Cold weather and snow and mountains (oh my!) What has been your EV experience?

Cool!

How many times did you have to stop? Looking at the map, that route is littered with dozens of Tesla Supercharger stations.

On my normal route to the inlaws, it's 200 km to the first Tesla Supercharger, then another 238 km from there to the next Tesla Supercharger. (And that last leg isn't that different if I use non-Tesla quick charging stations). It's also not near as flat, with some thousand meters going up and down in altitude. But driving due East and adding 3 (summer) driving hours does keep the Tesla Supercharger stations more like 100 km appart.

 

Ya, the EV range debate is complicated. I need to go 1 mile to work and 1 mile back. I need about 5 miles to get to anywhere in town, and 5 back. It's about 10 to my mother's house. It's 30 miles and 30 back from the nearest actual town (albeit, a dead end on the highway most of the year).

I think owning two cars would make sense, a "clunker" EV for around town and nice ICEV for the highway. Or some sort of plug-in hybrid that does it all.

The mistake I made with the Leaf is I had a nice new EV for around town and had to use the 1985 DIESEL VW non-turbo Golf with all its rust, black clouds of billowing smoke, and its whopping 40 hp (or at least 40hp some 700,000 miles ago) that would get me pulled over going up mountain passes with the pedal to the metal for going too slow. (The officer just wanted to make sure I was ok).

 

I was actually gathering the parts together to make a range extending trailer for the Leaf. The problem is that batteries were too expensive and with ICE's I wanted one that would comply with at least the emissions for a normal ICE hatchback of the same year. Neither option seemed possible given my budget. So we traded it for the Avalon. So far so good, except the problems with the infotainment center and the stupid fabric wheel wells.