EV to ICE or Hybrid

[NW-Bound]

My brother just came back to Phoenix from the LA area yesterday. He said that on I-10, he passed many EVs going slow. He surmised that they went slow to stretch the range. Said he also saw a Tesla abandoned by the side of the road, and though that perhaps it was out of juice.

 

[Car-Guy]

My brother just came back to Phoenix from the LA area yesterday. He said that on I-10, he passed many EVs going slow. He surmised that they went slow to stretch the range. Said he also saw a Tesla abandoned by the side of the road, and though that perhaps it was out of juice.

If he was out of juice, I guess the only "practical solution" is to get a tow to a charging station? Can't bring you a 5 gallon can of electricity. Or maybe you could get someone with a big mobile gas or diesel powered generator to come to you and charge your car up on the side of the road "enough" to get you to a charging station.

 

[NW-Bound]

After hearing my brother's story, I went to Plugshare.com to check out the EV charging points on I-10 between Phoenix and LA.

At first, the map shows a galore of charging points. But once you start to click the pointer on each one, will soon discover that many are puny 6 kW trickle chargers, such as at public libraries. The nice thing is they are free, if you have the time to spend. So, don't be misled.

Once you raised the filter to screen out chargers below 50 kW, many disappeared. And if the limit is raised to 100 kW, I see only 2 stations in Blythe. These are Tesla superchargers, so other car makes are SOL.

Reading the description on the Blythe chargers, I saw that the fee was 43c/kWh, not as cheap as charging at home. The reviews from users are mixed. Some were happy to draw 250 kW, while others got 60-70 kW. The reviewers surmised that the summer heat prevented the car from accepting a high charge rate.

For what it's worth... I found Plugshare.com site very interesting for armchair EV driving.

 

[Chuckanut]

There are big areas of Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and Montana devoid of high-speed chargers. EV owners would do well to stay away from these areas. And even if there are a few, if one is not lucky, he may be queuing behind other EV owners.

Or, as happened to an acquaintance of mine, an unexpected road closure sent him many miles out of his way on a detour route. No chargers on the detour led to getting towed. A shame really since he was not that far from a town with several chargers via the main, but now closed road.

 

[Ronstar]

We saw a disabled Tesla in Wyoming a couple of weeks ago. Owner standing next to their car on the phone. Probably ran out of juice and was having a hard time finding anyone in Wyoming that could help. We were in Wyoming 10 days and this was the only EV we saw, so EV rescue companies are probably non-existent there.

 

[NW-Bound]

Or, as happened to an acquaintance of mine, an unexpected road closure sent him many miles out of his way on a detour route. No chargers on the detour led to getting towed. A shame really since he was not that far from a town with several chargers via the main, but now closed road.

I would find a farm house and knock on the door.

"Hi. I'd like to offer you $100 to let me park and charge my EV off your front porch receptacle for 24 hours. I will sleep in the car during that time, and won't bother you".

Would that be less hassle than having the car towed?

 

[REWahoo]

Better yet, look for an RV park where you could use a much faster 50A/240V circuit - assuming you bring along your Level 2 charger on road trips. This would allow you to add 50 miles of range in a couple of hours.

 

[audreyh1]

Yeah, RV park is a no brainer in an emergency, might be some begging (+$$) involved. I can dial down the current pulled if there are concerns about current draw. I’ve even plugged into 110 at DS’s house overnight.

We do pay attention to highway construction and closures on long trips. There is usually a DOT map available.

Anyway it’s kinda funny reading about non-EV folks checking routes. Its pretty old hat to us now. We are currently on a month long southwest Colorado road trip over 3000 miles. We are quite used to superchargers being 150+ miles apart on the western US highways. Not a problem for us. There are still some preferred routes not adequately supported yet but they are closing those gaps fast.

And a Tesla can be pulled over calling for service other than running out of charge. You really don’t know.

I do check Plugshare.com in addition to the regular Tesla supercharger network just to be aware, and we can plug into just about anything.

 

[NW-Bound]

I dunno.

Just checking out Plugshare again for armchair traveling. From Albuquerque to Farmington, 183 miles stretch with no charger, fast or slow. Yes, one should be able to do that in an EV, but I think the gauge gets kind of low near the end. Me don't like that. My ICE car can do 450 to empty, and I am so used to filling up at 1/2 mark on the fuel gauge. I am a suspender+belt kind of guy.

About RV parks, that's a good idea. And for road trips. one should bring a tent and sleeping bags. One might as well pay for a night stay at the RV park, which can be less than what it costs to use the superchargers at the recent rates.

 

[Montecfo]

Good points.

 

[audreyh1]

I dunno.

Just checking out Plugshare again for armchair traveling. From Albuquerque to Farmington, 183 miles stretch with no charger, fast or slow. Yes, one should be able to do that in an EV, but I think the gauge gets kind of low near the end. Me don't like that. My ICE car can do 450 to empty, and I am so used to filling up at 1/2 mark on the fuel gauge. I am a suspender+belt kind of guy.

About RV parks, that's a good idea. And for road trips. one should bring a tent and sleeping bags. One might as well pay for a night stay at the RV park, which can be less than what it costs to use the superchargers at the recent rates.

We’ve done 225 miles between chargers and still arrived with 19% charge left.

New Mexico has more superchargers coming so that gap will be filled one way or another.

Nope, no RV Park car camping for us. Not necessary.

 

[mpeirce]

Interestingly, there are also stations that will sell you gasoline with no ethanol in it. It’s more expensive, but they claim better mileage.

Around here it's called "marine gas" and is available in quite a few stations for boats - and at most of the marinas too. I buy it for my small engines - lawnmower and pressure washer. It's a bit more than the has with alcohol in it, but not all that much more.

And I do wonder how "they" think we're going to electrify all the pleasure boats. If they try to get people to abandon their boats around here (Lake Erie shores and islands) things will get "very interesting".

 

[NW-Bound]

I still dunno. I feel edgy when the fuel needle is approaching 1/4 mark. Call me overly cautious, but I am also a guy who's happy with a 1% WR.

And I started my career out of grad school working on flight control systems where triplex and quadruplex redundancy is the norm.

What's belt+suspenders? That's just duplex, although they get extra points for being dissimilar. Heh heh heh...

 

[NW-Bound]

Speaking of running out of gas, I recall a funny story from a fellow engineer at megacorp. The following incidence happened in the 70s, when big V8's guzzling gas at single-digit MPG were the norm.

This guy went to the LA area to get a car that his sister asked him to drive back to Phoenix. He asked to be sure that the car could make it to Blythe (on the border of AZ and CA). His sister assured him that yes, she had made the trip many times.

As you can guess it, he ran out of gas 10-15 miles from Blythe. When he recounted the story, he said he still remembered hitchhiking into Blythe, bought all the 1-gallon gas cans that the store had, filled them up with gas. Then he had to stand by the freeway again to hitchhike back to his stranded car, with a tray carrying these gas cans. Remember that at 7-8 mpg, he needed several gallons of gas to get to Blythe.

Said he did not speak to his sister for a year.

Now the sister did not lie, but perhaps the car was out of tune. Or perhaps he was caught in slow traffic inside LA. He just did not have a safety margin.

PS. I don't know where he started the drive in LA, but he knew the true MPG of the car, he could have topped off in Indio, outside of the LA metro area, before hitting the long stretch to Blythe.

 

[NW-Bound]

By the way, the only times I saw cars stranded on I-10 between Phoenix and LA were going from LA to Phoenix, and not in the other direction of Phoenix to LA.

Why? A simple reason. These cars overheated. The mild climate in LA hid the fact that a car might lack coolant, or that its radiator was clogged. People drove around LA without knowing something was amiss. It was only when they drove east, crossed the desert and learned about the car deficiency.

Yes, I knew, because these cars always had the hood up. Steam billowing sometimes.

On the other hand, Arizonans would not have their cars running for long if their cooling systems were not up to snuff, let alone leaving town. In fact, in 115F weather, a car tends to overheat more in city driving than on the freeway, due to the engine not getting ventilation at lower speeds.

 

[Texas Proud]

We saw a disabled Tesla in Wyoming a couple of weeks ago. Owner standing next to their car on the phone. Probably ran out of juice and was having a hard time finding anyone in Wyoming that could help. We were in Wyoming 10 days and this was the only EV we saw, so EV rescue companies are probably non-existent there.

Might be lucky... when we were there the cell service was sketchy....

 

[Texas Proud]

I dunno.

Just checking out Plugshare again for armchair traveling. From Albuquerque to Farmington, 183 miles stretch with no charger, fast or slow. Yes, one should be able to do that in an EV, but I think the gauge gets kind of low near the end. Me don't like that. My ICE car can do 450 to empty, and I am so used to filling up at 1/2 mark on the fuel gauge. I am a suspender+belt kind of guy.

About RV parks, that's a good idea. And for road trips. one should bring a tent and sleeping bags. One might as well pay for a night stay at the RV park, which can be less than what it costs to use the superchargers at the recent rates.

Not sue where I saw it (maybe someone here) but there was an article about some guy in a Tesla that was using something like 'camp mode'... said it would keep the car comfortable, could watch shows on the screen etc... all while plugged in... said the seats were very comfortable...


Sounds like a winner to me..

 

[ken830]

I still dunno. I feel edgy when the fuel needle is approaching 1/4 mark. Call me overly cautious, but I am also a guy who's happy with a 1% WR.

And I started my career out of grad school working on flight control systems where triplex and quadruplex redundancy is the norm.

What's belt+suspenders? That's just duplex, although they get extra points for being dissimilar. Heh heh heh...

That's range anxiety! I got it too when I commuted in a gasoline vehicle daily.

Charging an EV at home for your day-to-day would fit your personality perfectly. You basically start every day with 80+% "fuel" and don't have to anxiously keep your eye on the gauge. I'm assuming you don't drive 300+ miles around town in a day very often.

I used to commute 80+ miles round trip, and my wife's 4-cyl Accord got just a bit over 300 miles on a tank, so I could only drive 3-and-a-half days before I needed to get gas, and gas was $0.40-.50 more per gallon near home compared to the stations near work and there are very few stations along the highway near my home, so I had to remember to get gas on the third day, when I left work, with a 1/4 tank remaining. If I forgot, or had to rush home for dinner or help with kids, I would have to get up early the next day, go out of my way, and pay through the nose for gas near home before going into work and make it in for my morning meetings.. or, I get up a little bit early and drive extremely slow and hope & pray I make it to work with the needle pegged on "E" and then be forced to get gas after work. Never got stranded, but getting a second EV (first EV was my wife's daily commuter) sure took that burden of every-third-day range anxiety away.

 

[ken830]

Not sue where I saw it (maybe someone here) but there was an article about some guy in a Tesla that was using something like 'camp mode'... said it would keep the car comfortable, could watch shows on the screen etc... all while plugged in... said the seats were very comfortable...


Sounds like a winner to me..

Camp mode keeps the HVAC systems running (assuming battery is above 20%) even if you are not sitting in the drivers seat.

You can stream show/movies on the car's screen... or if you have an S or X, you can play many of your games from your Steam library (it acts like a giant Steam Deck).

Here it is along with my Steam Deck:


And my kids like streaming shows from Disney+, YouTube, and our Plex server:


Camp mode is also great for the drive-in theater. Worst thing about drive-ins are the gasoline cars. Some people start their cars to charge their batteries half way through the movie and the exhaust gases are nauseating while the engine noise drowns out the movie's audio. EVs are perfect for the drive-in. They should make a comeback -- we go often with our Teslas.

 

[NW-Bound]

That's range anxiety! I got it too when I commuted in a gasoline vehicle daily.

Charging an EV at home for your day-to-day would fit your personality perfectly. You basically start every day with 80+% "fuel" and don't have to anxiously keep your eye on the gauge. I'm assuming you don't drive 300+ miles around town in a day very often...

I guess you missed my several posts where I said I would get an EV, even a shorter range one, if I were still working and commuting.

And there was a time when I drove 50 mi one way to work. In a car with 13 mpg, many years ago. Lots of money I would save with an EV.

But we were talking earlier about road trips, a different thing altogether. And when I am on a road trip, I want to minimize the things that I have to worry about. It takes away from the fun, the freedom to go where I want to go at the spur of the moment, to take an unplanned detour.

Also, all of my road trips in recent years were with a motorhome towing a car. It's a different kind of travel altogether, particularly boondocking in Alaska.

 

[audreyh1]

Funny it never occurred to me to worry on my long road trips as to me 20% arrival charge is quite conservative with plenty of margin for error. Tesla navigation often has you arriving with 13% which I consider too low, so I charge a little longer before continuing the trip. If we are at a higher tech V3 charger I’ll go ahead and charge to 80% as it might save me time later.

The entire time you are driving the car shows the expected arrival charge and updates it based on conditions so far.

 

[Koolau]

Talk about EV chargers in the US, I just browsed to "plugshare.com" to see its latest map. I then zoomed in to certain areas, and panned around to see the distribution of the chargers.

There are many chargers in CA. But in other Western states, there are stretches of highways with chargers spaced more than 100 miles from each other. And if you set the filter to show only chargers with 100+kW to screen out 50 kW chargers, you will see large areas devoid of high-speed chargers.

A 50 kW charger will give you perhaps 75 mi in 1/2 hour of charging, while with 100 kW, you can get 150 mi of range in 1/2 hour.

There are big areas of Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and Montana devoid of high-speed chargers. EV owners would do well to stay away from these areas. And even if there are a few, if one is not lucky, he may be queuing behind other EV owners.

Yeah, I drove my ICE across Nevada years ago. There were a couple of times I was glad I'd squeezed every last drop into the tank at the last stop. That's a long way to go without having a gas station. With a limited range EV, I would think it fool hearty to start crossing Nevada at 80% charge. But, YMMV.

 

[Koolau]

If he was out of juice, I guess the only "practical solution" is to get a tow to a charging station? Can't bring you a 5 gallon can of electricity. Or maybe you could get someone with a big mobile gas or diesel powered generator to come to you and charge your car up on the side of the road "enough" to get you to a charging station.

I've heard you can charge just by being towed. Maybe you have to push the brake pedal down to get the max charging (not so far to grind off the pads.)

 

[Koolau]

A



Reading the description on the Blythe chargers, I saw that the fee was 43c/kWh, not as cheap as charging at home.

Just about as expensive as charging at home in Hawaii. Actually, that's not quite true. My "average" KWH is around 40++cents - it would be lower if I used quite a bit more KWhs because of all those fixed and added charges. For instance. Right now (since I'm gone) I'm using 1KWh/day. BUT it's costing me $1/day.

 

[Koolau]

That's range anxiety! I got it too when I commuted in a gasoline vehicle daily.

Back in the day, when I got a new (different car) I would let it get very low on gas and then buy a gallon of gas in a gas can. I'd then drive normally until the car died from fuel exhaustion. At that point, I noted exactly on the gas gauge where "true empty was."

Now of days, that's a bad way to go as you can damage your fuel pump which may require being bathed in gasoline to keep cool. Ah, the good old days.