The range does kind of trip people out as soon as they ask how far it can go. With this being our second EV, the first being our Bolt, range issues aren't really something I think about anymore very often. It does indeed just take a different mindset.
We traded in our last two ICEV in buying this B from out of dallas. But we live 260 miles away from the dealer, and I have no patience for putting the B on a transport to bring it to tulsa. So I drove it. The dealer about had a melt down when I said that I was driving it... he simply doesn't understand.
So with that in mind, always have a back up plan, because he did what I expected, which was not charge it. It only had about 40% battery, but I got it to the north side of dallas where I plugged in at a whole foods, had dinner and took a nice long nap. The charger wasn't running particularly fast (5.5kW/h) so I just relaxed for a few hours (which was needed since I had already been on the road all day with the Titan towing a uhaul transport with our smart car on it).
Left there about midnight and drove to Atoka Oklahoma 96 miles away, which is obviously outside the 89 EPA range, but having lots of experience with hypermiling the Bolt, I just applied it to the B. Got there about 3am with mileage to spare. Travel time was a little long because of a stop in the middle somewhere when the car caught me dozing off and alarms started going off. Interesting tech... need to read up on how it knew I went to sleep while driving. Plugged in and went back to sleep, but I engaged the range extender, 7am the car was topped off and displayed 122 miles range, 9 miles short of my destination.
I was not able to open up the spread between the expected range and the actual range on navigation, this is probably the most important thing I think I've learned about driving a EV with their guess o meters... I constantly am checking the expected range VS the actual distance to go. If the net difference In the spread starts shrinking, I slow down, reduce climate control. If its growing but I want to drive a little faster, I can speed up or add more climate control. If its stable and I can't make it grow or shrink, then I feel like i'm at the max of my ability and the guess o meter isn't guessing any more.
So knowing I would definitely be 9 miles short from home, I stopped for a few mins in McAlester Oklahoma, grabbed breakfast now that it was closer to 9am, chatted with the store owner, who owns a Tesla X and had never heard of a B. What I didn't know was that the car was pulling almost 10kW off my 40A charger I carry with me. And shortly I had wayyyyy more than enough to get home and was there by 10:30am. Pretty fun, but uneventful trip.
89 miles sounds tiny.. but with the range extender, patience and planning, its even possible to travel across a EV desert like Oklahoma. EVs are more about enjoying the trip, than simply going as far as you can, as fast as you can. Slow down and spend some time sharing your EV experiences with strangers.
