Road trip advice

Mainly, it depends on whether you have destination charging available?
If you do, so are not depending on charging this leg for your return, then I would easily do the journey non-stop - I have often driven the 196 miles to Harris Ranch from my home, staring with a 266 charge.

Just don't go crazy fast and monitor the likely remaining charge at the destination, if it drops too fast, slow down, and if it keeps dropping below your comfort level, then stop at Woodburn.

The new trip planning feature in 6.2 has been observed to do some wonky things. Try this: set your destination to Woodburn and look at the Trip tab of the Energy app. If the predicted state of charge at your destination is not less than 12%-15%, there's no good reason to stop at the intermediate Supercharger. If it's only 150 miles from home, that's a slam dunk under all but the most unfavorable conditions. Starting with a full charge, any leg less than 170 miles or so should be a no-brainer in an 85D. And if you monitor your progress against the prediction, you'll be able to tell if things are going sour long before it's critical. If you're worried, slow down 5-10 miles per hour and reevaluate after 15 minutes. Plan to arrive at the next Supercharger with a reasonably low SOC: you'll charge at a higher rate the closer to empty your battery pack is.

It's not a bad idea to check the car's calculation against EVTripPlanner. Neither is 100% accurate because of variables they can't control, but by using both you'll get a pretty good idea of what will work. Having driven a few trips when Superchargers weren't available, I just don't worry about any of the time taken at a Supercharger.

Since this is your first trip, I would go ahead and stop to check out the SC locations. I've found the Trip tab to be pretty accurate as to the state of charge of the battery at the destination, it takes account the terrain. However, it doesn't take into account you testing the exhilaration of ownng a Tesla, if you know what I mean.

I don't get this. Why not just charge at Woodburn; as the battery will be more depleted it will charge much faster than doing a topup earlier?

Candleflame said:

I don't get this. Why not just charge at Woodburn; as the battery will be more depleted it will charge much faster than doing a topup earlier?

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Apple butter at Country Cousins is pretty good at Centralia.

are you implying the charger takes the quality of the charge location into account and applies a weighting. I.e. the centralia charger gets a 5x weightning coz of apple butter and hence the navigation suggests to spend 30min there + 15min at woodburn. Rather than ~35min at woodburn only in an empty parking lot?

I can tell you this about my 85D: I traveled from Omaha (Council Bluffs SupC) to KC, MO (Independence SupC) which are about 199 miles apart. I drove too fast for the energy needs going down and hit the mild hills going into KC and made it to the SupC with 10 miles left. I started with 250 rated miles, got about 199 with 10 left. Only adversity was 42F temp (and me driving fast). Going back filled up to about 250 rated miles again (as I recall) and hit a terrible head wind, causing us to need to stop at a J1772 to make it to the Council Bluffs SupC to get enough energy to get home.
So, in my experience with an 85D, 200 miles between SuperCharges can and will be close if you drive fast at all (70-75), and/or have any weather adversities. So, for me at this point, and I will learn more as I travel more, and see what 6.2 will tell me, but I plan to be careful and have backup places to charge if I have 200 miles between SuperChargers (fortunately, many are spaced closer than this).
And, IMHO, you won't need to make the first stop if you have time to stop for a longer period for the second one. Just my thoughts.
Someday, if you do the trip more than once, and try different ways of doing it, I would love to hear about it.

MSEV said:

I drove too fast for the energy needs going down and hit the mild hills going into KC and made it to the SupC with 10 miles left. I started with 250 rated miles, got about 199 with 10 left. Only adversity was 42F temp (and me driving fast). Going back filled up to about 250 rated miles again (as I recall) and hit a terrible head wind, causing us to need to stop at a J1772 to make it to the Council Bluffs SupC to get enough energy to get home.

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Exactly my point, and I bet if you went 65 you would have ended with more spare mile. Just changing my speed from 75mph to 70mph on a revent trip gave me at leadt 5% more of battery.

And, carry your UMC with its adapters. You just never know . . .

Yep, on another thread someone went out to the Mojave desert without their UMC, Tesla drove one out to so they can charge

A not so happy surprise about charging!!

I like stopping at all SCs along my route. They are usually spaced 90-120 minutes apart which is the right timing for me to take a potty break or grab a Starbucks. On every other break (4 hours), I like to grab a meal anyway. I usually stop for 10-15 minutes on the breaks and 45 minutes + for a meal.

As far as the 6.2 Nav in-car, I can't recommend it at this point. I would highly encourage you to use evtripplanner.com which is incredibly accurate. I use it all the time and have driven 4200 miles in the last month (picked up my S85D on 2/28) with SC use and destination charging. Good luck and enjoy!

- K

Another new owner here. On our first road trip we stopped at springfield for a full (90%) charge. Grants Pass SC is 135 miles so I figured no problem, heat on, 10 mph over the whole way. It was raining. Arrived with ~40 miles left, closer then I would have thought. We probably would have only got 170 miles.

On the way back I was watching the trip estimate as we took a 100 mile detour added onto the 135 miles. We arrived in Springfield with 40 miles left. That charge we would have got over 260 miles. It was at a lower speed, no heater, and no rain. Makes a big difference!

The elevation change wasn't much 500ft after all the ups and downs.

RyanT said:

It was raining. Arrived with ~40 miles left, closer then I would have thought.

On the way back I ... was at a lower speed, no heater, and no rain. Makes a big difference!

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Living in SoCal, I don't know much about this stuff you call "rain", so can you explain why rain reduces range? Does D make a difference to range in rain?

brucet999 said:

Living in SoCal, I don't know much about this stuff you call "rain", so can you explain why rain reduces range? Does D make a difference to range in rain?

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Increased rolling resistance on wet roads. The same thing happens with ICE cars, but you don't notice when you're getting worse gas mileage like you would when you watch the remaining charge drop!

TexasEV said:

Increased rolling resistance on wet roads. The same thing happens with ICE cars, but you don't notice when you're getting worse gas mileage like you would when you watch the remaining charge drop!

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Do you mean that there is enough energy expended to displace a fraction of an inch of water under the tires to make an appreciable difference? Wow.

TexasEV said:

Increased rolling resistance on wet roads. The same thing happens with ICE cars, but you don't notice when you're getting worse gas mileage like you would when you watch the remaining charge drop!

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brucet999 said:

Do you mean that there is enough energy expended to displace a fraction of an inch of water under the tires to make an appreciable difference? Wow.

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Yep. Think about what's happening: the tire is designed to keep the contact patch as large as possible in the wet and not hydroplane, so it needs to take that thin film and move it all. Various directions, but mostly forwards and sideways off the sides and into the tread. if the road was wet 1/10th of mm and the four tires are all together half a meter wide, 20 meters of road represent a liter of water, all of which needs to be moved (thrown at high speed, really) out of the way. the water is also a little bit sticky (we call it surface tension). .1mm is a well drained, barely wet road. if it's raining hard, 10 or 20 times that is common.