Living with a car from the future: Tesla Model 3

Idaho Springs is a fun little town. We spent a night/day there last June, before heading down (up?) to the PPIHC. We ate at the Main Street Cafe for breakfast, went whitewater rafting, and Tommyknockers for late lunch. Lots of wandering and shopping before heading back to Denver. Cool place to visit. We keep trying to fit Georgetown in for a couple of days, but haven't yet.

Just for comparison, that 600 miles would cost us about the same, $45 if we drove our Fusion. I'd have to get another 3 gallons at some point. We drove the Explorer on that trip, which stranded us with, fittingly for this thread, electrical problems (charging). 

Yeah, the Tesla isn't all that much cheaper to run if you're having to buy electricity at high speed chargers. The actual conversion varies with gas prices, but it's roughly the same running cost as a 40 mpg ICE here in Colorado right now. Of course, when we're staying near home and using our own electricity, the math is much different. In California, the Superchargers are not much more than home electric costs from what I understand.

If we had to pay for it, power at home would cost about 1/3 as much as getting it from a Supercharger. For us, it's basically free to charge the car because our solar array produces more power than we can use so any electricity we put into the car does not have an incremental cost. We have put a total of $51 of Other People's Electricity into the car over the past 12 months and consumed a total of almost exactly 3,000 kWh - equivalent to our power production for June. Obviously, any road trips have been close to the 280-mile (ish) round trip window of late - most of my big trips had me towing a big trailer with a diesel pickup.

I'd never stopped in Idaho Springs before they put the charger in, and now I like it. It's got a two block pedestrian strip down the middle of town right beside the chargers, makes it a very pleasant place to spend some time and it seems to have avoided the Big Ski Money that spoils so many Colorado mountain towns. So there you go, we choose our hotels based on chargers and we have discovered new cool places as well :)

Keith, what is the estimated range you start out with on a full charge? Is that what you mean by the 280 mile round trip? I don't think it's been mentioned for a while. And while I would enjoy rereading the entire thing, I don't have that much free time.

I just realized my comparison is not great, since you start out full in addition to what you add. I want to replace the 215,000 mile Fusion with an EV, but probably not until we add solar like you did. Most of it's days are less than 40 miles, so one fill-up every 2-3 weeks. And we've had zero issues with it, which is a nice change. Hard to pull that trigger. The finger is itchy though.

We rarely run 100% charge - that's not as easy on the battery and it charges really slowly between 80-100%. We only go to 100% for road trips when we think we might need the extra range. This is more of a Tesla thing, a lot of other EVs are fixed at 80% max charge. That's why you'll sometimes see "usable capacity" listed in the spec sheet.

Our current estimated range at our daily 80% charge limit is 228 miles. If we go to 100%, it shows something like 280 or 284, I forget exactly. Of course, the real range depends on a bunch of things like speed, weather, elevation change. Secondary road driving seems to hit pretty close. 75 mph down the interstate when it's windy is a little more energy hungry. For example, we went to see a concert in Carbondale a few months ago. That's 108 miles each way with a fair bit of interstate. That was almost exactly a full battery's worth to get there and back.

And yeah, when you go on a trip you start with a full "tank" so you only start paying for fuel at your first stop. Same if you manage to find a destination charger at a hotel, it's like having magic elves come and fill up your tank overnight.

In normal use (assuming you live in a place where this is possible), you plug in every night so you start the day with your full daily range. We never pay attention to the actual battery level in day to day use because the capacity is so much larger than what we'll use. It's hard to make a monetary case for buying a new car (ICE or EV) when you have a fully depreciated and paid-for ICE sitting around though. If I wanted to save money, I'd still be driving the 18 mpg 2000 Grand Cherokee every day.

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