Moved to electric: My Tesla Adventure

[Xlucine]

You'd think tesla of all people would know how to look after a lead acid battery, and avoid trying to kill it

[Ttaskmaster]

Maybe they were going for US army rangers as their inspiration?

Yeah, that photo kinda sums up my philosophy regarding repair procedures for these things... !!

[tfboy]

Long drive back from France went well. No real issues. I had to step on it, so compared to the planning, there was less driving and a bit more time for charging.

This was the plan:


Drive back ended up like this:


All times are UK - I left 15-20 minutes later than I had planned. There was some fog on the roads which was a bit of a pain at first. I also had a blablacar passenger I picked up at Saintes and took her to Rouen en-route.

I shortened my charging time at Rouen to add another quick "splash'n'dash" from the MSC on the A16. Last bit was "fun".


Still enjoying the car immensely, and despite the few niggles I've had, the combination of Supercharger network, comfort, toys, sheer driving power and pleasure mean I really am in it for the long run

[Millennium]

I am super jelly

[hb904460]

What would be helpful for cross channel trips would be charging on the eurotunnel.

[tfboy]

What would be helpful for cross channel trips would be charging on the eurotunnel.

True, and I had thought of that. But if you're only on the train for 30 minutes, anything other than a rapid 50kW+ charger isn't going to help much, and those are super expensive, so I doubt it's worth the investment. They would also probably be limited in numbers due to power requirements - I don't know the ins and outs of electrical engineering on the locomotives, but I doubt there's provision for a high power tap off going through the carriages.

[Butcher]

True, and I had thought of that. But if you're only on the train for 30 minutes, anything other than a rapid 50kW+ charger isn't going to help much, and those are super expensive, so I doubt it's worth the investment. They would also probably be limited in numbers due to power requirements - I don't know the ins and outs of electrical engineering on the locomotives, but I doubt there's provision for a high power tap off going through the carriages.

There's a fair amount for lighting and similar auxiliaries, but I don't know about a bunch of 50 kW charger feeds. The main locomotive pulls up to 7 MW, so that would be a fair amount of additional draw.

[tfboy]

Bit of an update, as I've been doing quite a lot of driving recently - namely we organised a 4-day rally leaving the UK to Monte Carlo, across various Swiss and Italian mountain passes. 4 days of driving with arguably some of the best roads and scenery.

Organised as a true "rally" stage where we all departed at 6 minute intervalls, the idea was not have a "race" but to stagger arrival times at chargers. There were some challenges along the way, i.e. finding particular spots to photograph. Turned it into a bit of a treasure hunt whilst enjoying the driving. Absolutely amazing time amongst 20+ other Tesla cars. There were about 60 of us in total. Great camaraderie, stories to tell, etc.

One of the chaps on the group works for a tracking company and developed a website so we could track each other's progress in realtime. Complete with scoring leaderboard on the left. As you can imagine, it played a part in strategy as you could see where the ones in front of you were going and make last minute route changes to jump them or plan to use an alternative charger. Great fun!

https://esplor.io/rally/tesla-2018

Also made a very quick one-minute YouTube video to give you an idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pDlbX0kJ8A

We're already planning the next one. Talks of Gibraltar or even Casablanca are being mentioned!

[tfboy]

Oh and some of you might have been to Fully Charged Live at Silverstone a month or two ago where a whole load of us volunteered to chauffeur people from the car park to the venue. Whilst I never would have considered being a cabbie for a weekend, this was the most rewarding and fun time with complete strangers. The public showed a massive interest and preferred to queue for 20 minutes to get a ride in a Tesla than a 5 minute wait to jump on the bus.

Following the success of FCL, we were contacted by Silverstone to cover the Silverstone Classic event where again, we'd be driving VIP and media around where they wanted to go. All done voluntarily and 65 odd of us gave up our weekend to do this. On the plus side, it did give us free entry so we were able to enjoy UB40 playing Saturday night

I probably enjoyed FCL more than Silverstone Classic as some of the people in the latter took us more for a convenience service than truly wanting to talk about electric cars, but we now have a waiting list of people wanting to do it for next year - and our group is in discussion with other venues to offer a similar service, raising awareness of EVs, etc.

From the Tesla-perspective, it's great free publicity for them, and we even made Elon comment on our efforts on Twitter so for Tesla fanboys, it was almost a bit of an emotional overload the day you get Elon to reply to your tweet

Still, public awareness is growing and I am noticing more and more EVs on the road, whether they be Leafs, Zoës, Tesla... With the new Kona EV being released as well as the IPace, it's a great time to see the next transition

[Moby-Dick]

The Kona has a lot of potential - especially with the 65 kWh model

[tfboy]

The Kona has a lot of potential - especially with the 65 kWh model

Agreed! Keeping it at an "affordable" price cutting down on the non-essential costs whilst offering a large pack will certainly ease range anxiety. Let's hope it delivers! Initial thoughts by Bjorn are good

[badass]

From the Tesla-perspective, it's great free publicity for them, and we even made Elon comment on our efforts on Twitter so for Tesla fanboys, it was almost a bit of an emotional overload the day you get Elon to reply to your tweet

Oh dear. He didn't call all of you pedo's as well did he?

Seriously...good job. Widespread adoption of electric cars can't come soon enough IMO

[tfboy]

Oh dear. He didn't call all of you pedo's as well did he?

Not quite!
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/...585299973?s=21

[wazzickle]

Test drove one back in february which was a pretty special experience but I'm not so bothered about one now. Next car will surely still be electric, if not self-driving in some capacity.

[tfboy]

Another bump - more to cover the lot of driving I did this summer.
Left Reading, UK to drive down to Aramits , SW France. Then, mid September, I had to go to the IBC trade show in Amsterdam to present the world's first fully electric outside broadcast van which I'm really chuffed about! Then drive all the way back down to Aramits via Paris.
Then, I ended up doing a 3-day road trip to Portugal to buy a kitchen. Yes, it's bonkers, a near-2000km round trip to buy a kitchen, but that's what one does when motoring is so cheap and enjoyable. I enjoyed it a bit too much and was stopped for speeding on the way back. Oops!
But I covered around 4000 miles in the space of a few weeks without a hitch and pretty much zero fuel cost.

I've now received the massively updated version 9 of the Tesla OS, but I'm yet to install it, might do that over the next day or two - I just want to enjoy what I have with V8 for a last day or so At least after the upgrade, I'll be able to play Asteroids