Tesla Road Trip: Lake Tahoe, Lone Pine, Death Valley, Las Vegas

Photos from this trip are here:
https://plus.google.com/101972168549936312806/stories/a7dae159-8cc4-334f-b2f1-619d7f2488fd14bd4400a7e


We picked up our new 85D at the factory in Fremont on Monday and wanted to take a road trip. Our daughter was going to be in Las Vegas for some meetings on Thursday so we decided to drive there. This is not the easiest trip since the only Supercharger on the route is in Lone Pine which is 263 miles from our home and Las Vegas is 230 miles from Lone Pine. These are both a bit of a stretch but we wanted to give it a try. We mapped out alternative chargers on the route and felt confident that we could stop and charge if needed.
We left Lake Tahoe and drove down US 395, starting with a 270 mile charge and a pre-heated car from our house. We had the advantage of a 2500 ft elevation drop to Lone pine but there are several mountain passes on the way. This is one of our favorite drives since it follows the Eastern Sierra with beautiful mountain views. The temperature was in the 60s for most of the route so we kept the sunroof open to "vent" and turned off the climate control. This helped with our energy use. We also kept the cruise control to about 60-65 mph for most of the way.
We arrived in Bishop at dinner time with 65 miles of range and 60 miles to travel to Lone Pine so we stopped at the J Diamond RV park in downtown Bishop where the very friendly proprietors were happy to rent us a 50 amp charging spot and gave us good advice on local restaurants. We added 35 miles of range during dinner which gave us confidence to drive to Lone Pine, arriving with 30 miles of range.
I charged at the Supercharger to 80% that evening then topped off to 275 miles 100% in the am (and also pre-heated the car). We headed across Death Valley to Las Vegas, again with the climate control off and sunroof open to "vent" which seemed to minimize energy use. The trip energy prediction software had a difficult time calculating the energy use going over the three mountain passes and down the valleys to below sea level. It's estimates of destination battery remaining varied between +10% and -23% as we went up and down the mountain passes but settled to a steady 10% once we reached Beatty, NV and the relatively flat stretch from there to Las Vegas. We had scouted out an RV park in Amagorsa, NV as a possible site where we could stop and charge if we needed to but we decide that we could make it without the stop. However, this is a very interesting spot in the desert since in addition to the RV park it also has the "Area 51 Alien Information Center" and a brothel prominently advertised on a large red billboard with the imaginative name "Brothel".
We arrived at the Las Vegas Supercharger with 30 miles of range. We did a partial charge and picked up our daughter and took her to her meeting site which was, fortunately, not in downtown Las Vegas but at a resort hotel located about 15 miles to the East in a development called "Lake Las Vegas" (think of Disneyland without the crowds). We hadn't been to Las Vegas since our daughters were in high school and we traveled there for a soccer tournament. I'm not sure that I would recommend anyone go to Las Vegas if they didn't have a love for the particular style of entertainment offered there.
The next day we dropped our daughter off at the airport (she was thrilled to be able to drive the Tesla before her older sister), stopped at the Supercharger and headed back to Death Valley. We only had 135 miles to the valley so no need to charge beyond 80%.
We stayed at the Furnace Creek Ranch. There are no public charging spots in the valley. There are 17 RV sites with power but these are booked solid months in advance. We asked nicely at the Ranch registration and they were happy to lead us to a NEMA 14-50 charging spot near the golf course which they unlocked for our use. I also had prepared an adapter that could plug into the (NEMA 6-20) 240 volt air conditioner plugs commonly found in motels. We didn't need the charge but I did test it out and it worked well, giving about a 10 mi/hr charge rate.
The next day we went for a hike on the sand dunes (I had just re-read Frank Herbert's "Dune") so this gave me some real world context. We stopped for lunch in Lone Pine while we charged to 265 miles at the Supercharger for the trip back up 395.
We knew we would have to stop on the return trip since we had a 263 mile and +2500 ft. elevation gain so we scouted chargers in Minden and Garnerville, NV. The first ChargePoint charger only charged at 30 amps so we moved to Minden where there is a 70 amp charger but this is only 208 volts and the Tesla single charger would only draw 40 amps for a 26 mi/hr charge rate. We had dinner at Francisco's Mexican restaurant and then headed up the hill to home.
When I picked up the car, I had them install the Michelin winter tires but I almost changed them out for the summer tires for this trip to the desert. Fortunately, I didn't because on the return trip a storm came through and we had a foot of snow going up Spooner pass and around the north shore of the lake. I was eager to try out the Tesla in snow and it performed flawlessly on the ice and snow packed roads. Of course I was driving cautiously since these are steep winding mountain roads with 100+ ft drop-offs but the car was absolutely solid. I couldn't detect any slippage or squirming. It felt as solid as a dry road.
We made it home with 7 miles reserve. Average energy use for the entire trip was 300 Wh/mile.
I now have almost 1500 miles on the car and it's less than a week old. We're looking forward to many more trips.

Can the ICE age return?

This article is written from the perspective of some time in the (hopefully not too distant) future when electric cars are common and ICE cars are declining in popularity.

There is much speculation on whether internal combustion engine (ICE) powered cars can make a return. Many people have been driving electric cars for years now and have become adjusted to their advantages and disadvantages. Recently, several of the old school auto companies have introduced new models of ICE cars. Can they recapture the electric vehicle (EV) customer?

Now that more people have become accustomed to the convenience of just plugging their car in at home at night, will they return to the gas station to refuel? There are still a large number of gas stations but the high cost of building and maintaining them means that they are slowly disappearing. The establishment of high speed charging stations means that long distance driving is no longer a limiting factor.
The other factor is the high cost of gasoline or diesel fuel. Crude oil has to be extracted from increasingly difficult to reach places and transported, refined and delivered to gas stations. All of this contributes to its high cost. Once the fuel is in the car, only 25% of it delivers useful work, leaving a lot of waste heat (and wasted money). Gasoline and diesel cars are very inefficient and expensive to fuel. Electricity is only about one tenth the cost.
ICE cars have thousands of precision moving parts and complex control mechanisms. The engine, clutch and transmission are incredibly complex and difficult to manufacture compared to the electric car which replaces all of these parts with one moving part, the electric motor. The maintenance on an ICE car requires visits every three months to change fluids and filters and make adjustments to the complex machinery. This is expensive and time consuming. Electric cars only require routine tire rotation.
ICE cars produce a lot of toxic pollution. This includes CO2 as well as NOx. Electric cars produce no pollution and even when they are charged from a coal fired power plant, their total lifecycle pollution is about one tenth that of ICE cars.
Electric cars last a long time since they have few moving parts. The engines and transmissions in ICE cars have limited life. They are just not as reliable.
One adjustment that people moving back to an ICE car from electric will be getting used to the ritual of "starting" the car and engaging the transmission. Since ICE cars have a narrow power range, they use complex transmissions and a clutch to adjust the engine to the speed of the car. Even in ICE cars with automatic transmission, this produces a lurching acceleration.  Electric cars offer powerful, smooth, quiet acceleration and operation at all speeds.

It will be difficult to bring people back to ICE cars.