Trip to San Antonio

Entry posted by SpiceWare June 10, 2019

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Headed to San Antonio for the weekend with my folks. We met up with my sister and her family, and stayed at the Éilan Hotel & Spa. It's part of the BlueGreen timeshare that my folks belong to. View from the balcony of my folks' room:

I preferred the view from my room, though it did not have a balcony so I took this through the window.

Hotel was nice, but they had no options for charging the car. If they did the trip would have had a brief 10 minute charging stop in Flatonia (though it would have been longer as we'd have used the stop to eat dinner):

Since they didn't, we detoured to San Marcos to charge:

While it only added 7 miles to the trip, we were there longer than the trip planner's estimate of 10 minutes because it assumes you can charge at your destination. The car shows an estimate of over an hour for a full charge, but that's off:

What's wrong is the display pegged at 500 mi/hr based on the old max charging rate of 120 kW. Tesla recently did an update which increased the max rate of most existing Superchargers to 150 kW, which results in a higher mi/hr rate as seen in this tweet - I suspect their car has a newer firmware than I do. The charge rate was definitely faster than past experience though, so I know it was doing over 500 mi/hr.

The Supercharger is located in the back lot of the San Marcos Premium Outlet Mall. We had dinner in the food court then wandered around for a bit. I found an interesting BBQ Sauce at Pepper Palace - sample tasted good on a chip, hopefully it does as well on actual BBQ.

We got back to the car about 45 minutes after arriving. Charge wasn't at 100%, but with about 300 miles of range I felt we had enough for the weekend. We arrived at the the hotel with 244 miles.

I had Sentry Mode on which used about a mile of range per hour to monitor the car.

This was much better than our Trip to Lafayette where I ended up turned off the newly released Sentry Mode feature because it had used 15 miles of range in just a few hours.

On Saturday my folks and I met up with some friends of mine for Dim Sum at Golden Wok. Afterwards we had some time to kill, so we decided to try out a non-Tesla charging option. I used the Plugshare App and found a Chargepoint site at a nearby mall.

We first tried the circled location, but none of the 4 charging stations worked. We then drove around the mall to the squared location. We expected to find 4 charging stations, there was only 1 but it was a newer 2-connector model than the first chargers we tried. The chargers use the J1772 plugs, so I was finally able to utilize the adapter that came with my car - Tesla side up:

J1772 side up:

I have a label with my phone number on the adapter as I've read about Tesla owners leaving their's behind, though after using one I don't know they did that as I had to plug the handle back into the charging station to end the session, and you're not able to do that with the adapter still connected. Maybe older charging stations don't require you to do that.

I was able to initiate the charging session via ApplePay on my iPhone. The charge rate wasn't very impressing, only 22 miles per hour (same as the 30 amp dryer outlet at home). We left after about 45 minutes and had gained 15 miles of range. That cost me $2, which is rather expensive, though I later found out the cost was $1 per hour with a $2 minimum. If we'd stayed 2 hours we'd have gained around 44 miles, which would have been more reasonable.

However we couldn't stay as we had to make our way to the Freeman Coliseum for my cousin's kid's graduation.

On Sunday we had breakfast at the hotel before leaving. We didn't have enough range to make it the 105 miles to Flatonia, so had to detour to San Marcos a second time.

Yes the estimated range shows 111 miles of range but that's based on average speed of 65mph, I-10 has a limit of 75 mph between Houston and San Antonio so range will be less due to increased wind resistance.

We stayed in San Marcos about 40 minutes, just long enough to spend some money at the Hilfiger outlet store. Picked up a couple new shirts for what I'd have paid locally for one.

We travelled about 570 miles for the trip and spent $17.62 on charging (and this includes the $2 experiment with the ChargePoint location, which we didn't need).