EV Road Trip - Charging Stops

A quick note on charging stops for a road trip in different brand EV's. Tesla Vs. Cadillac. On separate trips from Detroit to Chicago, in my 2018 Model 3 Dual Motor Long Range, 2014 Tesla Model S P85D, and 2024 Cadillac Lyriq Sport AWD, I used different charging strategies. The first was using the vehicles recommended charging stops, the second was driving to 10% and then charging. The goal was to see whether the car’s GPS and charge strategy was the best method, or planning my own charge stops worked out better.

This is not an apples-to-apples comparison as all these cars charge differently. However, it was more of a quick comparison between companies range and charge recommendations. One quick observation to note, the Model S and Model 3 at the time were running different MCU's which presented different charge stop recommendations. Also, no changes were made to settings to affect the standard recommended charge stops.

Tesla, even running different MCU's and GPS firmware etc., both were fairly close to each other in the recommended charging stops. Meaning, both of my Tesla's recommended stopping between 30% - 40% SOC.

Cadillac, however, recommended charging at the lowest SOC possible using the cars Google based GPS system. This meant I was driving down to 5% SOC before charging to 80% to get back on the road again.

Driving to Chicago would be done using each car’s recommended charge stops. The drive back from Chicago would then be done using the second charge strategy. I wanted to do the opposite of what the car recommended for the return trip to determine which trip took longer.

Tesla GPS recommended I stop at mid to low SOC and charge to the needed SOC to get me on the road and to the next stop. On the way back I drove down to 10% SOC and charged to 80%. the thinking was, if I wait to charge, then I can drive further..... It took two hours longer to get from Chicago to Detroit using this method.