How Miserable Is A Tesla Road Trip?

hello everyone and welcome in this video we are talking about how miserable is it honestly to take a road trip in a Tesla in this case we are in my Tesla Model 3 performance and I just drove it 2,000 miles so first off a huge thank you to Otto tempus comm for sponsoring this video we'll get more into it at the end of the video but just know that if you go to Otto tempus comm it's a really awesome website for looking for a used course so they compiled all the search results out there of the major car used car websites out there and they put it all in one spot super helpful I use it all the time I love it but in this video we're talking about Tesla road trips so I went two thousand miles 1963 miles ironically the year I was born in 1963 so that's how far I went it took three days to do that total time that it took to do that actually driving and charging including both I was about 38 hours now if you go on Google Maps and you put in the point to point of where I drove it actually says it will take 27 hours so this took 11 hours longer than Google Maps says it will take keep in mind that Google Maps is not going to include you stopping for gas it doesn't know what traffic is gonna be over those three days of driving it doesn't know if there's going to be road construction popping up things like that so I did run into some traffic some road construction those kind of things that also add delays to it but there certainly is a significant portion of time where you are actually charging so if you like to stop and eat it's not going to be all that different if you like to just grab something and keep driving then it will be significantly faster to drive a gasoline car versus an electric so the total amount of time that my cart was sitting at a charger for those 38 hours that it took to drive those 2,000 miles was 7 hours and 50 minutes so about 8 hours of total charging time spent now I was stopping and eating during those stops while it was charging and it generally took about the average was about 40 minutes there were 12 total stops taken now the averaging 40 minutes reach stop and generally speaking I would just either eat breakfast lunch or dinner around that stop the way it works out kind of logistically is you drive for about 200 miles that takes about three hours and then you stop for about 50 minutes while you let the core charge so 200 miles wait for 50 minutes 200 miles wait for 50 minutes the first day you can go a pretty significant distance so the first day I actually drove a 919 miles total in one day so if you need to go really far in and Evi yeah it's gonna take the whole day uh but it can be done you know you just consider that you're gonna be driving for about 200 miles then you're gonna charge route 50 now I was including a 15% safety buffer in battery for that entire trip so I never left a supercharger if it said that I wouldn't get to the next supercharger under 15% battery so I made sure that I always had enough range to get there with a 15% buffer now that 15% buffer is about 40 miles of range at the speed I was driving at so I was driving at 75 miles per hour and I maintained that 75 miles per hour pretty much the entire trip so if the speed limit was 80 I was still doing 75 that's exactly what I do in my cross track in the cross track once you hit 80 it's just like crazy loud in there the road noise the wind noise it's not as efficient so generally speaking on highways I Drive at 75 miles per hour I didn't change that can you drive at 80 in it yes does it decrease your efficiency in your range yes there is a noticeable difference reason being as your speed increases the amount of power required to overcome aerodynamic drag is increasing exponentially so it does take more power to drive at 80 versus 75 I did do a little looking at this on the little energy map it's it's basically a game of you're playing how much risk do you want to have so I was driving at 75 miles per hour and I knew that doing that I'd have that 15% buffer in order to get to where I'm going and if anything happened you know kind of a mishap during the trip or if it was going uphill for a long time or if it was really windy I had that 15% buffer which is good for about 40 miles now you can also just decrease your speed if you're really low on range you can just decrease your speed and that will give you you know much more efficient driving and you'll be able to increase the range that you're able to travel so as far as the charging we took 12 total stops for those 2000 miles specifically to charge so of those 12 stops the average time was about 40 minutes the longest time was 52 minutes and that wasn't because I needed to wait there that long it was because we were eating we finished after 52 minutes and then off we went so generally speaking you'll have enough range to go to the next stop after about 40 to 45 minutes I generally went in till about 50 minutes to make sure I had a little bit of a safety buffer because this was my first time doing an electric car road trip the shortest time we spent a charger was just 10 minutes and then actually went up about 20 percent in those 10 minutes and that was enough to get us to the next spot with plenty of range all right so what are the variables going on here because I'm sure you're curious about that as far as the efficiency is related to what I was actually doing in the course so as I mentioned speed was at 75 miles per hour there were two of us in the car for the entire time and the car was fully loaded with stuff now I had enough visibility to look out the rear windows and the side windows but the quarter was packed with stuff and it actually is pretty impressive how much stuff you can fit into this car including that front trunk and then there's that like kind of secret rear trunk below the main rear trunk so there's a ton of space in this thing I'll show you kind of a short video of what I was able to fit in here and so it's quite a bit of stuff plus two people so there was a good amount of weight in the car and that's one thing to consider especially important if you're going uphill or if you know you're in like short stop and go traffic where you have to accelerate that mass over and over again now of course more mass does mean more regen but ultimately that's a losing battle the more weight you have in the car the less range you're going to have and you also have increased rolling resistance other variables I did have the AC on for pretty much the majority of the drive it wasn't super hot outside but it was pretty much always sunny and it does kind of heat up this cabin if it is sunny outside so I would say it was probably in the mid 70s for most of the journey sometimes sitting around 80 degrees outside but overall it was warm enough outside and sunny always so that the AC needed to be on so the AC was pretty much on the entire time I had music going the entire time I had my phone plugged in charging for that drive so you know pretty much all the variables were happening that were not in my favor the car is fully loaded I'm using the AC that kind of thing the only thing is that temperature outside wasn't really cold so if it was really cold that would significantly reduce range I don't know to what degree because I haven't done that yet but it would change probably more so than using the accessories the accessories really don't play a huge role and how much range you have and then when you come up to traffic you might think oh I'm now in traffic and now I'm gonna lose all this range because I've got my AC going that kind of thing but reality when you're in traffic and I did run into it on your traveling at low speeds at those very low speeds it actually turns out to be really efficient so the city rating is better than the highway rating it gets better mile per gallon in the city and so driving in that kind of high traffic conditions you have plenty of range even if you're running AC and that kind of thing so that was actually nice to see the estimated range that it would have would actually increase when I came in to those high traffic scenarios because you get the regen every time you stop and you're not traveling at that high of speeds so there's not very high aerodynamic drag losses overall it's a really efficient way for the court to travel at low speeds so if you do run into traffic it's not a huge deal unless I guess you're just sitting there like literally all day long running the AC and not moving but generally speaking if you're moving at all in that traffic then it's going to have plenty of range and it's actually going to operate somewhat efficiently in that range now speaking of efficiency this is something that actually gets me really excited on and it was very cool to see because this car traveled 2,000 miles on the equivalent amount of energy of sixteen point five gallons of gas and that happens to be less than the fuel tank size for my Subaru Crosstrek so what that means is if my Subaru Crosstrek were as efficient as this Tesla Model 3 I could have done that entire 2,000 mile drive on one tank of gas then that really tells us two things first of all it shows you how wildly inefficient internal combustion engines are and then second of all it shows you how wildly non dense electric batteries are the the battery in this car is only a little more than two gallons of gasoline and energy equivalency but it's so efficient that you can go really far on that so my longest stint of the drive was 221 miles and that took 78% of the battery of this car's battery to do it to go 221 miles so if I look at the energy efficiency of my most efficient leg of the drive or my least efficient leg of the drive and then convert that to the equivalent range that the car would have the longest range this car would have on highway driving 75 miles an hour with all the variables that I told you it's 286 miles and the shortest range possible that I had experienced during my drive with a full battery how far could go was about 200 23 miles now Tesla claims that you know that based on its Highway mpg rating that this thing is good for about 250 miles with a full charge on the highway now those 250 miles of range on the highway are assuming Tesla's Highway mpg equivalent of 112 for the average of my trip I got 118 MPGe about the equivalent so 118 miles per gallon equivalency and so I was doing better than what Tesla is rated for on the highway with all of those variables so it is a very efficient machine and you know you're gonna be getting those 200 miles of range between your little charging stops with that 15 percent buffer left over in case something were to go wrong now if you want to tempt fate then you can drive faster than I drove and you can spend less time at chargers than I spent and you're going to be getting into those lower battery regions up but that's where it charges very quickly and you know you so it's just dependent on how much risk do you want to take on this case I was making sure I had that 15 percent buffer and I did just fine overall the entire trip took 560 kilowatt hours for my vehicle and so that's the equivalent of about seven and five full batteries in order to go those 2,000 miles okay so how about the journey itself what was it like in this vehicle and actually I was pleasantly surprised with how nice it was we were spending very long days especially that 919 mile day in this car even let's had any complaints about comfort these seats are extremely comfortable they're not like race car seats where they're gonna hug you and like keep you real snug but they're very plush and so as a result I never got sore my back never hurt my butt never hurt I felt fine for the entire trip as far as comfort I could just sit in this thing all day and not worry about it so that was actually really nice tire noise isn't too bad at 75 miles an hour wind noise isn't too bad overall it's pretty quiet here you got your sound system going and it's a very nice environment to beat additionally if you happen to have one of these large I just filled this thing up with iced tea it's a Toyota Supra thermos fits wonderfully in both the cup holder as well as the side holder over here so if you happen to be a super enthusiast perhaps this is the car for you that doesn't make any sense but either way the water bottle fits really well in here good location for that tons of storage in here which is nice for road trips good convenient locations to put everything so I like that now the suspension itself is fairly firm and this is the performance model so that's somewhat to be expected it's a little bit lower than the regular Tesla Model 3 so a little firm as far as the ride quality but I think what compensates for that perfectly is the fact that these seats are very comfortable very well cushioned like there's quite a bit I don't weigh all that much I don't know if you can tell by the size of my wrist but I don't weigh all that much and so usually seats around the firm site for me just because of that and this car actually kind of sink in a bit and it's really comfortable and it evenly distributes the pressure of me sitting on it alright so what about autopilot well here comes some unenjoyable news for all the massive Tesla enthusiasts out there I don't have auto I think it's cool I think it's great I just don't have a problem driving 2,000 miles I happen to use my own hands in order to turn the wheel I know it's a crazy concept but it's not that big of a deal to me so I do not have autopilot I did not use it I just have the regular cruise control it's actually really nice and really easy to use if you do like a fast swipe up it goes up 5 miles per hour if you go a fast swipe down it goes down 5 miles per hour if you just do one at a time you can have incremental increase of just 1 mile per hour so it's really easy to use this wheel I like the wheel method rather than like a button method a lot of cruise control systems often have a little switch that you have to push up or down and I really like the wheel here it makes it really easy and because this has regen you can actually if you're coming up on a car fast and you just swipe that wheel down you'll actually slow down really quickly so you don't actually have to touch the brake very often at all you can do all of it with your hand I know it's crazy it's human control Brett rather than just letting the car do it and and maybe I'll buy autopilot someday because they gave the discount for people who bought before February 28th but regardless I don't mind using regular old cruise control I think adaptive cruise control is sweet but I don't mind steering myself I don't mind adjusting speed myself it's not a huge deal so I didn't use autopilot ok so I have a confession to make I may have told a small little lie at the beginning of this video when I told you it only took 38 hours to go those 2,000 miles actually it took 45 hours and where did those 7 extra hours come from well they came from hitting a pothole I have never liked low-profile tires I wish they offered something different for the performance model and it ended up being about a six and a half hour ordeal because I got a flat hitting a pothole now I didn't want that to be the focus of this video I wanted the focus of the video to be about the logistics of electric car traveling and not about hitting potholes and having flat tires but I do think it's something we're talking about so I'm going to create an additional video discussing it because it was quite a mess actually to go through getting a flat tire in this vehicles alright so now let's talk about the navigation system set up on this car and this is what's really cool about Tesla supercharger network because they make it really easy to do road trip without having to think very much which is what I like I don't want to have to get into a core and have to think about okay where do I have to stop every single time so you just put in your destination as you can see here we're just going to drive from Michigan to California and it gives you all of the stops and an estimation for how long you will remain at each of these supercharger locations so you can see I'm at 65% battery right now and my next supercharger I will wait at in charge for 40 minutes and I'll arrive there with 6% so personally I wouldn't actually leave if it only said 6% I would wait for it to be a little higher if you're risky kind of fellow go for it so I would charge up a little bit past 65% and then start working my way over to that supercharger but the other cool thing is if you go to you know begin your trip there and then you look at the energy there's this trip computer here and it shows you along those those miles that you're going to travel and so this is a hundred forty eight mile stint that we're about to start it'll take two hours and seven minutes we'll get there at 5:45 p.m. there you can see that entire list of everything you're going to do in the different churching locations arriving in st. Joseph Michigan with 6% need to charge for 40 minutes once you're there but if you go into the energy here it shows you your trip so those 140 some miles here's where it shows you where the battery will be at along that and you can also monitor your consumption to see hey I've got 65 percent left based on how I've been driving how far will I get with that 65 percent and as you can see my last 30 miles that I've driven based on that 65 percent is going to give me 229 miles of range so there's all kinds of information in here if you want to look at it if you don't you can just literally follow these instructions do what it says go where it says to go charging the locations once you get to that location it will tell you hey you're here now you can charge for this long and then you can go and it tells you when you can leave again and it'll tell you then it'll give you the percentage which you'll arrive at the next destination and so you know each time what percentage you can you will expect to get when you arrive at that next destination and it will also show you this on your phone so if you leave you go to a restaurant or whatever it'll say hey you've got 25 more minutes of charging before you can go which is really cool so you know you know you're sitting there in a restaurant how long do you want to sit there for it will show you on your phone now these super charges are pretty fast so I wanna see you're not gonna have to spend that much time if you are actually sitting down and eating wondering oh man do I have to stay here like they charge up pretty quick and I found that on average I was kind of getting it would tell me that I could leave about 10 minutes before each of these guesstimates here so it says 40 minutes I bet in reality I could sit there for 30 minutes and it would say okay you're ready to go but it would give you only that like 6% to 10% buffer of getting there versus I want to be a bit more on the cautious side and have a bit more than that but again it's completely up to you so the range anxiety portion of it is kind of at how much risk are you willing to take and you can reduce your speed like let's say worst case you pull up this energy graph and it says you're not going to get there with any battery well reduce your speed and you'll notice this thing start to go up over time because because you've reduced your speed you're driving more efficiently and you'll actually get there so if you want to drive at 80 miles per hour and just see how far you can get maybe you can get there cool and then if it doesn't work out you just drop your speed and then you can actually make sure you get there so there's a lot of information to play with here if you're if you're you know a nerd and want to kick out on it and there's as little as you need just to get there if you don't want to know all that stuff I personally wish there was a bit more functionality in here I think it'd be really cool if you could say hey I want a 15% or 20% buffer I always want to have that minimum amount when I arrive at my next destination and then it plugs in the charges for you it also doesn't show you the Chargers in between so often there's locations where you know there's probably a supercharger between here and here but it doesn't have you stopping there so if you use the lower portion of the battery that battery charges up really fast for example I charge from 15% to 65% 50% of the battery charge in just 20 minutes so if you were constantly only charging that really fast charge region then you could probably also get there quicker and doesn't allow you to optimize that drive on here basically it just optimizes minimizing stuff so fewer stops rather than more shorter stops I wish I gave you the flexibility to choose but it does not I've heard there's something called like a better route trip planner an app or website out there that you can use it adds in that functionality but it would be cool if it was built in overall though the system is pretty easy to use I mean you don't have to think very much you just get in the car and you go if I were to do this in like a Chevy bolt or like a Nissan Leaf I'd have no clue as far as like ok where are all these stuffs and they would take way way longer than the hundred fifty kilowatt charging rate that these superchargers provides so what is really convenient honestly a few things I wish there was a bit more flexibility with it but overall it's a pretty good system now as far as this estimation curve here one of the things I kind of wanted to monitor while I was driving is how accurate is it because that plays into how comfortable am i listening to you know its recommendation and so I always kept that 15% buffer the worst case what happened is I was driving and it said I would arrive with 23% and instead I arrived with 15% so that was down 8% from what it said initially the best case I had one time I started driving it was that maybe 15 percent then it went down based on the initial portion of the driving to eight percent and I was like oh I'm only gonna arrive with eight percent and then by the time I got there it had gone all the way up to twenty four percent so you know a 16 percent better than what it was predicting best case you know the the best most accurate it had is it guessed fourteen percent and I got there with 14 percent okay so what about the act of charging itself what's super charging like and it is super easy which is the good news I mean literally you just Park you plug the thing in and everything's already working so it's already linked to your Tesla account you get charged that way you're not using a credit card or anything like that you get charged through your Tesla account and it just immediately starts charging and I never had an issue none of them were broken that I came up to all of them worked out there was never a line the most that I saw at one location was for cars and there were eight stalls so that was half of them most of the time I showed up it was either no cars or one other car and that core was gone by the time I left so they are not staying super long you know three in 240 minutes and they're generally out of there so I never had a problem charging I haven't driven around California I would assume there's probably a lot more of these in California and perhaps charging becomes a real issue with everyone waiting in line I don't know what it's like out there but my own experience there was never line waiting everything always worked it was really convenient so these Chargers are crazy fast too I mean a hundred and fifty kilowatts to give you some idea that's about 500 miles of charge per hour 150 kilowatts is what it's charging when it's on that lower end at home with a 240 volt charger I'm at 7 to 8 kilowatts rather than 250 if you're using a 120 volt outlet then you're at 1 kilowatt so a hundred and 50 times as fast as you know a regular old plug at home so very quick charging again you know it's going from 15 to 65 percent 50% of the battery in just 20 minutes that was crazy to see how fast it's capable of charging and then that does start to taper off so once you get to about 80% you know you're coming down to maybe 60 70 kilowatts once you get to 90 percent you're charging and only like 30 kilowatts so it does get significantly slower as you get up into those higher percentages which is why you know from a convenience standpoint from a timing standpoint you'd want to be in that lower battery region in order to have the fastest possible road trip because that's where it charges the quickest but it charges crazy fast I mean literally sit there and watch it go 1% 1% up so it's it's quite cool how fast the superchargers are how easy they are to use how simple it all is and it shows you on the screen you know this is what the charging rate is this is how long it'll take to get to your next stop how much charge you need to get your to your next stop that kind of thing so all the information there for you to kind of eliminate that range anxiety wondering about when do I get to leave what do I need to do but I know the question you're likely here for it's the latest YouTube craze how cheap can you get into something crazy and so the question is how cheap can you get into a rolls-royce I wondered the same so again a huge thanks to auto tempest comm for sponsoring this video results were looking pretty pricey until spotting a $4,000 silver shadow this is definitely a case of the listener working the angles quite well as well there's a bit of damage on the car but if a Silver Shadow is a must it looks like they can actually be found in wonderful condition for under $20,000 I'd still recommend a Mazda Miata check out auto tempest com if you are in the market for a used car it is a wonderful search tool for compiling the results out there thank you all so much for watching and if you have any questions or comments of course feel free to leave those below

Channel: Engineering Explained

Views: 2,277,752

Keywords: tesla, tesla road trip, engineering explained, tesla model 3, tesla model s, tesla model x, tesla pickup, tesla roadster, tesla charging, range anxiety, supercharger, tesla supercharger, road trip, gasoline versus electric, gas car vs electric car, electric car road trip, nissan leaf, chevy bolt, electric car, how it works

Id: uC95WACQhCY

Length: 24min 11sec (1451 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 03 2019