Day 3 - Northern Ontario to Manitoba

Geoff had used his phone (rather than the dashboard) to set our maximum percentage charge the previous night and Geoff forgot that using the app to change battery charge level turns off battery conditioning (heating), so our battery didn’t condition coming into Thunder Bay. We realize it’s not really worth conditioning when headed to a 50kW charger (assuming your battery temperature is reasonably warm - it retains heat for quite a while). We think 25 degrees may be optimal battery temp for charging (more may just use juice with little/no benefit). Hyundai needs to fix that in a software update.

Thunder Bay – one plug was out at the Petro Canada (communication error) but the second was okay and we headed towards Upsala with 25% estimated SOC for arrival. Got to the Upsala Family Restaurant, to find someone in our charger (for the first time!). One was down – luckily the girls in a Kia EV only needed another 5 minutes. They also had 2 Tesla destination chargers (which we probably could have used in a pinch) and 6 Tesla superchargers (that we can’t yet use). We charged to 93% (took us roughly 1.5 hours on a slow charger) and meanwhile settled in with our computers at the ‘restaurant’ which was a hole in the wall with 2 tables and a bank of sandwiches, a warming unit with a bunch of comfort foods and baked goods. While initially a little sketchy, we actually had a great beef and barley soup, jalapeno poppers and really yummy homemade strawberry-rhubarb pie! Destination SOC estimate on ARBP for Dryden 8%.

Turned out we had 17% on arrival at the Ivy at Canadian Tire in Dryden (a 50kW Level 3). We were happy to find that as the Chargepoint at the GM Dealer (bit faster) had a line up of 3 cars (including the girls we’d encountered in Upsala). We charged to 62% and did some Christmas shopping (or at least browsing) while we waited. Next we hit Kenora and the Redden’s Store where we charged on an Ivy to 95%. This store – just outside Kenora - is incredible! It’s a huge emporium of everything you can think of under the sun and amazing fun gift stuff. So easy to kill yet another hour plus. It also advertised a restaurant which turned out to be a no-seat order counter with about 50 menu items – the Reuben and Philly cheese steak (that we ate in the car) were absolutely delish! We left there 7:20pm (after chatting with the girls in the other car who were clearly in competition for our chargers) ;).

So somehow it’s always our last leg that is the most challenging ;) Planning and navigating in an EV appears to be a pretty much full time job, switching between the various platforms, trying to confirm whether information is accurate and current…and this was no exception. We must have spent a few hours easily while charging and on the road trying to figure out what the heck was going on with our route from Kenora to Winnipeg. A Better Route Planner and even Google both were insistent that it was not a viable route – in fact they both routed us through the States to get there (a 500+ km trip)!!. Our calculations told us that we should be able to do this trip (that was roughly 225kms) – tight, but doable. But again, not somewhere you want to be stranded, and it was so puzzling why all our comms were telling us it wasn’t possible. Won’t bore you with the stress of that; suffice to say we will reach out to ABRP to ask what the heck was going on. The really weird thing is that as soon as we crossed the border into Manitoba it started routing properly again and showing that it was doable. Needless to say (or maybe we do need to say), we made it – with 16% left (had only we known for sure that we could do it and not just be trusting our gut).

At the Super 8 in Winnipeg someone had parked poorly next to the charger so they tried to find them before letting us plug in – this was 10:30 at night – we wanted to go to bed. They were very nice about it and finally let us plug in – it just reached.

Heads up from yesterday – in future we’ll check https://511on.ca/ for road conditions before heading out.

As we get to know the car and its capabilities, we’re trusting an average of 30kms for 10% of charge. ABRP seems to be quite conservative, so when it suggests charging to 100%, we’ll now go to 80 or 90% and be pretty confident we’ll be okay. This will save us a fair bit of time since the charging curve is much slower once you get beyond 80% (i.e. for the last 20%).

Apparently we’re useless bloggers as we forgot to take any pics en route L.

Woke up to full charge in Terrace Bay (Ivy - $46.44 ouch). Not sure why motels have Level 3’s?? ironically, on way out we noticed that the Red Dog Inn next door actually has a Level 2 so we might try it next time. Good brekky at Drifter’s – headed out to Thunder Bay, arrival SOC estimated at 11%. We think at this point that 10% of charge goes 27 km conservatively. We picked up speed again on this leg to 105km/h.