Electrically Speaking: September 2023

Just finished a nice long late summer road trip in northern New England! Our ride took us from Central NJ to Saratoga Springs NY, across Vermont to North Conway NH for a couple of nights, and then to Winthrop ME for a family wedding - then home. The trip was 6 days and about 1,100 miles, and included several new charging locations (for me) which is always fun. Ac always, the Tesla driving and charging experience was flawless. With just over 40,000 miles on the car since March of 2021, and a new set of tires, it continues to be a great road trip car - roomy, comfortable, quiet and efficient.

Here is a summary of the trip from my TezLab app -

A couple items of note -

- Charging cost vs gas savings - you can see that charging at the Supercharger network cost me almost $138, with gas savings of about $100. This reflects the most expensive charging costs you'd encounter, about $.40 per kilowatt. Compare this to my home cost of about $.09 per kilowatt.... Still, $100 in gas savings beats a sharp stick in the eye...

- Total charging time of 11 hours is a little misleading, as that includes home charging at either end of the trip. Actual time spent at Superchargers was 3 hours and 15 minutes. A couple of those stops also included lunch so were a little longer than I would normally stop (one for 27 minutes and one for 29 minutes). One in North Conway also coincided with us doing some grocery shopping.

- Another interesting thing - driving through the mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire does interesting things to your energy consumption. Just like in a gas car, you use more energy going uphill, but unlike a gas car, an EV can recapture some of that used energy going downhill by regeneration - using the electric motors to capture energy that would normally be wasted by braking and put it back into the battery. You can see on the picture below a flat spot just past halfway in the graph, where is was essentially using no energy coming down a hill.