So, for the first time since I bought my first Model S I actually had a situation where I came very close to needing to abandon my Model S for a vehicle with a longer range.
Long story short, and I'd prefer not to discuss details publicly, yesterday evening an emergency came up where I needed to drive ~125 miles to Virginia (in the mountains off of I-81), pick someone up, then drive ~90 miles to Winston-Salem, NC, then drive home (90 more miles) for a total round trip of just over 300 miles.
There are zero superchargers anywhere near this route. There are no CHAdeMO stations beside one at a Nissan dealer that was closed anyway. There are a few Nissan dealers with limited access J1772s, and a few Plugshare folks that I'm not going to try calling at 11PM. Not helpful for making good time regardless.
In any case, I had 2 critical way points: Pick up in VA, arrive in Winston-Salem. This portion of the trip was time critical, so there was no slowing below the pace of traffic possible, especially for the trip from VA to Winston.
As we know, driving 75-80 MPH through the mountains in the Model S is a surefire way to kill your range. So for that ~215 mile portion of the trip, even with 100% charge it was going to be tight, but I've driven in the area previously and I figured I could at least make it to Winston-Salem. Once there I'd be stuck until I could find somewhere to charge, probably in the morning. I had to be somewhere back near home around 10AM today (the next day at the time) so that wasn't really an option.
Last year I had installed a NEMA 14-50 on the outside of a friend's house about 30 miles west of Winston-Salem (towards my house) for both me and his RV. But making good time from my house through the VA way point and to Winston was going to probably leave me with insufficient power to make the 30 mile trek from there to the 50A outlet.
Basically, there was no way this could be done in my Model S, and I wouldn't even have either Model S charged to 100% for at least 50 minutes. So, reluctantly, I called up a rental company and was preparing to get an ICE rental for the night. As it turns out while I was doing that I found out that I had about 90 extra minutes before I could make the pickup in VA vs what the plan was when I got the initial call.
I had driven my P85D a bunch earlier in the day and it was still charging (was at ~75%) so no way I'd be able to take it. If I had only the P85D available then I definitely would have needed the ICE anyway since I was looking at over an hour to 90 minutes more to get to 100%. However, my wife's P85 was idle yesterday and I set to charge to 100% (from 90%) as soon as I got the call before I knew exactly where I was going (not knowing it was as far as it was at the time).
I figured if I waited until 99% or so, left and used the extra ~35 minutes I had to hypermile the first leg of the trip then I'd have enough power to make the second leg and still get to the NEMA 14-50 for a 2 hour nap before heading home.
So, I did this. 245 miles, including mountain passes on a charge, in half-decent time. Finally arrived with 9 rated miles and plugged into the 14-50 at about 11:45PMand took a ~2 hour nap while I got the range I needed to get home, got up, made it home with 10 miles on the dash, and slept. ~305 miles total.
Wasn't really thinking about taking trip meter pics at the time, however I did snap these as I worked to my friend's 14-50.
(LO without A/C on just to have the fan without the heat coming on since it was just over 60F outside)
Success this time, and only because I ended up with an extra 90 minutes. If I needed to go ~25 miles further, or didn't have extra time, this story would definitely be different.
This was definitely the first time since I got the Model S where I actually felt that I should have an ICE secondary vehicle... and I'm considering it... maybe a cheap used Volt to tinker with.
It's worth noting that there is at least one planned supercharger on Tesla's prediction maps that would have made this trip much less stressful, but that red push pin on a prediction map didn't help me yesterday. In fact, the closest superchargers to the route I took were about 50 miles away in the opposite direction of where I needed to go.
All together this kind of opened my eyes a bit to the fact that we're a long way away from any real mass adoption of EVs. While we can probably get by 99% of the time with what we have an maybe with what's coming in the near future as far as superchargers and such.... that other 1% is still pretty important.
Long story short, and I'd prefer not to discuss details publicly, yesterday evening an emergency came up where I needed to drive ~125 miles to Virginia (in the mountains off of I-81), pick someone up, then drive ~90 miles to Winston-Salem, NC, then drive home (90 more miles) for a total round trip of just over 300 miles.
There are zero superchargers anywhere near this route. There are no CHAdeMO stations beside one at a Nissan dealer that was closed anyway. There are a few Nissan dealers with limited access J1772s, and a few Plugshare folks that I'm not going to try calling at 11PM. Not helpful for making good time regardless.
In any case, I had 2 critical way points: Pick up in VA, arrive in Winston-Salem. This portion of the trip was time critical, so there was no slowing below the pace of traffic possible, especially for the trip from VA to Winston.
As we know, driving 75-80 MPH through the mountains in the Model S is a surefire way to kill your range. So for that ~215 mile portion of the trip, even with 100% charge it was going to be tight, but I've driven in the area previously and I figured I could at least make it to Winston-Salem. Once there I'd be stuck until I could find somewhere to charge, probably in the morning. I had to be somewhere back near home around 10AM today (the next day at the time) so that wasn't really an option.
Last year I had installed a NEMA 14-50 on the outside of a friend's house about 30 miles west of Winston-Salem (towards my house) for both me and his RV. But making good time from my house through the VA way point and to Winston was going to probably leave me with insufficient power to make the 30 mile trek from there to the 50A outlet.
Basically, there was no way this could be done in my Model S, and I wouldn't even have either Model S charged to 100% for at least 50 minutes. So, reluctantly, I called up a rental company and was preparing to get an ICE rental for the night. As it turns out while I was doing that I found out that I had about 90 extra minutes before I could make the pickup in VA vs what the plan was when I got the initial call.
I had driven my P85D a bunch earlier in the day and it was still charging (was at ~75%) so no way I'd be able to take it. If I had only the P85D available then I definitely would have needed the ICE anyway since I was looking at over an hour to 90 minutes more to get to 100%. However, my wife's P85 was idle yesterday and I set to charge to 100% (from 90%) as soon as I got the call before I knew exactly where I was going (not knowing it was as far as it was at the time).
I figured if I waited until 99% or so, left and used the extra ~35 minutes I had to hypermile the first leg of the trip then I'd have enough power to make the second leg and still get to the NEMA 14-50 for a 2 hour nap before heading home.
So, I did this. 245 miles, including mountain passes on a charge, in half-decent time. Finally arrived with 9 rated miles and plugged into the 14-50 at about 11:45PMand took a ~2 hour nap while I got the range I needed to get home, got up, made it home with 10 miles on the dash, and slept. ~305 miles total.
Wasn't really thinking about taking trip meter pics at the time, however I did snap these as I worked to my friend's 14-50.
(LO without A/C on just to have the fan without the heat coming on since it was just over 60F outside)
Success this time, and only because I ended up with an extra 90 minutes. If I needed to go ~25 miles further, or didn't have extra time, this story would definitely be different.
This was definitely the first time since I got the Model S where I actually felt that I should have an ICE secondary vehicle... and I'm considering it... maybe a cheap used Volt to tinker with.
It's worth noting that there is at least one planned supercharger on Tesla's prediction maps that would have made this trip much less stressful, but that red push pin on a prediction map didn't help me yesterday. In fact, the closest superchargers to the route I took were about 50 miles away in the opposite direction of where I needed to go.
All together this kind of opened my eyes a bit to the fact that we're a long way away from any real mass adoption of EVs. While we can probably get by 99% of the time with what we have an maybe with what's coming in the near future as far as superchargers and such.... that other 1% is still pretty important.