How Miserable Is A Winter Tesla Road Trip? -18°C & Broken Superchargers

hello everyone and welcome in this video we are talking about a 2500 mile road trip that i just went on in the winter in my tesla model 3 and so temperatures were as low as zero degrees fahrenheit minus 18 degrees celsius rarely did temperatures get above freezing uh you know there were parking lots covered in ice where the superchargers are the back of the car got covered in snow the wheels got snow in them this was a proper winter test across 2500 miles and i also experienced the first supercharger that i pulled up to and it did not work so we're going to talk about broken superchargers as well it was a good experience now this video has been about 18 months in the making because about 18 months ago i did 2 000 miles in my tesla model 3 in the summer and so i wanted to see you know what if temperatures are a lot cooler how does that differ and so the 2 000 mile road trip that i did in the summer i took basically that exact same 2 000 mile portion as part of the 2500 mile road trip that i just did just in the opposite direction and so we're gonna compare those two two thousand mile portions directly with the temperature difference being about 50 to 80 degrees depending on the day in the summer it was mostly around 70s 80s and then for this road trip it was you know around zero degrees fahrenheit to about 30 degrees fahrenheit for most of the trip so first off let's talk about navigation tesla makes this super easy there's no real adjustments for it basically you just sit in your car you tell it exactly where you want to go 2500 miles away and it gives you the route including all of the supercharger stops where you stop to plug in and charge up and tells you how long you need to sit at each supercharger station now what tesla does is they optimize fewest number of stops so they show you how to get to wherever you're going stopping the least amount of time and we'll talk about whether or not that's a good strategy or bad strategy or fine strategy whatever either way they make it very easy for you and you just plug in where you want to go they tell you everything you need to do super simple now as you look out here you can see there's snow on the ground this has been a good cold test and so what's challenging about the cold and really it's two things so first of all batteries you know the powertrain doesn't like to be cold batteries are going to operate at their happiest state their most efficient state with a bit of temperature in them and so that's part of the other part of it of this course you want to keep this cabin warm and so throughout my entire 2500 mile drive i had the interior of this cabin at about 70 to 72 degrees depending on whatever i was feeling like that day at that time but i kept it comfortable the entire time i was never you know turning off things to see you know hey how much range can i get the intention was i want to be comfortable i want to see how this thing does using a car like you would use any car so i kept it comfortable the whole time so that heat comes from resistive heaters now this is a 2018 tesla model 3 performance some of the newer ones like the tesla model y and future models of the tesla model 3 will come with a heat pump and so heat pump is more efficient but basically with these resistive heaters like what i am using any heat that you put within this cabin it comes directly from that battery pack uh so the battery pack is used to create heat in the cabin so you know as far as an efficient way of driving it's not really because you're using energy to keep yourself comfortable rather than using energy to move yourself so that was the big question to me you know how much of a difference is this going to make being cold on my range and my efficiency and so i looked at a aaa study from a couple years ago where aaa took five different electric cars and they compared their range uh you know at different temperatures and they dropped them down to about 20 degrees fahrenheit driving in 20 degrees fahrenheit and across these five vehicles one of which included a tesla they said the average range drop was 41 so nearly cutting your range in half to drive around at 20 degrees fahrenheit and so that to me was like oh god like that's bad like that is not good if you're using losing that much of your range just because of the temperature outside and so what i wanted to know is like is this road trip going to be miserable am i going to be miserable on this winter road trip or is it actually possible uh because you know if if it's that big of a drop 41 that can be kind of detrimental to electric cars in that you know some people need them for this scenario and so can it actually work in this scenario so how did it do well for most of this video i want to compare just the 2 000 mile segment that is equivalent to the 2000 mile segment i did in the summer so we're comparing a 2 000 mile drive in the winter versus a 2 000 mile drive in the summer and so what was the difference in energy used well in the summer it averaged 285 watt hours per mile over those 2 000 miles in the winter it averaged 338 watt hours per mile over those 2 000 miles and so that was about a 19 increase in energy used meaning about you know 80 percent of the range that you had um in the winter versus how much range you have in the summer now if you look at range based on the averages for my summer road trip the average range of a 100 full battery pack was 250 miles for my winter road trip the average range for a 100 full battery pack was miles so about a 40 mile drop in range about 20 percent due to having those colder temperatures and heating the cabin now what about worst case one of those lags of that 2000 mile drive in the summer as i mentioned we were getting temperatures as low as zero degrees fahrenheit minus 18 degrees celsius and i think the high during that leg was like seven degrees fahrenheit it was a very cold leg and on that leg i had about 384 watt hours per mile it also included a little bit of elevation gain um and so you know not all that bad i mean it could have been a lot worse compared to these studies that i saw saying you know 41 drop my worst leg in the winter compared to my worst leg in the summer uh you know still in that 15 to 20 range increase um as far as like how much more range would you have in the summer i think another interesting way of comparing is looking at mile per gallon equivalent so one gallon of gasoline is equivalent to 33.7 kilowatt hours so if you look at that 2000 mile drive in the summer it took the equivalent of about 16 and a half gallons of gas which is pretty incredible 16 gallons to go you know 2 000 miles in the winter it took 20 gallons the equivalent of 20 gallons of gas to travel those 200 miles or 2000 miles so you know again 100 miles per gallon equivalent even in the winter and then in the summer 118 mile per gallon equivalent so still extremely efficient in the winter even though yes you are getting a significant drop about 20 15 to 20 drop in range due to those colder temperatures now driving strategy is a really fascinating discussion because what i noticed i was sitting at a supercharger and it was telling me it wanted me to charge up to 90 some percent in order to get to the next supercharger which was two superchargers down so there was one supercharger in the middle that i was going to skip and it's telling me hey we're going to charge up to 90 some percent you've got 25 minutes remaining that you're gonna sit here at this supercharger and i thought well i don't want to sit here another 25 minutes i'll look up and see how long would i have to charge at the next supercharger to then get to that second supercharger so that's what i did and i plugged in that second supercharger the immediate one and it said i would only need to charge it it for 15 minutes and i could leave now so i could stay where i was for 25 minutes or i could leave now and charge later for 15 minutes in my mind that's a 10 minute savings that i can have now yes you have to take into consideration getting off the highway and plugging in you know that little amount of time but usually these superchargers are right off the highway and so as a result it's really not much extra time just pop off the highway plug in pop back right on the highway so that's what i did and i took more stops this winter road trip partially because it had less range but also partially because it seemed to be a better strategy and so 18 stops in the winter over those 2 000 miles versus 12 stops over the summer over those 2 000 miles and the average stop duration over the summer was about 40 minutes average stop duration in the winter was about 25 minutes but the most fascinating thing is that i spent the exact same amount of time charging so in both road trips for that 2000 mile drive it was 30 hours of driving eight hours of charging pretty much very close to and so the difference is in the winter i needed nine full battery packs in order to make that distance in the summer i only needed seven and a half full battery packs to make that distance so what does that mean well it means that i charged up a full battery pack and a half additional in the same amount of time that i did in the summer and why is that the reason why is because i was keeping my battery at a lower percentage so the battery charges really fast at low percentages you know around 10 to 20 percent up until about 70 percent it's gonna charge really fast above seventy percent starts to slow down above eighty percent starts to slow down above 90 percent really starts to slow down so if you're sitting at a supercharger and it's telling you you need to charge past 90 percent you're going to be sitting all there all day you might as well just leave it go to the next immediate supercharger which is closer and you'll spend less time charging because you're using that lower portion of your battery rather than that upper portion of your battery and that saves you time and charging so the the data just shows this from my drive i mean i was able to charge an extra battery pack and a half in about the same amount of time just by using a lower portion of the battery and charging more often and it ultimately meant that this the road trip though i required more energy to do it i did it in the same exact amount of time that was very cool to me and it's worth mentioning that i was not stopping at faster superchargers these were not v3 superchargers they were all either 120 or 150 kilowatt superchargers not the 250s now another benefit i had from doing these shorter drives you know about 100 miles between stops rather than about 200 miles between stops uh the benefit of doing that is that i drove at faster speeds and the reason why is because i had so much energy when you're only driving a short distance you know hey i only need this much energy to do it it's no problem i can drive at 80 no problem but if the supercharger is telling you charge up to 95 then leave and you'll arrive at the next supercharger with 5 then you're thinking okay i need to be pretty conservative with my speeds i need to make sure i actually get there so you don't go over 75 or 70 something like that so it allows you to use a bit more speed if you do those shorter stops without worrying you can still do it you know the longer strategy and then just adjust accordingly but when you're doing those shorter stops allows you to drive faster so part of that i drove at 80 miles per hour fairly frequently during this winter road trip whereas i did not during that summer road trip like in the summer i kept it always at 75 and so if you look at the energy difference required tesla submits curves to the epa if you look at the energy difference required to drive at 80 miles per hour versus 75 it's about an eight to nine percent difference so of that you know twenty percent uh extra energy that it took me to go the same distance in the winter versus the summer uh you know maybe five percent of that could be accounted for simply because we were driving faster so not just because it was colder so really impressive when you start to look at that how efficient it still was even though temperatures are ranging from you know 0 to 30 degrees now some other variables worth discussing i did this road trip on 18-inch wheels because yes on the first road trip i blew out a wheel a wheel two wheels and two tires i destroyed on the first road trip uh that was 20 inch wheels um and so i i learned my lesson from that and i've switched to 18-inch wheels and tires so these are 18-inch wheels with michelin winter tires versus in the summer i did that on the stock 20-inch performance wheels uh with the oe michelin ps4s summer tires and so you know there is a bit of a difference there though the 18s that i have on this are not very aerodynamic so they may provide a small benefit because they're a bit smaller but they're certainly not aerodynamic looking at them and then also you've got the winter tires which generally don't have super great rolling resistance uh coefficients versus summers you know which can be a bit harder and they might have a bit less rolling resistance it depends kind of on temperatures rolling resistance wise honestly the two tires are probably actually fairly close now one little tip if you're thinking about doing one of these road trips one little piece of advice is get your charging done at the end of the night rather than starting your next morning with charging because if you show up to one of these superchargers in the morning and your battery's at 10 and it's frozen it's not going to charge quickly at all it's going to spend time heating up that battery before it charges it up so after your long day of driving where your battery's nice and warm pull up to the supercharger plug in get it fully charged for the next day or to however much you want uh and then head to your hotel room or whatever it is and wait for the next day and start your next day with more battery pack uh that way you start off and you heat up that battery on your way to that next supercharger also another thing you know you might wonder how much battery does it lose overnight and i lost about 10 about eight to ten percent on the three nights uh that this was sitting out in the cold i mean you know temperatures seven degrees or so it was it was definitely cold that it's sitting out there some of that you know maybe five percent of that it would lose uh you know just sitting there overnight and then in the morning i would preheat the cabin precondition the battery and that would use up about another five percent before we started going off so you might lose about five percent overnight and if you want to just go ahead and start driving then you can and you've got extra battery pack if you want to get in a nice cozy car with the battery pack pre-conditioned you can do that as well now let's talk about superchargers because i did encounter two broken superchargers and so i think the first thing to note is just that uh throughout all of this trip i never showed up to a supercharger and there wasn't one available there was always one available in fact most of the time i was the only car there there's a pandemic it's winter not a lot of people are doing road trips across the northern united states and so there was always availability and that i think is fantastic it wasn't something that i had to be concerned about you know sitting and waiting around for now broken superchargers this was my first time experiencing and that was kind of scary honestly because so what i did is i pull up the supercharger i plug the thing in it start making it starts making these noises like it's trying to latch but it won't latch and the little tesla light is flashing and i look in the car and it's saying either it's not latching or i'll show the message that it was showing uh it's not latching or it's too cold and it's not able to and i'm thinking like is it really that it's just too cold and i'm not gonna be able to supercharge because of that so that was for sure worrying i looked uh in you know the supercharger itself i didn't see anything blocking it um from being attached so i'm not sure you know why i was saying hey something's being blocked that was concerning for sure because you know if that doesn't work you're stranded you call tesla service and you get them to tow you i guess to wherever you're going next um or you find a nearby you know slow charger that you can plug into so i just went one supercharger over and one supercharger over worked just fine so the good news is there was plenty available um bad news is you know there it is possible to run into a broken supercharger on your trip which obviously is not ideal the second one i ran into uh didn't actually run into because when you look at this you'll think yes someone did actually run into that second broken supercharger that i encountered um the exterior of it was smashed and so you know it may have worked just fine my thinking is though this is 150 kilowatts right like you don't want to risk that not being okay like that 150 kilowatts in half an hour puts out more energy than i use in my entire house in a full day so that's a ton of electricity um it's not something you want to mess around with so if the supercharger looks broken i'm probably not going to plug into it um so i plugged into a different one they all worked just fine but that one did have that exterior which had been broken i did peek inside it didn't look like any of the wires were actually damaged but regardless you know this is a lot of power you're dealing with probably a good idea to play it safe now how much does the trip cost that's something people are usually curious about with electric cars how much does it cost to do a road trip like this and full disclosure uh because i have that referral link and people have asked me and emailed me hey what's your referral link um i've gotten enough people to use the referral link that i generally won't be paying for supercharging so for a trip like this 2500 miles if you got three people referred then that's enough to cover that entire trip however that said it's not all that expensive um so for these 2500 miles uh it still shows you how much it does cost to each supercharger and so my total cost would have been 177 dollars and 65 cents for those 2 500 miles so it's not crazy expensive or anything like that to go these long distances now is it much of a savings over gasoline well in the united states gasoline is quite cheap right now so if you were to compare a 30 mile per gallon car buying gasoline at 2.50 cents per gallon uh you know that's maybe 200 bucks of gas to try to drive these 2500 miles so 175 or 200 bucks you save 25 bucks um and a lot of people will use this and be like this is why electric cars are so stupid uh you only saved 25 and it took you so much more time i i have a lot to say to that first of all this is a tesla model 3 performance like you don't buy a tesla model 3 pretty much any tesla to be honest you're not buying the tesla to save money they're expensive cars all right when people buy a limited f-150 that cost seventy thousand dollars they could buy an f-150 for thirty thousand dollars they're not buying the f-150 limited to save money they're buying it because they want that nice truck um so you know buying a sports car is not a financially intelligent move so there's my spiel on that the other part is this video isn't saying hey is a tesla the best vehicle for a road trip no i use my crosstrek if i genuinely want to go on a long road trip it's way more practical but if you have one car can this one do it can this one be the one that does it and yes it absolutely can that's the point of this video you know a 20 you know max range drop is what i had from driving in super cold temperatures which isn't a huge deal if this is a rare occurrence is it ideal to spend eight hours out of 38 hours charging for a road trip no of course not but you can spend that time eating lunch you know you can spend that time eating dinner eating breakfast going to the bathroom staying plenty hydrated because you're taking a ton of stops so you don't have to worry about going to the bathroom there's always going to be one available so you know it's just a can it do it yes and honestly it's not that bad and that was what was very surprising to me about this road trip is just how chill it was overall i had my cat in the car with me so part of it from a comfort standpoint wasn't as great because we didn't want to leave the cat in the car alone just in case he got scared or you know he didn't like it regardless but he kind of chilled out and just slept you can turn on the rear heated seats and he loved that so he would just sleep on the rear heated seats which was pretty adorable um so i wanted to keep it you know nice and comfortable in the cabin and then i wanted to stay in the car at supercharger stops to keep my cat uh you know comfortable and so because of that it was less comfortable because i stayed in the car and didn't go out into restaurants or things like that obviously you know during a pandemic it's not like you're going to dine in anyways but um the option is there in normal times and so you're just i think people overreact on how miserable uh supercharging is because you know you spend 30 minutes at a stop by the time you get out of the restaurant your car's done and you're ready to go like it's it's a pretty nice experience honestly it's it's not that bad and it takes out a lot of thinking for you it tells you exactly where to go it's simple to do so overall i think the the supercharger the driving experience isn't perfect i think it would be cool if they gave you you know ways to optimize time based rather than stop based so you know hey i can take more stops but i'll get there sooner um i think it'd be cool if they had settings to allow for that there's websites that allow you to do this but you know direct through tesla would be a cooler solution and also i guess one thing i should mention because people ask about autopilot i still don't have autopilot so i'm still driving a dumb tesla and probably one of few tesla owners because now all of them come with autopilot that doesn't actually have it so for those 2 500 miles i was using my hands these like little things on the ends of my arms to like move the steering wheel around it was kind of awkward because i had to like do it that whole time and you know look at the road and whatnot i don't mind driving i honestly don't it has dumb cruise control so you can set the speed and use a little wheel on the steering wheel to set your speed um so i don't mind driving uh i i don't mind not having autopilot um people say they really love it that's great if you do full self driving of course not fully released yet so you know the day that i can sit in my garage and say go here and i don't have to touch anything and i'm not liable for anything i am all for it i think that's amazing um let's not pretend that like driving in city traffic is fun right so the day that that comes cool neat i'm excited perhaps i'll buy it um and and have the car do everything for me but i think we're a bit off uh you know i think we got a bit of time until that happens so in the meantime if you're interested in an electric car and you're wondering hey can i actually make a road trip in the winter work yeah you know honestly it was surprisingly relaxed surprisingly chill chill like the uh you know the cold outdoors all right jason don't explain it so anyways thank you all so much for watching if you have any questions or comments of course feel free to leave them below

Channel: Engineering Explained

Views: 720,765

Rating: 4.8907852 out of 5

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, chevy bolt, how it works, cold temperatures, below freezing, EV winter road trip, winter road trip, tesla winter road trip

Id: UskzfQJt2Bc

Length: 23min 13sec (1393 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/badcatdog]

8.1 hrs charging v 7.9hrs. Unexpected!

[u/ecodweeb]

"It is possible to run into a broken supercharger on a trip."

Thank you. I'm so tired of the "they're never broken" line. Chargers break, doesn't matter who makes them.

I also share his experience in that when you're doing a 1000+ mile trip, you rarely (if ever) see anyone else at a charging stop.

[u/jolteonthetesla]

It's not miserable, I've done them all the time.