Discussion of my trips in 2018, 2019, & 2021

As I'm getting ready for our 4th annual pilgrimage across the US, I thought it might be a good idea to have a summary of the previous three trips.

2018 was our first time to try this, so I was a little bit nervous and loaded the car up with my boy scout "be prepared" mantra. I also wanted some way to gather data automatically, since I knew that driving and keeping track of consumption was going to be too much. I searched around and found TeslaFi (https://www.teslafi.com) that connects to my Tesla account and get the data directly from the car. Perfect.

It summarizes the data wonderfully. Here are some details to geek out on:

https://www.teslafi.com/sharedRT.php?roadtrip=YOM3iKnjU7RUq40

1,669.74 kWh consumed over 6,113.25 miles = 278 Wh/mile

https://www.teslafi.com/sharedRT.php?roadtrip=1KHajDR6VgAUKlN

2.014.93 kWh consumed over 5,786,28 miles =  337 Wh/mile

Yes, there was no road trip in 2020 - the lost year.

https://www.teslafi.com/sharedRT.php?roadtrip=uac2Dnb5Bp1wMb3
2,495.30 kWh consumed over 7,765.75 miles =  321 Wh/mile

TeslaFi also has some other cool ways to look at the data collected over the last 65,000 miles. Everyone asks how long the battery will last and they have a battery range graph for that:

This is showing a 3.96% reduction in range in the 65,000 miles. So when do we say that a battery is "done"? When it has 80% of it's original capacity? When the range is 200 miles?  Let's extrapolate the data we have out to those two.

• I'd have to drive 329,798 miles to get the battery degradation to 20%.
• I'd have to drive 544,167 miles to get the battery to degrade down to 200 miles of range (33% degradation).

The ups and downs in the graph have to do with the battery management system (BMS). If you only charge it from 50% to 80% for a long time, it "forgets" that it can be used outside of these limits and it can be "retrained" by discharging below 20% and charging up to 90% a couple of times...

I imagine that the car will still be okay at these mileages. Cars are lasting a whole lot longer than they were when I first started driving. Back then when a car hit 100,000 miles it was DONE. Now, cars are just getting broken in at 100,000 miles. Of course, gas was $0.35/gallon then too - I couldn't put $5 of gas in my first car (66 VW squareback), of course I was making $1.17/hour at McDonalds... so $5 meant more than it does now.

Quick diversion on inflation. When people freak out about inflation being high now it reminds me that my first house's mortgage interest rate was 13.5%. We had a very long run at low inflation! More than 30 years. Cycles repeat. Get over it. If you have a low percentage home loan, rejoice.