Recently, I rented a Kia E-Niro as the teenagers were complaining about the 11 hr trip to Tremblant. We managed the Tremblant run in 8 hrs and 15 minutes, vs the usual 11 hrs. The Teenagers were most pleased. In an effort to further explore this, I figured Id try some of the other EVs in Hertz’s garage. Love and behold, they had a Model Y I could check out for my February holiday weekend jaunt to Tremblant. We managed a little better, and did the Tremblant run in 8 hrs flat.
Before we get into it, the current political climate nowadays is very charged. Somehow Mr. Musk, Teslas CEO, has been making very controversial moves in his new role as “CEO” of the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency, not to mention a long list of questionable and derogatory statements we strongly object to. That alone probably puts Tesla in our bad books, but in an effort to separate the art from the artist, and for the science of EVs, I held my nose and checked out the Model Y.
We did the run to Tremblant in 8 hours flat, taking the 401-416 route. It is slightly longer than what I usually do in the Leaf, the faster driving on the 401-416 more than makes up for it (source). A brief summary of my previous trips can be seen below.
Compared to the Kia E-Niro, the efficiency is a little lower, but the averaged charge speed is much higher, almost double. This reduces the charging stops substantially, from “about an hour” in the Leaf to “45” minutes in the E-Niro, to “30”-ish minutes in the Model Y. While it charges faster, the lower efficiency of the Y, reduces this advantage somewhat. In the end, this matters. The km/hr charging speed, is in many ways the most important metric, there we see 150 km/hr for the Leaf, 200 km/hr for the E-Niro, and 325 km/hr for the Y.
The lower efficiency, also reduces the benefit of the Model Y’s larger battery, at 75 kWh compared to the 65 kWh of the E-Niro (source and source). Thus we were able to travel a bit further in the E-Niro between charging stops. Granted, along the route, there was ample charging available, hence this did not really matter much in the end, as both cars required two charging stops.
To be fair, the conditions in our Model Y run were quite a bit worse compared to our earlier E-Niro run. It was considerably colder (-10 to -20 C, vs 0 to -10 C), and winter weather made for delays owning to snow removal operations. I suspect the E-Niro would not have made the Tremblant run in 8hrs and 15 minutes under these conditions. Also, my wife recons I should have given the Model Y a “20 minute bonus”, as we did get stuck behind a snow-plow during snow-removal. But that slower driving has a silver lining, as that does improve efficiency, to about 4.2 km/kWh, not enough to catch the E-Niro but it does close the gap, so Ill keep my statistics real.
Also, we did encounter busy superchargers on our journey, when this happens, the supercharger does not dish out the full 250 kW the Tesla Model Y can support, but settles for something closer to 90 kW. This happened on our return trip, which took even longer, at 10 hrs, largely due to a crash on the 401, hence we opted to report on our trip to Tremblant. But the point stands, sometimes fate erases the benefits you get for purchasing a car for twice the money.
Electric car adventures 