Well welcome to the last day of Bucky’s trip across the US. It has been a epic journey filled with fun adventures, some great food, beautiful scenery and even some lessons learned. For those who thought this could not be done, or that we were setting ourselves up for some really big problems attempting this, I hope these series of blogs has convinced you that long distance road trips in an EV is definitely possible and for the most part even low stress. I’m sure the Tesla crowd and their supercharging networks agree with me. Tesla’s supercharging network is their greatest asset in my option. I look forward to the day they open it up for all EV’s.
The day began early (6:00am) in Twin Falls Idaho. After a quick shower, a quicker breakfast and packing up we headed out of town towards Boise Idaho and our first charging stop of the day, at you guessed it - Wally World! We met some very nice people in a Kia EV6 who were tracking back to Vancouver Washington. In fact we met nice people for the most part at every EV charging stop we were at. We exchanged info on charging stops along the route, talked about our cars (lots of interest in the IX), and just had generally really nice conversations. I can’t remember when I had a conversation with someone at a gas station. If I had one thing I would suggest to the Electrified American corporation it would be to put some benches and covering at that charging stops. The SUN was HOT HOT HOT this summer. I bet it is even worse when it is raining and cold out. Oh, and how about a windshield washing station, mad props to the charging station at Green River Coffee Company in Utah. Windshield washing station, and even BETTER coffee.😎
From Boise we headed another 2hrs to our final charging stop of the trip at Island City OR. It turns out this was going to be the longest we stopped for a charge the whole trip. No matter was we tried we could not squeeze more than 56KW of electrons out of the chargers (sloooooooow going). No matter we we just about 127 miles from home and we just kicked back and did some emails and caught up on the news while we waited.
It was then off on the final leg home to Kennewick WA via Dead Mans pass out side of Pendelton OR. Deadman’s pass is a fun drive and even though you burn a little extra power climbing the pass, you get it all back and more with that 6 miles 6% grade down hill drive down the other side. We started down that hill at 145miles of range and regenerative braking gave us another 40 miles of range at the bottom.
On the final leg home we had one scare, when a semi pulling a trailer home started to whip around violently between lanes, luckily we were a few cars lengths behind him (a lot more after he started whipping around). How that trailer did not flip is beyond me. 😱
We made it home to Kennewick at around 3:00pm and the first thing we did was give Bucky a really really good bath. Spent about 5 bucks with the wand wash getting 3000 miles of bugs off the front face of Bucky and out of his “teeth”. Then it was time to head to the house and clean out the interior and basically collapse on the couch.
So that ends our epic adventure from Baltimore MA/Dulles VA to Kennewick WA. I hope you enjoyed reading the blog. I had a lot of fun writing it. The BMW IX is a dream machine and a road trip monster. It eats up payment and miles with little to no stress at all. Charging for the most part was uneventful with the exception of Topeka Kansas, and our backup plans worked great.
My advice for anyone considering a trip cross country in an EV - DO IT! Good planning is essential. Have a route, and check is twice, also check your route multiple times along the trip to see if anything has changed (weather, road construction, charging station issues, etc. Have accounts on multiple charging networks so you have multiple backups in case they are needed (see my story on a previous blog about Topeka Kansas).
Use the tools available and double check them against each other.
I used the following:
A Better Route Planner
Plugshare
Electrified America App
ChargePoint App
EV Go App
BMW App (on board routing)
Some final stats for the trip.
Total Miles Driven - 3057
Total Charging Stops - (15), Averaging three per day with the last one at night so we were ready to go the next morning.
Average Charging Session “fill” 80%
Average miles driven between charging stops - 250 miles
Average miles driven per day - 510 miles
Total cost to charge at EA stations along the way - $0. (Yep, I got my moneys worth out of my free 2 year EA plan that came with the IX.
Number of McDonald’s cokes and unsweetened Ice tees consumed - 14
Number of Walmarts visited (for the EA charging) 12
Average amount of money spent by wife at Wally World - $25. (Now we know what Walmart let EA put all those charging stations in their parking lots.
Favorite Charging Stop(s) - (tie between the Evergreen Coffee company in Utah, and Caspers in Salina Kansas.
Favorite SiriusXM channel - The Garth Brooks channel - The Bowers and Wilkins Stereo is AMAZING!
Nicest new friends made along the way —all of them.
Best food along the way - (tie: Jack Stacks BBQ Kansas City, and The Red Iguana in Salt Lake City)
Worse road construction - Indianapolis.
Favorite BMW IX feature (so far) the Professional Driving Assistant Pro (with congestion assist) SO MAGICALLY. Where has this been all my life.
PS: Thanks to my brother in law Jake who had our new Wallbox Plus Level 2 charger installed for when we got home. Plugged in and in the morning - up to 100%. Total cost for that charging session $4 bucks. 😎
No comments:
Post a Comment