A Really Big Trip

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Clamps

Clamps

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Lots of recall talk going on right now and rightly so but thought I would create a fun post about a big trip I'm about to take in my Kona. I will be leaving tomorrow morning and driving from near Boston, MA to just north of Milwaukee, WI. With charging it's about a 22 hour trip give or take.

I'm planning on stopping around the Cleveland area for the first night and found a hotel with destination charging, just hoping the one J-1772 station is available for the night. They have two other Tesla destination chargers but I don't own an adapter and not sure that would work.

I have two basic routes to Cleveland from the Boston area, the quicker route is along the north through Albany, Syracuse and Buffalo but the charging stations along that route aren't rated as consistently high as the southern route through Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

Once I reach my destination I will be visiting family for about a twelve days and won't have access to any level charging. Plan on using the level one cord that came with the car. The Milwaukee area doesn't have a lot of charging options but there are a few it's just that I'm about an hour north of the city.

I will also need to get my tires rotated once I get there as I will just reach 5k miles by then.

The entire trip will be somewhere around 2,200 miles once I get back home, not including local driving.
 
Huh. Last time I looked there didn't seem to be a lot of DCFC along that stretch of
I-90. I'll have to check that again ..

_H*
 
Yeah, the I90 route isn't as robust but it is possible to do (based upon plugshare info) plus I'm more familiar with that route than the I80 way. Plus it's about a half hour difference which is nice on a long drive like this.
 
Clamps, you didn't mention whether you plotted this trip on A Better Route Planner (ABRP), but the stretch across NY on I-90 certainly looks quite doable. I plotted it for you just for fun, and assumed that you can cruise at around 4.2 mi/kWh, given the temperatures we are now seeing. All charge stations are EA except one EVgo in western MA. I'm a little envious, it should be interesting!
 
Bill Carter said:
Clamps, you didn't mention whether you plotted this trip on A Better Route Planner (ABRP), but the stretch across NY on I-90 certainly looks quite doable. I plotted it for you just for fun, and assumed that you can cruise at around 4.2 mi/kWh, given the temperatures we are now seeing. All charge stations are EA except one EVgo in western MA. I'm a little envious, it should be interesting!
Click to expand...

I used plugshare to map it out and did two routes. Agree, I90 should be okay... let's hope anyway! We'll see how adventurous I feel tomorrow morning when I leave.
 
I’m on the road. First time using Electrify America and boy is it fast. Decided to take the I90 route and other than some bad behavior from a bunch of tunes up cars the ride has been easy peasy.
 
Clamps said:
I’m on the road. First time using Electrify America and boy is it fast. Decided to take the I90 route and other than some bad behavior from a bunch of tunes up cars the ride has been easy Peary.
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Some day I am going to have to make a similar trip to St Paul, where I have family. Looking forward to hearing how it goes for you.
 
The I-90 route is very doable. We've gone from Maine to Rochester 5 times in the last 2 months, due to some family issues out that way.

While it's true that it would be nice to have a couple more options, the existing ones are just fine. I'd recommend sticking to the EA stations when possible (Crossgates Mall in Albany, then a Denny's in ... Herkimer maybe, and then the outlet mall in Waterloo, NY)

Theres a free 50kw charger at the Mohawk Valley welcome center (westbound), but I think you need to download the EVConnect app to start it. We had a bit of trouble with the EVConnect stations at NYT service plazas, but ultimately found that using the app to start the chargers was the key. They're only 50kW though, so my recommendation is to just hop from one EA station to another EA station. Charge speeds were really fast, across the board at all EA stations we used.

At your destination, your L1 charger will suffice if you just make sure to keep it plugged in at all times. You're there a long time, so it should be no problem getting charged up for the return trip.

Have a great journey!
 
Clamps said:
I’m on the road. First time using Electrify America and boy is it fast. Decided to take the I90 route and other than some bad behavior from a bunch of tunes up cars the ride has been easy Peary.
Click to expand...

Any recommendations for hotels on the I-90 corridor that have chargers?
 
ericy said:
Any recommendations for hotels on the I-90 corridor that have chargers?
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It was an 11 hour trip for us, so we always do it in a single leg, but there are L2 chargers at many of the city parking lots in small towns in upstate NY, so you can look for those, and then choose a hotel nearby. One trip, we stayed at a Quality Inn in Waterloo that was a short walk (5 min?) to the Seneca County office building, which had two free 40A chargers. Worked great.
 
ericy said:
Any recommendations for hotels on the I-90 corridor that have chargers?
Click to expand...

my wife and I are Marriott members so I found a property in Cleveland that has overnight charging. PlugShare has a lodging feature that you can use to find hotels with destination charging. Seems a lot are Tesla destination chargers so you may want to get a Tesla to J1772 adapter.
 
So I made it to Cleveland for tonight, about 650 miles. Things went mostly smooth with the exception of trouble with an EVconnect station.

I started on a full battery and made it all the way to Albany from home with no fuss. Afterwards I noticed I was getting lower than usual efficiency. Sometimes as low as 3.6/kWh but usually around 3.8. On an 80% charge I was getting around 180 miles which surprised me as I’ve done much better in the past.

One funny thing happened. At one of my stops an older gentleman walks up to me and ask me about charge times and range and then goes on to tell me his SUV will go twice as far on one fuel stop. Then he had to add that his car is cleaner/greener than mine, telling me the electricity I’m buying is dirty. But the corker was I told him I used renewables at home and he asked me what renewables? I said wind power, he then scoffed and said, looked what happened in Texas. I then told him that was mismanagement and wind farms in the north I just fine. In closing I told him he had a very nice truck and said goodbye.
 
I had not heard of EVconnect before, but checked them out today and had a convo with their
[offshore, mostly useless] support. They're another one with the "you must use our app"
philosophy, which just makes me angry especially when they don't offer a direct download
from their own website. Come normal business-hours I'll try to find out how I could sign
up and get one of their RFID things without messing with apps.

RFID tags are actually a lot more convenient and likely more reliable, I don't mind
accumulating a handful of them as the Kona will probably never do plug-n-charge.
But all of these networks that keep pushing their apps, which are *not* universally
obtainable in the first place, can stuff that noise.

_H*
 
I don’t have a lot of positive things to say about EVconnect. When I was having my troubles at their station the friendly but ineffective rep couldn’t really help. He had no access to override the station to reset it. Claimed it must be done by the admin or owner. Kept claiming it was owned by Nissan and not until my third call with him did he realize it was owned by EVconnect.

The station itself was problematic, the connector plug was difficult to remove and for about thirty minutes I thought it was stuck in my car. The station had a CC reader that was busted, only to find out later that it was a free station from a different EV driver who stopped to charge. You did have to use the app but it was easily downloadable from the App Store but I could not get it to work with the station. The other EV owner did get his app to work and charged my car for me. Overall it was a really bad experience and I wasted about an hour before I was able to charge my car.
 
Clamps said:
"he had to add that his car is cleaner/greener than mine, telling me the electricity I’m buying is dirty. But the corker was I told him I used renewables at home and he asked me what renewables? I said wind power, he then scoffed and said, looked what happened in Texas. I then told him that was mismanagement and wind farms in the north I just fine. In closing I told him he had a very nice truck and said goodbye.
Click to expand...
I would love to have told him his fuel will always be dirty. At about 20-30% energy efficiency (most of it lost waste heat) his gas thing is obsolete, but if he's happy with that to each his own.
But that's just me, I admire your restraint.
 
So I arrived yesterday to my destination, just over 1,100 miles total. Only two real hiccups along the way. The first was the very temperamental EVconnect station (though it was a free station so, bonus) and the incorrectly mapped EA station in Ohio.

A couple of interesting anecdotes from my travels.

At my destination charging stop my car stopped charging at 61%. Thankfully I got an alert on my phone and with the help of hotel maintenance reset the station. There was a circus in town and lots of people streaming through the hotel parking lot. Don’t know if someone messed with the charger as it has a reset button or if it was just a fluke. It was corrected and I had a full charge by morning.

At one of my charging stops in western Ohio I met an owner of a Porsche Taycan. The short time I was there he had five different people stop and either talk to him about his car, take pictures of his car or simply stop and ogle his car. I told him he is going to be like a rock star.

At my Chicago stop at the charging station I met a man, named Larry, who was reviewing a MachE. Didn’t get what media he worked for but he was impressed that I was driving an EV from Boston to Milwaukee.

And finally I witnessed a car fire on the interstate in Wisconsin and it wasn’t an EV.

That’s about it.
 
Ditto with the EVConnect experience. I'd probably avoid them in the future (even the free one at the Welcome Center). For what it's worth, when I called the number on the screen, the person on the other end of the line claimed that he had no control over the station and that there was nothing he could do. Then I called the number on the sticker NEXT to the screen, and she was very helpful, and offered to remote-start the station. By then my wife had downloaded the app and we were able to start it ourselves.
 
NRH said:
For what it's worth, when I called the number on the screen, the person on the other end of the line claimed that he had no control over the station and that there was nothing he could do. Then I called the number on the sticker NEXT to the screen, and she was very helpful, and offered to remote-start the station. By then my wife had downloaded the app and we were able to start it ourselves.
Click to expand...

Right! What’s up with that help number. The guy while trying to be helpful and kept his cool while I was getting angry, he was completely useless. Didn’t see the alternate number, if I get caught there again I’ll remember.

By the way, I was told to go into the service plaza and find the property manager. Turned out it was owned by McDonalds and they told me to call 911. I didn’t.
 
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