Saturday, May 13, 2017

Tesla Charging Stations

mph warning from the end of our trip

Across Arizona the charging stations are just a little too far apart.

The car gave us a warning not to drive above 65 and then not to drive above 60 so that wasn't fun.  We were just driving directly from one super charger to another.  We changed settings on the car to conserve power too.

This was between Kingman and Flagstaff. I tried googling along the way to see if other people made it or had issues. Reception was spotty so it was extremely hard to google!  Other cars made it with people driving faster but they were the more powerful cars. We were in a Tesla Model X 60D. There are better battery packs for the Teslas out there.   We arrived with 11% battery life left so it seems like we could have gone faster.  About halfway through the route, the car was warning us that we wouldn't have any power at the destination. Poor Ella said she had to go to the bathroom and we said we didn't have enough power for us to stop.

We ate at Freddy's while the car charged and we loved it!

Then we headed to the Grand Canyon.  We had to backtrack then go north. The car did not give us warnings but we looked into a place to charge the car at the Grand Canyon. So we plugged in at an RV park. Since we said we'd only be there a couple hours they charged us $10.  Even with slowly charging there, we only made it back home with 3%. The estimate was higher than our actual! Shockingly the car never even gave us a warning to go slow on this trip. It was much colder out and dark so I think that contributed to using more batter than projected.

Tesla needs a supercharger at the Grand Canyon then we wouldn't even have to backtrack at Flagstaff or maybe we could go a different way.  Or they just need one between Kingman and Flagstaff.

We did meet a couple in Flagstaff driving 2 Teslas and theirs were more powerful and they had no issue arriving at Flagstaff and even said they drove at or above the speed limit.

For the rest of the trip, we only had issue with warnings for power for 1 more charging station. That one ended up reevaluating after a bit and removing the warning and I think we arrived with about 15% then. The estimates can be way off.   Most of the time it'd say we'd arrive somewhere with 27% or more but we'd arrive with 14 or so.  But since we still had spare power it didn't bother me that much.

2 comments:

  1. Was this your car or a rental? I feel like this would make me a nervous wreck the entire time.

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