Winter storm Elliott vs. Bolt EV

foreigner foreigner okay, it's one degree Fahrenheit outside according to my car. Now I'm going to Marshall Minnesota to work. I'm going to make a quick stop in St Louis Park at the Micro Center. I need an SSD for my video editing equipment. casually and then I'll be on my way, it's about 150 miles, there's a fast charger in Redwood Falls which is about 110 miles from here so things get tough, I can fast charge there on the way to my hotel where I I will stay a hotel with a level 2 charger at the Sleep Inn and Suites in Marshall so no matter what you arrive with hopefully we can charge, if not there is a fast charger at Marshall and it looks like there are two now.

I'll definitely try to see the new one that was recently built at the GM dealership, so that's the plan for 541pm. and there's a degree outside, let's see how this trip goes well. I traveled 24 miles from work to this Chipotle I used. 10 kilowatt hours to get here, so considering about 2.4 miles per kilowatt hour, at that rate I should still be able to get to Marshall, but I'll be driving through Redwood Falls, which is only 92 miles from here. At worst, fast charging at Redwood Falls gives me enough to get me to Marshall, where my hotel's gasometer shows a minimum of 95 miles, so in the heat driving the speed limit I should be able to get there no problems, okay, mid-trip updates.

I'm about 64 miles from where I left and I'm about 50 from Redwood Falls. I've decided I'm going to stop in Redwood Falls. I'm not going to make it to Marshall without a quick recharge. I'm alternating between the Heat. at 61 degrees and very low doesn't seem to produce much of anything certainly difficult when it's six degrees below zero Fahrenheit, but it goes that way, so I arrived in Redwood Falls Minnesota. I'm 38 miles from my hotel and arrived with just under 25 batteries. I'm here with a fast charger operated by Zeph, as expected. I had some problems initializing the loading session in its defense.

I think partly due to snow buildup on the plug. I got a message in the car saying I can. to start charging because the plug was not fully inserted. I also tried to log in on my phone and then the team here said to start pressing the home button. So I finally ended up getting it working, so I'm here loading up a bit. I got my range to 10 or 20 miles on battery so I can get to Marshall comfortably, but there's 38 miles to go and I think this session will be free, which is really nice. I was expecting a five dollar connection charge along with the price per kilowatt hour as always nice well lit area there are four standard outlets two j17 72 that I can see in the distance there is a Walmart and then there is a tritium fast charger with chatimo plug for Nissan Leafs and a CCS plug for everyone else, this place came in a clutch, I wouldn't have made it to Marshall if it didn't, I was probably going to stay at a casino hotel that was in the area that had an overnight charger level 2 so I'm glad this worked, thanks Seth.

Alright, I arrived here at my hotel in Marshall Minnesota at the Sleep Inn and Suites, which conveniently has a Clipper Creek j1772 charger and three Tesla destination chargers. Fortunately, it's far enough away that the risk of other people blocking it is low, and based on my app, it looks like my car will finish charging tomorrow around 9:15 a.m. m., which isn't entirely ideal hoping to hit the road a little earlier, but I guess that's what happens when you arrive at 10:45 at night and don't understand. To get the full overnight charge in total, I spent 45 minutes on the charger in Redwood Falls again with air temperatures as low as five degrees Fahrenheit.

I was only able to put about 22 kilowatts into the battery for that session. Again, it's a bit of a setback from a timing perspective, but so far all the Chargers have been working, which has been great, and it's been a relatively smooth ride so far, so we'll talk to you later, see you at In the morning, it's 6:45. the morning four degrees below zero Fahrenheit this morning I got 86 percent battery, which is a little better than I expected headed to the wind farm did a few things at work here's to another day another snowy day in Minnesota very good 35 miles to Wow, I have 75 miles on the gasometer, so I should have no problem getting to the next wind farm and the Electrify America station, which is about five miles beyond the wind farm at this point, just driving safely with the snow underneath, but I keep running. the heat just because I'm not too worried about range, getting to where I need to go through the minimum maintenance road, that stressed me out a little because there were piles in the middle of the road where the tires wouldn't go.

Piles of snow scraped the underside of the car, but it wasn't too big of a problem. I'm sure they designed the vehicle to handle things like that. Well, I arrived at my third and final stop of the day. Get out my portable cable and plug it into that little 120 outlet there, basically just to keep the battery warm. I'll get some power out of it, but I'll only be here for about an hour, so maybe a kilowatt hour. As you can see the snow is falling very lightly but it is accumulating on the roads which is making things a little difficult but so far it has been going well and from here on it's all interstate so I'm looking forward to doing the last one Travel fine a couple of hours later. and uh I've hit a bar on the battery so I'm headed to the Electrify America station which is about five miles away so we have enough power to get to the next Electrify America station because I probably won't be able to make it home Under a normal charge, those little gray lines usually aren't there because the battery is so cold that we can't fully regenerate it.

I'm curious what kind of charging speeds I'll achieve here at the Electrify America station if it's anything like last night, it'll probably be about 20 kilowatts, so I'll probably be on that charger for an hour and a half, maybe two hours, we'll see. just as it is in these cold temperatures and on the Evie lock. See you at the charger let's add some problems with the other charger but wait with this one and it's working so 25 kilowatts isn't too bad it's actually better than I expected because it's one degree Fahrenheit but the snow is accumulate here in front of these chargers. so there's a lot of things here that you can do a little better to clean up a place.

Luckily I have a shovel in the back of my car, but if anyone else stops here, they're out of luck. I will have to move or adjust so they can reach the chargers because the snow is quite deep so due to the low temperatures I cannot draw the full 50 to 55 kilowatts from this 350 kilowatt charger. The battery temperature is causing the system to limit charging to around 20 to 25 kilowatts. Something to take into account. I'm currently wearing the Heat and it's actually nice and comfortable in here. You can see that the temperature outside is one degree Fahrenheit. but I still have fluid collecting on the windshield because it is hitting the windshield and melting, it is very comfortable.

You might wonder why you are using all this electricity that you could use to charge well because I am not using all the capacity. from the charger, I'm actually getting extra electricity from the charger to run the heater, so whether I have the heater on or off, I'll still get 20 to 25 kilowatts into the battery, but since this is a higher capacity charger, You'll see at the bottom left right now. I'm actually consuming 28 kilowatts if I turned off the heat right now. You'll see that number go down, so now it just went down to 27 26. 25 24 and now that 24 matches what the car is saying again that cold temperatures are really the limiting factor in fast charging.

Nothing says you can't get 28 kilowatts out of the charger or 30 kilowatts or whatever your heater requires; You will still be limited to what the battery can handle and In fact, I would say that it is better to run the heater at a cold temperature like this because the waste heat that builds up in the cabin will also be circulated by the coolant passing through the battery, so it is possible that cabin heating actually has a net positive effect on the battery charging rate. I've been here for probably 45 minutes so far and I've reached about 22 percent charge.

I have 118 miles to get to the next Electrify America station, so I'll probably be here for another hour. I'm going to open my laptop, check some emails and get back to you, then okay, I'm 80 percent in total, I've been here an hour and 50 minutes, but I have 115 miles left to go, it's still a degree . In degrees Fahrenheit, I'm going to dial this one down a bit, but it's a long enough trip that keeping an eye on the odometer as long as you keep that average above 2.3 miles per kilowatt hour, there shouldn't be any problems. Getting there and you really know that that average is what the gasholder is doing at the bottom and so far I've found that it's pretty accurate, so again I hit it right in the middle of where it thinks I'm going to be. but it's still daylight, I really need to get back before the weather gets worse, so I'm going to hit the road and hope for the best, so I'm about 40 miles from Albert Lee and the gasometer says I am.

I'm 40 miles on the low end, the roads are terrible, I don't care what car you drive, you get stuck behind. Vehicles traveling at 35 miles per hour like they are now on the interstate semis pass by and kick up a pile of snow. I'm looking forward to getting to my next stop carrying the bare minimum I need and then finishing the rest of the 20 mile trip. I plan to stay at my parents' house tonight and I won't be able to get back to Rochester, so I'm just logging 40 miles to go and hope we make it safely past the next lake.

I'm connected there. I'm going to open the Electrify America app on Android Auto. I'll choose nearby stations, it's the one I want. Right now I'm on charger number one. I'll press start upload. I just tried to get the car to do something. I see the loading start there. The car says please connect now. I'm plugged in fine and heard the beep. You can see the kilowatts are starting to flow, here's how to start a charging session from Android Auto. I must admit that was the second time I tried that there was a problem with my phone.

I had to restart my phone. I guess pixels have quite a few advantages. Interesting feature, almost like a tesled, but not just a sample, looks like there's a rivian in there charging too much. It's very nice that the Selectify America station is improving. The app says there are three available right now. The shared sockets have two. Yes, so far, very good. and a perfect experience and it seems like they are plowing this station, which is good, there goes the Rivian. It seemed like he tuned out at 79 percent. I was doing some quick math because I could see the screen there at the station I was charging at.

On average they put between 180 and 140 kilowatts, it was almost 100 kilowatt hours that they put into the battery, so it was a pretty decent 45 minute charging session for them, but it's still a testament to how quickly they can charge. the new electric vehicles. That's pretty good for this cold of temperatures when my Bolt is only handling 20 kilowatts right now, so it's certainly a generalization, it's unfair to simply say that all EVS are bad in the

winter

. You know, I wouldn't even call this one bad. you just need to change your approach a little. I can't just drive it like a normal vehicle and assume that you'll be able to load it up and live life exactly the same if you have to take a long road trip like I did, but as you can see with the Rivian, I mean, they were here for 45 minutes, so which is a decent stop, but there's a gas station here, there's a Brown Round restaurant right behind us, so even in these cold temperatures it charges at 150 180 kilowatts. on average it's pretty good and that's enough kilowatt hours.

I'm sure I'll let you know at least 100,200 miles to your destination, no problem, crashing into another EV driver in these crazy conditions just 20 minutes from my parents' house, so I hope the last leg goes smoothly. issues. Wow, what a road trip it was. It's eight degrees Fahrenheit here in Austin, a nice eight. That's the warmest temperature I've seen on the entire trip. In total, this was a 480 mile trip in all temperatures. below zero I used 200 kilowatt hours and most of that, of course, was used for driving, but a good portion of that is also used for weather.

I arrived with 22 miles left on the battery. I had enough energy to do some Christmas shopping here when I got into town. The weather wasn't that bad and it's going to get worse between now and Christmas, so I already did it. I'm going to plug my car in here. My parents have a120 volt outlet in the garage and an evse that my dad. use with your Fusion Energy um, I'm just going to change the charge limit here because I know it's a reliable outlet, we'll make it to 12. I plug in the charge and ride out the rest of the

storm

here, so happy holidays.

Merry Christmas, thanks for watching and see you on the next trip, bye.