A video where nothing goes wrong isn't going to get any viewers.
Today I went to Aberdeen and back. I knew Aberdeen, 140 miles away by the slightly slower but more economical route, was on the edge of my winter range, so I was careful. It was also potentially a pain because I would have to charge twice on the way back. I could have made a huge drama about what happened.
The car was serviced yesterday and the GOM went back to the factory settings. Once recharged it was telling me I had 199 miles of range. In your dreams. I've been seeing 145-150 miles this weather and it was a cold morning. But there it was, 199 miles. Whoopee?
I turned on the heating, suddenly it's 189 miles. Could have had a big bellyache about that, no?
I set off, constantly comparing the range on the GOM as it counted down to the remaining distance to Aberdeen on Android Auto. Entirely unsurprisingly the GOM went down a LOT faster than the distance remaining did. Shock horror, terrible car! No, it was the result of the factory reset. I knew it was lying to me with that 199 miles rubbish.
By the time I was half-way things had settled so that the GOM was telling me I had 14 miles in hand (as opposed to 49 at the start!). I more or less believed that, but in fact it eroded a bit more due to the hilly road so that at one point I was seeing only five miles in hand. I was quite close to Aberdeen by then though, and the last part was downhill, so I wasn't worried. At 12 miles on the GOM the car asked if it should go into energy-saving mode and I said yes, but I have no idea what that did as I didn't notice any reduction in performance and I never saw a turtle.
I think I was down to seven miles when I saw the MFG charging site. I had been going to go straight to the church for the memorial service I was going to and worry about the car later, but I was over an hour early so I decided to charge up.
Oh dear, it's going to take an hour and 20 minutes to fill up! I'll be late!!! Well of course not, because I'm not going to go to 100%, am I? After 40 minutes I was on 83%. What a dreadful wait! Well, no, it was lunch-time. I went to the loo and bought a snack, and by the time I'd taken that back to the car I was already on about 40%. I could have unplugged any time, but I had the time to spare so I just let it go on.
Or of course I could have tried to get a destination charger near the church, but there are only 4 plugs. The two near the church are £0.00 so what chance of getting on these on a Saturday at lunch-time? Zero. The two that are ten minutes walk away are 35p and were also both taken. I did check the app but I knew there was no point. I just went to the church and into its car park.
So I left Aberdeen on 80% charge. Not enough to get home! What a hassle! No, I just stopped at a Tesla supercharger and put in about 25% to make sure.
I was never in any doubt that I'd make Aberdeen one way or the other, but I could have made a huge drama out of what the GOM was doing. I could have gone to the AC chargers and made another drama out of them being fully occupied. I could have moaned like stink about having to charge twice. But actually the first charge was lunch, and I would have had to hang around waiting for the service to start anyway. And the second charge was just a short stop at a nice hotel where I used the facilities and could have had a coffee if I'd wanted, but I wasn't really there long enough.
Nothing went wrong, I was absolutely fine, I didn't feel I had wasted a load of time and I didn't have any range anxiety. But by golly if I'd been one of these YouTubers I could have made that out to be a hellish experience!
Just a thought. His home charger is an issue, but he has a drive. Why on earth doesn't he just plug in his granny cable every night, indeed any time the car is parked at the house? He'd get a pretty useful chunk of charge that way, and he'd be able to fill in the 80% to 100% part of the battery without waiting around on a DC charger, if he just used the granny. And it would be cheaper.
Didn't think of that, did he?
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