Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday! I hope you’re ready for more of this because now that we have it in our garage, I have a few weeks of post ideas queued up.

This week let’s talk about the question “How long does it take to charge?” I get it. I asked the same question when I was researching. The questions is a bit flawed though. Driving a gas vehicle, we think in terms of stopping to fill up. When you’re driving an electric vehicle, it’s most economical to arrive at home empty, not full. It’s significantly cheaper to charge at home. The goal is to make sure that your home charging solution can supply enough juice to let you leave with a full battery in the morning.

When I was doing the math, I kept thinking about how long it would take to charge from 0% to 100%. My home charger adds about 14 miles of range per hour so it would take almost a day to go from 0 to 100%! Is that ok? It turns out that yes, this is fine, because in the entire life of your vehicle, you’ll almost certainly never do 0-100%. Running down to 0% is bad for the battery and charging to 100% isn’t great either (though it’s ok when you’re preparing for a long drive.) A much more likely scenario is that overnight you’ll simply be replacing the charge that you used during the day. We drive around 80 miles per day so in less than 6 hours, I’ve recovered my lost charge for the day. That leaves a LOT of leeway for longer trips on weekends, and even if I didn’t completely refill from an exceptionally low battery state, I’d have plenty for my normal day of commuting.

But charging speed DOES matter when on a road trip. If you’re traveling more than one charge form home, and if you’re not charging at your destination, then you’ll be supercharging. All Tesla superchargers are faster than home chargers by there are a variety of speeds ranging from 72 kW to 250 kW. My 220v 20amp circuit at home is good for 4 kW so these Superchargers are significantly faster. We did a test at a 150 kW charger and added 17% to our battery in 7 minutes. That supercharger was adding around 10 miles of range for every minute we charged and it wasn’t even the fastest charger version!

Further complicating the original questions is that batteries charge fastest at lower charge states and they get much slower as you approach 100%. So if you’re really trying to optimize your stops (like on an EV Canonball Run), you would keep your charges in roughly the 10-50% range. Here’s a chart showing how much juice you can shove into a Tesla battery at various states of charge:

So how long does it take to charge the battery? I don’t know, and most of the time, I don’t pay any attention to charging speed. If I’ve got enough juice to get through my day then I’m good to go and I know it will be full again the next morning. I’ll think about it more on a road trip, but even then, if I’m stopping for the bathroom or food, it’s going to be ready for the next leg of the trip before I am. Stay tuned for a future post about what it is like to plan and execute a road trip on battery power!

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

We ordered a Tesla Model Y on October 18, 2021. The original estimate was that we’d receive our car sometime in May 2022. 210 days later, almost exactly in the middle of the original estimate range, our car arrived! While we waited, the estimated delivery date changed many times. I kept track of all the changes and plotted it as the number of estimated days until our delivery window.

Less than a week before the delivery date, we got a call to talk about our trade in. Via a combination of text messaging and the phone app, we shared some basic information and photos of the car we wanted to trade in. They gave us a quote which seemed reasonable compared to other sites like Carvana and CarMax so we went with it. In Washington state, trade in value is deducted from the new car’s price before sales tax is collected so that’s a significant advantage.

The next day we got a text message asking us to choose a date for delivery! We picked the first available spot and then it was time to start filling out forms… online. Everything was done through the app! We got PDFs of all the sales documentation along with a full breakdown of exactly how much we owed. Once I texted back and forth a bit to understand some of their calculations, we completed the payment via the app. Payment is all done via the app whether you’re financing, paying cash, or getting a third-party loan.

We’ve ordered cars from other manufacturers in the past and when they were “delivered”, we had to go to the dealership and spend 2-3 hours going through paperwork and attempted upselling of paint protection film, interior sprays, extended warranty, service plans, and more. With Tesla, it was a true delivery experience. A driver arrived at our house within the two-hour scheduled window and dropped off the car. We did have to do some paperwork for the DOL, but then I signed a form on his phone and he transferred ownership to the app on my phone. (With a Tesla, your phone is your key.) The driver inspected our trade-in to make sure it matched the condition that we had shared earlier and then drove away. That’s it!

The entire process from ordering it online to getting daily updates on the estimated delivery window via the app to texting our sales advisor periodically with questions to the streamlined delivery approach was a joy! I can’t begin to compare it to some of the bad experiences we’ve had buying cars in the past.

Now it’s time to go through that semi-awkward period where we are the “new car people”. It’s a tradeoff between being super excited about this new purchase but also feeling a bit embarrassed about it. Even though I’ve done the math that shows it will pay out eventually compared to what we would have bought instead, that’s not totally true because we could have bought a much cheaper used car to get us from point A to point B.

A lot of the frequent questions I get about owning a Tesla are covered in my original “Why we bought a Tesla Model Y” post, but I’ll update one of them: “How much does it cost to charge it up?” That question is a little easier if I convert it to “What is the energy cost to drive 100 miles?” Our Escape consistently got 22.7 mpg and gas at the six closest stations around my house averages $4.89 today so the Escape would cost $21.54 in gas to drive 100 miles. For the Tesla, if I consider average kWh/mile and a small amount of energy loss to heat while charging, it would be $2.88 to drive that same 100 miles (87% less).

Will this really save us money overall? Only time will tell and even then, we’ll be guessing since we won’t be driving a comparable internal combustion car on all the same trips. It will probably come as no surprise that I have detailed data about the exact cost per mile for all our vehicles over the years (purchase price, trade in value, service costs, registration fees, fuel costs, inflation, etc.) so I’ll be able to make a good comparison. But in the meantime, I’m going to be happily driving around our new computer-on-wheels and thoroughly enjoying not wasting my time waiting in line at slow gas pumps or wondering what the oil drip on the garage floor means!

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

We’re eagerly awaiting the delivery of our Model Y. We ordered in mid-October and our original delivery estimate was May 2022. I have the Tesla app installed on my phone and I check it at least once a day. It has changed many times (both forward and backward) but it was holding steady for May 8 – June 12. As we got closer and closer to May 8 our hopes were going up that it was going to happen. But this morning, the date range got pushed back to May 24 – June 20. (Tuesday seems to be a popular day for them to change the estimated delivery dates.) So the wait continues…

There is an online spreadsheet for eager Tesla owners where people record when they ordered and when it was delivered. As with most crowd-sourced data, it’s noisy and full of obvious errors, but looking at similar orders in my area, people who ordered around the same time as we did are starting to receive their cars. Hopefully we’re not too far behind!

While I wait, I continue to soak up Tesla content, and while this video didn’t teach me a lot that I hadn’t read elsewhere, I thought it was a good summary of what it’s like to own a Model Y for a couple years:

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

While I don’t have sales data to back it up, I expect that our county ranks near the top of Tesla’s sales list. They’re everywhere. At a stoplight a couple weekends ago, there were five Teslas waiting with me. On the highway, there’s usually at least one in sight at all times. But this area is an anomaly. How well are they selling around the country?

Would you believe me if I told you that in January 2022, in the US, Telsa outsold Volkswagen, BMW, and Daimler? Check out this data from truecar.com.

Furthermore, while most manufacturers decreased deliveries due to supply chain issues, Tesla almost doubled their output.

Tesla had two factories (Freemont, CA and Shanghai) each producing about 500,000 cars. Their Berlin factory just came online and Texas is right behind. Those will each add around 500k/year more capacity with even more capacity coming later. It remains to be seen whether Tesla has enough supplies to take advantage of all that additional capacity right away.

Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!

Tyla has a lot of extended family members in Montana, and a few years ago, we drove to Fort Peck for a fun weekend. When the topic of a Tesla comes up with her family, the question is often asked, “Could you drive it to Fort Peck?” The short answer is, “Yes, but I probably wouldn’t.” The fastest route breaks off of I-90 at Missoula, heads up to 2, and crosses to Fort Peck. The Tesla route planner keeps you on I-90 to I-94 and then heads up to Fort Peck after a final charge in Miles City. It’s 1133 miles instead of 985 miles and it adds charging time too. If you use a third-party route site like ABetterRoutePlanner.com, you can get a little more creative. While not as fast or convenient as a supercharger station, RV campgrounds provide 50-amp service which isn’t too shabby, especially if you’re planning to stop there for a longer meal or overnight anyway. And in a pinch, lots of hotels and shopping centers (even in Montana) have much slower charging, but I wouldn’t rely on that for a trip.

If you look at any of the charging network maps, Montana and the Dakotas are barren except for the interstates. It’s easy to drive across the states but going deep off the interstate gets tricky. This is one of the reasons why we still have a traditional internal combustion engine vehicle. I have no plans to get rid of the truck and it’s always there as an option if it makes more sense for road trips. If you have multiple cars, you don’t need your electric vehicle to be capable of every drive you might ever take.

Ignoring extreme examples like Fort Peck, most of our drives straightforward with the Tesla. The car navigation system predicts battery usage and automatically routes to chargers as needed. One of the longest trips we have planned this year is to the small town of Alsea, OR. Google Maps says it is 292 miles and 4 hours and 42 minutes. If we took the Tesla, we’d have a single 8 minute charging stop along the way.

However, that leaves us with a 10% charge when we arrive at our destination. While I assume there’s a 110v outlet that we could slow charge from, I’m more likely to plan the route to include arriving with enough battery so I don’t have to worry about charging at the destination. Adding that means that total charging time increases (round trip) to 41 minutes spread across three charging stops. I guarantee that the people in the car with me would need more bathroom stops than that anyway.

When we were debating the purchase, I spent a lot of time plugging in our common drives to the Tesla route planner. Most of them don’t require any stops at all, but for the ones that do, it’s rarely more than 20 or 30 minutes of total charging time. It will take a little more planning, especially if someone needs a bathroom break and I try to find an EV charger on the fly to take advantage of the stop, but we’ll definitely be trying it and if it proves to be too annoying, we always have the truck which is a great road trip vehicle.