There were a bunch of jokes about Sheetz in the FB group, so I guess that's where they were. Made no sense to me at all.
mtn, another option would be to find a way to plug in overnight at the outfitter. If you can get your hands on an 220v outlet, that's basically equivalent to a destination charger and it will easily top you up overnight. The Teslas come with a mobile charger that will let you do that, it's about the size of a 1990's laptop power brick :) If you can only get 110v, you can get some charge out of that but it's slooooooow. This is the sort of infrastructure that will grow eventually - outfitters will learn that, like flush toilets, their guests would like a place to plug in their EV and so one will get added.
FYI, I asked about the human aspect of a stop, here's the report.
Yeah 20 min sounds about right. On every stop we
- go to the bathroom (initially sequentially because of the cat and equipment, but then we realized that with Dog and Sentry Modes, we could parallelize)
- get our next meal out of the cooler.
Sometimes we also buy a coffee.
That doesn't seem like 20 minutes worth of time especially with parallel bathroom breaks, but there you go.
edit: ha, followup:
Serena has packed us a bunch of great meals that are all very healthy and nutritious. Means we can avoid the typical rest stop junk food, which not only is better for our energy during this trip but also the timing. Buying food would cost us another 10-20 per stop easily.
On the flip side, this healthy food has a lot of fiber. So yeah, bathroom breaks.
Very cool insights Keith! They really hustled, that's a good daily mileage total for anything short of a semi.
That said, still a walk in the park compared to cross country on a motorcycle.
They just stopped at the only v3 Supercharger they'll hit on the trip. 11% to 71% battery in 22 minutes. It was adding range at a rate of 831 miles per hour (it's a weird metric, but think about it) on one screenshot. $14 cost.
Which brings up something else. We got free Supercharging for a year or two as part of our purchase - it was a deal to bump the Q3 numbers. I forget that some other people have to pay :) And that we will as well at some point.
I wonder how long this would take with an EV that is not a Tesla and cannot use the Supercharger ?
Thanks for the report....
Gee, some of you guys need some road trip practice. I do the return trip from the Challenge in one day......1067 miles......in a MINI Cooper......stopping more to pee than gas up.......and I'm 68 years old,which is why I have to pee so often. 
Keith Tanner said:
You can charge an EV using a generator ;) Just like you use a generator to pump gas at the gas station.
I'm curious, roughly how long would it take to charge given a 7500W generator? And how many watts would it take?
I had assumed charging an EV off of a generator would be a fool's errand, but I'm curious what it would look like in real life.
For say an 85kwhr battery from 0-100, it would take 85/7.5 = approx 11.3 hours.
Now really you will only supply like a 70% charge because you'll go from say 20% to 90%
And Level 2 charger efficiency is around 89.xx% so...
(85*.7)/(7.5*.9) = 8.8 hours
My wife and I have done 2 thousand mile days on trips before. Brutal but two years ago I did a Mammoth Lakes, CA to Chicago in 2 days by myself.
Loaded up Sentra with no room to even tilt the seat back. I slept if I got sleepy and stayed the night in a crappy hotel in Wyoming. Second day was an 1100 mile run and I rolled into my house at midnight. Two Tylenol and a quick shower and I slept until I woke up. (Rare for me).
What do those charging stations cost?
When I'm in banzai run mode a stop cost me 15 minutes on average. That's from exiting the highway to back on. It includes off loading fluids and solids, gassing up the truck, and grabbing whatever fluids and solids we need until next stop. But ... I only have about a 250 mile range when loaded so they're way more efficient. I always tell the story of 7 year old Lil Stampie riding on a trip. As I came up to an exit I did a quick calculation and decided that was the one to stop at. Poor kid must have been holding it for a while as his response was "Good I really have to pee."
californiamilleghia said:
I wonder how long this would take with an EV that is not a Tesla and cannot use the Supercharger ?
Thanks for the report....
Depends. An EV that can't fast charge? Better to ship the car. A Level 2 charger pumps in electricity at about 7-8KWh. The normal Suoercharger is 150. So a stop that would take 25 minutes on a Supercharger would take roughly 500 minutes on a Level 2. Fast charging is the key to this sort of use of an EV.
An EV that can use the Electrify America network like the Porsche Taycan? Something similar to this although you'd probably have to be careful with the route planning as that's a smaller network. The Tesla is the most popular EV on the market in terms of sales, though, so thus is very much indicative of the current (ha) state of affairs. Cross country trips are a legitimate option for EV owners today.
Costs: The Supercharger network costs 28c per KWh. Destination charging is usually free. I don't know what my friend's energy consumption is, but right now we're showing a 201 Wh/mi average in the very similar 3. Let's call it 250 because that number seems low. At 250 Wh/mi, it will suck down 7c worth of Supercharger power every mile. If you're paying $2.50/gallon for gas, that's the same cost as about 36 mpg not counting the free tank of gas you get every night. Charging costs for other networks can get a little complicated because it depends on time, charging rate and total energy, but I have heard that some of them can get pretty spendy. Obviously it's a lot less expensive to drink your own juice, we're 9.9c/KWh here. But that's not a road trip.
In reply to Keith Tanner :
Do you guys have a "let's big oil lobby bureaucracy berkeley the hybrid/electric vehicle owners with a special tax because they buy less/no gas" tax?
We have a"still gotta maintain the roads" EV tax in CO. It's $50/year and doesn't go to the oil companies but goes to the DOT for infrastructure. That varies quite a bit by state.
So they made it to the end of the trip yesterday. Turns out it's in the middle of the Adirondacks. Like, moose and bug country. There's a Supercharger 45 miles away in Chesterton, but generally it's the sort of place that makes people very nervous about using an EV. Especially when they arrived with about 17% battery.
The place where they're staying doesn't have an outlet for their charger yet, but they're just down the road from the (currently closed) Museum On Blue Mountain Lake. There's a free Chargepoint Level 2 charger there so they can charge there. Phillip will install a 14-50 outlet at the house and then the car will have juice at its home for the next 1-2 months.
Keith, thanks for this thread. Range anxiety would be my number one fear, probably to the point that I'd carry a gas generator, much like I used to carry a water pump and alternator in the trunk of my 72 Monte Carlo.
I'd struggle with that a little bit as well, although not to the point of carrying a generator :) I don't carry jerry cans in the diesel truck very often either, and never have in the Westfalia even though it spends a lot of time wandering the wilderness where there may or may not be fuel available. I have been known to make extra stops just because I like having those big numbers on the estimated range, both in the diesel truck and the EV.
As I posted earlier, I think it comes down to trusting the data. The car tells you where you can stop and how much energy you'll have, and then it provides you with the tools to tell if you're deviating from the plan in the form of the glide path. If it looks like you won't make it, it will give you lots of warnings. First it'll tell you to slow down, then it will just say "you're not going to make it". I can't remember if it will reroute you to a mid-way Supercharger automatically or not but I'm pretty sure it does. This is all Tesla-specific but I would expect any modern EV to have similar abilities. Or you just set the cruise control to the speed limit which is probably what the car is expecting.
Here's what that glide path looks like. The grey line is the planned consumption. The green one is actual/projected. The bump at the end of this one in particular is the run down Donner Pass, which will put a bunch of power back in the battery. My friend drove using this graph most of the time, using it to set his cruising speed and compensate for things like wind.
Here's another (blurry) one in night mode In this case, you can see where the speed limit bumped up to 80 mph and the driver got a little excited. They're using more energy than planned but will still make it to the supercharger with 10% battery.
I'm glad I got to follow along on this trip as well. I learned a few things about the car and what it's like to road trip with them. One of these days I'll take ours to Vegas or Durango, that will be a real test. Somehow, SLC wasn't enough and Denver is a well-worn road for us.
This is pretty cool, thanks for sharing.
They just encountered a problem. The TMPS identified a screw in a tire. The Model Y, like a lot of other cars, including the ND Miata and my 2002 model year E39, doesn't carry a spare. The inflater pump and can of sealant is actually an optional extra (again with the ND Miata, where the inclusion of these parts appears to be random in my experience). And as a Tesla-specific bonus, the sort of noise-deadening tires they use can't be patched. So my friend had to go get a plug.
An EV in the middle of backwoods New York State is having more trouble with a flat tire than access to charging. That made me laugh.
That is pretty funny. I wonder if it would make sense to carry a spare for trips like this, or if that would be too much space/cost prohibitive.
One question on the generator... Lets say that you don't care about the time. How much charge/range would you be able to get from 5 gallons of fuel? Pick a random HF/Honda/Whatever generator you're familiar with.
In reply to Keith Tanner :
I had a pic of those tires a while back, from a Land Rover but the Teslas use the same type.
They basically have a big sheet of foam glued to the inside. I'm not entirely certain that tire sealant would work.
Pete. (l33t FS) said:
In reply to Keith Tanner :
I had a pic of those tires a while back, from a Land Rover but the Teslas use the same type.
They basically have a big sheet of foam glued to the inside. I'm not entirely certain that tire sealant would work.
Probably just dissolves the foam thus making the tire tech who has to deal with it hate you even more than a normal can of the goop.
mtn (Forum Supporter) said:
That is pretty funny. I wonder if it would make sense to carry a spare for trips like this, or if that would be too much space/cost prohibitive.
One question on the generator... Lets say that you don't care about the time. How much charge/range would you be able to get from 5 gallons of fuel? Pick a random HF/Honda/Whatever generator you're familiar with.
A gallon of gas has approximate 33.70 kWh of energy in it.
Some googling says that small portable generators have efficiency between 13% and 18%.
And charging my LEAF as an example has roughly 90% efficiency.
.9*.13=.117 and .9*.18=.162
So, a portable generator paired with a level 2 charger can convert somewhere between 11.7% and 16.2% of the energy in gas into energy in a car's battery.
5 gallons of gas has 168.5 kWh of energy.
The generator/charger could convert that to between 19.7 kWh and 27.3 kWh
My LEAF averages about 4 miles per kWh.
So this combination could fuel the LEAF for 78.8-109.2 miles.
FWIW, modern power plants have thermal efficiency nearing 50%, which is why electric cars are so much more efficient than gas cars in the real world. If they were all fueled by portable generators, they wouldn't make much sense.
Pete. (l33t FS) said:
In reply to Keith Tanner :
I had a pic of those tires a while back, from a Land Rover but the Teslas use the same type.
They basically have a big sheet of foam glued to the inside. I'm not entirely certain that tire sealant would work.
I wonder if you could put the foam in a regular tire to cut road noise ......
I find this very interesting to follow along, but it doesn’t seem like a lot of fun. I am intrigued by EVs, but I’m starting to think that I might have to ease into that world with some kind of hybrid first.
The first few weeks are weird–lots of looking up exact distances on your phone, spreadsheets, worrying about chargers, etc. I put about as much effort into driving my LEAF 100 miles to the Challenge a week after I bought it as NASA put into moon landing.
Nowadays, though, it's just a car. And like any car, sometimes it needs more fuel. When that happens, I stop at a fast charger, put more fuel in, and get back on the road. The cool thing is that only happens very rarely, since I start every single day with a full tank at home. It would be awesome if my truck could fill itself with gas while I slept.
My range anxiety is basically nonexistent, though I do always carry a level 2 charger with me in the car. This is completely pointless (how many people carry a can of gas in their daily drivers all the time?) but makes me feel better.
