Road Trip With LFP Model 3
We see a road trip starting with a Tesla Model 3 RWD, and it starts at a Tesla Supercharger. It is at 100% state of charge or 266 miles. He has put almost 12,000 miles on his car. He's doing a little better than me as I am at about 7,500 miles and 264 miles of range, but I think I have fast charged more than he has.
He left his house at 3:15 AM and arrived at 6:00 AM to charge with a 15% state of charge. The charge was at about 115 kW. LFP batteries generally charge a bit slower in the cold.
Autopilot worked pretty well, but had some issues where lanes were under construction or had unusual markings. He is going to visit his family out of state, and it is about 800 miles of driving.
He's excited because he hasn't supercharged his car for over 4 months. It will be interesting to see if his battery degrades. I think fast charging my Model 3 RWD caused faster degradation.
The stops are less frequent to charge, and it's about 45 to 50 minutes per stop. The car makes a lot of noise when it is supercharging. After charging, he went back on the road.
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How Far Did It Go?
He then went to his next stop to charge, and it took 14 seconds to blink green and start charging. This charge was about 15 minutes.
When charging in the cold, he got a notice that the battery was heating up in order to charge more. His next charge happened at 50%, and he wondered why this happened. There might have been a Supercharger station that was down.
During one of his trips, he used 7.2% less than the predicted amount, and this was about 202 Wh/mi. For his next stop, the battery continued to precondition due to being cold even after driving for an hour. I've noticed that before in the cold too, and it seems to take the battery a long time to heat up in an LFP battery.
The car was very noisy while Supercharging. He had an issue after about 10 minutes that charging stopped, and he had to unplug and plug it back in. Things are working now.
After 12 hours of driving, the experience is pretty easy using the navigation and Supercharging network. Tesla tells you how much longer you have for your next stop and how long you will be stopped. It's a lot nicer structure than a gas car, where you are guessing or playing it by ear.
As he arrived at his parent's place, he said it was about 1/2 as expensive as using a gas car. The stops were more leisurely and cheaper. The road trip cost about 60 dollars for 800 miles.
I look forward to seeing what his max charge miles is after this trip to see if there was more degradation. What did you think of this road trip?
For more information, see this video from Tailosive EV:
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Jeremy Johnson is a Tesla investor and supporter. He first invested in Tesla in 2017 after years of following Elon Musk and admiring his work ethic and intelligence. Since then, he's become a Tesla bull, covering anything about Tesla he can find, while also dabbling in other electric vehicle companies. Jeremy covers Tesla developments at Torque News. You can follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn to stay in touch and follow his Tesla news coverage on Torque News.