Welcome to another Tesla Tuesday!
Last week I wrote about our trip to central WA. Part of the fun of those trips for me is the logistics of doing it with an electric vehicle. This one was a particular challenge because there are no superchargers up around the Grand Coulee Dam and it was going to be a long loop. If we left with 90% charge my estimate was that we’d get back with 15%. That’s ok, but it’s about the minimum that I ever shoot for.
While the Tesla itself will do everything it can to avoid you running out of power (as long you tell it where you’re going), my favorite pre-planning tool is A Better Route Planner. I’ve got the knobs tuned really well for our car and I can often predict it as good or better than the car itself at the start of a long drive.
To buy us a little extra cushion, I planned for us to eat a picnic lunch at the Gehrke Windmill Garden which Plug Share said had a handful of free NEMA 14-50 plugs which are good for about 10% battery charge per hour. I haven’t yet made any plans that require one of those random free spots to be functional, but I was happy to try it out and it did indeed work well. We added 6% to our battery while we ate and in the end, we made it back to the supercharger in Moses Lake with 20% so without the 6% charge we would have only been 1% off my pre-trip estimate.
When we do a trip like this, I always travel with our mobile connector and all my various adapters. If we got into a big bind, I would pull into an RV park and ask if I could pay $20 to take a couple dollars of electricity from them. We’ve never needed it, but it’s nice to have that as an option if we ever really got into a bind.
This probably sounds crazy to non-EV people and it would have made me way more nervous before we got into the EV world, but now I just view it as expanding my comfort level. When we first got the car I got nervous when we dropped below 50% charge. Now I’m much happier to play games to optimize our supercharging (15-50% is MUCH faster than 50-85% for example) and I’ll try to arrive at home with 10% or lower so that I can “fill up” with much cheaper electricity at home. Part of the fun of all this for me is knowing that in 10-20 years, this will all sound silly because there will be so many chargers everywhere. Our family goal is to hit every county in Washington. Privately I’m keeping track of which counties we hit in the Tesla versus our gas truck because I think it would be fun to say we hit them all in an EV. Some of the northeast and southeast counties will be quite a challenge!
Bonus fact: The Model Y was already the world’s best-selling vehicle in 2023 and now it is very close to being the best-selling vehicle in the US, already having knocked off the F150 and hot on the heels of the Rav4.