How did that Tesla trip work out for going to 6Y9 this year?
Since my work schedule dictated that it would be a day trip, no car was going to make the trip. If I could have stayed overnight Fri-Sun then we'd have done it.
There wasn't 220 available. Turns out the time to charge the car to get back to a supercharger was going to take longer than the time he would have been there.
Talk to Kent. He's the one that said the Tesla couldn't make it back to the charging station from Sidnaw.
That is not true at all. I'll post the entire (relevant part of the) conversation below. EVs are most convenient when they're charged at your origin/destination, so that was the thing I was planning on first. I also thought that the camper spots over by the lodge had both the TT30 (30A 120VAC) and NEMA 14-50 (50A 240VAC) plugs; both are commonly used by RVs. That would be ideal as the 14-50 plug is exactly what I have in my garage for the cars and I already own multiple adapters to charge cars from them.
Alas, my memory was incorrect, as verified by Brad, and I commented that a full charge from 0-100% in my car on a 15A 120V plug would take 4 days. In reality, it's about 2.5 days. That's when I *started* looking for a Supercharger up there. There's one in Marquette. Easy peasy. If I used that, I'd have had plenty of charge to make it to Sidnaw, drive people around while there, and make it back. Twice.
The conversation:
K: ...I'm going to tentatively plan on it being a road trip for the moment... we'd need to plug in the car at one of the campsites
D: Can you use 110 for your car?
K: I can theoretically use 110 for my car, but it'd take 4 days to charge.
With the 240V camper plug, maybe 8 hours.
D: There is nothing available in 220, so I'm not sure what the answer is. The camper hookups near the station were 110.
K: Interesting. I could have sworn they had both. I'll see if there's anywhere else I could charge along the way.
K: It looks like there are Tesla Superchargers in Escanaba and Marquette, so I should be fine.
Uncheck everything except the Tesla plug and report back.
Yeah, changes things doesn't it.
No. Tesla includes the J1772 adapter with all their cars. I am still using my non-Tesla charger at home - I'm on my fifth electrified vehicle now (Ford Fusion Energi PHEV, BMW i3 BEV, Chevy Volt PHEV, Chevy Bolt BEV, Tesla). I bought a second J1772 adapter to carry with me so I can just leave the original one on the charger at home. I still haven't used the second one. I also haven't used the Tesla mobile connector that, along with the standard NEMA 5-15 plug, came with the car, nor have I used the NEMA 14-50 adapter I bought for it. But I have a lot of options! I don't even bother carrying three other adapters I built along the way.
Basically, I can plug into numerous types of 120VAC and 240VAC plugs, or I can plug into the standard J1772 EV plug at a public charger, or I can plug into a Tesla charger. I'm not going to buy adapters for the CHAdeMO or SAE-CCS plugs as they're more expensive and I haven't used most of the stuff I have! But the bottom line is, the Tesla can plug into any EV charger except CHAdeMO and CCS with the one adapter that they include from the factory, and the Supercharger network is far more built out (and more reliable) than any of the CHAdeMO and CCS stuff anyway, so it's no problem at all to plug it in.
I always thought (incorrectly it seems, Toyota too) that hydrogen or some other fuel cell would be the future. The mining costs and effort for lithium, their heavy weight, tiny energy density - always made them seem like they'd be dead on arrival. But here we are!
I thought that once upon a time as well. It turns out that by the time you take energy, use it to make hydrogen, transport/store the hydrogen, put it in a car, and make it back into electricity, it's about 3x more efficient to just use a battery to store the electricity.
The Volt paradigm seems a good gap. Unlike planes hybrids do make actual sense in vehicles. Charge when you can, use electricity when you can, regenerate when you can - and have the gas when you either can't charge or don't have the freedom to spend 45 minutes (for a partial charge, if you find a high speed charger) at an EV charge bay on your road trip.
In the case of the apartment with no charging infrastructure scenario, a plain hybrid is better than a plug-in hybrid, since carting around the much larger battery of the plug-in tends to make them somewhat less efficient and have gas mileage that isn't as good.
Really, it would make a lot of sense for workplaces to offer charging as well, and many do.
I'm also surprised (though not really) that battery packs weren't standardized and can't be swapped out at fill stations. Imagine you pull into a bay, stop atop the designated area, and out pods the old battery and in the new.
Tesla actually did offer that in the early days. The Model S is capable of having its battery swapped for another one in about 90 seconds!!! And they opened up a Tesla battery-swap station at Harris Ranch (about halfway between LA and SF).
Turns out, almost nobody did it. They'd plug in at the Supercharger and grab a steak... So Tesla shut down the battery-swap station several years ago.
I don’t think they’ll ever get widely adopted until the charging infrastructure gets updated and charging times to 5 minutes, not 30 minutes. My car works for me because 1) I charge at home and 2) I don’t do road trips. It’s obvious that there are a lot of apartment / condo situations that’ll never work for a lot of people. And while the current charger network works (barely) for 1 % of EVs on the road, no way it’s capable of supporting a majority of EVs vs ICE.
For the same reason that most airports don't have mogas. Or charging stations. It doesn't make sense to put in more infrastructure than the market needs. Charging stations are being built out at least reasonably in line with demand.
Just pointing out the problems if a smaller fraction than the majority wants charging but the others don't. Then there are the many people who have no garage space and use street parking.
In Oslo, they put chargers on the street light poles. That seems like a great solution, and solutions will be needed for those who are in multi-unit dwellings and/or have to park on the street. It won't remain an obstacle forever, though.
