E38 | Road Trip Death Valley - Enough Range? (Tesla Model Y)

hello this is daniel and i'm going electric for the average person thanks for coming along for the ride coming to you today from death valley in california the tesla.com trip planner says i cannot make this 235 mile trip on a single charge but my personal mathematics say i can come along on their journey and let's find out who's right the trip i'm on is going to start just north of the national park i'm going to supercharge up to 100 at lone pine here in california and then i'm going to drive 50 miles down to panament where i'm spending the night at a resort and then i'm going to do a 73 mile stint out to death valley of the town and then finally about 112 miles from death valley all the way down to baker california where i'm going to supercharge again and then continue my drive on to palm springs the route should be about 235 miles that's assuming i take no detours and don't get off the road and don't turn left or right anywhere that i just drive straight through on that route which i'm pretty much planning on doing and when i do my own calculations for driving my car normally the efficiency that i get for my regular day-to-day driving including 75 highway driving and then maybe 25 country roads and cities is 290 watt hours per mile and if you multiply that number by the miles per kilowatt number that you get out of that by 70 kilowatt hours is what i calculate my battery to have a usable capacity of that works out to about 241 miles total range if i charge the car up to 100 and deplete it down all the way to zero now that is just barely over 235 miles so if i actually do that route at my regular highway speeds i'm going to be coming into baker at that supercharger with about a two percent charge left in the battery i am not the kind of person who feels comfortable rolling into a supercharger or any charger for that matter with two percent it's not going to happen you could have a road detour a road closure you could have bad wind who knows i'm just not going to do it so what i am going to do is actually hyper mile my way through the park and what does that mean it means that i'm going to squeeze every mile out of this battery possible and how do you do that if you're in a pitch you do it by slowing down you take your foot off that accelerator and miraculously miles start building up in your car it's crazy the slower you drive shock of shocks the more miles you get out of your car so i'm going to be driving for at least half the trip about 10 to 15 miles per hour below the posted speed limit now a lot of people would rather not come to the park if they had to drive slow that's okay life's about choices but i am going to come to this park and i am going to make it work allegedly there are a couple j1772 chargers in the park and i was looking at some third-party apps there are some nema 1430s and 1450s which are those 240 like rv chargers i don't have that adapter unfortunately so i can't benefit from those rv chargers but i will see when i'm driving through the park if i can find a j1772 and then i'm also gonna figure out whether or not i need it so this is a lucky little find now it's really windy out here in the desert so i'm gonna get down behind my door and hopefully that'll block the wind so you guys don't have to hear all that wind noise i pulled into panama springs resort last night and let me tell you when i say resort what i mean is rv park with tents and cute tiny little cabins and the people staying in the cabins around me had a bonfire and we were chatting about my tesla they had all sorts of questions there was a family from atlanta a family from orange county by l.a and then also a two couples from latvia in europe and they were asking all sorts of questions about the car and then they were like oh by the way i don't know if you saw it but there looks like there's a tesla charger right across the street in one of the rv slots i go to plug in and the rate on this charger is two kilowatts sometimes it ranges up to three kilowatts so just so you know if you come to panamet resort and you are low on energy make sure you give yourself plenty of time to plug in because at that rate it's going to take you like 30 hours to get from zero to 100. for all of you who care about the environment just be aware this whole area is powered by a diesel charger so that is environmentally like the absolute worst way to charge a car but on occasion you're desperate for miles and you're going to do what you have to do [Music] so did i make it through the park on a single charge yesterday well it's the next day and i'm in palm springs so that's a clue that something good happened yesterday now i'm going to give you a couple tips here that you can consider when you think about taking your model y into death valley national park a couple details about the trip i did the run at the end of november so that's pretty much ideal weather conditions the temperature was 85 degrees fahrenheit or about 29 degrees celsius and that's a whole lot different than when a lot of other people would go into the park during summertime when temperatures can reach up to 120 degrees fahrenheit or even more which is around 50 degrees celsius because of that i didn't have to use my air conditioner in fact i had the windows down for a lot of it it was super lovely if you do go into the park during those high temperature seasons you might consider getting a sun shade for that beautiful glass roof in your model y that'll help protect your head from some of the excess heat that comes through during summertime and will also help your battery just last a little bit longer as the air conditioner would not need to work as hard the original route was scheduled to be 235 miles i decided to add the artists drive loop which was nine miles or 14 kilometers on top of that so that would have me up at 244 miles or about 393 kilometers for the entire drive that is totally pushing the range of my car with my regular driving however there's some great opportunities for regen on the trip as well especially if you come in from the north side i arrived pretty late driving from lone pine in the panama springs i couldn't really see what was around me but i could see i was driving up a mountain there was like one ledge on one side of me and then there was a cliff on the other side and there was a person driving an rv in front of me and they were not thrilled with any of it they were like way over far from the cliff anytime they had to take a turn but the good news is there was lots of region and then there was a second mountain range that you have to drive over from panamed springs as you get into death valley when you drive up that mountain and i'll show you a screenshot here i was getting 1106 watt hours per mile and for those of you who don't know much about electricity or electric cars that is a horrible horrible rate i usually get around 290 in my typical driving and can go a little higher a little lower based on my speed or what i'm doing 1106 is absolutely atrocious you just see the range in your battery going way down the good news is i was in santa fe new mexico a couple months back and i made a video about mountain region check it out i actually know now that if you go up a mountain the beauty is you get to go down the backside and you get a lot of that energy back so if you look at this screenshot on the back side of that mountain i was getting minus 450 watt hours per mile that just means free miles free energy back into the battery it was truly phenomenal so i was able to make my way from lone pine into death valley with no problem at all in fact my average range was something like if you convert all the numbers into miles per gallon that's about 185 miles per gallon i was getting and that had me up in like 400 miles per range for the battery it was phenomenal now as i was going through the rest of death valley you don't have that sort of benefit of the going up the mountain then getting the region so i think if you're coming in from the south side of the park you might have to do some more calculations but that north side was really spectacular there are a couple things to consider before going into the park cell phone reception there is almost none in the entire park so plan accordingly say goodbye to all your friends and loved ones get all your business affairs in order because you will very likely not be on your phone now maybe at some of the destination hotels in death valley there might be something but where i was out in panama we had a wi-fi signal there were a whole bunch of people like trying to cram around the wi-fi router by the gas station it wasn't working no one knew where i was i couldn't contact anyone and frankly i loved it your model y is likely not going to have any access to the internet either and my model y certainly did not that means that route planning and the navigation app on that display is not going to be able to tell you on the fly what your range is going to be where you're going to go all the rest of it you have to type in the information manually and i was having trouble even doing that so before you go into the park make sure you run all of your routes you can go to tesla.com they have a nice little trip calculator there and make sure that you have everything plugged in before you go you may want to print off some maps you're going to get some maps when you enter the park do not count on your cell phone and do not count on being able to call anyone in case of an emergency public charges are scarce i did see online that there are four public chargers j 1772 behind the ranch at death valley it's a lovely little area with a park and lots of palm trees but when i showed up there were three taken and i took the last one and you had to sign into this app sema connect and then they debit you 10 bucks and then you start charging what i didn't know is as soon as i plugged in a car drove up and they were waiting for uh my spot or any spot to open up and they were like oh yeah we heard that um on charge point you can just plug in for free and tap your charge point and then some other car drove up and they're like you don't even need that you just plug in and get it for free so i ended up spending about two dollars per kilowatt hour for energy if i average it out the most expensive charge i've had all across america but hey i'll consider it a gift to sema connect for at least putting those public chargers there if you're coming during high season expect there to be a giant line if you don't have one of those destination chargers or expect that you're not even going to be able to get into this public charger so plan ahead accordingly now it's time for the moment of truth was i able to drive my tesla model y long range with 20 inch wheels through death valley national park on a single charge it's getting pretty overcast here in palm springs so i'm going to take off these sunglasses and answer yes but and what are those butts the butts are i started in lone pine at 100 charge and arrived in panama at 86 because they had that 2 kilowatt charger in the resort i charged up to 98 so that's a plus 12 when i got into death valley at that public charger j 1772 i was down at 80 percent and added an extra 8 in the battery so a total net of 20 added to my car during the drive when i arrived south at the baker supercharger i arrived with a 30 charge in the battery however if you subtract that 20 percent that i added to the battery during my charge in the park i arrived or would have arrived with a 10 charge at baker so i was able to get through the park 245 miles by using 90 of my battery but if you're gonna go during hotter weather windier weather if you're packing up your car with all sorts of things you might not be getting the range that i got and if you're not willing to hyper mile and drive super slow through a big chunk of it i would really encourage you to listen to the tesla navigation if they say charge up and baker drive all the way up to bd and then down and then over to lone pine or some other combination or make sure you get a destination charger and are able to charge up to 100 overnight in the park that way you can get through the park without any concerns if you want a hyper mile and do it the way i did you definitely can but it's going to come at a price and finally death valley is a real deal desert especially during summer time when you drive into the park make sure you come with enough food and water to get through in case anything happens along your way thanks for coming along on the journey with me i'd love to hear your comments or questions in the comments below i answer everybody and i'm going to add my 60 second movie trailer that i made for this video right at the end here thanks a lot and have a great day [Music] foreign [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Going Electric

Views: 4,933

Keywords: Tesla, Model Y, Road Trip, Roadtrip, Canada, USA, Norway, India, UK, Germany, California, desert, hot, cold, air conditioner, air conditioning, HVAC, distance, range, range anxiety, how far, can I make it, travel, long distance, Death Valley, National Park, Panamint Springs, Resort, Lone Pine, Inyokern, Sierra Nevada, Las Vegas, Highway 395, Baker, Beatty, kWh, Wh/mi, Wh/km, miles, kilometers, American West, battery capacity, hypermile, diesel generator, adapter, plug, public charger, destination, J1772

Id: wbmcUHKmolU

Length: 13min 12sec (792 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 26 2021