Now that spring weather is in full swing, I took my first real roadtrip this past weekend to Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. About 650 miles round trip, give or take.
First: If you haven’t been to Black Canyon, go. It’s an amazing place.
There’s some construction going on at Highway 50 at the moment, so I took the northerly route both ways. (I wanted to take the southern route on the way there, and do north on the way back, but so be it.)
Starting off in Boulder, I wanted to see if I could make it to Grand Junction on a single charge. That’s four hours of driving and about 260 miles. My car is a Touring on 19s, so my EPA rating is technically 425 miles. But there are some obvious factors that make this not necessarily a no-brainer.
I don’t want to drive from 100% to 0%. Ever. So I want to build in a very generous buffer.
There’s a considerable vertical climb involved, as I would be starting out at roughly 5,600 ft and climbing up over 9,000 before descending back down.
It would be raining for the first 90 miles or so of the journey, where the climb was steepest.
I wanted to stop for a rest at Vail, which would involve some small town street driving and parking, etc.
Despite it being a three-day trip, there would be a considerable amount of luggage and other various niceties in the car, along with two other people, adding some weight.
EPA is all about what’s possible, not what’s practical. I didn’t want to drive like I was trying to eke out every mile, and I wanted to be very realistic about how well the car would do.
Still, 260 miles would be doable with room to spare, right?
And indeed, it worked out fine. I started at 100% SoC by charging overnight on my home L2 charger. So not a tremendous amount of heat strain or loss on the battery. I used ACC / HA to keep my speed just under 70 most of the way. Painful, but speed is the biggest factor in losing efficiency. I had the AC going normal. No point in being uncomfortable. The temperature outside ranged from 38-degrees up to 78 throughout the trip. (Such is mountain driving.) My tire pressure was 50 PSI all around. (I like to overfill by just a little bit, and I check often to be sure the tires remain properly inflated.)
My mi/kWh was pretty abysmal at 2.7 or so for that rainy 90-mile climb, but once I stopped climbing and the weather improved, I managed to shoot up to 4.1 mi/kWh average for the overall trip.
I reached Grand Junction with 33% SoC, which was plenty of buffer. In fact, I could have easily pushed on without charging all the way to Montrose, 15 miles from the Park, another hour (60+ miles) away, and still had range to spare. But I had the time and wanted to spend a few hours in Grand Junction, anyway. So I charged there.
Bottom line: my conservative estimates made the journey stress free. Range anxiety? Nope.
EA at Grand Junction has a few 150 kW chargers and a few 350 kW. I jumped on one of the 350s. My first attempt ended up giving me an error message, but a quick switch to the other cable on the same charger got it going just fine. Went from 30% to 80% in 29 minutes. Topped out at 162 kW at the beginning of the charge, and followed a predictable curve down all the way to 80%. I was pleased with outcome. This is about as good as charging gets at the moment, and it’s not a bad thing.
That charge in Grand Junction to 80% saved me from needing to charge again until the trip home.
I made it to Montrose with about 57% SoC. Parked overnight. Drove about 15 miles to the Black Canyon Park (another climb of about 3,000 ft), and drove around the park for the day, stopping and starting often. Got back to Montrose in the evening with 42%.
The next morning we went back to the park to enjoy the views one more time before heading back home. Ended that visit with 29% SoC.
Sunday morning I took the car to fast charge in Montrose for the long haul home. Montrose has no EA, but they do have a ChargePoint station with 2 200 kW chargers.
Not wanting to fast charge to 100%, which takes way too long, I stopped again at 80%, knowing that would mean needing another charge before I got all the way home.
Charging again went fine. This one worked on the first try. But the 200 kW charger topped out at about 105 kW. Not sure whether it was getting split with the Hyundai Ionic 5 next to me or not. These ChargePoint fast chargers are quite new.
Since it wasn’t EA, it wasn’t free. But the charge from 29% to 80% cost me $15.50. Hard to complain about that.
Stopped in Grand Junction again for lunch. Stopped a few more times for bathroom breaks. Made one last charging stop at EA in Edwards, just to give me a bit more juice to get home with a healthy buffer again. In about 20 minutes, I filled up from about 33% to 65%, which turned out to be way more than I needed. But again, why stress about it? Charging station was located next to a convenience store / gas station / Wendy’s. Even had some outside tables with umbrellas to sit. Perfect opportunity for another bathroom break.
Again with EA, I had to use the right-hand-side cable, as the one on the left just didn’t start a charge. (Not sure what that is, but it’s no big deal.) Top speed on that 350 kW charger was 180 before ramping down again along the predictable charging curve.
Stopped for dinner in Morrison, as it was getting late. Weather on the way home was much more cooperative. Only a few light showers through the mountains and sunny the rest of the way. AC had no issues keeping up. In fact, at times we were a bit chilly.
Got home safe and sound with about 33% SoC. So I could have spent even less time at that last EA station.
Overall, it was a great trip, and the car performed like a champ.
At this point, I figure in decent weather, with few mountains to climb, I could easily regularly get 360 miles or so with plenty of charge to spare in case something went wrong. I am quite pleased with that. If I really tried, I’m pretty convinced I could get the EPA 425 miles. But I’ll never want to push it to 0%, anyway. So no need to test that theory. 360 is at least one bathroom break longer than I’d ever want to go on a single stretch, anyway.
68-69 mph is the sweet spot for this car. A few times on the way home, once I realized I had plenty of juice to get home, I let myself zip up to 80 or 85, and my mi/kWh almost immediately tanked. Especially climbing mountains. You will never get anywhere near peak efficiency at that speed. Which is fine, because I only need peak efficiency when I’m doing extended trips like this. When I’m home, driving under 200 miles a day, I drive it like I stole it and don’t fret over the electricity.
Colorado is in a sweet spot right now, where there are enough EVs to warrant decent infrastructure, but not enough to cause long lines at the charging station. They have a long way to go to cover the entire state, but along the 70, which is one of the busiest routes in the state, there are plenty of charging spots, so you can almost always push on to the next one if you encounter an issue. I came close a few times, but I never had to wait for a charger. I also think it’s interesting they are working with ChargePoint, not EA, to add more chargers along critical points. I don’t mind paying for good service. And the competition seems to be good for EA. I have yet to encounter an EA charger here that is broken.
The other charging companies seem to be following the fast food industry approach of placing chargers wherever there are already Tesla Superchargers. This is a smart strategy. Let Elon figure out where the best spots are and just copy him. Eventually, when Tesla opens some of these chargers to the rest of us, it’ll be even better.
HA on highway 70 through the Rockies is not quite as effective as HA around the highways in Boulder. It really does matter which road you are on. The big issue is the dashed lane divider markers on 70 are often severely worn or just not there at all for long stretches. This seems to throw HA off quite a bit.
I don’t mind when it loses itself on a sharp curve and forces you to take over. But there were also times where it just got confused about where to be, and I had to nudge it back to the center of the invisible lane. Not to mention, the winter is murder on those roads, so there’s a lot of pothole dodging that needs to occur. All ADAS systems are oblivious to this.
In the end, I just switched over to ACC for most of the trip and handled steering myself. Not a big deal. I was only using ADAS to keep me from being a lead foot, anyway. Still, I think Lucid should send a team over this mountain highway and see if they could make some improvements to the software. Either that, or NVidia just needs more data along that stretch. Hope my drive helped feed the network.
The seats in this car are just superb. I never felt the least bit uncomfortable, and neither did my passengers. They are firm and supportive, but soft to the touch and just comfy? For lack of a better word. Perfect long-distance seats. I’ve never had a car where I didn’t feel at least a bit sore after a long trip. This morning I woke up fine.
The car had zero software glitches. Zero. I don’t even remember the last time I did a reset of any kind. It was before we all discovered the “Logo reset.” I know that much.
Of course, I rely extensively on CarPlay, so I do think that helps. All nav and infotainment basically happens via the phone. And I had no hiccups on this trip with any of that. CarPlay was consistent. I didn’t even have the occasional audio dropouts I’ve seen from time to time.
Honestly, once I start driving, I don’t really use the car’s software much, anyway. Climate controls, sun shades, checking the efficiency once in a while. What else do you really need?
Cameras came up each and every time. No odd glitches with the sound.
HA / ACC are easy enough to engage and disengage. ACC worked perfectly. HA you can see from my earlier post. Definitely room for improvement. But I like to drive, so that’s not a big deal to me. What was a big deal to me was driving over 600 miles without a single instance of the car braking for no reason. Cars cutting in front of me were handled with perfect smoothness. I can’t emphasize enough how excited I am to have a car that doesn’t phantom brake at all after driving one that did constantly for three years.
Don’t let anyone tell you this car is not good for road trips. It’s beyond excellent for road trips. The range is far beyond what I’d be willing to go without stopping. Way better than I ever got out of my Model 3. Charging was not an issue on the trip at all. (Switching out a cable at EA is hardly something to fret about.) And sitting inside a Lucid for several hours is no bad place to be.
I don’t want to discount other people’s issues that have been reported here. I’ve occasionally had some of those same issues. But on this trip, and the vast majority of my time with this car for the last 5 months, my Touring has performed well above expectations. And it’s just an amazing car to drive. Particularly over long distances.
