I took a road trip from Bay Area to Vancouver BC (and Whistler) and back during Thanksgiving week and here are some notes from the trip. Sorry for the long post, but hopefully someone will find something useful from these notes for their trip.
Trip stats:
Interior/Comfort:
Driving with Auto Pilot:
Pros:
Charging and Range:
Other points:
Trip stats:
- Model S75RWD Sept 2017 build with 19 inch stock wheels and tires.
- Total miles driven - 2280 miles
- Total energy used - 776.2 kWh
- Avg. energy - 339 Wh/mi
- SF Bay Area to Vancouver & Whistler and back via I-5
- Max charging speed noticed: 98 kWh, about 317 miles per hour
Interior/Comfort:
- The interior is pretty quiet except some wind noise at high speeds.
- My wife complained that the front seats are not very comfortable because of lack of appropriate thigh support. I tend to agree with her on this.
- There is a serious lack of interior space for a long drive. It is good in a way that it keeps your interior less cluttered but it is also very inconvenient at the same time. A Tesla cubby helped a little bit.
- I added a MERV 13 filter based on a DIY posted in these forums. It worked out really well and we barely smelled any exhausts from other vehicles on this trip. Highly recommend this DIY.
- The rear USB ports were very useful in keeping kids iPads charged.
Driving with Auto Pilot:
Pros:
- AP was great overall. Treated it as an advanced driver assistance feature rather than a self driving feature and it worked pretty well.
- Just the TACC by itself is wonderful on highways. I like how it reduces speed automatically on curves, not sure how it does it though.
- I was able to enjoy the scenery more with the AP
- Really useful in rainy weather when lanes are not very visible and its hard to see. It AP does an incredible job at keeping you in the lane.
- Less tiring on long drives because you can rest your arms in a more comfortable position.
- Doesn’t do very well with somewhat sharp turns at highway speeds.
- Sometimes falsely detects additional lanes on the left of the leftmost lane and right of the rightmost lane. I was afraid of accidentally hitting the indicator and causing an accident.
- It doesn’t like dips at highway speeds. It seems like that causes the AP to think that the lanes are not straight.
- Once on this trip, it tried to go to the lane to my right by itself for no apparent reason.
- The AP does not like to be engaged while in a curve.
Charging and Range:
- I turned off “always connected” and turned on “range mode” for the trip. Never felt a need to revert these settings throughout the trip.
- I had some range anxiety initially but found that the car calculates things pretty well. It tries to keep around 15% buffer to arrive at the next supercharger. I had to adjust my driving style a few times because the predicted battery declined more than expected, but I always made it to the next supercharger with around 10% battery remaining. It might be a good idea to charge for additional 5 minutes after the car says that it has enough charge if you want more peace of mind.
- Rain causes about 5% more battery consumption. Factor that in when calculating the charge required.
- Your regeneration decreases in cold weather that can impact your overall range by a little bit.
- There are no supercharges around Vancouver BC area. I had to charge at a Chademo charging station (at 31 kWh) once to get some miles for local driving using a Chademo adapter that a fellow TMC member lent me for the trip.
- I got good charging speeds at pretty much all superchargers. The max charging speed I saw was at 98 kWh at Woodburn OR and Mt. Shasta CA superchargers with around 318 miles per hour average. A couple of exceptions are the Springfield, OR and Corning, CA superchargers. They were adding more stalls at the Springfield SC and hopefully, they will fix the charging speeds as well.
- Superchargers visited
- Vacaville, CA
- Corning, CA
- Mt. Shasta, CA
- Grant Pass, OR
- Springfield, OR
- Woodburn, OR
- Centralia, WA
- Burlington, WA
- Squamish, BC
Other points:
- People who don’t know much about Teslas think that it can really drive by itself. When you explain the limitations, it is not very exciting anymore.
- I did not see a lot of Teslas outside of the Bay Area.
- Superchargers were pretty much empty outside of the Bay Area.
- More stalls were being added to Springfield OR SC.
- I got expected charge speeds at pretty much all the charging stations except Springfield OR and Corning CA. The paired stalls were unoccupied.
- I booked hotels (in Ashland, OR and Portland, OR) that offered destination charging and it worked out pretty well.
- Ran into someone who thought that if I charged at a stall right next to her, her charging speed will slow down. I had to explain the A-B stall pairings and that the first one to plug into a paired stall does not see a decline in their charging speed.
- Half of my trip was on 2017.44 and the other half was on 2017.46. I did not notice much difference between the two except that it felt like 2017.44 was better on curves at highway speeds. 2017.46 seemed to get too close to the lane markings for my comfort on curves.
- Fog lights were very helpful in the rain at night.
- I had some anxiety regarding a flat tire on this trip. I bought the Tesla tire repair kit and 4 hockey pucks just in case I had to deal with the unexpected.
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