I will be posting regular updates to my upcoming Road Trip on this thread.
Starting 2/18/22, my wife and I will be leaving for two weeks of family visits in the San Diego area. We will be taking the I-70/I-15 route. Following this relaxing time in SoCal, we are off to the East Coast with an interim stop for 2-3 days in Dallas, eventually landing in the DC area and a week in historic Williamsburg. Side trips to Southern NH and Raleigh\Durham, NC are also possible.
My posts will highlight the reliability of Electrify America (primarily) and other networks we encounter along the way. My Bolt recently got the replacement battery pack which achieves a few key enhancements for this trip. With the new pack, 100% SOC is again possible (GM had recommended not charging past 80-90% on the old pack as an interim recall step), the 5% or so degradation of the original pack (over 72K miles) is reset, and the pack has ~10% more capacity than the original. Despite cold temps overnight, my Bolt is displaying 255 miles on the Guess-o-meter (GOM) this morning at 100%, something I rarely saw with the original pack, even in summer months. This seems to bode well for the upcoming travels.
I have no delusions about DCFC charging speeds. The Bolt is limited to ~55kW on DCFC. Fortunately, most of the stops I am planning are 150kW EA chargers. My goal is not to set a cannonball run record, we recently retired and are looking forward to a slower pace.
My planning tools? Basically, Plug Share. I put together a spreadsheet in Excel with data pulled from the Plug Share Trip planner. It is fairly extensive, using miles, speeds, SOC, expected time and kW at charging stops to estimate costs, and factors in expected miles/kWh to estimate arrival SOC. The benefit of using PS Trip Planner is that saved trips can be recalled and displayed on the Car Play interface on the Infotainment system, allowing us to keep the plan visible as needed. The spreadsheet seems to offer a little more flexibility in estimating critical factors and was used to pick DCFC stops to include in the PS trip plan.
My posts won't be daily, but I will try to checkin at each charging stop along the way, for those interested in following the trip in near real-time (probably not many), look for Plug Share checkins for Arob.
Starting 2/18/22, my wife and I will be leaving for two weeks of family visits in the San Diego area. We will be taking the I-70/I-15 route. Following this relaxing time in SoCal, we are off to the East Coast with an interim stop for 2-3 days in Dallas, eventually landing in the DC area and a week in historic Williamsburg. Side trips to Southern NH and Raleigh\Durham, NC are also possible.
My posts will highlight the reliability of Electrify America (primarily) and other networks we encounter along the way. My Bolt recently got the replacement battery pack which achieves a few key enhancements for this trip. With the new pack, 100% SOC is again possible (GM had recommended not charging past 80-90% on the old pack as an interim recall step), the 5% or so degradation of the original pack (over 72K miles) is reset, and the pack has ~10% more capacity than the original. Despite cold temps overnight, my Bolt is displaying 255 miles on the Guess-o-meter (GOM) this morning at 100%, something I rarely saw with the original pack, even in summer months. This seems to bode well for the upcoming travels.
I have no delusions about DCFC charging speeds. The Bolt is limited to ~55kW on DCFC. Fortunately, most of the stops I am planning are 150kW EA chargers. My goal is not to set a cannonball run record, we recently retired and are looking forward to a slower pace.
My planning tools? Basically, Plug Share. I put together a spreadsheet in Excel with data pulled from the Plug Share Trip planner. It is fairly extensive, using miles, speeds, SOC, expected time and kW at charging stops to estimate costs, and factors in expected miles/kWh to estimate arrival SOC. The benefit of using PS Trip Planner is that saved trips can be recalled and displayed on the Car Play interface on the Infotainment system, allowing us to keep the plan visible as needed. The spreadsheet seems to offer a little more flexibility in estimating critical factors and was used to pick DCFC stops to include in the PS trip plan.
My posts won't be daily, but I will try to checkin at each charging stop along the way, for those interested in following the trip in near real-time (probably not many), look for Plug Share checkins for Arob.