2019 East Bound - Day 4

A little longer drive today, but completely uneventful. As we worked our way East the speed limit dropped, and since I'm setting the cruise to 3-4 over, our speed dropped too. You can see it in the average speed and the drive efficiency (Wh/mi).

Here are the charts for the day:

This next drive is a long one, from Meridian to Auburn - 211 miles with no supercharger. The car says we will get there with 20% if we charged to 97%. So I charged to 100%, since it will be a couple of percent lower in the morning after the battery settles. Once we hit Alabama we are off the Interstate and the speed limits will be much lower, so I'm not worried...

Totals for the day:
555.0 miles, 181.3 kWh, 326.7 Wh/mi (3.1 miles/kWh)

9 hrs 57 minutes total trip time (55.8 mph, including lunch & dinner stops).
Actual drive time was 8 hrs, 0 minutes (69.4 mph)

Totals for the trip:
2287.5 miles, 774.5 kWh, 338.6 Wh/mi (3.0 miles/kWh)
45 hrs 20 minutes total trip time (50.5 mph, including lunch & dinner stops).
Actual drive time was 33 hrs, 49 minutes (67.6 mph)

2019 East Bound - Day 3

It was a much easier drive today since the weather cleared up. It was still quite cold (in the mid-30s) but the roads were dry and I didn't have to contend with spray off truck tires.

There were a couple of interesting things that happened at the Childress supercharger. As we tend to do, drivers talk and as we pulled up on driver noticed we had California plates and asked if we were going East. When I said yes, he said that I should stop at the new supercharger in Henrietta, TX. It is not yet on the Tesla map, so it does not show up in the car yet. That's a great place for one, because without my aero wheels I would have had to drive the speed limit (or below it!).

Not on the tesla map:

I notice that the ABetterRoutePlanner website shows it though:

Interesting...

A little later a car pulls up going West and I ask him about it.  He says that it is open and it's not on the Tesla map because it isn't commissioned as a v3 charger yet. He says that he spoke with folks working on the site, and they said that Tesla didn't want to publish it until the v3 commissioning was complete.

When we get to Henrietta, it is a v3 charger (v2 maxes out at 120 kW, v3 goes to 150 kW):

Also at Childress, I spent a long time chatting with some random guy in a Dodge Ram diesel dually. He wants to know all about the car and hints a couple of times for a ride. I decline because the back seat is full of our crap, but I told him to not be shy to strike up a conversation with folks he sees at superchargers. Everyone is happy to evangelize about Tesla (he got a kick out of my saying evangelize). I spent so much time chatting with people I overshot my 80% target and went into the low 90s.

Here are the drives and charges for today:

Totals for the day:
448.7 miles, 153.2 kWh, 341.4 Wh/mi ( 2.9 miles/kWh)
8 hrs 56 minutes total trip time (50.2 mph, including lunch & dinner stops).
Actual drive time was 6 hrs, 43 minutes (66.8 mph)

Totals for the trip:
1732.5 miles, 593.2 kWh, 342.4 Wh/mi (2.9 miles/kWh)
35 hrs 23 minutes total trip time (49.0 mph, including lunch & dinner stops).
Actual drive time was 25 hrs, 49 minutes (67.1 mph)

2019 East Bound - Day 2

What a crappy day. It started out in Kingman as just rain, but 100 miles West of Flagstaff it started turning to sleet then as we went higher in altitude it was snow and fog. It didn't start to warm up (to 35) until we got to Tucumcari.

We grabbed some dinner and I got Suzanne settled into the hotel and I filled up the battery for our morning departure.

Totals for the day:
669.3 miles, 233.4 kWh, 348.7 Wh/mi (2.87 miles/kWh)
12 hrs 57 minutes total trip time (51.5 mph, including lunch & dinner stops).
Actual drive time was 9 hrs, 47 minutes (68.7 mph)

Totals for the trip:
1283.8 miles, 440.0 kWh, 342.7 Wh/mi (2.2 miles/kWh)
26 hrs 27 minutes total trip time (48.5 mph, including lunch & dinner stops).
Actual drive time was 19 hrs, 6 minutes (67.2 mph)

2019 East Bound - Day 1

I charged up the night before to 96% (I didn't want to be completely full since I wouldn't get the benefit of regenerating all the way down the hill to sea level to get on the freeway). We left the house at 6:30 and grabbed coffee and breakfast at the Summit Store then we were on our way.

We drove to Kettleman City where they were upgrading the superchargers to 150 kW (from 120).

Driving from Kettleman City to Mojave I realized that I had forgotten to put the aero-covers on the wheels... DOH!  That's why we were consuming more energy than on the last trip. By that time we were 150 miles in, so I'm not turning around to go get them...

I guess I'll just have to be as energy efficient as a Model X for the rest of the trip. Note the Watt-hours/mile number below - I used 277 Wh/mi on the whole trip last year, now I'm using 365!

Here's the rest of the trip:

Notice how the consumption number (Wh/mi) goes up with the increased average speed. The speed limit in California is 65 and in Arizona it's 75. In parts of Texas it's 85, so I may have to be careful on that really long stretch across West Texas.

Totals for the day:
614.5 miles, 206.6 kWh, 336.2 Wh/mi (2.97 miles/kWh)
13 hrs 30 minutes total trip time (45.5 mph, including lunch & dinner stops).
Actual drive time was 9 hrs, 19 minutes (65.9 mph)

2019 Trip - Route

I used ABetterRoutePlanner to plan my route. Here's what it shows our route and stops to be:

I'll be capturing data using TeslaFi, like last year too. I'll try to update once we get settled in the hotel each night...

West Bound - Day 6

It sure is nice to be home...

We had another short day today with only 487.5 miles between Indio and home. The drive was again uneventful. We did have one new thing that happened at the supercharger in Harris ranch. The first one (of 16?) gave a "charging station error". That's the first time I saw any error at all for the 48 supercharges that I did over the 5,988 miles. That's something that I wondered about before the trip - How reliable were the superchargers? Pretty damn reliable...

I noticed that there was a monitoring station at all of the superchargers. I guess so that they can see what's happening (see the camera?) and remotely reset things:

I saw another one of the temporary setups (with 00-AWG 480v 3-phase temporary wiring) at the charger in Cabazon, CA. I guess they were making sure to have enough charging spots for the Thanksgiving peak travel days.

At the Cabazon supercharger

At the Indio supercharger

We noticed when we were going East that we passed quite a few semi trucks carrying Teslas.  Suzanne started counting them and we ended up counting 15. There were lots in California, but we only saw one in Texas (on I-40). Well we saw a TON of them yesterday and especially today. We counted 60 trucks, each with at least 8 vehicles on them. Just in our time on the road we saw almost 500 Teslas going out to people...

The overall trip map is pretty impressive. 5,988 miles in 16 days. But, the total mileage on the car is 8,268 miles and 5,988 miles of that is this trip! 64% of the car's total is this trip:

Our trip today... not so impressive:

Our drive & charge details:

Totals for the day:
487.5 miles, 139.1 kWh, 285 Wh/mi (3.51 miles/kWh)
08:00-16:59, so 8 hrs 59 minutes trip time (54.2 mpg, which includes lunch at Harris Ranch)
Actual drive time was 7 hrs, 21 minutes (66.3 mph)

Totals for the trip:
5,987.75 miles, 1,660 kWh, 277 Wh/mi (3.61 miles/kWh).
111 hrs 8 minutes, 53.9 mph (including lunches and dinners)

West Bound - Day 5

It was a short day today, only 482 miles. We went through some serious cross winds, a dust storm, and rain. We also sat in traffic for half an hour East of Tucson because four people's cars touched and made a big mess.

When we got to Indio we drove around some to look at what's there. The places we wanted to look at turned out to be gated communities and the places that weren't gated we didn't want to look at. Does anyone know why RV parks need to be gated? There must be hundreds of them here...

Looking at the total consumption for the trip, we used 1,521 kWh of electrical energy to go 5,500 miles. Since a gallon of gasoline has 33.7 kWh of energy in it, we used the equivalent of 45.1 gallons of gas so far to go the 5500 miles!  That's the equivalent of 121.9 miles per gallon.

We are so ready to be home tomorrow! So much laundry to do...

Here's our route today:

Our route so far:

Our drive and charge details:

Totals for the day:
481.6 miles, 125.8 kWh, 261 Wh/mi (3.83 miles/kWh)
07:38 - 14:22 (but one last time zone) so 7 hours 44 minutes trip time, not including our driving around in Indio.
Actual drive time was 6 hrs, 50 minutes (70.47 mph)

Totals for the trip:
5,500.3 miles, 1,521 kWh 277 Wh/mi (3.61 miles/kWh)
102 hrs 9 minutes, 53.8 mph (including lunches & dinners)