I recently did a short road trip from home here in NJ to visit my parents in Saratoga Springs, NY - drove up Tuesday afternoon and returned Wednesday afternoon. Thought I would just do a quick post regarding the importance of not depending solely on the Tesla Navigation system for charging stops.... Especially if you are still new to the EV world...
Of course, many people wonder what's the deal with doing a road trip with an EV - all the extra time spent charging when you could be driving and filling up at a gas station in 5 minutes and be back on the road.... Well, with the price of gas these days, certainly cost is a factor (electricity is cheaper than gas) and personally, I can't go more than a couple hours without having to make a bathroom break...! And I'm generally not in a huge hurry to get anywhere, so the little bit of extra time is no big deal.
And the amount of time to charge is really overstated by the unknowing. For example, on a recent trip to Cape Cod for a weeks vacation, we stopped once either way, about half way, for about 20 minutes each time. So over the course of a 5 hour trip, 20 minutes was spent charging (and also using the facilities and getting a snack). That's no big deal, especially since if we stopped for gas, we'd spend that time using the facilities and getting a snack = 20 minutes!
But back to my 'fail'... One thing that it's important to do before taking a road trip in an EV is to use a tool like A Better Routeplanner (ABRP) to plan the trip prior to getting in the car and using the Navigation system. The reason it's important is that the native Tesla Nav is a little limited - for example, you can't put multiple destinations in (waypoints), you can't adjust the desired arrival State of Charge (SOC), and it's difficult to adjust which Supercharger you might want to stop at, vs the recommended one. You also cannot 'experiment' with it - you can only navigate from where you currently are, to somewhere else. Apps like ABRP allow you to input all of the info, and also adjust for extra weight in the car, weather conditions and planned road speed. All of which gives more of a comfort level to (especially) new EV drivers. I generally plan the route using ABRP prior to starting my trip, and then when I get in the car and put my destination into the Tesla Nav, compare it to ABRP.
Unfortunately, I did not do this prior to leaving my parents. I had about 30% SOC when I left, so I figured just one stop would be needed and that I would just stop where the car said to stop - which turned out to be the Superchargers at the Albany Crossgates Mall, only about 30 minutes from my parents house. It advised to charge for 30 minutes, and that I'd get enough energy to arrive home at about 12% SOC - which was a little low for my comfort level, so I figured I'd charge an extra 5 minutes to get to around 15%, a more comfortable buffer for me.
However, when I finished charging I noticed that the home SOC was only 9% - which was too low a buffer for me... The other issue was that I still had 3 hours to go to get home, and as noted, I really need to stop after about 2 hours to use the bathroom! So I ended up stopping at the Woodcliff Lake NJ Superchargers and charged for as long as it took my to walk to a Panera Bread and use their bathroom, and back. That was about 5 minutes. After that charge, I'd arrive home with about 31% which was more than enough.
So, I ended up stopping to charge for 40 minutes total. If I had followed ABRP charging instructions, the charging time would have been 32 minutes and I would have arrived home with 20% SOC (again, plenty of buffer for me). So the difference was 8 minutes over a trip of a little over 3 1/2 hours - which may not seem like much, but however you can cut down charging time, you should, especially as the rate of charging slows as the battery fills - that is, it's not linear. So my charging time in Albany was impact by a slowing rate as the battery filled.
BTW, the total cost for those 2 stops was $18.46 for about 265 miles of range. For comparison, my previous Mazda CX-5, which got about 26 mpg on the highway, would have used 10 gallons of gas which would have cost over $33 at current prices.
Screen shots from ABRP:
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