Road tripping

Many people have commented about range anxiety and how EV's are unreliable.  This is a little plug for Tesla.  (I won't give a comment on the guy that runs the company, just the car.)

George and I left our car in Florida in the garage of the big house.  When the house sold, we had to either sell it or find it a new home.  We came to an obvious conclusion. We 'loaned' the car to Katherine while we are out of the USA.  You see, we believe the car to be too valuable to sell.  I know what the Kelly Blue Book values it as, but they don't take into account the free supercharging for the life of the owner.  For this reason alone, it is worth the loan.  Add to that free hardware upgrades and a number of other perks we got when we purchased and it's a keeper.  But more importantly, we have a car to drive when we return home that isn't an overpriced rental. 

On our last trip around the US, we saved close to $2000 in gas charges had we been driving an ICE machine.  The only place I paid to charge was the IPP hotel as they didn't have a Tesla destination charger.  

The beauty of the car is that it tells us where to 'gas up'.  Now I know that sitting for 15 or 20 minutes to charge is much slower than putting gas in a car, but think of it this way.  You always need a bathroom break, most people want to buy a drink or a snack, and there goes your 20 minutes.  

In the photo I have here, we pushed for longer drives and longer stops.  Mind, we didn't do this trip.  I set it up only for this blog post.  The car even tells us how many chargers are there and the charging speed at that charger.  Most of the charging stations have a place to get food nearby and all have a bathroom within a few meters. 

Our MO is to charge full overnight, drive until noon.  Enjoy a nice leisurely lunch while charging the car and drive on again until mid-day comfort stop where we would charge some more before finding a hotel for the night with a destination charger.  Perhaps we would have a morning stop if I didn't fully charge the night before.  It's not at all inconvenient.  And if we did have to stop longer than we thought, we can always hook up to Hulu or Netflix and watch a movie while we wait. 

The better bit for me is that I have learned to game the car.  If I pass a stop that it tells me to take and I have enough charge, it will send me to another one further down the road.  (I've never had it do anything else, so I'm pretty sure there is always a 'reserve tank' available that Tesla doesn't tell us about.)  In this way, I can make fewer stops should I choose.  If I am running low on charge when I do this, the car automatically tells me to slow down to a certain speed to make the next charger.  Usually along the way it will allow me to increase speed again.  This slowdown?  Back to 65 instead of the usual lead footing that I do.  

Now why am I posting this?  Because we finally got the tags for our Tesla here in Italy!  We have taken a trip to Viterbo recently and while we were charged to 85% before starting, I wanted to see how it compares to the US.  Viterbo is 1 1/2 hours south of us so I did about 4 hours driving total.  This used up 64% of our battery.  Not bad really.  The best part?  I just plug it in at home and it's filled up overnight.  If only we could have solar here.

Once I pass my driver's license theory test (in Italian of course) we plan to do a roadtrip down to the toe of Italy and see a few things we haven't seen before.  Just playing around with the Go Anywhere page, I can see by looking at the little red dots that charging won't be a problem here either!  Bring on the free time!  

Where is the puzzle you ask?  Well, I gave the solution today instead.  Electric vehicles are amazing.  No problems as claimed by many of the nay sayers.  Recalls? An over the air update.  Oh, and did I mention that everytime we put through an update we effectively have a new car?  Ok well, the brains are new anyway.  And how many cars do you know that will drive themselves home?   

We thought we were stuck with a small engine vehicle and had numerous problems with getting the tags for this car, so we had to buy the puzzle van.  It has served its purpose, and will be garaged until we have a lot of puzzles to pick up once again. We get excellent milage in it, but we'd much rather ride in comfort.  

Next week, a new visitor comes to Panicale.  Until then, Happy Puzzling.