Friday, May 21, 2021

Recent News

 Planning another road trip this weekend, so just some random thoughts to fill the time....

I did maintenance on the Model Y this past weekend. Added some windshield washer fluid. That's it. Oh, and I checked the air in the tires, using the function on the touchscreen.

I downloaded an app called Tezlab a couple of weeks ago, and ended up buying the Pro version ($50/year). This gives you a lot of detailed info - efficiency, charging details (cost, range added, projected range), efficiency vs temperature, detailed breakdowns for each trip, etc. Pretty interesting stuff. Here are some samples (note that these are since the date I downloaded the app, which was April 16) -

- Overall efficiency is 84% - given that a decent chunk of my mileage to date (2028 miles as I write this) has been highway miles, this isn't bad. Higher speeds = less range. Also, I like the acceleration, so that leads to lower efficiency.... ;-)

- The equivalent of MPG for an electric car is Wh/mi - watt hours per mile. Basically, how much energy you are using for each mile driven (some BEV's, like the Mustang Mach E, use a slightly different calculation of miles per watt hour, which is probably a more direct comparison to MPG). With Wh/mi, lower is better. My cumulative Wh/mi is 284, which isn't bad. In general, keeping below 300 Wh/mi is good. 

- Cost - this is the most interesting aspect - I only charge at night (off-peak rates are about 6 cents per kilowatt hour) and since April 16, my total cost to charge is $14.43 for 1,062 miles of range. As a rough comparison, if I was using regular gas and getting 22 mpg around town (like my Mazda CX-5) I would have spent around $135 (using $2.80 as the price of gas). 

One change I have made to the car is removing the aero wheel covers to uncover the attractive alloy wheels - see pics below for before and after. It will be interesting to compare the efficiency from my trip to Boston this weekend to my previous mostly-highway trip to Saratoga Springs a few weeks ago. It won't be a totally apples-to-apples comparison as temps are definitely higher than they were when we did the Saratoga trip, but it will be fun to compare anyway. I plan to do a writeup on that trip next week.

Stay tuned!







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Updated Supercharger Visits Map

65 separate Superchargers visited to date...... I need to head out west now!