RocketGhost
Well-known member
- First Name
- Spencer
- Joined
- May 22, 2024
- Threads
- 3
- Messages
- 180
- Reaction score
- 197
- Location
- Memphis TN
- Vehicles
- 2022 Lariat ER
I rented a Tesla for a road trip once. Plug in your destination, it routes you to Superchargers as necessary and tell you how long to charge at each one. Effortless and you don't have to think.
I took my Lightning on a road trip. I manually researched and chose charging stations beforehand, even using a spreadsheet to calculate how much I needed to charge at each one. I picked an alternate station in case one was unavailable and made sure I'd have enough charge to get there.
Electrify America was garbage. Got lucky a couple times. One station was completely out of order. Another only had one stall working. Also used a Chargepoint, only two stalls but they were open, however charge rate was slow. Francis Energy station was great, no one there and fast. And I stopped at two Superchargers with Magic Docks. Only problem was one adapter wouldn't release, so I moved to the next one. With 16 stalls and few in use, it was no problem.
Moral of this story is that you cannot rely on the nav to pick charging stations for you, unless it's Tesla Superchargers. For the Ford nav to be useful, I want to tell it a destination and only select Superchargers. I could trust it then. Of course I want the option to manually select a different alternate station.
One thing that the nav in Teslas lack that's extremely important is the ability to choose a minimum charge % on arrival to a station and destination. If my destination is a cabin in the woods, the Tesla nav will get you there but with a low charge and you won't have enough to get back to a charging station. It assumes you can charge at your destination. A workaround is to have the ability to set your home is the origin and destination and the cabin in the woods as a waypoint. But that also doesn't take into account putting around town while you're at the cabin.
I used Apple Maps on my last trip and manually input addresses for charging stations. I like the interface much better than the Ford nav.
I took my Lightning on a road trip. I manually researched and chose charging stations beforehand, even using a spreadsheet to calculate how much I needed to charge at each one. I picked an alternate station in case one was unavailable and made sure I'd have enough charge to get there.
Electrify America was garbage. Got lucky a couple times. One station was completely out of order. Another only had one stall working. Also used a Chargepoint, only two stalls but they were open, however charge rate was slow. Francis Energy station was great, no one there and fast. And I stopped at two Superchargers with Magic Docks. Only problem was one adapter wouldn't release, so I moved to the next one. With 16 stalls and few in use, it was no problem.
Moral of this story is that you cannot rely on the nav to pick charging stations for you, unless it's Tesla Superchargers. For the Ford nav to be useful, I want to tell it a destination and only select Superchargers. I could trust it then. Of course I want the option to manually select a different alternate station.
One thing that the nav in Teslas lack that's extremely important is the ability to choose a minimum charge % on arrival to a station and destination. If my destination is a cabin in the woods, the Tesla nav will get you there but with a low charge and you won't have enough to get back to a charging station. It assumes you can charge at your destination. A workaround is to have the ability to set your home is the origin and destination and the cabin in the woods as a waypoint. But that also doesn't take into account putting around town while you're at the cabin.
I used Apple Maps on my last trip and manually input addresses for charging stations. I like the interface much better than the Ford nav.
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