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Driving 1725km in an electric car in 2 days

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Re: Driving 1725km in an electric car in 2 days

#91

Post by notJim »

revscat wrote: post #81
version_five wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this kind of "it's great to have a break" justification tiring. Glad that you found something to do while your car is charging, but pretending it's not a limitation feels like just glossing over something that does make it less flexible, whether that was a problem for you or not.

It’s not, though. It is genuinely a nice break. The very first road trip I took on mine was with my three teenage children. It was a moderately lengthy trip, from Texas to Colorado. After we got back home I asked them which they preferred, and their answers were surprisingly unanimous: electric. And given that they had taken many road trips with their mother and her ICE vehicle, they had something to compare it again…

This feels like a post-hoc rationalization to me. I drive a Tesla and I do often find the breaks annoying. I would prefer to drive straight through rather than stand in some random parking lot for 30 minutes. Even if I want a break, I’d prefer to find a park or something. You can take a break whenever you want with any car, the car doesn’t need to force you.

Re: Driving 1725km in an electric car in 2 days

#92

Post by derefr »

gorkish wrote: post #27
bluesquared wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who are financing brand new cars are either wealthy enough or uneducated enough to not worry about a $40k+ MSRP. I've frequently championed my Chevy Bolt. Caveat being the recent recall on the battery fires, but ignoring that...My 2017 Bolt, bought used with ~35k miles was ~$16k USD. 238 mile advertised range, 50kW "DC Fast Charging". My Bolt (and I believe all of the new ones) still have the pathetic 50kW "fa…

I paid even less for my Bolt and while I think it's a wing dang doodle of a little car, I am not stupid enough to try to take it on a road trip. If I had to move the car any significant distance, I would not even attempt to drive it; I would ship or tow it. I "fast charged" the car exactly once, to test that it worked and familiarize myself with the process. $15 and 90 minutes later, I lost interest in ever doing it…

> while I think it's a wing dang doodle of a little car

Is that you, Robert Dunn of Aging Wheels? (I don't think he owns either a Tesla or a Bolt, but he owns a lot of weird cars so I wouldn't be surprised, and you're aping his speaking style almost perfectly.)

Re: Driving 1725km in an electric car in 2 days

#93

Post by notJim »

gorkish wrote: post #27
bluesquared wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who are financing brand new cars are either wealthy enough or uneducated enough to not worry about a $40k+ MSRP. I've frequently championed my Chevy Bolt. Caveat being the recent recall on the battery fires, but ignoring that...My 2017 Bolt, bought used with ~35k miles was ~$16k USD. 238 mile advertised range, 50kW "DC Fast Charging". My Bolt (and I believe all of the new ones) still have the pathetic 50kW "fa…

I paid even less for my Bolt and while I think it's a wing dang doodle of a little car, I am not stupid enough to try to take it on a road trip. If I had to move the car any significant distance, I would not even attempt to drive it; I would ship or tow it. I "fast charged" the car exactly once, to test that it worked and familiarize myself with the process. $15 and 90 minutes later, I lost interest in ever doing it…

> By contrast I would drive my Tesla without hesitation to anywhere in the continental US.

You gotta get off the interstate and away from major cities more! Plenty of places worth visiting that are far away from a supercharger.

Re: Driving 1725km in an electric car in 2 days

#94

Post by toomuchtodo »

notJim wrote: post #91
revscat wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not, though. It is genuinely a nice break. The very first road trip I took on mine was with my three teenage children. It was a moderately lengthy trip, from Texas to Colorado. After we got back home I asked them which they preferred, and their answers were surprisingly unanimous: electric. And given that they had taken many road trips with their mother and her ICE vehicle, they had something to compare it again…

This feels like a post-hoc rationalization to me. I drive a Tesla and I do often find the breaks annoying. I would prefer to drive straight through rather than stand in some random parking lot for 30 minutes. Even if I want a break, I’d prefer to find a park or something. You can take a break whenever you want with any car, the car doesn’t need to force you.

Are the breaks annoying enough you'd go back to a gas car if you had to pay the fully loaded carbon costs per gallon of fuel? At ~$100/metric ton of CO2, that's about 90 cents of carbon tax alone per gallon of fuel.

Re: Driving 1725km in an electric car in 2 days

#95

Post by drewg123 »

238475235243 wrote: post #87

Genuinely baffled why anyone buys anything but a Tesla. It's cheaper, autopilot is pretty great, has a vastly better charging network, charges vastly quicker... I guess it means you can write blog posts about bad experiences with an electric car...

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. I've read so many horror stories about bad experiences with non-Tesla fast charging.

One of the YouTubers I follow (Out of Spec Motoring) frequently takes road trips in non-Tesla EVs and vlogs about them. As a Tesla owner, I frequently watch his vlogs and feel a huge amount of schadenfreude. His trips are much more "interesting" than my own experiences road tripping using the Tesla network. He frequently encounters slow charge rates, failed chargers, and even entire stations being offline. In fact, he talks about how Electrify America shut down its entire network in the I95 corridor for upgrades, leaving non-Teslas stranded.

I've got about 36K on my Model X, about 50% of which came from road trips on the east coast. I've encountered 2 failed chargers, and had to wait to charge once.

Re: Driving 1725km in an electric car in 2 days

#96

Post by laurencerowe »

wstrange wrote: post #89

If my math is correct, driving 1,725km in a Prius (assume 6L/100KM - which is fairly conservative) would cost about $135 CDN in fuel - (approx. $1.30 per litre). Not much more than $120 spent on charging. For a car that is much less expensive than the Jaguar. Environmental considerations aside, this is a tough sell for most consumers.

For most long trips are rare so if 90% of your miles are charged from home (for much less than the cost of gas) you’d prefer charging outside of home to be more easily available even if it comes out more expensive than gas for that particular trip.

Re: Driving 1725km in an electric car in 2 days

#97

Post by rjsw »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #84
bryanlarsen wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carbon zero transportation is a two step process: electrify the transportation and green the electricity. They both have to be done, and they both take a long time. If each side waits for the other, neither gets done. At current prices, renewables are the cheapest energy sources, any increased demand for energy will bias the electricity mix greener.

> If each side waits for the other, neither gets done. But for it to get done, we essentially have to junk all current IC vehicles, and build replacements. My question was whether or not that actually puts us ahead CO2/climate-wise.

There seem to be several TV series that show people converting ICE cars to electric, the cost seems comparable to buying new electric cars but with a lot less environmental impact.

Re: Driving 1725km in an electric car in 2 days

#98

Post by jmpman »

I just did a 2 day 2000 mile trip in my long range model 3. Total charging costs were around $100, which didn’t include two stops where the superchargers were free (network connectivity problems?). Required a total of 13 supercharging stops. Each stop was between 20min to 45min. I started off completely full, and charged overnight at a Tesla destination charger, (so, 14 stops?). Roughly half the cost of the article’s reported charging costs.

At two superchargers, I had to wait due to a crowd, which probably added a full hour to my trip. But, all the superchargers worked.

What’s not talked about are the bathroom facilities. You’d expect the superchargers to be located next to a fast food restaurant or gas station. Some place with extended hours and restrooms. Nope. Ended up peeing in bushes on the side of the road in the middle of the night. Tesla needs to fix that.

At one Supercharger in a hotel parking lot, the fellow chargers informed me that the hotel wasn’t friendly to supercharging restroom seekers. I tried crossing a busy freeway to get to a gas station on the other side, only to find they were open, but their restroom closed. Peed in a culvert.

Once I arrived at the Shamrock Texas supercharger past midnight, and the attached gas station (a Conaco used for inspiration in Pixar Cars - highly recommend checking it out) was closed. They probably have some camera footage of me peeing behind a bush. Quite opposite from the premium experience you’d get driving a BMW or Mercedes. Luckily I’m the prime demographic for mandatory late night public urination. However, my wife is not.

Re: Driving 1725km in an electric car in 2 days

#99

Post by [deleted] »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #94
notJim wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like a post-hoc rationalization to me. I drive a Tesla and I do often find the breaks annoying. I would prefer to drive straight through rather than stand in some random parking lot for 30 minutes. Even if I want a break, I’d prefer to find a park or something. You can take a break whenever you want with any car, the car doesn’t need to force you.

Are the breaks annoying enough you'd go back to a gas car if you had to pay the fully loaded carbon costs per gallon of fuel? At ~$100/metric ton of CO2, that's about 90 cents of carbon tax alone per gallon of fuel.

[deleted]

Re: Driving 1725km in an electric car in 2 days

#100

Post by drewg123 »

jmpman wrote: post #98

I just did a 2 day 2000 mile trip in my long range model 3. Total charging costs were around $100, which didn’t include two stops where the superchargers were free (network connectivity problems?). Required a total of 13 supercharging stops. Each stop was between 20min to 45min. I started off completely full, and charged overnight at a Tesla destination charger, (so, 14 stops?). Roughly half the cost of the article’s…

I've done multiple ~1000mi road trips in my Model X, and I've peed in a lot of bushes too. A lot of the newer chargers (at least on the east coast) are located at WaWa's, and have 24hr restrooms. But the chargers at malls are a pain. Either the mall is closed, and you need to pee in the bushes, or the mall is open and the traffic is terrible and the chargers are ICE'ed in.

There is one charger in Hardee SC thats in the parking lot of a police station. I was a bit nervous to use the bushes there..

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