Great Scott! Fleeing A hurricane in a rechargeable car is when you need 1.21 gigawatts or at least 75 KWH! Help me understand this, please

I think he meant to type 80%.

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If the electricity is out, you’re also not going to be pumping any gas.

If you are “Fleeing a hurricane” as the OP’s topic suggested, why would the electricity be out? You flee ahead of a hurricane. The electricity is still on. Once the hurricane hits you have either left and are in a place where there is safety and presumably electricity, or you stayed. If you stayed you didn’t use any gas or electricity and you now have a full tank of gas or a fully-charged battery. Unless you’re an idiot and don’t keep your vehicle ready ahead of impending bad wether. So you stayed, have a range of about 300 to 500 miles if your car uses liquid fuel or you have about 250 miles range if you own a Tesla. What is the issue?

You’re now stuck in traffic behind the other people that did not prepare as well as you and they are out of gas, blocking you from proceeding… :slight_smile:

Have you checked how long the state of Florida IS and how many miles you’d need to drive to reach Georgia? Key West to anywhere in Georgia is 570 miles. Marco Island - the landfall - is 403 miles. That 250 mile Tesla range would get you only to Orlando - right in the path of the storm. My truck, however, has a range of about 425 miles, even crawling in traffic, it got me to the Florida Panhandle

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Great points about range vs. affected area. My family opted to stay. Your point was a big part of why. They have evacuated in the past and the hurricane did change expected course, missed the place they left and did hit the hotel they were at (they were OK). My relatives that stayed this time were all OK and the generator is running (intermittently and outside) and they are fine. Both properties were in Naples in the exact landfall of the hurricane the news said for a week was the “Biggest storm ever recorded in the Atlantic.” One property is a two-story multi-unit home about 4 miles inland with zero damage. The other is a single family home about a half mile from the water with minor roof damage, one screen missing, and minor lanai damage. It was very scary, but they are glad they didn’t evacuate six or seven hundred miles. With each storm, those not on the water, and not in mobile homes or assisted living are learning that staying put may be the best of a lousy list of choices. The folks who stayed have no need for much gas. No private business are open except Publix and those who are working on repairs and cleanup locally (according to my folks).

Well then it’s a good thing there’s a supercharger in Orlando that will have you back on the road in half an hour.

En-route to Orlando, there’s also one in Marathon, Ft Lauderdale, West Plam beach, Port St. Lucie, and one just south of Yeehaw Junction. Then you can keep going, stopping for power in any of: Ocala, Daytona Beach, St. Augustine, Lake City, Live Oak, Tallahassee, and Defuniak Springs.

And that’s not mentioning taking the western route, when you can recharge in Naples, Cape Coral, Srasota, Largo, and Tampa before hitting Ocala.

Actually you can get from Key West to just about anywhere except the Dakotas purely on superchargers, and that’s not counting all the other EV chargers that Teslas can use.

I think you’d manage to get out of the state using those chargers, and those chargers would not run out of electricity before the storm hit, unlike the gas stations which ran out of fuel.

In fact, here’s evidence: Here’s what you’d do if you had the Model S with the smallest battery:

https://www.evtripplanner.com/planner/2-8/?id=1tys5tog

Don’t disagree with that. Hopefully the chargers are open. Also, the Tesla driver should be travelling with their AC off since crawling in traffic would rapidly deplete the range if power was used to run the AC. Add in the at least hour long time delay (recharge time, travel to charger time, traffic time) to recharge the car at least once in the travel path. Range anxiety would would be rather intense in any event.

As a practical note, I saw not one full electric car during my evacuation. As I posted earlier, a Tesla driver would have the means to fly out.

I’m a fan of Tesla (realistically) and I think the Superchargers are ingenious. Both for practical and marketing reasons. They will power up a Tesla from near empty to about 80% in a half hour. No other electric car has anything like this rate of charge when total miles added are considered. Unless there is someone ahead of you in line. Then the wait till powered up is an hour. And if two people are ahead of you the wait is 90 minutes, assuming they leave as soon as they are up to 80%. There are always multiple stations, but images showing Supercharger lines in California are now being posted at all the Tesla clubs and on Twitter, and this is during normal situations. It will be interesting to see how the Supercharger network grows to match Tesla’s planned vehicle ownership explosion. Tesla says that it will be shipping 5,000 Model 3’s per week in December to U.S. customers. Combined with the two other models existing production plus a growth of the Model S beyond that early number, Tesla will be tripling its population of cars in 2018. And that will continue again in 2019. It’s hard to see how the chargers could ever be much help if folks all needed them in any given region on the same day after the brand matures. By Tesla’s own admission, these are to be occasional use stations and most owners are expected to normally charge at home.

No argument there, but we’re talking about evacuating a lot of people here - I’d rather wait a couple of hours for my turn at the charger than find out, as many did, that gas stations are out of gas and I can’t fill up at all, period. In all the arguments about range anxiety with electric cars, that seems to be the one that gets glossed over. The electric cars had to stop every few hours to charge up, and maybe had to wait a while at the charger. Once gas stations ran dry, gas cars… didn’t go anywhere because there wasn’t any gas.

This is not uncommon in the computer industry. Been going on for well over 30 years. What Tesla did is a little different, but these types of features that can be turned on and off with a simple software switch is common. Why? - Because they can. It’s not uncommon in the auto industry either.

Personally - I’m not a big fan of it.

What if there’s no electricity at the gas station? We’ve had a few ice storms here in NH where power was out for a 40 mile radius. Only ONE gas station within 20 miles of my house had power because they had on-site generators. But they ran out of gas quickly.

Unless, like me, you are hauling an extra 20 gallons in the truck bed. :open_mouth:

Running out of gas when trying to evacuate means, in some instances, you didn’t fill up in anticipation of the storm. And you had LOTS of warning even though the computer models were wrong and the storm went west. Remember, all models are wrong, but some are useful.

There are always lots of people who don’t prepare, wait until the last minute or pay little attention even though they have the means to do so. This diverts resources away from helping the truly needy to include the lazy, unprepared and stupid.

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Certainly true, but we probably aren’t talking about them, because they just never left. That said, if you are going to wait till the last minute, the default for a Tesla at home is to be plugged into the charger. The default for the last-minute crowd with gas cars is to be on empty 6 hours before the storm hits. Of the two, the Tesla guys are going to get farther when there’s no gas. :wink:

A lot of those folks who didn’t prepare didn’t stay, they got mandatory evacuation notices and hit the road with 1/4 of a tank.

Yeah, the EV folks could still leave, at least partway, but again, they flew out 3 days earlier.

Yup…agree. When ever I hear of a ice storm warning or a big snow storm I make sure the vehicles are filled and I have gas cans filled for my generators.

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I had the extra gas for my generator bought a few days before shortages occurred. When we decided to leave, I took it along. When I lived up north, I almost always had a few gallons ready, just in case.

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I usually have a few gallons around to run the snow-blower.

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Oh, I’m well aware of this sort of thing going on in the computer world. A few years ago AMD was selling some dual core CPUs that were actually quad cores with a pair of cores disabled. Some enterprising enthusiasts found that on certain motherboards you could enable the dormant cores and have yourself a quad core for dual core money. That’s just how CPUs are binned, and sold.

I wonder how long it will take before people hack their Teslas (once they are out of warranty) and access the features that were previously behind a paywall (basically). Why pay Tesla $6000 for Autopilot when you can pay a third party maybe $900 for a hand held tuner that you plug in to enable it. Or you if you have a P60 and want the extra range that the P75 gives you. You can just plug in your laptop, hit a few keys and, suddenly you’ve got another 50 miles of range.

With internal combustion cars you actually have to replace bits and pieces (at least moreso than you do with a Tesla it seams). If I want want more range, I have to physically fit a larger fuel tank. If I want more power, I have to change out the cylinder heads or add supercharger. Even for something like sat-nav. At the very least I’m changing out a module on my infotainment system, if not replacing the whole thing.

I wonder if the layperson knew that most of Tesla’s tech is already built-in to the lowest-tier model, and that they are basically just paying to have it unlocked if that would sit well with the typical car buyer.

Shadowfax made a good point. If there isn’t gas ahead, evacuating is an issue. A real issue it turns out. My relatives in Florida had friends who did evacuate. The driver got to the 45% range in his gas vehicle and stopped to top off. No gas available. Sold out. He turned back and toughed it out in Naples.