# Road Trip to Texas and the Midwest with M3 AWD LR



## JoeP (Sep 7, 2018)

Im about 2/3rds of the way (3500 miles) through a 5000 miles 15 day road trip in my M3. (first time longer than going to LA which is 486 miles for me).
First time "living off Supercharging", although i did find some destination charging in Texas.

A few things:
- the range at 80mph is really a lot less than you think. Great reason to buy the LR car if you live someplace where there are 80mph speed limits on the Interstates..
- Superchargers are quite frequent on the Interstates. I had not trouble driving all the way to Houston from Northern California.
- abetterrouteplanner.org is a godsend. I leave it up on the web view in the car with my current trip and watch the graph. Very helpful in odd situations (like running into 30-40knot headwind going from Midland Texas to Dallas.). You can see when you're underperforming and *slow down* with plenty of time. It also seems *very* accurate, especially if you link to your live Tesla data. 
- log bugs. I logged about a dozen "bug reports" so far, when the car does something weird in Autopilot (which it will).
- Navigate on Autopilot hates weather. Texas Rain makes it disengage (and then rengage a moment later). Its quite odd. *AUTOPILOT* doesnt disengage, which is what you'd think might happen, only Navigate. I have no idea why, you'd think weather would affect AP more than NAP.

Current weird issues/things I've noticed that are different: (I'm running 2019.32.12.2):
- the car "fakes" a bit when you're in the right lane and an entrance enters the freeway especially. It jerks a bit like its going to move over into the entrance lane but then catches itself. Its very distinctive once you notice it. Solution: Dont drive in the rightmost lane. This sometimes happen when an exits departs the right lane too but seems to be less often. The little jerk at entrances seems to be very consistent.
- the car will *really stand on the brakes* to let someone in who is entering, even when you would naturally pass in front of them. This doesnt always happen but it happens enough that i always get over a lane when passing an entrance if i can now. (which is courteous anyway but still). This is Texas, they "Drive Friendly" here... I haven't figured out exactly what triggers this yet.
- weird line markings can be terrifying. I had a section in Oklahoma where they had *painted over* intermittently the dashed line between lanes on a 2 lane segment and the car went crazy, sometimes it disengaged AP, sometimes it tried to move into the other lane. I shut it off and drove the next 10 miles manually till they stopped doing that. So pay attention to what the road looks like and anticipate AP going nuts. Remember the car drives by the marks, not the way you would. (I had one instance where the lane markings went basically into a divider and the car tried to do that...) That actually happeened in California and is the only time so far when an accident would've resulted from AP if not disengaged.
- Its actually much better than you'd think at picking out *dim*/worn lane markings. Even when its raining. As long as the markings are *there* it'll do pretty well with them.
- Auto windshield wipers seem to work pretty acceptably even in heavy rain. Which surprised me because i remember them being useless in V9.
- Ive had very few "phantom braking" instances. Maybe 3 in 3500 miles? thats way better than i hear on this board. and 2 of those instances were pretty minor (the car realized what it was doing and aborted with just a small drop in speed)
- AP is very sensitive to another vehicle being in your lane *at all*. Like by inches. So i someone ahead of you is really close to the line turn AP off. Otherwise you might get a panic brake when that guy drifts 2 inches into your lane (which you as a driver would probably just ignore. AP won't.)

Thats a long list but overall the experience has been quite good. I'm a software guy so i tend to notice weird things happening a lot and report them. But overall driving this car long distance has been much less of a hassle than i expected and its definately less workload than driving a "dumb" car.

My Settings for ABetterRoutePlanner:
Maximum charge 90%
Minimum charge to arrive with 20%
If i see any segment in red, i try to eliminate it by putting in an extra charge stop if available (set waypoint to this charger)

(Yes this means i effectively never use 30% of the range of my car. In practice this means my "legs" are between 90 and 150 minutes max btw. Which is fine. I need to go to the bathroom more than the car does...)


----------



## Ed Post (Sep 18, 2018)

I've driven this part of Texas and had the same experiences, especially:
* 80mph range drops substantially
* West Texas winds -- you might as well be driving at 120mph if bucking a 40mpt headwind
* Entrance ramps -- it'll dodge into the exit ramp consistently
* Exit ramps -- in places where there's a long exit ramp delineated with a dashed line, the autopilot thinks you're in the wrong lane
* It used to at least recognize traffic cones in construction sites (would try to run them over anyway); now it doesn't see them at all


----------



## JoeP (Sep 7, 2018)

Well today’s supposed to be the last day of this trip but... the utility had a scheduled outage for the entire day at Wendover, Nevada -so I’ll be staying here tonight - the power will be on by 4pm they say but that’s too late to drive home today!

so I’d definitely be in the market for a “get me to the next supercharger backup solution...


----------



## JoeP (Sep 7, 2018)

And the power is back on in Wendover for anyone driving through.
Interestingly, the Tesla Navigation app showed the supercharger as working when i drove here, but after another driver of a black Model S who was also stuck here called it in, it changed to "Supercharger Closed" with a little red "No" circle on the display. It was still showing that after i plugged in when the power came back on about 2PM but it flipped back while i was sitting at the charger.

It'd be superhandy if Tesla knew about these things ahead of time (this one was a planned outage that was announced weeks ago) and would make the Supercharger not available on the app *before* it goes offline. That might have saved me stopping here. (i could've driven, *slowly* all the way to the next station in Elko, if i knew this one was going to be down The distance between the last previous station going West on I-80 is 182 miles (Toele, Utah, to Elko, Nevada). However you cant make that in a Long Range (Model 3) car at the speed limit (which is 80 on the Utah side).


----------

