We recently drove from San Francisco to Springdale Utah, and again from San Francisco to San Diego in our 2014 Model S. The automobile is fantastic. We have a 60 KWH battery which is the low end of Tesla’s offering. We get around 196 miles on a full charge now. That’s down from 208. Some of that is battery wear and some could be changes in the projected distance algorithm. The car is so comfortable that long distance driving is a breeze. We hope from supercharger to supercharger on our trips. Charging at a supercharger is free for life for any Model S owner who takes delivery before January 1, 2017. After that date Tesla will provide 1000 miles of free charging and charge a fee for supercharger use thereafter.
It had been over a year since we last drove our “S” long distance and there have been some welcome changes. First the navigation application can handle a long distance destination. The application selects optimal superchargers to stop at along your route and even includes an estimated time to charge. In the past I had done this calculation by hand. It seems that the nav. app calculates range and charge consumption based on some “standard” speed. I tend to drive faster than whatever magic speed the app uses which results in less charge when I stop at a supercharger and therefore more charge time. I would love, love, love having an adaptive app that takes my average speed on the last leg to project time/distance/charge for the next leg. That would be great.
More startling than the new navigation application is Tesla’s supercharger network build-out. Where there were five or six superchargers on our route to San Diego, there are now fourteen of them. There was a dead zone on highway 15 going to Las Vegas. That is gone now with the addition of a supercharger at Barstow, one at Primm, and one in Las Vegas. There’s even a supercharger in St. George, Utah making a trip to Zion from SF easily doable. There was a dead zone going to Eureka from San Francisco and that too is gone with superchargers installed at Ukiah and Eureka!
Thinking about it, this is necessary if the Model 3 is to succeed. Still there are not sufficient superchargers to service a massive fleet of them. Tesla has between 373,000 and 400,000 pre-orders for the Model 3. If 250,000 of them are delivered in the US, Tesla will have to increase their supercharger build-out to avoid long waits at the chargers.
It is fascinating to wake up one morning and have your car’s features enhanced or changed significantly. In addition to the navigation function, the map was expanded make use of the icons atop the display and the music application was completely redesigned. I am still learning how that works.
I only wish that Tesla could retrofit the self driving hardware into the older Model S’s. That would be cool, but not cool enough to have me trade up or give up life long free supercharging.
Ron