Road trip complete!
Miles: 5,124
States: 12
Time: 15 days
Family visited: 4
Nat'l Park Sites: 9
Energy consumed: 2,100 kWh*
Gasoline equivalent: 62.3 gallons
MPGe: 82
Energy cost: ~$600
Savings vs gas of similar SUV-sized vehicle: ~$500 (I used 22 mpg @ $4.75/gal)
Average daily road charge time: 1.15 hours (low 0, high 2.7)
Percentage of charge time spent doing things we'd have stopped for anyway (dog walks, meals, bio breaks): ~70%
Net time cost: ~21 min/day
%age of that delay spent watching Iron Chef on Netflix via the car's screen: 100
Number of charging issues encountered: 0**
This was a really fun trip. When planning out a 5k mile trip, I was a little unsure of how it'd go--whether the wife/kids/dogs would get annoyed at charge stops, whether I had jinxed things by playing up the Supercharger network prior to the trip, whether my patched tire would hold, random other issue crop up, etc. But everything went more or less according to plan. The family actually commented a couple of times that the charging stops were not an issue for them (average Supercharge stop time was 28.9 minutes).
Our net speed (including all traffic jams, stop-and-go park roads, etc) was 60 mph. Interstate speeds averaged ~82 mph.
I'm now up to 138 unique Supercharger locations visited, across 24 states and 5 years. 25 new stations on this trip. Interesting (to me) sub stat: we pulled 1,662 kWh from Superchargers, and 272 kWh from travel charges while we slept. 86% Superchargers, 14% overnight. Those included 2 stops with L2 charging @ 11 kW, and the rest on standard 120V/15A outlets.
Interesting (again, to me) sub-sub charging stat: V3 Superchargers are so much better than V2. This isn't news, but on a trip this large it really became apparent. V2 vs V3 when the station isn't busy (and on my older X car capped at 200 kW but really mostly charging at 150 kW and below) isn't that stark, but when the stations are busy it's big. V2 splits 150 kW across pairs of stalls, so a busy station will see the effective max rate capped often. V3 splits something like 800 kW across four stalls, meaning it's exceedingly rare to have any current Tesla capped even at a fully-utilized station--and if they are maxed out, the capping is less drastic and for a shorter period. It'll be interesting to see the specs on V4 stalls when they begin to pop up later this year. V3 already outnumbers V2 in the wild, but I'm blessed/cursed that I70 through Colorado and Kansas was one of the first routes completed, so we still have a lot of V2 stations (many of which have since been augmented with V3 stalls).
* - Per the in-car trip meter, 1,857 kWh were used. According to TeslaFi, it's 1,978 kWh. The actual energy entering the vehicle over the past 30 days was 2,269 kWh. That includes not just battery energy used to propel the vehicle, but charge losses, sentry/preconditioning/Dog mode usage, etc. Also a few smaller charges prior to the road trip. I used 2,100 as I think that's a fair estimate of the 'true' energy use for the trip.
** - One station was a little slower than expected; not sure why--perhaps due to the 100+F temps. One other was full when we arrived--we were the 10th car for an 8-stall station. But we were charging within 2-3 minutes, so it wasn't bad.
I haven't owned a Chevy, since I briefly had a PoS $300 Malibu in 1990.
