Celebrating Four Mostly Electric Years of the rEVolution.

On February 23, 2012, we joined the rEVolution with the addition of our BMW ActiveE.

This was one of the first pictures we took of our ActiveE when we picked up the car at Long Beach BMW. Shows a very happy, young rEVolutionary:

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Brought it home and plugged it in… We didn’t even have our Level 2 installed at the time and had to charge a BEV with an 80-100 mile range on 120V.

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Granted, my commute at the time was 70 miles roundtrip if I took the most direct route, and the “fastest” route used the carpool/HOV lanes and that was 100 miles roundtrip.

BMW’s friendly policies for ActiveE Electronauts meant that I was able to charge at Pacific BMW (a 10 minute walk from my office) J1772 station and ensure that I recovered my miles that first week.

Side by side ActiveE 1

I wrote about my first year of electric driving on the blog three years ago.

Once you go electric, it’s hard to look back. At the time that we picked up the Active E, we had a few ICE vehicles in the garage. The Active E was outnumbered by ICE vehicles and we figured to keep the ICE for our hybrid garage.

After taking delivery of the Active E, we we sold our Honda Civic Hybrid. There was no real need to keep it since we originally purchased the Honda as a commuter vehicle and the Yellow HOV stickers were expired by the time we picked up the Active E.

The two year lease of the Active E meant that there was pressure to see what “the next car” will be and we decided to place a deposit for the Model S. However, at the time, the plan was for my wife to get the S and for me to look for a replacement for the Active E.

We received our “configure your Model S” message in the beginning of 2013. However, we still had another year on the 2 year lease on the ActiveE and we didn’t think we would run with 2 EVs concurrently, so I took the time to test out other cars for me to use when we decide to become a 2 EV family, after all, the Model S was going to be her car.  Since I wanted to ensure to get the Federal Tax Credit in 2013, we delayed the delivery of the vehicle to the end of the year.  The ideal delivery would be December 31, 2013, however, understanding the Tesla process and to ensure that I get the vehicle with some “buffer” we settled to take delivery in November 2013.

Long time readers of the blog and participants of the now defunct Active E forums will remember the many test drives (a few sample test drives: CodaFiat 500e,  Smart ED to name a few) and discussions over what my next car will be. I was really hoping to love the i3 and my wife was “under protest” if I went with the i3. At the end of the day, we skipped the i3, a decision that I discussed on a previous posting.

To make November 2013 delivery, we figured that we needed to start configuring our Model S on August 2013.  It was at this time that we noticed a bunch of Tesla Roadsters being sold as Certified Pre-Owned (CPO) and my wife fell in love with her Roadster.  So, it was at this point that we decided to pick a Roadster up and the Model S became my car.

Here is the Roadster on our pick-up day:

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And here I am with a rare (driving my wife’s baby) picture:

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Picking up the Roadster was awesome, but not without problems.

And a few months later, we did our first roadtrip with our Model S when we picked it up at the factory. And live-blogged the weekend a few hours before and a few days after. I summarized the whole weekend.

Here is our Model S on pickup day:

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After the early start, factory tour and pickup of the Model S, our first recharge for the car…

The driver and passenger needs to refuel.

…was for the driver. Needed Starbucks.

Though we started the year thinking that we wouldn’t need to drive 2 EVs, we ended up with 3 EVs from November 2013 until the return of the Active E to BMW on February 2014. The second year anniversary was a bittersweet one.

The following year of EV ownership strengthened our positive impression of Tesla Motors. The BMWi debacle in the launch of the i3 in the United States made us adjust back to the original plan of 2 EVs for daily use. Originally we wanted to get a third EV so that we can minimize the miles in the Roadster, but my better half was having too much fun driving her Roadster and didn’t feel like swapping it out on daily drives. So, we saved some money and skipped the third EV.

I didn’t even write a 3rd EV Anniversary post.

So, from February of last year to now, we’ve settled into a life with our two EV, one ICE hybrid garage.

This past year, we’re really just living the rEVolution on a day to day basis. We took our Model S on a Roadtrip Coast-to-Coast and back, and it was a blast. With over three years of EV driving, we don’t suffer from range anxiety, however the trip solidified our “can do” attitude as far as driving our EV for distances and this past year we took more roadtrips than we’ve done the previous years.

I would have loved to say that we hit 150,000 miles of all electric driving, but I will just have to settle on 148,404 electric miles vs 14,194 ICE with a little under 3 hours from the time we brought our Active E home 4 years ago (9pm Pacific vs. 9pm Eastern (6pm Pacific right now)). [EDITED 2016-March-5, Looks like I had an error in my tracking spreadsheet…  We’re closer to 125,000 EV miles…  I had transposed numbers in Month 16 of our tracking spreadsheet that overstated total miles by around 20,000 miles for totals.  I was preparing for the Year 3 of our EV vs. ICE posting, and found the error…]

So, what’s in store for our EV future?

To begin with, we’re about 2 weeks from the third anniversary of my ICE vs EV statistics that I’ve been tracking and we broke 90% EV vs 10% ICE use after almost three years. But that’s another post.

My Thanksgiving 2015 post gives a good hint of what I’ve been up to. Additionally, I am happy to report that my client, EV Connect, Inc., was selected for three of the nine Electric Charging Highway Corridors for the California program. This project, when completed will allow all EVs equipped with CHAdeMO and/or CCS DC Fast chargers to complete the travel from the Mexican border to the Oregon border with Level 3 charging stations.

Additionally, the Model 3 reservation process will be open on March 31st for a $1,000 deposit. We’re trying to see if we’ll take advantage of this or not.

Lastly, we’re thinking of expanding our long EV roadtrip plans. We are tempted to do another coast-to-coast trip using one of the newer routes. Perhaps we’ll finally join the Teslaroadtrip folks on one of their cool get togethers. This year, they’re planning on something at Colonial Williamsburg, and we’ve never been. We’ll have to see if things work out for this trip.

Here’s to hoping that the Model 3 and its competing EVs become massive successes and we transition from ICE to EV at a faster rate.

In the meantime, time flies when you’re having fun.

MyEV post-mortem review…

A few months ago I published a guide to install the MyEV on our Tesla Model S. What I didn’t share in the original post, but did on subsequent comments is the purpose of the support of the Indiegogo project – MyEV Electric Vehicle Logger and App.

Since we’re a two electric vehicle family, there is some healthy competition between my wife and I on who is the “more efficient” EV driver. The marketing for the MyEV project introduced the fun, social gaming concept using the loggers that MyCarma built for the MyEV product. Since my wife drives a 1.5 Tesla Roadster, I made sure that the folks at MyCarma are able to support her car for the purchase of the two units. I was pleasantly surprised by their positive answer.

The original version of this post was to be along the same lines of the installation guide for the Model S, but we ran into some snags with the way that the Roadster reports itself. Furthermore, it appears that we were the only Roadster owner to support the project for the Roadster. In the end of the day, the Roadster reported data at a rate that was too much for the logger. I appreciate the effort from MyCarma to try to resolve this challenge. Especially since I needed them to make the product work in conjunction with OpenVehicles.com OVMS.

Here is the Custom Roadster cable to the MyEV unit.

IMG_20150429_162640The folks at MyCarma were aware of my requirements to have the unit work with OVMS, so they sent me a Y-cable for the Tesla Proprietary diag port with custom OBD adaptor. IMG_20150429_162701

Like I said, this one is built for the Roadster

IMG_20150429_162728Here is the cable chained up. IMG_20150429_162807

And connected

IMG_20150429_162838Here is the footwell with the OVMS installed in the Roadster. IMG_20150429_171344

Pulled the cable and OVMS off…

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When connected, the Bluetooth connection should work.

IMG_20150429_171029And start transferring the log files. IMG_20150429_170949

Here’s what the setup looks like, before it is tidily installed.

IMG_20150429_170848Then put it back in place. IMG_20150430_135749

So. It all hooked up just fine. The problem lay with the fact that though it looked like the unit was logging and transferring it actually wasn’t. I tried playing around with it and finally asked for help.

Tech Support at MyCarma replaced some cables, did some programming and generally tried to help me for at least a month if not longer. At the end, since we were the only Roadster purchasers of the product, it became cost ineffective for them to figure it out and offered me a refund for the unit. I explained to them the reason why we purchased two units (one for the Model S and the one for the Roadster) and they went ahead and refunded us for both units.

The app looks like a lot of fun, but we really needed it to work for both vehicles and it was quite good customer service of MyCarma to provide us with the resolution. I continue to hope that they fix the Roadster, but lacking any further sales. It’s like Waiting for Godot.

[Added at 10:20 PM 9/27/2015 – I forgot to add pictures of what the software looked like when I was using the product]

All these screens are for the Model S as the Roadster one never really processed the data properly. The roadster processed at a speed that the logger could not figure out.

Here is the summary of the power charged for as long as the unit was plugged into the Model S.

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Here is the charging histogram of when the most amount of power was added to the car. Considering that the unit was installed before the start of our Here, There, and EVerywhere roadtrip in May 2015.

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Several leaderboards, this one is for the Same Model (Model S) in the Same Region (California?)

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The next leaderboard is for All Cars in the Same Region. IMG_1040

The last leaderboard is for all cars in all regions.

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Tesla CPO Program and Driving on SoCal Surface streets – comparing Meerkat and Periscope

Something different on today’s post.

After being in the Model S for 23 days straight on our Roadtrip 2015. I felt like it’s time to “shift gears” and write about the Roadster.

It has been a while since I’ve written (and ridden) the Roadster.

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Soon after our return from our trip, I took the picture below, but I was in my “usual” seat in the Roadster – the passenger seat, or as I call it, Batman’s seat.

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I had an appointment last Wednesday and asked my wife if I can borrow her Signature Green Tesla Roadster. We purchased her car under Tesla Motors’ original Certified Pre-Owned (CPO) program. With all the hoopla over the CPO Model S program it’s important to note that it isn’t their first CPO Rodeo.

As I understand it, the current Model S CPO program adds another 50,000 miles and 4 years to the warranty of the vehicle at delivery. The Roadster CPO program is 37 months and 37,000 miles from the car’s delivery to the CPO owner. They chose the Roadster numbers to be one more month and 1,000 more miles than when the car was sold brand new. The Model S warranty is an improvement over the Roadster’s CPO program In that you get 23 more months and 23,000 more miles, however the CPO Model S warranty is similar to a new Model S warranty in that Tesla warrants it for 50,000 miles and 4 years. The battery warranty on the car is lock-step with the drivetrain warranty of 8 years and infinite miles (for 85 kWh cars, I believe that it was 150,000 miles for 60 kWh versions.) It is important to note that Tesla remains consistent with its own practice of not including any battery degradation in its warranty.

Unlike its competitors at BMW and Nissan, Tesla does not warrant the pack to maintain a certain level of use for a certain amount of time. This issue continues to be one of the things that I find irritating with Tesla. Granted, as others have found, the degradation seems to stabilize after 30,000 miles our max. range on the Model S has stayed firm close to 255 rated range miles (a ten mile loss from factory pickup, the Model S community reports its range loss in rated range miles) and our Roadster now is consistently around 179-180 miles of ideal range (the Roadster community reports its loss on ideal range vs. rated range, go figure.) Our current ideal range numbers is actually an improvement from last July’s Roadster Battery degradation panic (Post 1, Post 2, Post 3) where the car was reporting as low as 172 ideal miles range that improved to 175 after a few weeks of testing.

I wanted to compare and contrast my experience while driving the Roadster and broadcasting the experience on Meerkat and Periscope. Being an active Twitter user, I’ve noticed the competition between the Meerkat App and Periscope. Each product brings live streaming to the masses via app extensions to Twitter. Furthermore, both applications provide realtime engagement between the broadcaster and his or her audience. I figured to experiment with this further and see if the previous test during our Model S Roadtrip 2015 cross country video has improved in a little over a month since I last tried it out.

This time, I wanted to bring viewers with me on a drive around in my wife’s Signature Green Tesla Roadster. So, how did i do it? My initial plan was to take viewers with me around surface streets in the Roadster. There have been more Model S videos out there and thought that folks might be interested in the Roadster.

My first streaming video experiment was on Periscope. Since neither app lets users store the video ad-infinitum, I stored the archives on Youtube.

Drive through Beverly Hills in a Tesla Roadster

We had some active users, and they were fairly engaged. Periscope overlays viewers questions on the video that the broadcaster sees and thus provided the broadcaster with the ability to verbally answer the questions posed.  When I archived the video, the questions and interaction disappears, so I transcribed it below. (no timestamps, you can see the logical flow for the folks that I did get to answer.)

@Baderj57 – hi

@AdamClistWynant – Love the sound of the electric motor

@meier_audrey – People like to hear their sports cars 🙂

@AdamClistWynant – How is your range?

@ILushYouM – you’re in SoCal?

@ILushYouM – Omg 😍

@ILushYouM – I can’t wait to live in LA

@ILushYouM – I’m in Maine

@ILushYouM – 😮 !!

@AdamClistWynant – In SD and LV

@AdamClistWynant – Go to Cafe Gratitude while you’re out there.

@AdamClistWynant – Have a good day. Peace

It was a fun few minutes of driving. However, I had to use Youtube’s tools to fix the “herky-jerky” nature of my hand-held filming of the event. (Not a steadicam operator.)

I did do a good job parking the car on the surface streets.

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The next experiment was later that morning on Meerkat.

Drive through Culver City – Meerkat

It is important to note that on Periscope, I had viewers pop in rather quickly. I gave Meerkat the same amount of time, and no participants joined the stream. So I quickly ended that session.

Drive through Culver City – Roadster

I was having some fun with the live streaming video thing that I decided to do another Periscope session, and again we got a bunch of viewers right away.

And again, I partially transcribed the questions on this short drive below. Now, I took the liberty of editing out the handle of a participant with a handle that others may find offensive.

@Unlock_Success – Hi from the UK

@f[edited]inglawn – Is that a Porsche Panamera

@f[edited]inglawn – I think I’m Behind You

@f[edited]inglawn – Oh Okay I see you

Later on the drive home in the freeway, I was behind a White Model S in the HOV lanes. Not on video, but always a fun sight to have in front of me.

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I wonder whether the driver noticed that another Tesla was behind him or her.

What can I conclude by this quick drive and test? It’s definitely a load of fun to drive the Roadster.

My other takeaway, on the live broadcast of streaming video front, at least for those that follow and find me in public, it seems that Periscope has more participants than Meerkat. I don’t know if Meerkat does enough to promote the broadcaster’s feed more or if there are more subscribers to the app, but it definitely is more fun and engaging to stream in Periscope.

As for the apps themselves, they seem similar from the broadcasting perspective and I would like to have the archive function allow the broadcaster to save the chat overlay with the video. In the meantime, enjoy the ride in the Roadster. I did.

Oh yeah… Thanks for the reminder…

Two Roadster posts in a row… Must be some sort of record…

Well, I got the following in the mail the other day…

Thanks for the oil change reminder, Just Tires...  The @TeslaMotors Roadster doesn't need one #EV #EVBenefits

I guess having work done at non-Tesla locations subject one to some really interesting car offers.

A few months back, we found a nail in the Roadster’s tire. The tread was still good, and the leak was slow, so we had the tire patched at Just Tires.

This was an interesting repair because, the Roadster did not have a standard location to jack the car up to get the tire removed, so Just Tires refused to do the work… Initially.

So, I called the nearest Tesla Service Center (which was less than 2 miles from the Just Tires) and requested them to remove the tire, instead of doing it at their location, Tesla sent a Ranger to the Just Tires parking lot and removed the tire, waited for the repair to be done, and re-mounted the tire back on the Roadster. That’s the sort of service that’s somewhat screwy, but above and beyond. Tesla refuses to patch the tires, but understand that customers may opt to do this anyway (within reason) and the service center staff are reasonable enough to adjust and have workarounds that they help with.

Needless to say, I was happy with the work from Tesla.

Just Tires did a great job with the patch. They also patched the Model S a few months ago when I got a similar road debris issue with the Model S.

I think that Just Tires does have to figure out how to make their CRM system understand the needs of electric vehicle drivers may not be the same as internal combustion engine drivers.

A day with the Tesla Roadster… 16,061 Miles

Got to take the Roadster out for a “spin” this past week and it hit 16,000 miles in the process…

Unfortunately, I didn’t catch it at 16,000, so I remembered at 16,009 miles… But that’s kinda boring.

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So, I thought, 16,016 miles would be a good shot…

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Well… That’s nice, but not quite “memorable” enough for me. I figure a palindrome would be better…

So, let me present… 16,061 miles…

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Now… What have we learned in the nearly 14,000 miles that we’ve owned the Roadster. Well. It’s squeeky. Especially with the hardtop on.

I spent part of my day stopping by the Tesla Motors Hawthorne Design Center (also known as the site of the original Tesla Los Angeles Supercharger.) It’s now pretty empty, looks like more people stop off at Culver City or Redondo Beach now that those two are open. I stopped off at the Design Center because they have a bank of eight Model S HPWCs for folks that don’t need to supercharge.

I thought the start of charge looked promising (started around 205V and 61A) the rate with which the Roadster with the CAN SR charged fluctuated between 205-208V and 44A. That’s not much faster than using a 40A UMC at 240V at home. Still, I wanted to see the behavior, so I stuck around for a little while to recover some miles and hung out with a few Model S at the center.

Hanging with some Model S at @TeslaMotors Hawthorne Design Center using CAN S-R to charge our Roadster!

Here’s a Panoramic of the eight HPWCs with Model S charging at the occupied ones, with the exception of HPWC 6 which I was charging at:

Panoramic of using the CAN SR at @TeslaMotors Hawthorne Design Center. Charging a Roadster off Model S HPWC

The HPWCs were all well labeled, and I only tested one of them, so, I don’t know whether the others will provide the full 80A to a Model S or 70A to a Roadster with the CAN SR. I posted my statistics on teslamotorsclub.com and Henry Sharp (hcsharp) advised that perhaps the PEM was overheating. I was driving for a while before the stop, so that could have affected it. I know that the adapter and car work at 70A because I’ve had it tested at the Service Center on a Model S HPWC and I’ve seen it at that speed on OVMS.  So, I’ll have to try charging it with a cooler PEM in the future.

It would seem that what looks like premature battery degradation on the Roadster can be rehabilitated. Since then, we’ve been closer to a CAC closer to 149 and full standard daily ranges closer to 177-179 miles. One of the things that we’ve done since July of last year has been to leave the car unplugged until it really needed to charge. In general, in a protected garage, the vampire losses on the Roadster are minimal, especially compared with the Model S. So, what does this mean? The battery on the Roadster seems to perform better when you let the charge drop low (but not too low.) We’ve been advised to let the car drop to 40 miles or slightly less at least once a week. We do this closer to lower than 60 miles of range rather than 40. It’s just how the math works with the car’s usage patterns. For the record, the Service Center did a range charge the last time I had it in and that looked to reach 226 miles in Range Mode. So, that’s increased as well.

Another thing that we learned in the approximately 14,000 miles that we’ve owned the Roadster, is that the squeaks can be taken care of, at least for a while. There is some sort of lubricant that the center applies to the hardtop to take care of these squeaks.

The car’s not so squeaky with the soft-top, but we like to use the hardtop, so squeaks it is.

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Apparently, before installing the hardtop, apply some of the substance above to the parts of the roof and car that touch each other and it lessens the squeaks. And it works great. For a while. However, a Roadster is not the comfortable car that the Model S is. It’s a driver’s car, and the adrenaline that comes with driving it is really part of the “fun.”

Appreciating the past and hopeful for the future of EVs.

This past weekend, my wife and I joined our fellow members of the Orange County Tesla Club on a visit to the Nethercutt Museum and Collection in Sylmar (Los Angeles), CA. [SIDE NOTE: For those not from Southern California, the city of Los Angeles is the largest city in Los Angeles County and within the city there are distinct neighborhoods that have their own identities, but are part of the city of Los Angeles. Hollywood is an example of such a neighborhood, as is Sylmar. West Hollywood, on the other hand, is its own city. As is Long Beach, where the Formula E race will be held on Saturday, April 4, 2015. (which is why I wrote Sylmar with (Los Angeles) in parentheses, that’s my own editorial on it, and not convention.) Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.]

The Nethercutt family are the founders and heirs to the Merle Norman cosmetic company and have built an impressive collection of automobiles and other “mechanical art”. The OC Tesla Club has been itching to have longer drives for our group outings and this venture into Los Angeles (City and County) was just one such drive.

So, the day was meant to appreciate the company of fellow Tesla enthusiasts and appreciate the Nethercutt Museum and Collection. As with most automobile museums, I was prepared to view beautiful and restored relics of the past… ICE cars.

Well, I was in for a surprise and a treat. (The benefits of not really paying attention to the marketing brochures and online information about what was in store for me at the Museum and Collection. The only thing that stuck to my head from the materials was the restored locomotive and Private Train Car in the back, and that was pretty much it.)

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As was pointed out by some of my fellow OC Tesla Club members, as impressive as the car collection is, the automated music collection was even more impressive. Unfortunately they didn’t allow us to record the audio or video of the event, but here are a few photos from that

This piano entertained us while we strolled the car collection:

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and the piece de resistance was this automated/programmable pipe organ that came from a movie theater (for silent films) from Denver

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You can see the rest of the visit in my flickr album.

But what does the Nethercutt have to do with EVs? Well…

I love to play “EV Spotting” and in the guided tour portion of our visit (at the Collection this time, and not at the self-guided museum section) in the ground level of the visit were TWO EVs!

Front view

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Back view

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Most EV junkies would recognize the more modern EV as the pre-cursor to this generation of EVs and focus of the documentary, “Who Killed the Electric Car?” (and the movement which spawned Plug in America, the 1997 GM EV1. The other one is older and not as well known. The 1914 Rauch & Lang Model B4 Electric Brougham.

Both vehicles were shown with their respective chargers connected to the vehicle in the Collection.

Rauch & Lang

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Charger information

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Interior

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1997 GM EV1

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Interior

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One of the things that I noticed and would like to draw our attention to is the price of the GM EV1 at the time it was being leased out. Interesting that the price of the GM EV1 was $43,995 and the average car price in the US at the time was $14,000. That means that the EV1 is about 3.14 times the price of the average car.

So, the average car price in 2012 is around $31,000 and the Model S average is around $100,000, that means that the Model S is about 3.22 times the price of the average car. However, considering what you get in a Model S vs. an EV1. However, as was pointed out to me by David Peilow in my post at Speakev.com, “Just shows the jump with the Leaf or Volt in terms of value for money. I wonder how much of that is a reduction in the design price vs benefits of economies of scale, though.”

David’s point is made even clearer when one looks to see what the 2012 Nissan Leaf sold for in 2012. It started at $35,200 before the Federal Tax Credit of $7,500 for the purchase of a battery electric vehicle. So, that’s 1.13 times the amount of the average car without the application of the Federal Tax Credit. If the purchaser in 2012 was eligible for the whole credit, it also means that the Nissan Leaf at that point is 0.89 of the average car price. Food for thought.

The 2012 Chevrolet Volt had a MSRP starting at $39,145 when purchased new. I don’t remember whether it was eligible for the whole $7,500 Federal Credit, but let’s assume that it was. So, looking at the same ratios again. The Volt was 1.26 times the average car before the credit and 1.02 times the average car after the tax credit.

I used 2012 as my figure to compare as it was the easiest recent year for me to find the average car price for. Assuming mild inflation in the averages, it’s even more dramatic to see the drop in MSRP for the 2015 model years of the same two cars that I used for my example. The 2015 Nissan Leaf can now be purchased around $29,010 and the 2015 Chevrolet Volt starts at $34,185 before the tax credit.

It’s interesting that when one looks to the past, it really makes one appreciate what the future holds for us.

Range Anxiety? Not really…

Elon Musk’s tweet (“@elonmuskTesla press conf at 9am on Thurs. About to end range anxiety … via OTA software update. Affects entire Model S fleet. March 15, 2015“) to end “range anxiety” which has since been deleted, had me thinking not about the disappointing announcements regarding the 6.2 software patches, but about when the last time was that I’ve actually experienced range anxiety.

I must admit that it’s been a while for me. We decided to move to Tesla Motors electric vehicles because we didn’t want to have to worry about range. Both the Model S and Roadster have a range of at least 170 miles. As for recharging, using DC Charging, the Model S can Supercharge at over 300 miles per hour or quick charge using CHAdeMO over 130 miles per hour. Over AC charging, our Model S can go up to 80A (or approximately 58-62 miles per hour) and the Roadster can go up to 70A (or approximately 56 miles per hour). That’s plenty fast recharging. Besides, if you charge overnight, it’s time you’re spending sleeping anyway.

When we first started our adventure with electric vehicles with the Active E, range anxiety was a byproduct of moving from a nearly limitless range to one where each full charge lasted 80-100 miles. However, it wasn’t long that I was making the statement that the range of the Active E was limitless, as long as you can get charge and have the time to wait for a charge.  If a charger was available, I plugged in, even at 110V when no L2 was available.

It was not uncommon for me to do 140 mile days in the Active E. It required charging at multiple places, but L2 at 6.6 kW and later at 5.2 kW is not exactly speedy, but it isn’t slow either, at least at the time. Now that I’m used to Supercharging, quick charging, 40 Amp/10kW charging over a NEMA 14-50 or 6-50 connector, it seems that approximately 20 miles per hour seems so slow. Public charging in 2012 was fairly plentiful and easy to use in Southern California. Rarely did I have to wait, and most of the places that I found to charge at Level 2 were relatively free. Things became relatively harder at 2013. One could say that projecting the pending difficulty in obtaining public charging with shorter range electric vehicles definitely helped contribute to the decision to get Tesla Motors vehicles.

So, Range Anxiety with the Model S? Not really. One of the first things that I did when we first got our Model S and Roadster were to get some of the available charging adapters. Aside from J1772, we got adapters for NEMA 6-50 as well as NEMA 14-50. so that we could charge the car at up to 40A. Though the Model S (with dual chargers) and Roadster can go to 80A and 70A J1772 if presented with that speed. Plus, as I recently wrote, I just got CHAdeMO for our Model S, that’s a really respectable 130 miles per hour.

Which brings me to hyper-miling and Elon’s announcement.

Hyper-miling is a skill that I learned about and learned to do when I first got the Active E. Getting the most miles per kWh was the goal (or consuming the least wH per mile as is the measure on the Model S, which I’ve measured at 307 wH per mile recently). In a nutshell, hyper-miling involves driving at a constant speed, or motor use and using larger vehicles, trucks, etc. ahead of you to lower the wind resistance that impacts your vehicle.  With the Active E and the size of the 1-series that it was adapted from, it was relatively easy to find vehicles that are “larger” than it to “drift” behind and it was noticeable to see the miles per kWh climb.  I’ve even hit a respectable 5.0 kWh (200 Wh per mile) on the Active E, as heavy as it is.

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My most recent trip to San Diego from Los Angeles County gave me a long time to ponder this thought and put a few things to test with the Model S. Since moving to the Model S, I really haven’t given hyper-miling any further thought. Until now.

As more Model S roll off the factory floor in 2015 with Adaptive Cruise Control or Autopilot, I’ve been intrigued with the ability to set the number of car-lengths to the vehicle ahead of you (pictured below from a loaner I had driven a few weeks ago.) Figuring that such a feature really lends itself to hyper-miling.

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However, a more fundamental question presented itself to me. Can I even hyper-mile a Model S? So, during this same trip to San Diego, I followed a smaller delivery truck that was the ideal candidate for my test.

I started the drive making note of my average 30 mile consumption that is constantly graphed on my dash (as a preference that I’ve set.) See the example below.

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After getting my base (which, I did not record on photographs) I was in flowing traffic of around 75 mph at this point.

I decided to see what the effect was if I implememented hyper-miling techniques behind smaller vehicles. As predicted, it didn’t really help much. Too much of the wind resistance was not cut-down by the smaller vehicles.

Which leads me to try the test with the aforementioned small truck. I decided to pace the vehicle for about five miles and my average Wh per mile consumption during that period dropped at least 20 Wh per mile at a driving speed that was constant with the speed I was following smaller vehicles with.  Is that a lot?  Well, every bit counts and this was for five miles.

Physics doesn’t change, it’s just more difficult to find candidate vehicles to drift behind in a Model S. Next time, I’ll see if I can recreate the test using a loaner with Adaptive Cruise Control to see if I’m better than or if the Autopilot is at trying to hyper-mile. Granted, I have yet to set ACC at less than 2 car lengths for any distance, but that’s what I’ll have to do.

Oh and Range Anxiety, not really… I did that San Diego trip and back (220 miles RT) with no anxiety.

100,000 All Electric Miles reached by our household today…

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About 1/3rd of the way home today, we reached 100,000 All Electric miles on all vehicles owned or leased by our family. We reached this landmark mileage figure with the help of our Active E, which we picked up on February 23, 2012 and returned on February 23, 2014, as well as our Roadster and Model S…

One of the side-effects of tracking our hybrid garage (our minimizing gas use post, first year, and recently posted second year) use has been to track the number of all electric miles that we’ve done since we picked up our vehicles. Which means that we deduct the original 2,220 miles on the Roadster when we picked it up CPO, we deduct the 14 miles that we had on the Active E, and the 22 miles that was on our Model S on our acquisition of each vehicle.  That’s how we get to the 100,000 Total EV miles on our family vehicles.

So at 3:29 PM Pacific Time on March 10, 2015, we hit 32,221 miles on the Model S which made our total for the family at 100,000 all electric miles. Additionally, it turned out that we hit that 100,000 EV miles target on day 1,111 of our ownership/lessor of our primary EVs. These totals mean that we averaged about 90 miles of electric driving per day for the past 1,111 days. That’s more than double the US average commute of 40 miles roundtrip. Additionally, 54,321 of those miles are on an EV that averages 80-100 miles of range in the Active E. So to those that say that EVs are for short distances only, need to check on the mileage that we did with our vehicles. Range Anxiety? Not around here.

Ended today at 100,024 total household EV miles. Next target? 10 MWh [corrected from 1 MWh thanks to @grahamparks] of energy consumed on our Tesla Model S. [as was pointed out by @grahamperks on Twitter, I understated myself. 1 MWh=1,000 kWh. So, I’m about to hit 10MWh on the Model S]IMG_20150310_160416

9901.3 kWh consumed for the 32,245 Miles that I ended my commute to home today at a conservative 291 wH per mile for the day (still at 307 wH per mile since we picked up our Model S).

29,000 Miles in the Tesla Model S

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We’re getting to the point where we’re close to “doubling up” on the miles on the Model S than our Roadster. It’s got a lot more to do with the utility of a Model S vs. a Roadster as well as the number of miles that I drive for work.

The Model S is a 2013 that we picked up in November 2013 and the Roadster is a CPO that we picked up in September 2013. The Model S had around 20 miles when we picked it up and the Roadster had around 2200 miles when we picked that up.

They’re both great cars in their own rights and we’ve put in close to 15,000 miles on the Roadster at this point.

Ideal Miles – 291

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Rated Miles – 251

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The battery degradation on the car has shown its effect in the last few hundred miles. My 90% daily charge has gone down to around 226 Rated miles/261 Ideal Miles. Range charges in my most recent charge is 251 Rated miles/291 Ideal Miles. Most parts of the world, winter has a very noticeable effect on range. This is not normally the case in Southern California. With 291 Ideal miles or 9 lost miles. Doesn’t look bad vs 300 miles. But I live in a rated miles world and my 265 is now down to 252, so that sorta hurts, after all 13/265 is almost 5% of usable range gone vs. the Ideal loss around 3% (291/300) though this is also 4.6% (291/306).

I often charge the car to 90% on most days.  The Roadster has a feature called “Top Off” that I mimic on the Model S.  What that means is before I roll off, I extend the charge and run the pre-conditioning to cool the car and battery down.  I wonder if that contributed to the degradation.  Either way, there it is.  Still waiting on Tesla to step it up and provide some sort of warranty and guidelines on what to expect.

If battery loss is linear, then should I expect 20% loss by 116,000 miles?  Or is loss on a curve and 20% is closer to 150,000 or even 200,000 miles?  Or is it accelerated and 5% loss is actually good for 29,000 miles.  Not to mention the fact that I am measuring this based on Rated miles, which is what really works, but should I continue to normalize and look at Ideal miles, which may be ideal, but unrealistic.  Because, as I’ve written, that’s currently closer to a 3-4.5% loss of Ideal miles.

Do I need to change my charging behavior?  Because 9,000 miles ago, I was still range charged to 260 Rated miles.  So, if we plot my two data points.  I lost 5 miles in the first 20,000 miles and 8 more miles in the next 9,000 miles (Rated miles again).  One thing to note is the car has been constantly updating with new firmware.  So, one needs to wonder if these losses were already in the car and that changes in the rated mils is because of firmware changes and “fine-tuning of the algorithm.  If it’s based on our driving, I’ve been rather conservative over the past 29,000 miles.  My average since we picked up the car has been 308 Wh/mile (see the Trip A meter on any of the three pictures.)

Perhaps I should charge the car less and let it dip below 100 miles more often.  Some guidelines from Tesla really would help here.  In the meantime, we’re saving for replacement battery packs for the Roadster and Model S.  Even without some sort of guidelines on what that will cost, the recent 400 mile Roadster upgrade announcement makes me hopeful that the same, or at least a replacement pack price will be announced for the Model S when our pack drops down to a level where either something kicks in to replace it or it gets unbearable and we decide to replace it ourselves.  Tesla Gigafactory anyone?

As I’ve mentioned before, c’mon Tesla be AWESOME again! Publish a Battery Degradation Warranty that we can count on or at least start to provide pricing on replacement Model S packs for folks to start saving up for.

[UPDATE 2015-01-17]
I’ve been asked several times on social media as to the firmware at the time of the publication of this post.

It is V6.0 (1.67.125). The car is actually going in for a patch to fix an unrelated bug with regard to the clock switching from 12h AM/PM to 24h seemingly randombly.)

Now updated to v6.0 (2.0.81) at the Service Center.

The CAN JR and The CAN SR… Must have accessories for the Tesla Roadster

Elon Musk and Tesla Motors tweets regarding the upcoming demonstration of upgrading the Tesla Roadster to a 400 Mile Range has increased the interest in Roadster ownership. To continue further the previous post upon receipt of the CAN SR a few days back. Each version of the CAN is sold for $695 each and is well worth it.

What makes the CAN from Henry Sharp a valuable accesory is that it allows Roadster owners a nicer/smaller adapter to standard J1772. The Tesla produced product is rather bulky and a car like the Roadster space truly is a premium.

Here is a photo from Tesla (from their shop) of the Tesla produced adapter.

Tesla Roadster to J1772 adapter from Tesla

Whereas the CAN from Henry Sharp is rather compact.

This first picture is the J1772 side that the Roadster driver uses to plug the J1772 into.

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This second picture is the Roadster side that the Roadster driver uses to connect to the Car.

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You can see that the CAN is not much larger than a Blackberry Curve Telephone.

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And here is the CAN attached and charging a Roadster. To ensure that the CAN does NOT walk away at public stations, there are slots in place to place a small padlock into it.

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It works great with the JESLA from Tony Williams of QuickChargePower.

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Henry’s been making the CAN JR for a while and have just released the CAN SR. The naming convention of JR and SR means that he’s converting J1772 to Roadster (for the JR) and SR is converting Tesla Model S to Roadster. Henry reluctantly released the SR because the testing showed a 95% success factor for Roadster 2.x and 99% success with Roadster 1.5 between Model S Chargers and Roadsters. (you can read the SR thread on teslamotorsclub.com)

Before purchasing the CAN SR, I would highly recommend that Roadster owners get the latest Firmware upgrade. There is a known bug between unpatched Roadsters and EVSEs that charge greater than 70 Amps. A fully configured Tesla Model S HPC is configured to run at 80 Amps and the Roadster, if unpatched, would be confused by that issue. The patch for this error has the Roadster understand an 80 Amp signal and drop the rate to 70 Amps, which is the maximum speed that a Roadster can handle.

This next picture is the Model S side that the Roadster driver uses to plug the Model S nozzle into.

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This once again is the side that plugs into the Roadster.

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Henry sends each CAN with a neoprene bag to protect and store the adapters into as pictured.

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Here is the CAN SR plugged in and getting ready to charge in our garage.

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Lastly you can see the detail of the construction of the CAN SR. It’s a great accesory.

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So, how do I use these adapters.

For the CAN JR

1) Attach the CAN JR to the Roadster
2) Plug the J1772 into the CAN.

IF in a public charging spot

3) I insert the padlock into the slot for the CAN to lock it in place.

4) If I need to interrupt charging to leave, I press the stop charging button on the VDI of the Roadster OR stop on the charger, otherwise, if it IS stopped, then proceed to the next steps.

IF in a public charging spot

5) I take the padlock off.

6) Unplug the J1772
7) Unplug the CAN, put can in the bag, and put the bag in the Roadster.

For the CAN SR

1) Attach the CAN SR to the Roadster
2) Plug the Model S nozzle into the CAN.

IF in a public charging spot

3) I insert the padlock into the slot for the CAN to lock it in place.

4) If I need to interrupt charging to leave, I press the stop charging button on the VDI of the Roadster OR stop on the charger, otherwise, if it IS stopped, then proceed to the next steps. I have not yet tried this, but according to Henry, I can pull the ring around the Model S nozzle to stop charging as well.

IF in a public charging spot

5) I take the padlock off.

6) Unplug the Model S adapter.
7) Unplug the CAN, put can in the bag, and put the bag in the Roadster.

There are very few “must haves” for the Roadster, and the CAN JR and SR are two of the things Roadster owners should consider owning.