Trip Log, East SF Bay to Fresno

[dustboy]

Last week was my first of six weeks of training in Fresno at a new job.

I decided this week to drive the eGolf, you know, just for an adventure and to see if it could be done. Let me tell you, range anxiety is no joke. This will be my first time using a public charger.

Started the trip early, the drive over the Dublin Grade and the Altamont Pass definitely taxed my range. Got to Tracy with around 45 miles range. My goal was to get to Ceres (~70 miles) on 99 to charge, but by the time I was at the Vintage Faire Mall in Modesto I was down to 12 miles range. Pulled off the highway and was using the ChargePoint app to find the charger, but it showed the DC evGo charger in the middle of an empty parking lot, which it wasn't...OK, don't panic and call evGo. The agent on the phone was helpful and guided me to the charging station in front of JC Penney's. Honestly it was like calling 911, I was having a difficult time talking with my heart in my throat. But, she activated the charger, I plugged in and I went in to Starbucks for a decaf :roll: If it hadn't been 9:30 in the morning I might have been looking for whisky.

I'm watching the evGo app tick along, not sure what happens when it is done, I guess it will tell me.

 

[miimura]

The PlugShare app usually has an accurate position for the pin locating each charging station. If not, the pictures can help to give context to help you find it.

The EVgo chargers shut off after 30 minutes. Depending on how your account is set up, it should e-mail you when it's done.

Use navigation in the car or on your phone to show the miles to the next charging station or your destination. Make sure you have some range buffer between the car's estimated range and the destination. If you have less than 10 miles buffer, slow down 5 mph. If you're not maintaining or increasing your buffer, slow down another 5 mph. If your buffer is increasing, then you can speed up.

Good Luck. You should be able to make it with just one more fast charging stop at Chowchilla.

 

[f1geek]

Trying to make it 70 miles on the highway is pushing your luck unless you are able to drive REALLY efficiently. I generally go no more than 60 miles before stopping for a DCFC. Plugshare is probably a better app to use than Chargepoint if you are looking for EVGo stations. EVGo now also has an app that is pretty good. EVGo owns and operates their stations, while Chargepoint's stations are independently owned. In my experience, Chargepoint's customer service is pretty useless when a station is down as they can only ask the station owner to fix it.

 

[dustboy]

So I pulled in to the SaveMart in Chowchilla with 15 miles remaining. There were two open chargers, the first one would not begin the charge. I called EVgo support and tried the other charger. She restarted the controller twice and it still would not start the charge. :shock: This is not good, I'm due in Fresno by 1:00.

I set google maps to the nearest Level 2 charger somewhere at a country club in the rural area to the south. Driving there it became clear I would be short on juice by about 2 miles. Fortunately on the rural roads I was safe going 35 mph.

Then I saw an oasis: a field of solar panels, and a sign saying "Lean Solar Manufacturing". I pulled in, but alas they didn't have an L2 charger. They kindly allowed me to plug in my charger to a 110VAC outlet. So here I am, and I'm definitely going to be late... by at least an hour My plan is to find another charger nearby, but for now I have to wait for this slow charger to do its thing.

 

[miimura]

The BTC chargers at Chowchilla are a little different than the one you used at Vintage Faire. You need to get the charger authorized and started before plugging in the car. If you didn't do that, I would head back there as soon as you have enough range from the 120V charge cord. If you are closer to Madera, then head there. However, it has the same kind of BTC chargers, so you will have the same problem getting the car to start charging. Last I heard, the sequence of authenticating and plugging in is important.

This is a problem with the EVgo sites that have no L2 chargers for backup. There are no L2's anywhere near Chowchilla.

 

[dustboy]

The procedure at the Chowchilla chargers might explain it, it did keep asking me to unplug and plug the connector. The CS agent from EVgo had no explanation for what was happening. It also occurred to me that since the manual discourages back-to-back fast charges, the car's system prevented the charge, or maybe the battery was too hot to accept a fast charge.

After getting 4 miles back on the guess-o-meter from the 110v outlet, I made it another 2 miles to an Amtrak station that had a L2 charger. Used that to get 12 miles of range then I went 6 miles to the Save Mart in Madera and got a full charge from their DCFC.

These chargers have a long way to go in terms of user friendliness. The ChargePoint L2 charger at the Amtrak station was completely obtuse, a less determined person would have given up as it refused to release the connector from the pedestal, even though the on screen instructions said to remove the connector.

Now that I'm in Fresno, I can park next to work and charge all day with the L1 charger. I also noticed that there is an outlet on the lamp post next to where I parked at the hotel, so I can sneak a charge overnight if needed.

 

[JoulesThief]

How fast can you discharge your battery driving freeway or interstate? How fast can you recharge at an L2 200V 6 kWh public charger? Do the math, and you'll find that unless you can guarantee that you can get a good DCFC, which VW recommends using "sparingly" in my 2015 e-Golf SEL manual, and you'll find that driving 55 saves you more time over all in the trip at ANY L2 Charger, than driving 65 or 70 mph. Slow down... on longer trips... and get more range between recharges. Seems counter intuitive, but that's the way it is with the current versons of the VW e-Golfs. You can discharge it 3x as fast as you can recharge it, if you drive it fast, at a L2 public charger. 5 hours to recharge, empty in 1.5, doing 70 mph. Try 55 mph. You'll spend waaay less time at the recharger than you lost doing 55 instead of 70 mph.


An e-Golf is not a good choice for any trip that you can't make the trip on a single charge and recharge overnight where ever you stay. Relying on public chargers is a crap shoot. Maybe fine if retired, but I don't screw with recharging on the road, I use mine inter city, and recharge usually in the morning before I need to depart, usually, 10:30 or 11 AM, on a hot freshly charged battery, at home. I loathe the use of public chargers nowadays. Nobody takes care of them, the cords or the handles.

 

[dustboy]

Well, yes, the trip was a learning experience and probably something I'll chalk up as a mistake...A consultant at my office once held a meeting to discuss some honest-to-dog F-ups. All the touchy-feely types didn't want to call it a mistake, so theme of the meeting became "Leveraging Lessons Learned from Missed Opportunities".

The return trip was much smoother, I charged in Atwater at the Applegate Mall (70 mi), then again at the West Valley Mall in Tracy (63 mi). The only hitch was occupied chargers in Tracy, but as soon as I started charging at the L2 station the Bolt at the nearby DC charger drove off. Oddly the EVgo app told me the charger had aborted the charge, but when I returned to the charger all was normal.

 

[f1geek]

Nice job! I have travelled the same route with my 2015 e-Golf (EVGo stations in Madera, Atwater andTracy), though I didn't try to make a 70 mile hop between DCFC stops. If you made it 70 miles, then you did a very good job of driving efficiently, but the weather is very warm right now, so there is no need for heat and at these temperatures, the A/C doesn't use much energy. Also, at these temperatures, I'm pretty sure the battery does not warm up enough to reduce charging rates.

 

[dustboy]

Yes, I was able to use the fan only and no A/C. The section of 99 between Fresno and Atwater had pockets of traffic so I was also using B mode and a lot of the driving was between 60-65 mph. I rolled up to the DCFC with about 12 miles of range.

It was also pretty awesome that I was able to complete a 300+ mile trip without a single whiff of tailpipe emissions. As the air quality in the Central Valley is so bad, I was happy to not be contributing.

B mode is really a great feature, I don't know how many other EVs have it (not the Focus) but in stop and go traffic you rarely have to take your foot off the accelerator pedal. I imagine for as little as I really use the friction brakes they are likely to last 100,000 miles.

 

[JoulesThief]

Yes, I was able to use the fan only and no A/C. The section of 99 between Fresno and Atwater had pockets of traffic so I was also using B mode and a lot of the driving was between 60-65 mph. I rolled up to the DCFC with about 12 miles of range.

It was also pretty awesome that I was able to complete a 300+ mile trip without a single whiff of tailpipe emissions. As the air quality in the Central Valley is so bad, I was happy to not be contributing.

B mode is really a great feature, I don't know how many other EVs have it (not the Focus) but in stop and go traffic you rarely have to take your foot off the accelerator pedal. I imagine for as little as I really use the friction brakes they are likely to last 100,000 miles.

You honestly don't know how the electricity was made that you used in your car, so that's false logic about not contributing to emissions. It may very well have been shopped out electricity made from coal in NV or AZ and bought for way less per kWh over the transmission lines at current market rates, where they are producing a surplus running the plant at 95 to 100 % of capacity because coal is such a cheap energy source, and the power plant runs most efficiently when all the power produced burning coal needs to be sold at spot market rates. No different than a dog crapping in someone else's back yard. The pollution is just somewhere else, nothing was cleaner about your form of transportation. Faulty logic, you need to look at the bigger picture. BTW, if you drive on asphalt, you are driving on bitumen, an oil by product from Big Oil.

 

[f1geek]

Like the poster said, the e-Golf has no tailpipe emissions. CA gets less than 1% of its electricity from coal, even if that electricity comes from NV. The majority of CA electrons come from natural gas, with renewables approaching 30% of the mix. This is public information and easy to find. Where I live, the electricity is 100% renewable, with most electrons purchased from wind. Coal is expensive and that’s why cheap natural gas is killing coal. In some locations (like the Texas panhandle ), wind is the cheapest source of power and there is so much cheap wind power that at times electricity is free due to the way the power agreements are written.

 

[dustboy]

There's a troll in every forum, and I quickly add them to my 'ignore' list.

 

[JoulesThief]

There's a troll in every forum, and I quickly add them to my 'ignore' list.

Who cares when you define it so conveniently as "tailpipe" emissions. There's a carbon footprint somewhere from the power generated to recharge your car. It's that myopic, smug opinion of some that want to force everyone else to drive an electric, because they believe it's emission free. It isn't. Carbon emissions are coming from somewhere to make electricity, just not in your backyard.

If you would have asked before going on your adventure trip, and almost getting stranded, a few would have advised you from their past experiences that it is overall not yet a good idea to do longer trips, unless you are retired and have all the spare time in the world to do so.

 

[jillianvanliew]

Slow down... on longer trips... and get more range between recharges. Seems counter intuitive, but that's the way it is with the current versons of the VW e-Golfs. You can discharge it 3x as fast as you can recharge it, if you drive it fast, at a L2 public charger. 5 hours to recharge, empty in 1.5, doing 70 mph. Try 55 mph. You'll spend waaay less time at the recharger than you lost doing 55 instead of 70 mph.

Good advice. Yes, I too have learned that longer trips are not as kind to battery life with the eGolf. I use Plugshare and have found it helpful for finding public (good and not-so-good) chargers.