I took a 900+ mile road trip in the first month I had my Tesla Model Y, and I've managed to put 9,000 miles on it despite being in a pandemic lockdown and working almost exclusively from home in the 10 months I've owned the car, so this is by no means the first road trip I've taken, but the last couple I did (Eastern Shore of VA and Johnstown, PA) revealed a couple of things that I hadn't noticed before that I thought I'd discuss.
Road trips in an electric car, even one with nominally 300+ miles of range, still require more planning than their fossil-powered brethren. I knew that going in, and TBH it sorta appeals to my inner tech nerd, but it's definitely not for everyone yet. Highway speeds, especially when the speed limit is 70 like many of the interstates around here, eat into that range, and since Tesla seems to have done a lot of work gaming the EPA test cycle for maximum claimable range, a safe estimate is more like 75% of claimed range, with additional modifiers if it's in a temperature extreme or there are a lot of hills. This isn't inherently a problem, but since you're dependent on chargers that even with some 2700 Supercharger stations and lots of other non-Tesla chargers available, are nowhere near as ubiquitous or convenient as ye olde petrol station.
The car does a fair amount of the work for you, in that you put a destination into the SatNav and if it predicts that you don't have the range to make it to your destination, it automatically chooses a Supercharger on your route, and even tells you how much time you should spend charging to gain enough range to make it to either your destination or the next Supercharger on your route if it's a multi-charge trip. The prediction seems to know something about topography, speed limits, and the like, because I can see obvious kinks on the car's projected energy graph line that correspond to mountain passes and things, and if you run into construction or traffic that slows you down, you often end up with a slight gain in actual range vs projected. Its trip range indicator is pretty accurate on the highway even if the car's primary range indicator on the dash isn't (it uses either ideal conditions or a much less aware average to project range based on percentage of charge remaining). The car will even warn you to stay below a certain speed if it thinks you're at risk of running out of megableems before your destination.
So they're doing a lot to help you manage range anxiety, and my experience overall has been that a restroom and snack/meal stop is plenty long enough to gain back the required charge such that I've rarely felt like I was wasting time compared with my previous road trips. It's especially nice that a lot of Supercharger stations near the highways are collocated with either a Sheetz or a Wawa, rather than a random mall, as that enables the same sort of relatively quick food/bathroom stop as one would make while refueling.
But there are some fundamental flaws in the way this system works right now, or at least bad assumptions that ultimately require you to do a little more planning than just hopping in the car, inputting your destination, and wafting away on a cloud of inconvenienced electrons, confident in both your car's range to never give you up, and the Supercharger network to never let you down.
- Tesla assumes that on a trip that stretches your range, you are going to be able to charge at or near your destination, and it doesn't really take into account whether you actually have enough range to make it to an appropriate charger post arrival, especially if it's not a Tesla charger. To complicate matters further, Tesla also appears to have lowered the threshold of acceptable minimum charge at destination both as their range projections improve, and in an attempt to reduce reliance on mid-trip charging (the Supercharger network is getting busier as more Teslas get sold) such that sometimes trips that a year ago would have featured a Supercharger stop now claim to not need it, but you roll into your destination with a projected 13% SOC (which likely translates to actually single-digit%). This is not user-adjustable. This might be ok if the stay is long enough to charge, but depending on where you are, that might mean:
- >24 hours charging @ 120v/15A (4 MPH of range added) - normal house current
- >12 hours charging @240v/30A (20 MPH of range added) - typical J1772 Level 2 charger/dryer plug
- >6 hours charging @240v/60A (41 MPH of range added) - Tesla AC charger (if these are installed at a hotel or somesuch, Tesla refers to these as "destination chargers")
- 30-60 minutes at a Supercharger (depends on whether it's 150 or 250 kW DC fast charging)
- However long you need on the above methods to gain back enough range to reach the closest Supercharger on your return path.
- There is also the rapidly-expanding CCS DC fast charger network that supports all the non-Tesla cars. In addition to often being expensive, bordering on usurious for its charge rates if you don't have some sort of deal through your manufacturer, Tesla owners have to buy a $500 adapter to make their car's proprietary plug interface with CCS. I suspect it will be a long time before the CCS network footprint exceeds the Supercharger network by enough to make that a worthwhile investment.
- Tesla's in-car SatNav has no ability to do multi-stop trips, or even a toggle to indicate that this will be a round trip. While it shows you projected state of charge for a round trip briefly when you first start the trip, you can't actually get the car to act on that information. The only way to do this is by using Tesla's Trip Planner website and adding the multiple destinations to force it to calculate charge stops without assuming any other charging is happening so that you know what your charge and range situation might actually look like for all of the legs of your planned trip. And then likely you're going to end up manually selecting the appropriate Supercharger along your route as your destination, stopping for whatever amount of time you deem appropriate, then putting in your actual destination once you're done charging. So you lose all of the trip planning aid in the car. And even when the car decides you need a charging stop, it is basically doing the same thing in the background, so what you get is the ETA and remaining distance to your charging stop, with no sense for total trip duration. This seems like a pretty basic set of missing functionality. Maybe they should reallocate a couple of the programmers working on making the car play fart noises and bring the Nav system to parity with Google Maps, circa 5+ years ago?
