Springs to Albuquerque

Being a veteran Tesla owner for hundreds of thousands of minutes, I thought I'd share my recent nice-weather EV experience to New Mexico. It was amazingly easy to plan and the trip was very pleasant. At my age, drinking the caffeinated and frequent beverages I do, stopping for 30 minutes to charge every couple of hours was GREAT.

Here's how I plan my trip:

  1. Use the weather app on your phone or on the Internet to find the temperature prediction for the day you're leaving.
  2. Use EVTripPlanner to plot the distance between each charging point. You can certainly put your final destination instead of each waypoint, it's just a matter of choice.
  3. I run/print the EVTripPlanner output 3 times - once for the expected temperature and two more times for 10 degrees a time less than the expected temperature. For example, if I expect 30 degrees F for my trip, I run the estimate again changing only the temperature to 20 degrees F, then again for 10 degrees F. You will be surprised how much the expected temperature can change your rated miles.
  4. Add whatever distance cushion you're comfortable with. This last weekend's trip being my first one, I added 25% additional rated miles to whatever EVTripPlanner came up with. After my trip, I would not use estimates as low as 15% depending on how cold it gets. I found that the "Trip" tab on the Tesla energy app was dead-on about your remaining battery %. I prefer to know what I'll have left at my next charging point so I can adjust my driving habits to save energy if necessary. I found that in all cases, the energy remaining estimate was within 2-3%.
  5. Set autopilot, read a book. 
  6. If you're not on a Supercharger route, use Plugshare.com website (or the phone app) to find alternate charging points along your route. Call Domino's Pizza and request a delivery pizza at the charging place you select. If Domino's won't deliver to that location, DO NOT CHARGE there. That's also a great tip when buying real estate! You don't want to live anywhere Domino's won't deliver pizza, just sayin'.
  7. Plan on 30 minutes of Supercharge to put back approx. 120 miles between chargers.
-Wilson Hitchings, Veteran Tesla Owner since Sept. 2015

1 comment:

  1. Great article. On my trip through NM, AZ, CA, NV, UT, and CO, I saw the battery estimate on the Trip tab vary a lot at first, then settle down as I got closer to the next charge stop. I got the impression that hills far from the next charge stop caused it to change its estimate a lot. Seemed like it should be smarter and know about hills.

    ReplyDelete

Thanks!