How to take care of your battery without stressing: advice for new owners.

[Rocky_H]

Oh no. This is turning into another miles versus percent preference debate threads. Look what you did!

 

[EnrgyNDpndnce]

And I was getting to very close to buying a Y until i read the one sentence on here. Range is about 3hrs of highway driving......that doesn't sit well with me. I am in my car for hours a day with a varying commute, rarely going to the same place in the same order (sales). So if I am to get in my Y in Philadelphia and need to get to Lewes, DE, there may not be enough range to make it without stopping. I can make this drive easily now in my ICE car and can get to Lewes AND back on one tank with plenty to spare.

I am so on the fence about Tesla. Some days I feel like I am over thinking everything and other days my gut tells me something must be a serious concern of mine otherwise I would have bought a M3 years ago. This coming from someone who has owned 48 (or it is 49, 50) vehicles.

Sales guy here and Tesla driver, so I wanted to respond to your comment. For perspective, before the corona virus slowed my travel, I was putting miles on my Model 3 at a rate of 50k per year. 4k mile weeks were very common along with 400+ mile days. I typically charge to 90% overnight in my garage (note all of this is predicated on the ability to charge at home, so if you can’t do that don’t buy a Tesla for your use case) and very rarely to 100% when I think I need the extra juice the next day. Yes I stop to charge at Superchargers occasionally but it really doesn’t slow me down. You see, I’m going to stop every 2 to 3 hours anyway for a bathroom break or to grab a cup of coffee or to check some email (ie my boss calls and says I sent you a file and need your input in the next hour so I can send that up the chain). This was true even when I drove a gas car. So now I simply time those stops with a Supercharger. Need a bio break and the next supercharger is 30 miles ahead, I can hold it until I get there. Plug in, do my business, unplug and hit the road. In your Philly to Lewes example there are plenty of Superchargers on that route, and that’s only 120 miles anyway.

For reference my last 3 Supercharger stops were for 13 minutes (added 72 miles), 12 minutes (added 80 miles) and 19 minutes (added 117 miles). All of those were at 40% SOC or greater, so I could have added more miles faster had I gone down to 10% or 20% SOC. But that’s the point, driving an EV requires us to adopt a new refueling paradigm. In a gas car, you drive until almost empty then pull over, refill, rinse and repeat. In an EV you plug in overnight and don’t worry about it, and when on the road you charge when you stop for any reason (food, bathroom, etc) but don’t have to charge to 100%. With the Supercharger network you just charge for short increments while doing other necessary activities and then move on. Very rarely have I made a stop just to charge my car.

Hope this was helpful for you. If you have any other questions about traveling sales in a Tesla feel free to PM me.

 

[filotej]

Oh no. This is turning into another miles versus percent preference debate threads. Look what you did!

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