Forgot to Charge, Still OK

When I got into my car to run my weekly errands this morning, I was disappointed to see that my car was only at 34% charged. Usually, I charge to around 63% overnight, and use up about 20% charge while running errands, coming home with about 42% of my charge remaining. I’m not exactly sure how my routine got messed up this time. Although while thinking about it, it must have occurred on Saturday, since I do recall starting my drive to church on Sunday at a lower-than-usual charge. But then why didn’t I plug it on Sunday? I suppose I probably left it unplugged in the anticipation of going out later that day, and when I didn’t go out, I didn’t bother going back to the garage to plug it in later. I didn’t leave the house Monday. Wait, it’s Thursday now, this can’t be right. Let me step back— I had the usual charge when I took the kids to school on Tuesday. And then we had a play date that afternoon, which would account for the extra 10% charge used that day. OK. I didn’t leave the house on Wednesday since it snowed. Then I stayed home on Thursday, too. So I forgot to plug in the car after returning home from the play date Tuesday afternoon. I’m not sure why, I woul not have had groceries in the car to unload or anything. Hmm. But I am not surprised that I didn’t notice it was unplugged the next two days since I didn’t venture into the garage. So that gets us to this morning, and it was too late for me to bother plugging it in once I noticed the low charge, but I did a little mental math that 34% should be plenty if I typically use up 20% in a day, I should come home with 16% charge remaining. That would be fine with me. If there was some unexpected problem, I could always stop by the supercharger in Cville for a few minutes between errands. But there was no problem. The drive home from Cville is approximately 12 miles, and I checked to see where my charge was at before I made that last leg, while I still had a chance to use the supercharger if needed. I had 25% charge remaining. Some more mental math told me with a range of 240 miles, each 10% would cover 24 miles, so I ought to have 60 miles left at that point, and I even changed my display temporarily from % to miles to double-check my math (Tesla calculated 63 miles versus my estimate of 60). So I blew off the supercharger as unnecessary, and headed home. The little battery charge icon turned orange on my dash somewhere around 20%, but I think I had still had over 16% left when I arrived home. I didn’t bother adjusting my driving style or cabin temperature or anything, and so it was a typical drive home. Next time I see 34% in the charge for whatever reason, I’ll have a higher level of experience driving with my car down on the lower end of its battery, and maybe I won’t bother doing the math. Or maybe I will, it only takes a split-second since it’s easy math. Still, I am happy to see that forgetting to charge (even for a few days, since I don’t always drive every day) does not render my car useless. My husband was a little worried before I got the car that I would be stuck at home sometimes because I forgot to charge, but now I see that I would probably have to forget not only once, but forget again AFTER driving around the next day I needed the car. Today I got a large message on my touchscreen once I was back in my garage saying something like, “If it gets any colder, your car will not have much range. We recommend you charge immediately.” And so I did. I’ve got the garage charger dialed down to about half its full speed (20A) because I read it’s better to charge the battery slowly if you could. I could slow it down even more since it’s usually only charging 20% per night, and I have more than 12 hours from when I typically come home until I need to take it out again. But I picked 20A as an arbitrary rate to see how it would work out, and it told me it would take over 8 hours to charge tonight. I’m not going anywhere, that’s fine. And I’m just pleased that my electric car has enough range that it’s even forget-proof for my routine driving.