Roadtripping The $15K Tesla, Pt.1: To Rt66

Getting to and beginning the Route 66 EV journey.   Done on the cheap of course...  ;-)     Duh.
In case you missed it: The Car's Gestation

Roadtripping The $15K Tesla -or- Eh, winging it works fine now.

Those poor hearty souls who have been wading through the mire of dense prose on this blog for years may recall the intense (at least occasionally) planning required to get anywhere with earlier, shorter range EVs. Having been at this for awhile, the Tesla being #8, we well recall the planning required to make sure you could return home if you thought to deviate from your normal path, like forgetting to pick up a child (not that such a thing would ever happen) and having to track back into town, and then crawl home, attempting to get 32 miles of range out of a 30 mile (optimistically) vehicle. Working with 30, 35, 40, 70, 109, 156 and 226 mile nominal range vehicles, you do get used to how they operate in the real world, and as long as you use experience rather than fantasy to guide you, you'll mostly be all right. In point of fact we never got stranded.

So when the 200+mi. range Leaf showed up, the options for extended travel opened up, but even then, over twenty years after starting out on this electric journey, some serious planning was required to make it to the Canadian border or the Mexican border or the other trips it could take, carefully. The earlier shorter range EVs could, with some planning, make it to the Coast or 70 miles to PDX, but it was rarely something you did on the spur of the moment.

Enter the Tesla. Basically there's so much charging infrastructure and you're so well connected to it that planning and worrying become mostly a thing of the past. The big screen in the car will tell you what chargers you might need to stop at along the way and even how long it will take to get charged up there.

Day 1

Just like the last electric roadtrip, we were late outta the gate, leaving closer to noon than one might like. Unable to decide on taking 101-S from Crescent City CA or doing the usual boring I5 all the way, we stopped at the Tesla SuperCharger (referred to hereafter as 'SC') in Grants Pass OR and took on $15 worth of electrons while figuring out where to go.

The lateness decided for us, as any reasonable destination over the hump to the coast (2 hrs.) would leave us in darkness. Hard to see the sights that way. So, I-5 rulez dude.

Not that there aren't a few sights along... Shasta for example. Pretty nice day too.

A bit south of Shasta was also our second charging stop. Took on $20 worth of electrons while we investigated a late afternoon snack and bathroom break. 25 min. is just about right for that. While snacking we investigated places to stay for the night. Expedia had recently messaged about a $20 credit. Their listing for a newly refurbished Motel6 just south of Sacramento on old 99, right behind an also refurbished Dennys. We took the chance and it turned out really nice. Owned by a family, they were pleasant, and the room was clean, quiet and better than expected. The bed was kind of firm, but some like that. For $63/night including all taxes and fees, we haven't had a Motel6 experience this nice in over 20 years. 

Day one totals 498 miles,  228wh/mi, 115Kwh over roughly 9 hours. 

If you don't care about FSD then skip down to 'Day 2' below.

This is our first real day with FSD, Tesla's mostly automatic driving software/hardware.  And it is by turns (so to speak) brilliant and quirky-bordering-on-dumb. We'll deal here with a couple of the bad and/or annoying things first:

It keeps popping up warnings or notifications, mostly in small-ish text sometimes toward the bottom of the screen. It's also quick to dismiss them, with no way we've found to bring them back. The really important stuff is bigger and toward the top driver's side of the screen and accompanied by three urgent beeps. Which is fine and appropriate but by the time you get through with whatever you're doing and focus there the urgent message has disappeared.

There's also the problem of it yelling at you like that in the middle of something you need to concentrate on, like it dropping out of FSD on the freeway because it's confused by leftover construction paintlines, as far as we could tell. You're supposed to be watching out all the time anyway, (and boy will it remind you) and so it's not really difficult to recover, but just as you need to be doing that it's beeping and flashing and distracting you to tell you that "You need to start driving now" which if you hadn't already, you'd probably be in trouble. We don't see a better way to do this and it does need to be done. As stated, maybe have the notices stay up longer, especially for newbies.
It also doesn't do well with really tight narrow curvy mountain pass kinds of roads, especially if there's eroded lines. It will do it, just rather slowly. Your grandma is quicker.

The rest of it, absent minor quibbles about when to change lanes is almost unremittingly positive. It has quickly jolted aside to prevent potentially hitting a pedestrian that stepped sideways off a curb, slowed markedly for children playing near the edge of the street, made it through complex off angle six input intersections without unnecessary pause, and paused intelligently to let other traffic by, or have more time to figure things out. It is able to thread through six lane freeway traffic, finding a 'relatively fast' lane and then working it's way back to the right as the next exit gets near. Pretty darn impressive.
We were expecting a dancing bear. It isn't usually about how well the bear dances, but rather that it can dance at all. That's not what we got though. The autopilot/FSD software has been through three fairly serious revisions in the three weeks we've had the car. One we didn't use much, one that worked well on the highway but not so well in town, and this third one 12.3.5 that does much better job in city's and will take a pretty good stab at parking. We've tried it on parallel parking and back-in parking and that was about 90% successful, but head-in parking doesn't seem to work, possibly because they want the main front cameras available when it comes time to leave the parking spot.

Day 2.

Not used to getting up early, so we didn't. Dennys isn't the world's best but they're the rare national chain that mostly does Gluten Free well. About ~96% of the time. Which doesn't sound so good, except that everyone else is worse. The 55&Over menu is reasonably priced as well which doesn't hurt any.
Looking at state of charge, we lost 4% overnight (25 down to 21%) running Sentry Mode (the video security system) -and- running the little fridge (from the Camping Tesla post)
A quick search for a Supercharger turned up one right on our route and one about a mile diagonally off route. Sounds like a no brainier until you find that the off route one has off peak rates (before 11:AM in this case) of $0.25/Kwh and the other, on I-5 is $0.49. So that nearly full charge cost $10.51 instead of $21. In this case it's worth the detour, but not always.

This brings up the art of SC (supercharger) arbitrage.

When you hit the lightning bolt symbol on the right side of the screen in the car it shows all the SCs in the area you're looking at. Hitting each one will bring up details like paid/free parking, times of operation and the number of cents/Kwh, either as a single quote, or with a time-of-day graph if peak billing is in effect. Mostly due to different electric rates from the provider. Sometimes to encourage people to make the SCs less crowded during peak travel hours. So in about 30 sec. you can not only look for charging, you can see if one has any advantages over another. Since the same screen will also show you local restaurants and/or bathrooms, the information for informed decision making is readily available.

Frankly the run down I5 through the middle of California is best done at night. In the day it's a long lotta brown nothing. The SC at Santa Nella was interesting because there's over 48(?) stalls, they have giant solar panel roof/sun-shades and MegaPack (giant storage batteries) to even out the power availability. Partially as a result the rates/Kwh are reasonable (40 cents) in the middle of nowhere where power can't be all that cheap. 

Then another long slog to Bakersfield. Not such an impressive SC, but it works, and it's a short jaunt to JackInTheBox, who also tends to do Gluten Free well.

Here, since the night's stop was planned for Ventura CA (as much as there's any planning) we happened to notice something on the fancy automatic map, 

LOTS of oil pumps. Some even work

which mentioned the existence of an alternate route through Taft and Mariposa (important oil fields back in the day)

Like all photos, click for a larger version.

and over the ridges directly to the coast on a tiny two lane, and sometimes one lane, road. This avoids the whole Grapevine/Tejon Pass mess in favor of roads built for the semi-sports car that is the Model 3. Certain passengers may not have appreciated the curvy diving up and down narrow road, but the driver had a blast. Almost no traffic, which was a good thing given the five single lane sections due to half the road being missing due to rock-falls or winter washouts.

Looking back on whence we came

We were going to get a nice shot of the sunset as the road headed into Ventura, but food was calling and we found no viable vantage points. The motel was a nice little reworked '50's two-row single story 'motor lodge' that has been redone with very modern interior and fixtures. It seems to have been bought by a nice family from India. We got to meet three of them and the daughter is off at UC Davis. They made the rooms slightly smaller due to much needed soundproofing and now the spiffy interior doesn't match the exterior, but in a good way. They were running a special through Hotels.com. $80,
 ...and certainly nicer than the $20 difference compared with last night.

Day2 stats. 458 miles at 232wh/mi. 106 Kwh over roughly 10 hours.

Day 3.

Up at the crack of ... well hey, we made it out the door by 8:30. Foggy and 55 deg. Went up the coast a bit to breakfast in Santa Barbara. Never been there before, so why not?
Morning rush seemed to be headed mostly the opposite way.  Glad FSD is comfortable with the high speed four lanes of rather competitive feeling 80 MPH traffic, because that's certainly not our comfort zone. Cooler temps and 80+ MPH eats batteries for breakfast. That short leg was nearly 280wh/mi. worst on the trip so far. We made sure to make it over to the SC before 11:AM so as to catch the non-peak rate: 37 cents vs. 52 cents. ($15 vs, $22). Only point of interest was that the charging stall next to us had been vandalized by having something sticky (gum?) stuck in the connector. You have to watch for that kind of thing. Probably people protesting Musk by inconveniencing everyone who is not him.

The day's plan was to hit the Venice beach pier in Santa Monica,  the nominal western terminus of route 66 and see how far we got following the route back east. Turns out: Not Very Far.

Nobody we know.  Looking East, beginning Rt66 at last.

Having forgotten just how bad LA traffic frequently is, any plan that might have been made was overwhelmingly optimistic. The thirty or so miles from Santa Barbara to Santa Monica took about three hours. Going from the pier to the old section of 66 near Glendale took over four hours. With some stops along the way (Venice Beach Boardwalk?) it was a full day, and we only actually made it around 100 miles. Once that became obvious we found a deal from the Wyndam hotels site that gave another big discount if you sign up for their rewards program. A nice room at a remodeled HoJo's turned up in Pasadena for $80. Not actually as nice as the previous night, if somewhat bigger.

The odd quirk was that when the navigation system in the car was asked to find it's way there, it, to avoid traffic, routed us up through old West Hollywood and curved around the hill with the Griffith Park Observatory on it and dropped us down via Mullholland Drive past the Griffith Park Zoo and Train exhibit. Alas, we were too tired to partake. Still quite the tour, bet there were star's homes on that route. 

Day 3 totals: 122 miles, 209wh/mi, 28Kwh (a lot of it AC) over 8+ hours.

Day 4:  Getting out of LA. Yay!

Basically Pasadena through Fontana (SC) and out to Barstow following the old Rt66 roads. Some labeled as such, some not. A clever book has turn by turn instructions going both ways.

Atlantic Richfield station, built 1915 before Rt66 even existed. Cool little Museum.

Rt66 is known as 'National Trails Highway" for about 200 miles in California from Barstow to Needles. Most of this is just flatlands with mostly straight somewhat bumpy two-lane running through it. On one pass the old road doesn't exist any more and you detour onto I-15 for 15 miles.
The only bit of excitement was a section 50 miles or so from Needles where the road is washed out and they haven't gotten around to repairing it. The higher rate of power usage due to having to use the freeway for that section, plus having to drive back aways resulted in the lowest state of charge on the car recorded this trip so far. 6%. It did get us into Needles no problem by driving 70 MPH instead of 75. 

Needles isn't much and the Museum was closed. Got a pretty good deal on a Day's Inn. $69 and to top it off the Superchargers here have the lowest cost we've seen ever. 20 cents per KWh. That's basically 220-230 miles of travel for $10. Not bad, that's like 4.5 cents/mile.

Day 4 totals 292 miles, 198 wh/mi, 59Kwh (again a lot of it AC, 98 deg.F) over 8+ hours.

The saga continues with Part II