How far do you push your range?

dogememe

dogememe

Joined
Apr 15, 2017
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5,394
Location
Napa, CA.
For Christmas we drove to my mom's for Christmas Eve, my aunt's for Christmas morning, then to my partners family for Christmas dinner. We did have to stop at an Electrify America station in between. Me being impatient I got just enough juice to get us through the day.

Note on that... if you have a Prologue/Blazer EV/Equinox EV/related vehicle, it tops out at 150kw, but you need to go to the 350kw charger to get those speeds. Due to amperage limitations, you'll only get a bit over 100kw on the 150kw stations. And on our charging session the 350kw chargers were in use by a BMW charging to 100% and a Bolt getting like 50kw so we were stuck on the 150kw chargers. Hence why I didn't want to get any more juice than required. Our local EA station is 2x 350 and 2x 150. I have the Tesla Supercharger adapter, but it was in the Bolt, which was at home, and picking it up would have taken an extra 15 minutes, so we opted to just deal with the 150kw EA station.

Anyway, we got home with about 10 miles left (once you shut the car off, it tells you the actual miles to E, not just LOW). I hate that all GM EVs do this LOW thing. My Bolt is the same way. I think 15mi is the cutoff point. I'd rather have the estimated mileage even if its like 3 miles vs just LOW. Because the difference between 14 miles to E and 2 miles to E is a big deal depending on your situation and if it just says LOW how do you know how desperate you really are? The initial "Charge Vehicle Soon" notifications is at 30 miles. I would prefer a warning at 50 miles, 25 miles, 10 miles, 5 miles, etc. vs just one at 30mi and then at 15mi it flips out.

If I remember right, at the same time it went from 15mi to E to LOW, I had got this "Reduced Acceleration" message along with a flashing turtle icon. I wonder what it really does, but I was going like 60mph when it went into this mode. It was VERY obvious. The entire vehicle jerked for a second. I'm wonder if it disconnected the rear motor and made it FWD only? Does anyone know how this works?

I really need better charging at home. We share a single level 1 charger (normal 120V wall outlet) across two EVs. If we had proper home charging, we could have recharged fully between Christmas Eve and Christmas day and wouldn't have had to go charge at EA. We make it work, but it's a little frustrating. Oh, and our PG&E bill was like $700 last month. I hate PG&E. Maybe @JeffKeryk can run a line from his solar panels to our house? ;)

Anyone else here with an EV let it get down pretty low? I still love the car btw. Super comfy even after what felt like a day full of driving.

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I've had my car down to below 40% twice. Even with level 2 I don't leave it there because I work on call. I do have my charge limit set at 80% since I have the NCA battery, but 80% gives me a supposed rated range of 220 miles and my farthest work point is 150 miles. My actual range is probably 190 miles with the colder weather, but I have a number of chargers in between. On those longer ones I up the charge limit and let the car charge while I get ready. I usually have 45 minutes from call to time I have to leave just to put a bit extra in the battery and warm it up.

I really don't have too many situations where I can leave the battery low. Unless I need to go somewhere I don't usually charge it on my first day off. I'll start it charging when I go to bed to prepare for a call for work on my first day back on.

I plan to take a trip for work for training next month if everything works out. I plan to get pretty deep into the battery on that trip. I'll 100% charge before leaving and at least get it under 10% for Supercharging. I'm not going to intentionally push it lower than that. The chargers are still 20-25 miles apart in this area. Infrastructure is improving, but it's not that great here yet.
 
Let's just say I am glad I got in on NEM2. I actually wish I had upped the generation a little. Get a 240V install and charge after hours.

The 300 mile rating on our M3P pretty much hits the sweet spot for my use case. Maybe you should look into the M3 RWD. Also, right now you can do real well on the Y because of the soon-to-be-released Juniper. And used 3's are dirt cheap.

Is Tesla still offering 0% financing?
Go big or go home...
 
I took our Mach-E to 7% or about 21 miles range coming back from Dallas last month on a coldish (for Texas) morning. We had flown back from Madrid the evening before and decided to rest before starting off back to home as it was 3:30AM Madrid time before we collected our bags at DFW. After a painful EA session to get up to 80% with Bolt like charging speeds in the near-freezing temps with the heat on in the car, we pushed off to points South. (Mental note - get a hotel with an L2 charger next time!)

At first both the car and ABRP wanted to stop in the Waco area to top off to make it home, but it was a clear sunny day and it got much warmer outside as we neared Waco with an attendant improvement in energy usage. I changed the destination to Buc-ees in Temple and Google was showing a 0% arrival (battery integration with Google Maps arrived in a recent software update) so I slowed the car down to 65MPH and drove exclusively in the right lane the 30 some odd miles to Temple. We made it with 7% and I will probably use this strategy again in the future.

Side note for anyone who travels the I-35 corridor in an EV - there is also charging infrastructure going in at the brand new Buc-ees just north of Hillsboro along the freeway. This will have the advantage of allowing you to skip Waco and if you are going to Dallas or Fort Worth, arrive with a higher state of charge. Or if you are going southbound, to make it past Austin without a stop. (depending on the range of your EV)
 
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ICE or EV it seems some people just want to drain every drop (figuratively speaking) from the tank. If I had the "low" system rather than actual miles I'd just default to when "low" pops up I've got 2 miles to get to a plug and head for the nearest one.
 
JeffKeryk said:
Let's just say I am glad I got in on NEM2. I actually wish I had upped the generation a little. Get a 240V install and charge after hours.

The 300 mile rating on our M3P pretty much hits the sweet spot for my use case. Maybe you should look into the M3 RWD. Also, right now you can do real well on the Y because of the soon-to-be-released Juniper. And used 3's are dirt cheap.

Is Tesla still offering 0% financing?
Go big or go home...
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Diff subject - You are allowed to add up to 1000 watts more under your nem 2 contract.

If you have the space and money - you can also config as much as you want under whats referred to as "non export".
It's a little confusing how it works, but think of it as two separate systems.

The non export system covers as much of household load you config it for while the sun is shining - leaving the initial systems to make up any slack and export more that it would without the addition of the second system.
 
UncleDave said:
Diff subject - You are allowed to add up to 1000 watts more under your nem 2 contract.

If you have the space and money - you can also config as much as you want under whats referred to as "non export".
It's a little confusing how it works, but think of it as two separate systems.

The non export system covers as much of household load you config it for while the sun is shining - leaving the initial systems to make up any slack and export more that it would without the addition of the second system.
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Thanks UD. I will definitely look into this. Now if Uncle Sam will kick back 30% of the cost like they did last time... What's a poor boy to do?
 
JeffKeryk said:
Thanks UD. I will definitely look into this. Now if Uncle Sam will kick back 30% of the cost like they did last time... What's a poor boy to do?
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He will.
Im looking at a max out strategy as well.
Once I started irrigating my use skyrocketed (no surprise)
 
LDB said:
ICE or EV it seems some people just want to drain every drop (figuratively speaking) from the tank. If I had the "low" system rather than actual miles I'd just default to when "low" pops up I've got 2 miles to get to a plug and head for the nearest one.
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The thing that makes it more important in an EV is that you don't have DCFC at home, and you want to avoid having to use one whenever possible. Therefore, at the penultimate stop, it makes sense to arrive as low as possible so you can be in the fat part of the charging curve and arrive home with a high state of charge. So for me in the example given above, it was about making it one more stop down the road to get to 80% at a charger that was only about 40 miles from home thereby leaving me with useful charge levels once I arrived at home.

That, and I prefer stopping at Buc-ees to stopping at a Walmart, which is what it is at Electrify America in the Waco area, Bellmead to be exact.

On a side note, Bellmead is also one of the most dangerous cities in America, not so much where the EA chargers are located right off the freeway, but more so city wide. That is still a consideration, especially at night.
 
Tuesday this week I bought the wife a used Leaf, and used a good chunk of its range driving it home. Asked her to intentionally run the battery low to see how it does.
Friday morning when she got to work, she plugged it in, with 11% left showing. She loves her used Leaf, and that is all that matters.
 
I've been below 2 miles remaining on my Focus Electric. First time it was an accident. I got stuck in an area ~70 miles from home unable to charge as planned because other EVs kept leaving their vehicles at the only available L2 charger. When we left the areas temperatures had dropped to the 40s. I navigated to a convenience store with an EV charger and limped the car there, only to discover that there were two of the same store a few miles from each other. I navigated to the store, not the charger. I had my daughter with me so that was hair raising. I was able to get the car down the road to the next highway exit and rolled into the charger with less than 1 mile remaining.

The second time was another cold night where I estimated how much I needed to get home and gave myself a 15 - 20 mile buffer. What I didn't anticipate is the stiff headwind that drained my range unexpectedly quickly. I reduced my speed to 50 to ensure I could get the vehicle home. I made it with a mile remaining again.

On my Blazer EV and Jaguar, I don't think we've ever been below ten percent. The Focus only had 105 miles of range so it was easy to run low unexpectedly in a single day of driving. We used the car for softball tournaments around town, so I frequently found myself driving over 90 miles round trip, but it wasn't an issue during warmer weather.
 
I live in the Santa Clara Valley, which means coming home is downhill. It helps when things get dicey...
Hopefully Tesla buffers the numbers!
 
JeffKeryk said:
I live in the Santa Clara Valley, which means coming home is downhill. It helps when things get dicey...
Hopefully Tesla buffers the numbers!
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I'd really like to push and test it, but with it being so cold right I'm erring on the side of caution for now. As long as the weather is good for the trip back next Friday I'll get it decently low on the way back home, but I'm not going to test it's reserve Out of Spec style. I just don't have the guts for that!
 
AZjeff said:
What would your electric bill + gasoline bill be without the EVs? Are you saving tons of money?
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No, I think I broke down cost per mile in another thread with some detailed math and stuff and it costs about the same as a gas car. I still prefer the EVs though, it is convenient for my driving.
 
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