Monster video. You all made the cross continent trek seem smooth. Sweet ride, the Air is. You had my heart stopped at the FreeWire 😮. Loved the vid. Thx for the effort and expertise in production🎉🎉🎉. RedBall😊😊😊🎉🎉🎉❤
Final thoughts after finishing the video. First, thank you for focusing on so many different CPOs along this route. Right now, a lot of folk in America still focus almost exclusively on Electrify America and Tesla Superchargers, so it's nice to see other charging providers featured. Second, just some food for thought: On the Southern route (I-10 mostly), Out of Spec's team drove a Chevrolet Silverado EV 3WT (a 180 kWh pack, so not the biggest battery) across the country with only 9 or 10 charging stops. Driving a fullsize truck kind of defeats the focus on efficiency, but I still think it's impressive.
ya'll cut it close on your waypoints, surprised to see how far you pushed the battery 😅 cool seeing your stats and analysis across country. this experiment answers the question a lot of potential EV buyers have - what is the road trip capability/experience of owning an EV? thanks for your insight on charger density and trip tips!!!
@@watsyournamedelicate yeah, it was quite a gamble arriving with low SoC at a single charger. It made us quite nervous. 😅 We hope it encourages more people to switch to EVs because long distance trips shouldn’t be an issue anymore.
Guys, what an amazing trip! Back in the day, it took me 16 charging stops with an old Tesla Model S, which had over 30% battery degradation, to travel from Stuttgart, Germany, to Burgas, Bulgaria, for half of the distance! I wonder how many charging stops I would need for the same route with the Lucid Air instead?!
Love it. Efficiency focus for the win! Fewest stops and lowest energy consumption should be the focus. Speed will increase over time as the battery tech continues to improve. Lucid rightly should already hold these records. I know it helps in the Tesla to use the shades with the glass roof. It does help. Nice job on the 7 stops run. Congrats! I would like to see the EV Canonball with a focus on an energy efficiency and time taken run. Everyone is focused on just the time, but let's see who can do it using the least energy combined with the time taken. That is a delicate dance between driving for efficiency and keeping the charge curve where the car charges quickly so that you could still make decent time. The Lucid should excel at this because the charging stops would still be short and the miles between stops would be quite long. Of course the long pole in that tent is the charging infrastructure. Charging infrastructure is the crippling factor in so many areas. The very fact that we are anxious about being able to get a charge or that the density of chargers is too spread out needs to be a thing of the past. Unreliable chargers make it far worse. In the summer heat the chargers are unreliable so someone needs to stay with the car and be prepared to restart the charging session, or move the car to a different charger when it derates. The infrastructure must be significantly improved. CPO's need to start updating Plugshare and other sites that keep people aware of what is going on with the chargers. Getting live data that is accurate from the chargers is a big problem. This appears to be a common issue with ABRP. If it doesn't have live data it is pretty wildly off on it's estimates. The reference consumption rates used are not accurate so the cost, energy, and time figures are off. Good for initial route planning, but after that it is better to just be flexible and replan the route with each stop. Tesla is still way ahead at this point. This is why it is one of the key selling points for Tesla is the integration of the nav and charging networks.
@@Longsnowsm Yes there would definitely be room for a “most balanced drive” challenge. Maybe the KPI could be kWh used per hour of trip time? Lowest number wins.
Thanks for sharing your run. I like the concept of the fewest charging stops, and you certainly shattered some local myths about not being able to drive slower than 85 mph on the interstates. Also, being able to skip Green River when leaving from Washington, UT was quite impressive. 22:58 A cool feature with the CPE 250s is that their cable support arms swing out, so you might not have needed to move the car. It's not always apparent, but you get a decent amount of extra reach with the cable.
We did check Plugshare and we knew the risks haha. But just a day before a Rivian had checked in successfully and reportedly got 134kW, so we had hope.
But the score is only 5.9, which is bad for PlugShare. Since you were targeting a record if it were me I would have looked to hit a higher score site. Options are very few in that area. Basically Sterling CO or Ogallala NE are the only good options. Anyway, a remarkable achievement none the less. Congratulations!
We needed to make every stop count and charging from 0-99% would have taken 10+ hours on a Level 2 charger. We usually only spent 5-6 hours per day at a hotel so there just wasn’t enough time for a full Level 2 AC charge.
Hey i love this video keep it up. But i think you guys should try to do this with the new long range model 3 rwd that car is so efficient that you can get 400 real miles of one charge and since you will be using the Tesla charging network you should be able to get it done faster.
If all you have to do is drive, every EV seems perfect, and no distance feels too long. But the moment you have a packed schedule and appointments to keep, the magic vanishes. So, this whole exercise feels like Lucid's car marketing. Seriously though, who footed the bill for that trip?
This isn't representative of a typical EV trip when planning for the best travel speeds. They were limiting the number of stops, but doubling the number of stops would likely cut the amount of time spent charging by 70-80%. Also, while it's true that EVs are unlikely to ever match ICE cars in average travel speeds and total travel time, there are reasons that laws have been passed to limit people from overextending themselves while driving (i.e., the car can exceed the safe capabilities of the typical human driver). The harsh reality that some Americans don't like to face is that, if you're actually on a tight schedule to cross the country, you should be flying (sadly, we still don't have sufficient highspeed rail).
If I have a packed schedule why am I driving? I have been in four cites, gone to 3 meetings and traveled 1200 mile in day, I don't care what car you have it is not going to happen. Normally I just plug into a lvl 2 charger while I'm at an appointment and have plenty of range to get back even when the drive is 2 hours each way.
