After yesterday’s post about driving across the USA from San Francisco to New Hampshire, many of you inquired about the experience – what was it like to drive an electric vehicle (EV) like my Tesla Model Y more than four thousand miles across the wide-open spaces of the American West? Very comfortable, and remarkably easy. Read on.
We covered 4,096 miles in eight days. Each day mostly followed the same routine: enter the address of our long-range destination (like Arches National Park, or Aspen, or Minneapolis) into the Tesla navigation system; wait for it to calculate a route; then follow the turn-by-turn directions. Every 2-2.5 hours it would take us to a Tesla Supercharging station, within a few miles of the main road. After two hours, we were ready to stretch our legs, find a bathroom, pick up a drink, and switch drivers. Charging at a Supercharger is dead simple: just plug in, then walk away. Everything else, including payment, is automatic.
Most of the Superchargers are next to a convenience store, sometimes with restaurants or shopping centers nearby, so all of our meals were timeshared with charging. In nearly every case, our car was sufficiently charged before we were done with our errands or meals, but sometimes we had time to explore. At one Utah truck stop I was struck by the contrast between a derelict wagon in the foreground and the hi-tech electric charging in the background.
If we’d simply wanted to get from San Francisco to Aspen to Minneapolis to New Hampshire, that would be the end of the story. But we were interested in seeing some of the roads less well traveled, like US Route 50 across Nevada, aka “the loneliest road in America.” There is no Tesla Supercharger in the middle of Nevada – as far as my Tesla was concerned, it was not possible to transit this lonely road. So I used the PlugShare app, which maps public chargers from all vendors, to confirm we could recharge in the tiny hamlet of Austin, Nevada. Crossing our fingers, we headed east along the lonely highway.
Following a road 284 miles from one Tesla Supercharger to the next is a sure way to trigger range anxiety: 284 miles is a bit beyond the realistic range of my car. We drove across vast plains of sagebrush, past the ruins of historic stagecoach stations where the Pony Express would ‘recharge’ by swapping their tired horse for a rested horse. Our batteries drained low enough so Tesla raised increasingly dire warnings:
Confident we would find an opportunity to charge in Austin (population: 167), we pressed deeper into Nevada. We arrived there to find a well-maintained gas station with two types of third-party charging stations. One used the standard J1772 connector, for which I had an adapter… but that station was out of order. The other station used a different standard, the CCS1 connector, which looks like it might fit… but does not. Fortunately – very fortunately – the gas station loaned us a CCS1-to-Tesla adapter and we were in business. Almost. It was a hassle to install a new 3rd-party app, requiring a phone call to tech support, but I managed to pump new electrons into my car. Phew!
Later, at hotels in Omaha (Nebraska), Prior Lake (Minnesota), and Olean (New York), I was able to charge overnight using on-site third-party charging stations. These required installation of yet more third-party charging apps (ugh! why can’t they unify all connectors and payment apps?), but allowed me to timeshare these slow chargers with sleep.
Analysis
So, how far did we drive? I grabbed a screenshot of the Tesla app (with odometer reading) when I began the trip on July 15, and then when I went to bed every night, allowing me to compute miles traveled each day. (Below, I’ve highlighted the eight driving days; the trip total does not include the first two rows of this table.)
Wow, 4096 miles – a power of two! in 8 days – another power of two! Thus, an average 512 miles per day (another power of two). Cool. (Not as much fun in metric: 6,592 kilometers.)
OK, how much did it cost? I was able to export lots of data from the Tesla app – which records every Supercharging session in great detail, but sadly does not keep a record of third-party charging. Using app-specific records from EVconnect, EVgateway, and ChargeSmart, and back-calculating from a Tesla-provided “other” number to compute the kWh I received free at Mystic Lake Hotel, I was able to construct this table of 35 charging stops.
Nice: an average of 320 Wh per mile, costing an average of 13¢ per mile. The latter is equivalent to a gas car that averages 30mpg at $4/gallon… but with zero tailpipe emissions!
Digging deeper into the Tesla data, I was able to see that the base (pre-tax) cost per kWh varied from 0.27/kWh to 0.55/kWh… a factor of two. Surprising! I suppose that variance results, in part, from the widely differing cost of electric power across the US. About half of the stations charged tax on top of the base cost, but most of those were less than a dollar.
One more thing: advice to Tesla
When I finished lunch with a friend in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I plotted a course for my next desired destination (Oneonta, New York). Out of habit, I almost clicked ‘go’ and was ready to follow its directions… but when I looked more closely at the intermediate route and charging stops, I realized it was routing me through Ontario. That’s nice – I would love to drive through beautiful Canada – but I did not have my passport with me. If I’d blindly followed these directions, I would arrive at a border station (possibly far, far out of my way) and need to turn around in embarrassment. Instead, I entered a fake destination (Cleveland) to force it to choose a route south of Lake Erie; when I got close to there, I entered my real destination.
So, Tesla developers, some advice: add an “Avoid international border crossings” to the navigation settings, alongside “Avoid toll roads” and “Avoid ferries”. This is important!
David Kotz 