Planning a Road Trip. New to SuperCharging

[TL:DR]

I am planning a 600 mile trip in my MYP. I have only used LVL 2 charging, to date. I'm planning on hitting a SC or three for this trip. In looking through the onboard Navi, I can see the prices of the SCs in my area. I'm posting 2 pictures so you can see what I see. I'm assuming that we don't get a large variance in price where I am. It looks like the Cambridge, MA SC has a constant price of .39 per kWh. Another nearby in Somerville, MA only varies between .39 and .47. Am I reading this correctly? The the bars underneath the prices represent busy times, not price apparently?

 

[Big Earl]

Correct - the bars represent usage at various times of day. The price is listed at the top of each time block. Some stations have one fee for the entire day, while others have four time periods.

 

[minderbinder]

Just curious - are you driving ”to” Boston or “through” it? If the latter, then I wouldn’t recommend either of those superchargers - especially not the Cambridge one, as it’s in a parking garage that’s not particularly near anything, and it’s an “urban” supercharger, which means it’ll be significantly slower (it’s designed for charging while you’re shopping, rather than stopping). You can tell by ‘max’ power rating in parentheses next to the number of stalls.

An excellent resource to see all your supercharger options when you’re not in the car is: Supercharge.info.

 

[Dracaris]

One more point that's been referred to peripherally: Note the Somerville charger is a 250kW location while the Cambridge charger is a 72kW location. Therefore, the Somerville location will charge much faster, though at quite a price premium per kWh except between midnight and 4AM. So, in this particular example, saving time will cost you money, and saving money will cost you time.

One more suggestion: as much as possible, pick SC locations along your route vs. those hidden in parking garages far from the road on which you intend to travel - unless that SC is in a parking garage for the hotel where you intend to stay. Oh, and of course, allow the Tesla navigation to take you to SC locations so it can precondition your battery for fast charging.

 

[Big Earl]

If you plug your destination into the car's nav, what does it recommend for the trip?

 

[EVRider-FL]

Since you haven’t used a supercharger yet, I would also supercharge briefly before the trip to make sure everything is working. You don’t want to discover that you can’t supercharge while you’re on the trip.

 

[SVMike]

Note that whatever the navigation picks for your SC location you can override it if you want to go to a certain SC. Just navigate to that location so that the car will start preconditioning a few minutes before you get there. If you just ignore a further destination and drive to a closer SC you don't get the preconditioning.

Mike

 

[Chisale]

I would definitely encourage you to look at various pricing because, in my area at least, there are superchargers in close proximity that have very different prices. The in car NAV will only choose the fastest route and not the cheapest. So ask yourself, is $ more important or is time more important (keeping in mind that supercharging is expensive and with current gas prices about on par with a 30-35 mpg car). If time is more important then just go with what the car tells you to do. If $ is more important then look at pricing and also try to throw in free charging at hotels when you can. That can save a lot of money on road trips.