Category Archives: Road trips

I arrived back in the US of A to find my Tesla asleep

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Screen Shot 2016 09 18 at 9 40 01 AM
Odometer: 3690 miles

I’m back from Europe, so now I’ll have a chance to drive Lightning for the next couple of weeks before I leave town for the next 6 weeks.

What surprised me about the recent trip was that Lightning powered itself down about 6 days after I left on September 2. I left my Raspberry Pi logger running, and Lightning stopped responding September 8, despite being plugged into my home charger.

My suspicion is that I have the option, “Conserve Power” enabled on my car, but I had thought that was disabled when the car is plugged into a charger. It seems that this might not be the case. The battery had not lost any charge over the two weeks, so I know it was still awake enough to maintain charge. However, the fact it stopped responding to over the air wakeup requests, despite being on my home WiFi network, is a bit disturbing.

When I got home, I told the car to unlock itself, and the dashboard told me to wait while the systems booted up, so clearly the car had gone into some low power mode. Everything came back online reasonably well, but I did notice that network connectivity was slower than usual and that I’d lost the ability to play TuneIn Internet radio. I did a quick touchscreen reboot (hold both driver’s wheel thumbwheels down for 10 seconds), and everything was back to normal.

Next weekend, we get to put on another 500 miles on Lightning as we head to University of Maine for Parents’ Weekend. This will be aided significantly by the fact that Tesla has now opened its second Supercharger in Maine in Brewer, near Bangor. Not only does this makes trips to University of Maine a piece of cake (Brewer is only about 10 miles from campus), but it also is now the easternmost Supercharger in the US. So now we don’t have to charge to 100% in Augusta to ensure making the roundtrip back to Augusta. Instead, we’ll just charge enough to continue our trip, and then supercharge to 90% or 100% for the ride home Sunday morning.

Wandering the Maine Coastline: Stow-Orono-Mt. Desert Island-Saco-Stow

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Lightning charging in front of the Seawall Motel just after dawn
Odometer: 3520 miles

Sorry that it’s been a while since I updated this blog — I’ve been traveling on business so I haven’t been home to play with Lightning. However, our younger son David departed for University of Maine at Orono, ME last Friday, so we used this trip as an excuse to tour Mt. Desert Island and Acadia National Park in Lightning. The entire trip was roughly 600 miles, and, as one would hope, it went off without a hitch.

This trip was made a lot easier thanks to David and Vickie Lloyd, who run the Seawall Motel. Despite their being off the beaten path in Southwest Harbor instead of the more well-known Bar Harbor on Mt. Desert Island, they installed two Tesla destination chargers connected to a 100A circuit as well as a general purpose EV charger. The result was that we were able to supercharge at the Augusta, ME (so far the only supercharger in Maine), visit the UMaine campus, tour around Bar Harbor, and reach the Seawall with about 150 miles of charge left. We could then charge overnight there up to our full range of 284 miles (see the map below).

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We highly recommend other Tesla owners stay at the Seawall. We plan to return to the Seawall during future trips to Maine. It is open year-round and David and Vickie run a warm, comfortable and clean property. Oh yeah, they like Tesla owners too; Dave noted that he has yet to meet one who didn’t seem like an interesting person.

On Saturday, we walked around the fabulous rocky beaches around the Seawall Motel, toured the island, and worked our way down Route 1 to Saco, ME to visit a relative. We then pressed on to the Seabrook supercharger and headed home. As you can see from the map above, we covered just about 254 miles from our overnight charge at the Seawall until we hit the Seabrook supercharger, arriving with 10% charge. While we had no official backup plan if our energy consumption had run higher than expected, we did observe several public chargers listed on Plugshare.com in places like York, ME and Portsmouth, NH that we could have stopped at if necessary.

Our conclusions from this trip:

  1. Destination chargers are a big win. We wouldn’t have looked at the Seawall Motel if it hadn’t been flagged for us as having a destination charger. Further, if we hadn’t been able to charge at the Seawall, we would have had to hit the Augusta supercharger again on our way home. That would have required us to skip the first 75 miles or so down Route 1 or to have charged at some slower charging station. Having a destination charger allowed us to go where we wanted.
  2. The Bangor supercharger will bring more Teslas to northern Maine attractions. A new supercharger at the Bangor Mall in Brewer ME will be operational in a matter of weeks if not days. That will make Acadia, Bar Harbor, and the Southwest Harbor accessible to more Teslas. In fact, that charger will allow Teslas with 85kWh batteries and up to do round trips to Mt. Katahdin, the most northern point on the Appalachian Trail. Bonus fun fact: When it becomes operational, the Bangor supercharger will be the easternmost supercharger in North America.
  3. Range really isn’t a problem on this car. While we know there are places where no superchargers exist, there aren’t many places with no charging stations at all. Increasingly, we’re feeling like our Tesla is just like our other cars: we just pick up and go, and we will figure out where we will refuel along the way. Planning in advance optimizes the process and will save time, but we are finding that planning on the fly works just fine.

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Flight plan for our first international road trip

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Route from Stow to Montreal

Route between Stow, MA and Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Odometer: 1840 miles

On Monday, we’re taking Lightning on our first international road trip from Stow, Massachusetts to Montreal, Quebec, where I’m dropping my son to travel to Japan. According to evtripplanner.com, this will be a roughly 312 mile trip each way. Even with Lightning’s 90kWh battery, the trip will require at least one recharging stop, which we’ve currently planned for West Lebanon, New Hampshire.

Supercharger locations with yellow 100-mile range circlesUnlike our prior road trip to Maine, this route really epitomizes Elon Musk’s vision for what an electric car trip should be like. While we have the luxury of a nearly 300 mile range with Lightning, we have no fewer than 3 superchargers along our route AND we have a supercharger available in Montreal when we get there. No one driving a Tesla would have any range anxiety on this route. In fact, as you can see from the circles on the map to the right, any electric car with 100 miles of range would handily make the trip using just Superchargers. And just like in a gasoline car, one could easily do this trip with no planning whatsoever; just point the car in the direction you want to go, and follow the in-car Navigation directions to Superchargers when the planning software tells you to.

One other convenient aspect is that Montreal itself is very EV-friendly. The hotel where we are staying has free parking for electric vehicles, and Montreal boasts a 12-stall Supercharger station and another 2 stalls at one of Canada’s largest Tesla dealerships. For those not in Teslas, Montreal also has an array of J1772 charging stations as shown in the screenshot below. Public EV charging locations in Montreal

We’re charging the battery to 95% capacity today off our solar panels which should give us about 275 miles of range. We will be climbing a bit into the mountains, so we will likely see less than that, but our Supercharger top-up in West Lebanon will easily get us to Montreal with between 50-100 miles of range left. Should we encounter rain or expend too much energy in the mountains, we can always top up again in Burlington, Vermont.

EVtripplanner.com estimates we’ll be driving about 5 hours each way, plus about 40 minutes of charging time, during which we’ll probably get a bite to eat in West Lebanon. I’ll be running my trip logger at home during the trip to record what our actual mileage and charging numbers turn out to be. Our current trip plan estimates we’ll consume about 103 kWh each way. Because our Supercharger use is free, our only vehicle costs for this entire 630 mile trip will be about $5 in tolls to use the Everett Turnpike in New Hampshire.

I’ll update the blog with tweets and photos as we drive up on Monday and back on Tuesday. This should be a fun trip.

Driving, autopark, and summoning

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Odometer: 1,668

I’m now roughly 6 weeks into my Tesla ownership. I’ve been in Chicago the last week, so I haven’t had much time to drive or blog. However, I have recorded a few observations that I thought would be worth passing on.

  • Turning off “Creep”. When I first started driving the car, I used the default driving settings which make the car creep forward when your foot isn’t on the gas. This emulates the behavior of an ICE car, so it’s familiar to most folks. However, I’ve never really liked this feature, I suspect because I originally learned to drive on a standard transmission where this was not the default. I now have disabled the creep behavior, and the car only moves when I push on the gas pedal. My wife disagrees with me on this (she likes creep), but for me, it makes more sense.
  • Dialing down Summon. The ability to summon Lightning into and out of our garage is one of Tesla’s unique driving features. However, the default settings look for a clearance of around 12 inches from all obstacles, and our garage opening is only about 4 inches wider than the Tesla itself with the mirrors folded out. I’ve now dialed down the sensor clearance to the minimum value (about 8 inches), and I can always successfully summon Lightning out of the garage (as you can see in this video. Getting Lightning to park inside the garage is a little trickier because we have a lip between our driveway and the garage entrance. When we first started, Lightning would abort the maneuver about 50% of the time because of the lip, but nowadays we’re seeing about a 90% success rate, assuming we get it lined up properly to begin.
  • Using Autopark. We spend an afternoon up at Tower Hill Botanical Gardens in Boylston, MA. Autopark indicator It was there that for the first time, I saw a big square P show up on my dash, indicating that Lightning saw an opportunity to autopark perpendicularly. It was pretty freaky at first, especially because you have to have cars on either side of the space for it to enable the function, but once we got the hang of it, we did it three times more. What I found most interesting is that it doesn’t have to get it right the first time; autopark will attempt to cut the wheel to make it into the space, but if it can’t make enough of a turn, it will do exactly what a human would do: it will stop, pull forward, and then back into the space a second time. It’s pretty awesome.

While July has been kind of a bust for Lightning driving, we’ve now planned a couple trips for August:

  1. A trip to Bar Harbor, Maine at the end of August as we drop off David at University of Maine, and
  2. A trip to Montreal, Canada to drop off Robert at the Montreal airport.

While our Maine trip could be a bit challenging (as we noted on our prior trip to UMaine, Maine has but one Supercharger in Augusta, which is more than 100 miles from Bar Harbor), we’re staying overnight at the Seawall Motel on the other side of Mount Desert Island. The Seawall has had the foresight to install 4 EV charging stations including two Tesla chargers and outfitted the lot with 100 amp, 240 volt service. So while we will be staying about 100 miles from the Augusta Supercharger and plan to do some touring around Acadia National Park, we will be able to charge overnight while we sleep and eliminate any concerns about running out of electrons.

Our other trip we’re planning is a quick jaunt up to Montreal, Quebec. While one might think an international trip like this might be more challenging, it’s actually a lot simpler logistically than the Maine trip. Unlike on the Maine trip where we have to plan around a single Supercharging site, we will pass no fewer than 3 Supercharging stations on the Montreal trip: Hookset, NH, West Lebanon, NH, and Burlington, VT. Further, Montreal itself has not one, but two Superchargers in the city itself. So driving to and from Montreal will be a lot like driving an ICE car: we just jump in the car, plan to stop for food and electrons in West Lebanon, and then drive to our destination. It should be a piece of cake.