Tesla 55 Goes to Yosemite

2009 May 14

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My recharge spot was Yosemite Pines RV Resort (20450 Old Highway 120 Groveland CA 95321). I had called ahead to make sure it would be OK. They were very nice, though I think they were a little skeptical about this crazy guy with a car small enough to fit inside many of the other "vehicles" parked there :-) But they had lots of room and were willing to give it a go. I happily paid them $20 for their trouble. (I ended up using about 40 kWh; $20 seems like a reasonably fair price all in all.) I sat in the shade and read my Amazon Kindle while my car ate electrons at 240v and 40A. And took a few loops around their "nature trail" to get in my daily quota of exercise. After one of the loops I returned to find that the circuit breaker had tripped. Resetting it worked fine but I lost a bit of time. After that I monitored the breaker more closely. It did get pretty hot but not dangerously so.

I don't have a Tesla MC240; I have Martin Eberhard's mobile charger system instead. It lets me hook up to a variety of different recepticles. And more importantly, it lets me use 40A with the NEMA 14-50 plug (the "50A RV connector" found at many RV parks). The MC240 only does 30A with correspondingly longer charge times.

After 4 1/2 hours my charge level was up to 88%. Conservatively, that's enough for at least 150 miles. That gave me enough energy to make the round trip to the valley and back (80 miles) plus a side trip to Galcier Point (50 miles) and still have enough to poke around in the valley a bit and a small margin for error.
Bill Arnett