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477 Posts
Distance: Very close to 1000 miles. My home near Dayton, OH to Washington D.C. and back.
The good:
The good:
- No serious issues. All charging stops went fine - these were planned in advance and checked in PlugShare to make sure they were operational before leaving.
- Autocharge+ is really nice once setup.
- The car is very pleasant on road trips. Nice riding, and overall easy to manage.
- Being able to warm the car before leaving is also really nice.
- The navigation and maps are just okay. They get the job done and didn't guide me astray, but:
- Integration with the phone app is poor. (See negatives below.)
- The navigation correctly identified that I would need to charge en route, and added bizarrely chosen charge stops (at the slowest DCFCs on the routes...). When ignored, the navigation keeps trying to route you back to the ignored charge stop, even if you've gone 30 or 40 miles down the road which is just absurd, until you manually recalculate the route (by clicking the route change/cancel icon and selecting the "Recalculate Route" option). If you skip a charge stop, it should just find another one on the route and remove the skipped one. After figuring out the recalculate thing to fix it, all went well. Nissan should improve this though.
- ProPilot 1.5. I have an Evolve+, so no ProPilot 2.0, which might work better.
- Good: Follow me in stop and go traffic works a treat! In general, the whole forward detection and speed control works very nicely.
- Bad: Steering Assist also works well, except for some issues with the hands-on-the-steering-wheel nagger that I think should be addressed.
- Bug 1: If you enter a major construction zone that it knows about, it will prompt you to put both hands on the wheel. (By giving you the hands notice until you do that, and eventually you figure out that it really wants both hands.) Okay, there's some logic to that. Sometimes. Where it doesn't make sense: Traffic is moving very slowly through the construction zone. If you're going 3-5 mph, there's really no need to have both hands on the wheel, but it still wants you to.
- Bug 2: It gets stuck in this both-hands-on-the-wheel mode! Once this mode turns on, it doesn't turn back off until you turn the car off and back on. 30 miles after a construction zone, I decided to test that. It was still insisting I have both hands on the wheel with no obvious reason, so I pulled over to the side of the highway at a safe spot, turned the car off, back on, and started on my way again, and it was now okay with just one hand again.
- Bug 3: (sort of) It has a limit to how tight of a turn it can handle. The PA Turnpike (I-70 portion) is a very old Interstate with some unusually sharp turns. They're working on rebuilding it to remove those, but it's a many-years-long process. Apparently the Steering Assist has a limit to how sharply it will turn, and several times it would not turn sharp enough and ended up turning itself off.
- There's a button to the left of the steering wheel on the dash, with a picture of a steering wheel on it. Press that button and the steering assist turns off. Press again and it turns back on. Pretty handy to have that on a dedicated button.
- OMG! Charge stations need roofs!!!! It was 39 degrees and pouring down rain when I did my first EVGo charge. I plugged in, got back into the car and went into the app, only to get prompted in the app to unplug because you have to start the Autocharge setup with the car unplugged, then plug it in. Get out of the car into 39 degree pouring rain, unplug. Get back in, and go back to the app. Okay, now it's ready for me to plugin. Get out into 39 degree pouring rain and plug in. Get back into the car. It goes through the rigmarole, then loses connection part way through, gets an error... Start over... Worked the second time, thank goodness... I was freezing and soaked by then and if it hadn't worked I was going to give up and do it some other time. Fortunately, once setup Autocharge+ worked very well and reliably and will definitely cause me to seek out EVGo when possible.
- NissanConnect App Maps. One of the features in the app is it will let you plan a route, and then send it to the car at a scheduled time. In the app, this works very nicely. You can pick alternate routes, add waypoints for specific charge stops, set a departure time, and it sends it to the car. How cool is that? Well...... It would be very cool if it worked right. What got sent to the car? My destination. That's it. Got into the car, and it prompted me to accept the route sent from the app. Then routed me on a different route without the waypoints that I had set. I had to redo that in the car. Rumor has it there's a new app coming, so maybe that one will work better?
- Dayton -> DC
- EA at Cambridge, OH. Only got a little charge, about 10 minutes at 60 kW. Unit worked fine. WalMart with nothing else there.
- EA at Belle Vernon, PA. Charged to 90%, at 70 kW. At a Sheetz, which is really a nice location for this.
- EVGo at Hagerstown, MD. Charged to 90%, at 70 kW (100kW station named Anka). Grocery store with lots of fast food nearby.
- DC -> Dayton
- EVGo at Hagerstown, MD. Used Anka again, got the same rate, and charged to 90%.
- EA at Belle Vernon, PA. Charged to 98% thinking maybe I could make it all the way home. Got 90 kW (initially) from the same charger. It was warmer out. Dropped down to 21 at about 91% charge and stayed there all the way to 98%. Belle Vernon to my house is 243 miles, mostly at 70-75 mph.
- EVGo at Reynoldsburg, OH. Chickened out with 28% left and added exactly 20% (so that I could see how close it would have been). Got 70kW from a 100kW charger.
- Pulled into the driveway with 22% left. I would have made it without the additional 20%, but it would have been really close.
