Initial Observations of Trip Planner in 6.2 Firmware for FL destinations

I got the 6.2 firmware yesterday, and started fooling around a bit with the trip planner feature. The timing couldn't be better, because I'm heading up to Gainesville for the Orange & Blue Debut on Friday. I live in SW Davie (practically Weston, I'm just west of I-75), and I plotted the course to Payne's Prairie. Payne's Prairie is the campsite where we'll be staying, which is about 10 miles south of campus.

Right off the bat, I could see that there is room for improvement. It seems as though it plots a course to the nearest Supercharger along the way rather than the most optimal, which is a bit disappointing. It routed me to Port St. Lucie first and then to the Turnpike through Turkey Lake. The Port St. Lucie Supercharger is 111 miles from home and it's another 120 miles to Turkey Lake. The trip planner put the recommended charging time at Port St. Lucie at 50 minutes (I have a 60 kWh battery pack).

The optimal route would be to go to Ft. Drum as the first stop, rather than Port St. Lucie. It's 143 miles from home to Ft. Drum, and only 79 miles to Turkey Lake. Even in my 60, I can easily make it to Ft. Drum without any issue. In addition, with the second leg being 32 miles closer, the charge time at the first stop should be a good bit less than 50 minutes. The navigation estimated the total trip time at around 6h 50m. I figure I should be able to shave off 30m of that with the more optimal route going through Ft. Drum instead of Port St. Lucie.

There's also room for improvement when navigating out of range of the Supercharger network. For grins, I put in Key West as a destination (Marathon is not up and running at the time of this post), and the navigation had no idea what to do. To drive to Key West from my home, a normal person would essentially drive due south from I-75, to the Turnpike, to US 1.

However, the navigation routed me to Fort Meyers, which is the nearest Supercharger to my home, 118 miles WNW. Then from Fort Meyers it navigated to Key West, which would have me backtrack the 118 miles I drove to get there, then take I-75 S, Turnpike, and US 1 to Key West. The navigation also informed me that I wouldn't have sufficient charge to arrive at my destination. Ummm.... yeah...

The new trip planner does provide a decent rough estimate. However, since Florida has a number of Superchargers within close proximity (Fort Drum/Port St. Lucie/West Palm Beach (coming soon) and St. Augustine/Port Orange), it's rather likely there are more optimal routes (vs. the 6.2 trip planner's route) when travelling through those clusters.

I'm curious as to what sort of results would come from plotting routes through those clusters in a car with an 85 kWh pack. On one hand, the 85 kWh charges faster, which would help to offset the problem I'm experiencing with less optimal routes. However, the longer range does provide more alternatives to decide between shorter and longer legs. If anyone with an 85 kWh has gotten the 6.2 update, I'd love to hear their observations on plotting different routes through Florida.

All-in-all, the trip planner is certainly a welcome feature (one I had had requested myself some time ago). I'm fairly confident that future releases will have more optimal routing, especially for those of us with 60 kWh packs.

GeekLad said:

Right off the bat, I could see that there is room for improvement. It seems as though it plots a course to the nearest Supercharger along the way rather than the most optimal, which is a bit disappointing. It routed me to Port St. Lucie first and then to the Turnpike through Turkey Lake. The Port St. Lucie Supercharger is 111 miles from home and it's another 120 miles to Turkey Lake. The trip planner put the recommended charging time at Port St. Lucie at 50 minutes (I have a 60 kWh battery pack).

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I was a bit hasty in my initial observations. Today is our trip, and I went ahead and charged to 100% overnight and re-plotted the course. Now the navigation does indeed have us routing through Ft. Drum as the first stop, so the initial course I plotted was based on current charge (makes enough sense). I think I did have enough charge to get to Fort Drum the first time I plotted the trip, but I think it would have left me with less than 10% remaining on arrival to the Supercharger.

It may be that the trip planner is a bit more conservative and wants to leave the driver with plenty of wiggle room between chargers. Perhaps in a future release, they'll provide the option to adjust the remaining percentage buffer between charging stops. Right now the only option in the apps settings for the trip planner is to turn it on or off.

The new plot is also recommending we skip past Turkey Lake and go straight to Ocala from Ft. Drum, but to make that leg of the trip we'd need to make a 1 hr charge stop (according to the trip planner). I think we could make a much shorter stop to gain sufficient charge to travel to Turkey Lake, make a short stop there as well, and be in good shape to get to Ocala. I probably will stop in Turkey Lake, just to see the Supercharger there and to check off another Florida Supercharger off my Supercharger list. :biggrin:

So far, I've stopped at all the I-95 Superchargers (except for WPB, which just recently went up), as well as Fort Meyers. I'm not sure if we'll go all the way up to Lake City yet or not, we may go by and see some old friends there in my hometown.

After taking the trip, and using the trip planer a bit more, I think maybe my initial observations weren't so far off afterall. It sometimes does some odd routing that just doesn't make sense. On our way back when we were travelling between Turkey Lake and Ft. Drum, I was fooling with setting different destinations. When I set home as the destination, it tried to route us through Port St. Lucie even though we didn't have enough charge to get there. We charged up enough to arrive at Ft. Drum w/ a 15% buffer (in-line w/ Dan's observations).

Perhaps they'll come out with a service release before 6.3 to work out some of the bugs.

Eric_L said:

I too was at the Orange and Blue weekend. Next time we should meet for a beer! We are buying a house near campus if you ever need a place to charge...

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Go Gators! Be sure to put your place on PlugShare, having a HPWC near campus would be awesome. I'll bring the beers. :biggrin:

I feel better knowing I'm not alone in experiencing poor routing with the Trip Planner. I suppose it really is beta quality. Hopefully it'll be much improved in 6.3. I did get a service release earlier this week, but I doubt it changed anything with the Trip Planner, it's probably the typical bugfix release that I usually get a week or so after the main release.

Brit4864 said:

Ok guys, there is a way around this madness called 6.2 lol When you load a trip in the nav, you'll notice a button called "trip" on the bottom left of the route screen. Hit that and it'll list all the intermediate stops. There's an option to remove those intermediate charging stops and voila, you have the earlier pre-6.2 nav screen again, ie. just the departure and destination showing. I found you also get a warning if you are about to go out of range of "known chargers". Obviously if you know you can charge ahead, hit cancel.

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Yeah, that's what I did to manage through the silliness. I'd set the destination to the next Supercharger that made the more sense, then go in and cancel the intermediate stops.