DAN EDMUNDS: It's a great night, slept really well.
It's hard to not have a great view everywhere you look here.
And so this has been a really cool place.
We've got to get an early start this morning
because this next leg is 95, 99 miles-- somewhere in there,
I forget.
So we got to go back down to Lone Pine,
top up the battery for, I don't know,
probably 15 or 20 minutes, and then hit the road.
So we just Lone Pine.
We just unplugged from the supercharger.
We were there about 40 minutes.
A little longer than I thought, but we were just
trying to top off the battery.
Batteries charge very slowly at the end.
The next leg is 99 and 1/2 miles and 4,000 feet elevation gain.
So this is going to be the nail-biter of the day.
As far as this being a good tow vehicle,
except for the range part, it feels pretty outstanding.
It's got air suspension, so it's able to level it to counteract
the tongue way to the trailer.
It accelerates and decelerates very smoothly,
and it has plenty of beans.
And the regenerative braking that all electric cars
have where they basically use the magnetism in the motor
to slow the car down works really well with a trailer
back there.
I mean, I can come almost to a complete stop
without using the brake pedal.
And that's great, because all that energy
is going back into the battery when that's going on.
We're about a third of the way to mammoth,
and I'm looking at the range meters,
and it's not looking great.
The original projection was we'd arrive with 20% battery.
It's dropped to 15% battery.
We still have a big climb ahead of us, so what I've done
is I've trimmed 2 miles an hour off our speed,
but let's see if that helps.
And I'm keeping one eye on the liter trying
to see if the projected battery life at the end point
maybe rises a little bit.
That doesn't mean I'm generating electricity,
it just means I'm using it at a less rapid pace, which
will leave me with a little bit more when I get there.
This is the feeling I had yesterday at Inyokern,
and I made the decision to hop off and charge
at that supercharger, but I don't have that option today.
I've got to go to Mammoth.
There's no choice.
I mean, the worst case scenario is a disconnect
the trailer, I leave it by the side of the road,
drive into town without the trailer,
top up, come back, get the trailer, and then keep going,
but I don't want to do that.
Aerodynamic drag is the big enemy here--
not necessarily the weight to the trailer, but just the fact
that there's a box behind me that's
like a little bit of a parachute.
Aerodynamic drag goes up with the square root of speed,
so the faster you go, the drag really gets big in a hurry.
So every little bit you can trim off on the speed will help.
Instead of going 55, I'm going 53.
It doesn't sound like much, but I'm only looking
for a couple of percent here.
About 25 minutes ago, I made the decision.
I dropped my speed from 55 to 53,
and I think that stabilized the situation because we're still
where we were when I made that speed change,
so I think that's good.
And we're just cruising up to grade.
We've only got 23 miles to go.
The consumption meter is pegged.
This is the last five minutes, so we've been on the grade
for more than five minutes.
If I go to 15, you can see here's where the grade started.
If I go to 30, you get a better picture
of what we were doing as we went through Bishop,
and then hit the gray.
All of these projections are dire when it comes to--
if this is expecting me to continue
to drive like I am right now all the way to Mammoth,
it'll adjust when the grade levels
off when we get to the top, which is about to happen.
So if you like data, this car will give you more data
than you know what to do with.
Sometimes I know what to do with it
and other times it just freaks me out.
We're rolling into Mammoth Lakes.
We've got 13% battery left.
It looked like the decision to cut my speed helped out,
and we're here.
One thing I noticed when I drove our Tesla Model S to New York
on the supercharger network and we're noticing is doubly true
here, is there is this zen quality to traveling
on a supercharger network.
It's not like you dive into a gas station,
fill up in five minutes, go in and buy a microwave burrito,
and get back on the road because you've got to get there.
Here, you can't do that even if you wanted to.
That takes the whole burden off of where do we stop.
All of that stuff is built in because you're
going to be here an hour.
You can take care of everything, you can chill,
you get back in the car, and you're on the road.
So we're making good time on the road to our next stop
at Topaz Lake from Mammoth Lakes,
and it's mostly downhill.
It's still about 96 miles, but downhill trend
so we've got plenty of battery.
We decided we'd take a nice little side trip on this dirt
road, check out the view here, and stretch our legs.
And we finally got the air conditioning figured out.
It turns out that we had the rear AC on,
and that was draining a little bit more,
so we turned it off because nobody's sitting back there.
Got the sunshade, such as it is, overhead,
so that's cutting down on the radiant heat from the top,
and now we're all happy and it's pretty comfy in there.
And we've got plenty of range, so yeah.
Maybe on our way back, when we have to go up on this route,
it might be a different situation.
But today, we're loving it.
We're here, and I've never been so happy
to see a detour road closed sign in my life,
because it made us go around the long way on a dirt road
through the forest that was just spectacular.
We splashed through a little mud puddles, which is always good.
And now we're here.
We've got a great, great campsite
and we're ready to relax and watch the sun go down.