Tesla Chronicles #24 - Longer is Shorter in an EV

I may have written about this in the past, but yesterday was the perfect example of this. This is a tough concept for some people, but sometimes.... the "longer" route (in time) according to most GPS mapping APPS, might actually be the best, fastest route in an EV.

Why is this? Well. For our drive home yesterday, the standard route was nearly all highway, which is at higher speeds, and consumes more energy per mile. From Watkins Glen to home, we were going to need to stop at least once no matter what, but if we were to take the Highway route, we didn't have enough power to get all the way to Jim Thorpe. As such, the car recommended going to Binghamton first. There are 3 problems with this....the charger is a little out of our way (north of our direct route - google maps is showing this as a 22 minute increase in drive time), it is an older V2 charger, and it was early in our trip (not ready for Bio Break). That V2 is only capable of 120-150kw if it isn't busy and we have a low SOC, and as I mentioned in my last post, it could be as slow at 56kw and we would have had a high SOC upon arrival. So, although going the HW route might have been 10 minutes "faster" according to Apple Maps and Google Maps, we were going to have to have as much as 30-40 minutes of increased travel time to take this route. The route below is the one we ended up taking.

Stats: We left Watkins Glen with 90%, arrived at Jim Thorpe with 24%, and left Jim Thorpe with 50%. Adding that 26% took 7 minutes...the time it took us to walk into the rest stop to use the facilities, walk out. We didn't stay to charge longer, and arrived home with 20%.

We made a few stops along the way to take a hike and to have coffee with Emily. Our driving time was 4 hours and 15 minutes + 7 minutes (let's call it 10 total).... for 4 hours, 25 minutes door to door. It would have been about 4:45-5 hours the other way.