We have a garage in which is installed a Tesla wall charger. It requires a 240 volt connection (same as a clothes dryer) and provides 50 amps into our car when it is at home. The bottom line is that it will fully charge the car in about 5-6 hours but most nights it is only required to replenish a couple of hundred kilometers, which takes an hour or two.
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| Our Tesla Wall Charger |
The rest of the time involves longer trips. So far I have taken trips to two locations, one 450 km away and the other 125 km away. The longer trip involved using Tesla Superchargers and fortunately my route included ample opportunities for using them. In a couple of half hour stops, coinciding with a meal or snack, the car would be ready to go again.
The shorter trip, oddly, involved a little more anxiety. A round trip of 250 km should of course be comfortably within the range of a car with 410 km of range. However, asterisks are involved here.
The first asterisk is that in cold weather the range of an electric car will suffer significantly. November and December are not warm months in Ottawa and so we have not had the chance to experience the car in warm conditions. The 410 km of rated range translates in winter into about 250 km of actual range. You will note that this is the length of my round trip. The second asterisk is that the car will lose range sitting idly overnight – the so-called "vampire drain." That meant that I had to find a hotel with a charger at the destination. Fortunately, I was able to do this and fortunately the charger was available and fortunately, it worked to perfection.
I also had to leave the car at the airport for the better part of a week and vampire drain slowly sapped the battery. I was able to follow this from the Tesla app on my phone but without having any means to do anything about it. Fortunately, by the time I came back there was plenty of range left to get me home comfortably.
So in my experience to date, range has not been an issue. However, this is not to say that it is not an issue that you have to be aware of all the time. Driving a conventional vehicle for most of us does not involve much thought about the level of fuel in the tank. If the fuel is low we can replenish it virtually everywhere in a few minutes. Driving an electric car requires planning. However, if you are properly set up, that planning becomes second nature and, quite frankly, liberating when you can set out with a full charge each morning.
However for many drivers, range will definitely be a factor. In fact, many urbanites who rely on street parking or who live in apartments will not have ready access to dependable overnight charging. The lack of overnight charging transforms the range issue dramatically. In my garage I have the equivalent of a private gas station that silently, dependably and inexpensively (more on that later) replenishes my fuel in the night.
Your experience may vary.
Using an amazing site called Teslafi.com I am able to track my car's usage in almost creepy detail. I discovered the site about 2 weeks after acquiring the car. In the six weeks since, I have driven the car 3600 km and I have paid about $120, combining Supercharging costs and home electricity usage. I have also used free chargers on two occasions, reducing the average cost further. Bottom line is that I am paying 3.3 cents to power the car each kilometer. In summer, when the car's range returns to normal, that should come down to closer to 2 cents.
Our internal combustion car needs premium gas, which is pretty standard among luxury cars. Gas prices are low at the moment but premium is still, well, premium. Let's say $1.20 a litre. The car will use 8 litres per 100 km. So that is $9.60 for 100 km, or 9.6 cents per kilometer. This is not a V8 gas guzzler but a fuel-efficient turbocharged 2 litre 4 cylinder car. The Tesla has vastly greater performance for a fraction of the cost.
So, is range anxiety a thing? Yes it can be, but the offsetting benefits are very considerable.
Hello neighbour, great blog! I was also thinking of creating a blog on driving the Model 3 in the winter, but maybe I’ll just add my observations as a comment on your posting :-)
ReplyDeleteI also see about 35% to 40% less range in cold weather. I’ve done some experimenting, a lot of that is just a result of heating the cabin ... but I like to be warm, so I’m willing to take that “penalty”. Recently there has been a lot of debate in the Tesla community around whether it’s better to charge to 80% or 90% nightly (400 km vs 450 km theoretical range). I’ve been going to 90% in the cold weather, I’ll probably revert to 80% in the spring when I take the snow tires off the car. It just gives that extra bit of range which means I never even think about it as I’m driving around town during the day.
I’ve also set up my nightly charging so that it finishes charging around 6 or 6:30 am (I’ve turned on “charging complete” notifications so that I can fine tune my start time to hit this finish time). That way, I’m still getting off-peak electricity rates, while having a nice warm battery when I leave in the morning, and more regenerative braking capacity when I start out.
You discussed the challenge of a 250 km round-trip journey in the winter. For that, I would definitely charge to 100% capacity before I headed out ... it’s fine to do that a few times a month, and I always charge to 100% before heading out on a road trip where I know I will be hitting the Superchargers along the way, or know I will be using most of the car’s range.
I’ve also been experimenting with optimising Supercharger use. The sweet spot I’ve found, when it comes to minimising time spent at the charger, seems to be to aim to get to a charger with 10% to 20% range left (50 - 100 km), and charge to 60% to 70% range (300 - 350 km). Easy to do along the Toronto - Montreal corridor where there is a Supercharger every 100 km or so. A couple numbers from the drive I did last night:
Charge #1 - Start 84 km, End 311 km, charge time = 26 min
Charge #2 - Start 84 km, End 449 km, charge time = 56 min (I was about to do a 240 km stretch with no Superchargers on that part of the route, so wanted to have a healthy charge on that leg)
So, 26 minutes to add about 230 km of capacity in the “sweet spot”. And another 30 minutes to add an additional 140 km of range during my second stop. The additional top-up during the second charging stop - to get to 90% - charged at only 1/2 the rate of the first 230 km of range. (I arrived at my destination with 20% capacity left, so I guess I could have charged to only 80%, but the 1 hr charge time really wasn’t an issue, as the car was charged before I had even finished paying my bill at East Side Mario’s :-) ).
It's great to get your feedback, Steve. I am planning to add posts over the next few days while I am taking some time off. I hope you come back to see them!
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