Last year, I booked an amazing Airbnb for my family at one of my favorite ski mountains. Ahead of the trip, we kept looking at the weather and saw it was going to be cold (below freezing) and snowy. Perfect skiing, sledding, outdoor frolicking weather.
This was going to be our first trip up to the mountain in our new electric vehicle. I'd researched online ahead of time and while the nearest Supercharger was over an hour away, there were several destination chargers nearby. So, I figured everything would be ok.
On the drive up to the mountain, we stopped at the Supercharger station and filled up and then continued our drive on.
Over the next hour, I started to get a queasy feeling as I saw the range decreasing on my battery much faster than I was driving. 100 miles left. 80 miles left. 60 miles left. A combination of the elevation change leading to the mountain and the cold sapping the battery was draining the battery quickly.
I knew I'd make it to my destination fine, but the real question was "what then?" How would I get enough juice to drive around? Suddenly I was facing that question that everyone asked me when I bought an EV:
"So, aren't you afraid you won't be able to charge on a long drive?"
I got to my destination and used my wall charger to plug into a standard outlet and charge my car overnight. I figured this would top me off and get me to a more comfortable place. I knew that the standard charger would only give me 3-4 miles / hour of charging, but I figured that an overnight charge would get me a 40+ miles of range and room for comfort.
What I hadn't factor in was that the brutal cold outside would eat into how fast I could charge.
I wound up getting into this crazy cycle where I would drive 30 minutes to the nearest destination charger, using up more battery than I'd be able to charge in an hour. So, just to "break even" on the round trip I needed to charge for 2 hours.
And then came the big surprise. We had a family emergency that required a trip to the emergency room. That hadn't been in the plans. The result, was a pitstop at 3 AM at a destination charger with 1 mile left on my battery to get me enough range to get back to the Airbnb.
As you can imagine, all of this created a tremendous amount of stress. Every day I was having to think about "where am I going to get my next charge" and planning out how far I could drive that day.
This is why we installed both a Tesla Wall Charger and a ChargePoint Home at Whispering Pines Lodgel. I never want a guest to have to go through this same stress. I want them to be able to focus on recharging themselves and not their car.
As a guest at Whispering Pines Lodge, we hope you can unplug while you plug in.
When you are out and about exploring our state, we recommend using:
- Open Charge (the app) when on the road
- DriveElectricVT.com
(image will take you to DriveElectricVt.com)
