miimura
Well-known member
I just got my 2012 RAV4 EV after joining the forum several months ago. I’ve been thinking about this car since I first heard about it. I did the little joke of a test drive at the National Plug in Day event at DeAnza College in Cupertino. This was during the Toyota tour where they were taking the early production RAV4 EVs and Prius Plug-In cars around to different events up and down California. Later I drove one on a proper test drive at a local dealer. They were only giving $50 off MSRP at the time and I had not really talked to my wife about this car yet, even though we had been wanting to replace our 2001 Passat Wagon for quite some time. Overall I’m very disappointed in the declining selection of wagons over the years in the states even though they are plentiful in other parts of the world, but that’s a different story.
Since we got back from our Easter vacation, my wife and I have been talking more about what car to buy. She was initially very much against any RAV4 even though she liked the Highlander Hybrid. “It’s a girl car and even I don’t want to be seen in it”. Finally, she started to come around and finally said I should get the RAV4 EV and I’d better find a dealer before she changed her mind. This was Friday morning April 26th. So, I did some searching online to see who had what inventory. We really wanted to the Shoreline Blue and there were none showing up in the Bay Area. I had noticed earlier that the inventory at some dealers like Magnussen’s Palo Alto don’t show up at Cars.com, so I checked theirs directly on their own web site. One dealer in the LA area was showing two blue cars and I filled in their contact form on their web site and in about 5 minutes somebody called me. The gentleman was very nice and immediately pointed out that the ones they have are 2013’s and the Toyota Subvention Cash does not apply to them. So, I quickly opened up the search to the whole state for 2012 Shoreline Blue and found only two cars - one at Roseville and one at Oxnard. I called Roseville Toyota and eventually found out that the car they showed on their web site was sold on April 7th. So, I called DCH Toyota Oxnard. I talked to Jonathan and he was very nice. I told him I wanted the Shoreline Blue RAV4 EV and I’d like to know if it was still available. He quickly verified that it was there and not sold yet. I asked him to get me a quote that would make it worth my while to buy from him since I was in the Bay Area. He called back in about 5-10 minutes with $1,000 below invoice which came to $0 down, $43,837 financed after all the tax, title, license and $10,000 Toyota Subvention Cash applied. That is about $500 more than the best dealer selling price I had heard of, but for the last car eligible for the $10,000 from Toyota in the color we wanted, I figured I’d better jump on it. My wife wasn’t totally sold on it but she was reading old information about the array of tax credits, rebates, and Toyota financing and cash back. After I completely explained the current offer from Toyota in addition to the tax credit and CVRP rebate, she said we’d better hurry up and get it!
Since Toyota Oxnard is about 328 miles from my house, it was not going to be easy to just drive the car home. I initially planned on having the car shipped up and got a quote from them to arrange it. They came back with $800 for a dedicated flatbed tow truck to pick up the car in the morning and deliver it directly to my house the same day. I’ve shipped cars before and I knew this was high – I had shipped a car to Florida for less than that. After some discussion with my wife we decided to trade in our other car, a manual transmission 2004 Honda Accord. Even though it gets good gas mileage, they’re not very popular so it would be a little harder to sell on our own. So, out of convenience we decided to trade it in. So, instead of doing the paperwork by FedEx and shipping the car, I would now be driving the Accord down to Oxnard and driving the RAV back home. So, I opened up PlugShare and Google Maps and tried to figure out how I was going to do it. It looked doable – 129 miles from the dealer to San Luis Obispo, 129 miles from SLO to Salinas, and only 70 miles home. This is actually an interesting drive for me because Cal Poly SLO is my alma mater. I would have loved to poke around SLO, but that was not to be – I was on a mission. The Central Coast charging infrastructure is also interesting because several years ago Tesla and Solar City worked with a regional bank called Rabobank to install solar and charging stations at many of their branches. These stations are 70 Amp Tesla-branded Clipper Creek units that originally had Roadster plugs. They have since been changed to J1772 plugs, but maintain their 70 Amp ability and don’t require any fees for use or access cards to activate. I had to take my daughter to her Saturday morning activities, so I would not be able to leave until about noon. Knowing how things usually go at dealerships, I knew I would have to spend the night somewhere Saturday night. In order to reduce the time on the road on Sunday, I really wanted to get the first leg to SLO out of the way with the full charge from the dealer.
Since I have been reading the forum for a while, I had a pretty good idea that the first 129 miles should be possible with an extended charge. However, that leg includes a trip over San Marcos Pass – unless you take 101 all the way around the mountains, but that adds another 11 miles. On the drive down, I decided to see what the San Marcos Pass road was like since I’d never driven it before. It wasn’t bad because the Santa Barbara end is the steep side and going down the back side in the RAV would be possible in B without using the brakes. The only nagging question was whether the dealer did an Extended Charge. As soon as I arrived at the dealership we went to look at the car. The salesman told me that they had just charged the car up on the 240 volt charger, so it was ready to go. I asked if they did an Extended Charge and he said yes, of course they did because they knew I was driving it home. I took him at his word because the GOM showed 124 miles. I didn’t think that was possible unless they had actually done the Extended Charge. Things went smoothly at the dealership even though it became clear that nobody I encountered actually knew anything about the car. I got underway at 7pm and headed up 101. It was cool, so I put on my sweatshirt and turned off the climate control to get the most range. I remembered reading something TonyWilliams wrote about the “fuel” gauge and the extended charge – the first bar will disappear after 7-9 miles on a Standard Charge and about 24 miles on an Extended Charge. Much to my dismay, after what felt like only 5 minutes of freeway driving, the first bar was already gone. This put SLO clearly out of range. Luckily I had a backup plan – the Rabobank in Santa Maria, which was 30 miles before San Luis Obispo. I had already programmed the GPS NAV for the Rabobank address. Now I was just watching the indicated range and the miles to destination on the NAV – the range was always more than the miles to destination, but the numbers were gradually getting closer and closer together. By the time I got to the top of San Marcos Pass, I think the numbers were the same at about 56 miles each. Luckily, I had the whole downhill stretch back to 101 and when I got back to flat land, I had built up a buffer of about 12 miles. Just after I got off the freeway in Santa Maria the Very Low Battery warning came up and I rolled up to the Rabobank charger at 8:30pm with 5 miles on the range indicator. My first plugging was interesting because it was dark and I didn’t know the inlet was angled so much to the rear. Anyway, I got it in and the Tesla (Clipper Creek) charger made a satisfying “thunk” and it was charging. Now I was cold, hungry and needed a restroom. There is a Del Taco across the street and a McDonalds about a block away, but those didn’t seem satisfying so I pulled up Google Maps on my phone and quickly found Atari-Ya Japanese. Yelp reviews said it was very good, especially considering the somewhat sketchy strip mall location. They were right – it was very good and run by actual Japanese people who had been running the restaurant for 30 years. After I was done eating, I went back to the car and pulled out my printout of Tony’s range chart. I had 30 miles to go, so to be safe, I needed 5 bars on the fuel gauge. It wasn’t there yet, so I had to kill some more time for it to drink up some more electrons. After it got to 5 bars, I unplugged and I was on my way to San Luis Obispo. I finally rolled into the motel parking lot at 11:00pm with the Low Battery warning on. I checked in, dropped my overnight bag in the room and drove to the chargers at the SLO Promenade. There are four Clipper Creek CS-100’s in this shopping center parking lot off Madonna Road. There’s an Embassy Suites less than 100 yards from the chargers but it was fully booked. The Best Western and Vagabond Inn are a reasonable walk, on Madonna Road. I set the Extended Charge, plugged in and walked back to the motel.
Based on my experience getting to San Luis Obispo, I wasn’t willing to attempt the next leg of 129 miles without a similar backup plan. The problem is that there are no charging stations just short of Salinas. The only reliable looking public charger is a Chargepoint station in King City, about 50 miles before Salinas. So, I planned to stop there regardless and charge to 9 bars before heading out. Since the Chargepoint station is only 30 amps and the Tesla charger at the Rabobank in Salinas is 70 amps, there was no sense charging more than I had to in King City. As long as I was sure to get to Salinas, it made sense to add more energy using the faster station. In the interest of time, I would still only charge up enough bars in Salinas to get home.
Knowing I would need to use the Chargepoint station, I signed up for access cards Friday night before I started my drive down to Oxnard. Of course, I wasn’t going to get the cards by the next day, but I figured it would be better to have the account open if I had to call them to activate the charger for me. As it turns out, the Chargepoint iPhone app can remotely activate the charging station. That was a pleasant experience that worked just as it should.
So, I woke up Sunday morning at the motel in San Luis Obispo eager to get going on the rest of my adventure. I wanted to check on the charge state of the car, but I knew I couldn’t because the “guy that does the SafetyConnect” at DCH Oxnard was not working on Saturday. They gave me his name and told me to call him on Monday. Without the SafetyConnect trial Contract ID, you can’t access the car information in the Entunes app. So, I had to just walk across the shopping center to the car and hope it was fully charged. Now that I’ve gone through the SafetyConnect sign up, I know that you don’t need the dealer to do it. Just call Toyota and they can do it over the phone. The number is right there on the Entunes setup screens when you enroll online. Anyway, the strange thing was that as I walked up to the car, the Clipper Creek station activated again with that familiar “thunk”. The charging indicator on the station was on immediately after that noise. I can only guess that it was a cell balancing charge, but it was strange to me that it decided to start just when I walked up. Since the car was cold soaked overnight, I decided to leave the charger alone and sit in the car with the climate control on to warm up the car. By the time I had the GPS Nav programmed with the King City Chargepoint address, exchanged a few text messages with and then talked to my wife on the phone, it was done. It took probably no more than 15 minutes. Then I drove back to the motel, got my overnight bag and checked out. Then, it was back on “the 101”. The drive out of SLO to the north turns into a long steady climb up Cuesta Grade almost as soon as you leave town. I kept checking the fuel gauge all throughout the climb to see when that first bar would disappear. It finally did at after 24 miles, which was well after I had descended the far side of Cuesta Grade. That was very satisfying after the previous night’s experience. I continued on with the cruise control set for 62-65 mph depending on what the other traffic was doing. When I pulled up to the Chargepoint station in King City, I had 7 bars. In 45 minutes I had charged up to 9 bars, so I headed out. The picture in PlugShare for this station is terrible, so I took one of the station with the back of my car in the frame and uploaded it with the PlugShare iPhone app. A big improvement, if I do say so myself. The drive to Salinas was uneventful and I arrived there with the Very Low Battery warning coming on just after exiting the freeway. The Rabobank Salinas charger is very easy to find and is part of a large strip mall with anchor tenants like Staples, Outback Steakhouse, Walmart, Costco, and smaller well known stores like Radio Shack, Subway, AT&T Store, and others. Passing the three and a half hours needed to charge up to 13 bars was mind-numbing to say the least. I don’t think I’ve done that much aimless shopping in my life. Finally, I went back to the car and took a nap. I actually overslept the time I had planned to leave by about half an hour, but it worked out well because I had not accounted for the charger efficiency when I planned what time to leave. 24,000Wh / (208V * 40A) = 2.88hr but it should have been 24,000Wh / (208V * 40A * 83%) = 3.47 hours.
The rest of the drive was uneventful and the slow traffic between Salinas and Gilroy gave me lots of buffer between the indicated range and the Nav distance to destination. Driving in B mode, I rarely had to use the brakes in the stop-and-go and slow-and-go traffic. Strangely, the buffer was getting larger almost all the way home even though I had to turn on the A/C with ECO High and a low fan setting from Gilroy all the way home at 65mph cruise.
I hope this has been useful to people and at least mildly entertaining to read…
Since we got back from our Easter vacation, my wife and I have been talking more about what car to buy. She was initially very much against any RAV4 even though she liked the Highlander Hybrid. “It’s a girl car and even I don’t want to be seen in it”. Finally, she started to come around and finally said I should get the RAV4 EV and I’d better find a dealer before she changed her mind. This was Friday morning April 26th. So, I did some searching online to see who had what inventory. We really wanted to the Shoreline Blue and there were none showing up in the Bay Area. I had noticed earlier that the inventory at some dealers like Magnussen’s Palo Alto don’t show up at Cars.com, so I checked theirs directly on their own web site. One dealer in the LA area was showing two blue cars and I filled in their contact form on their web site and in about 5 minutes somebody called me. The gentleman was very nice and immediately pointed out that the ones they have are 2013’s and the Toyota Subvention Cash does not apply to them. So, I quickly opened up the search to the whole state for 2012 Shoreline Blue and found only two cars - one at Roseville and one at Oxnard. I called Roseville Toyota and eventually found out that the car they showed on their web site was sold on April 7th. So, I called DCH Toyota Oxnard. I talked to Jonathan and he was very nice. I told him I wanted the Shoreline Blue RAV4 EV and I’d like to know if it was still available. He quickly verified that it was there and not sold yet. I asked him to get me a quote that would make it worth my while to buy from him since I was in the Bay Area. He called back in about 5-10 minutes with $1,000 below invoice which came to $0 down, $43,837 financed after all the tax, title, license and $10,000 Toyota Subvention Cash applied. That is about $500 more than the best dealer selling price I had heard of, but for the last car eligible for the $10,000 from Toyota in the color we wanted, I figured I’d better jump on it. My wife wasn’t totally sold on it but she was reading old information about the array of tax credits, rebates, and Toyota financing and cash back. After I completely explained the current offer from Toyota in addition to the tax credit and CVRP rebate, she said we’d better hurry up and get it!
Since Toyota Oxnard is about 328 miles from my house, it was not going to be easy to just drive the car home. I initially planned on having the car shipped up and got a quote from them to arrange it. They came back with $800 for a dedicated flatbed tow truck to pick up the car in the morning and deliver it directly to my house the same day. I’ve shipped cars before and I knew this was high – I had shipped a car to Florida for less than that. After some discussion with my wife we decided to trade in our other car, a manual transmission 2004 Honda Accord. Even though it gets good gas mileage, they’re not very popular so it would be a little harder to sell on our own. So, out of convenience we decided to trade it in. So, instead of doing the paperwork by FedEx and shipping the car, I would now be driving the Accord down to Oxnard and driving the RAV back home. So, I opened up PlugShare and Google Maps and tried to figure out how I was going to do it. It looked doable – 129 miles from the dealer to San Luis Obispo, 129 miles from SLO to Salinas, and only 70 miles home. This is actually an interesting drive for me because Cal Poly SLO is my alma mater. I would have loved to poke around SLO, but that was not to be – I was on a mission. The Central Coast charging infrastructure is also interesting because several years ago Tesla and Solar City worked with a regional bank called Rabobank to install solar and charging stations at many of their branches. These stations are 70 Amp Tesla-branded Clipper Creek units that originally had Roadster plugs. They have since been changed to J1772 plugs, but maintain their 70 Amp ability and don’t require any fees for use or access cards to activate. I had to take my daughter to her Saturday morning activities, so I would not be able to leave until about noon. Knowing how things usually go at dealerships, I knew I would have to spend the night somewhere Saturday night. In order to reduce the time on the road on Sunday, I really wanted to get the first leg to SLO out of the way with the full charge from the dealer.
Since I have been reading the forum for a while, I had a pretty good idea that the first 129 miles should be possible with an extended charge. However, that leg includes a trip over San Marcos Pass – unless you take 101 all the way around the mountains, but that adds another 11 miles. On the drive down, I decided to see what the San Marcos Pass road was like since I’d never driven it before. It wasn’t bad because the Santa Barbara end is the steep side and going down the back side in the RAV would be possible in B without using the brakes. The only nagging question was whether the dealer did an Extended Charge. As soon as I arrived at the dealership we went to look at the car. The salesman told me that they had just charged the car up on the 240 volt charger, so it was ready to go. I asked if they did an Extended Charge and he said yes, of course they did because they knew I was driving it home. I took him at his word because the GOM showed 124 miles. I didn’t think that was possible unless they had actually done the Extended Charge. Things went smoothly at the dealership even though it became clear that nobody I encountered actually knew anything about the car. I got underway at 7pm and headed up 101. It was cool, so I put on my sweatshirt and turned off the climate control to get the most range. I remembered reading something TonyWilliams wrote about the “fuel” gauge and the extended charge – the first bar will disappear after 7-9 miles on a Standard Charge and about 24 miles on an Extended Charge. Much to my dismay, after what felt like only 5 minutes of freeway driving, the first bar was already gone. This put SLO clearly out of range. Luckily I had a backup plan – the Rabobank in Santa Maria, which was 30 miles before San Luis Obispo. I had already programmed the GPS NAV for the Rabobank address. Now I was just watching the indicated range and the miles to destination on the NAV – the range was always more than the miles to destination, but the numbers were gradually getting closer and closer together. By the time I got to the top of San Marcos Pass, I think the numbers were the same at about 56 miles each. Luckily, I had the whole downhill stretch back to 101 and when I got back to flat land, I had built up a buffer of about 12 miles. Just after I got off the freeway in Santa Maria the Very Low Battery warning came up and I rolled up to the Rabobank charger at 8:30pm with 5 miles on the range indicator. My first plugging was interesting because it was dark and I didn’t know the inlet was angled so much to the rear. Anyway, I got it in and the Tesla (Clipper Creek) charger made a satisfying “thunk” and it was charging. Now I was cold, hungry and needed a restroom. There is a Del Taco across the street and a McDonalds about a block away, but those didn’t seem satisfying so I pulled up Google Maps on my phone and quickly found Atari-Ya Japanese. Yelp reviews said it was very good, especially considering the somewhat sketchy strip mall location. They were right – it was very good and run by actual Japanese people who had been running the restaurant for 30 years. After I was done eating, I went back to the car and pulled out my printout of Tony’s range chart. I had 30 miles to go, so to be safe, I needed 5 bars on the fuel gauge. It wasn’t there yet, so I had to kill some more time for it to drink up some more electrons. After it got to 5 bars, I unplugged and I was on my way to San Luis Obispo. I finally rolled into the motel parking lot at 11:00pm with the Low Battery warning on. I checked in, dropped my overnight bag in the room and drove to the chargers at the SLO Promenade. There are four Clipper Creek CS-100’s in this shopping center parking lot off Madonna Road. There’s an Embassy Suites less than 100 yards from the chargers but it was fully booked. The Best Western and Vagabond Inn are a reasonable walk, on Madonna Road. I set the Extended Charge, plugged in and walked back to the motel.
Based on my experience getting to San Luis Obispo, I wasn’t willing to attempt the next leg of 129 miles without a similar backup plan. The problem is that there are no charging stations just short of Salinas. The only reliable looking public charger is a Chargepoint station in King City, about 50 miles before Salinas. So, I planned to stop there regardless and charge to 9 bars before heading out. Since the Chargepoint station is only 30 amps and the Tesla charger at the Rabobank in Salinas is 70 amps, there was no sense charging more than I had to in King City. As long as I was sure to get to Salinas, it made sense to add more energy using the faster station. In the interest of time, I would still only charge up enough bars in Salinas to get home.
Knowing I would need to use the Chargepoint station, I signed up for access cards Friday night before I started my drive down to Oxnard. Of course, I wasn’t going to get the cards by the next day, but I figured it would be better to have the account open if I had to call them to activate the charger for me. As it turns out, the Chargepoint iPhone app can remotely activate the charging station. That was a pleasant experience that worked just as it should.
So, I woke up Sunday morning at the motel in San Luis Obispo eager to get going on the rest of my adventure. I wanted to check on the charge state of the car, but I knew I couldn’t because the “guy that does the SafetyConnect” at DCH Oxnard was not working on Saturday. They gave me his name and told me to call him on Monday. Without the SafetyConnect trial Contract ID, you can’t access the car information in the Entunes app. So, I had to just walk across the shopping center to the car and hope it was fully charged. Now that I’ve gone through the SafetyConnect sign up, I know that you don’t need the dealer to do it. Just call Toyota and they can do it over the phone. The number is right there on the Entunes setup screens when you enroll online. Anyway, the strange thing was that as I walked up to the car, the Clipper Creek station activated again with that familiar “thunk”. The charging indicator on the station was on immediately after that noise. I can only guess that it was a cell balancing charge, but it was strange to me that it decided to start just when I walked up. Since the car was cold soaked overnight, I decided to leave the charger alone and sit in the car with the climate control on to warm up the car. By the time I had the GPS Nav programmed with the King City Chargepoint address, exchanged a few text messages with and then talked to my wife on the phone, it was done. It took probably no more than 15 minutes. Then I drove back to the motel, got my overnight bag and checked out. Then, it was back on “the 101”. The drive out of SLO to the north turns into a long steady climb up Cuesta Grade almost as soon as you leave town. I kept checking the fuel gauge all throughout the climb to see when that first bar would disappear. It finally did at after 24 miles, which was well after I had descended the far side of Cuesta Grade. That was very satisfying after the previous night’s experience. I continued on with the cruise control set for 62-65 mph depending on what the other traffic was doing. When I pulled up to the Chargepoint station in King City, I had 7 bars. In 45 minutes I had charged up to 9 bars, so I headed out. The picture in PlugShare for this station is terrible, so I took one of the station with the back of my car in the frame and uploaded it with the PlugShare iPhone app. A big improvement, if I do say so myself. The drive to Salinas was uneventful and I arrived there with the Very Low Battery warning coming on just after exiting the freeway. The Rabobank Salinas charger is very easy to find and is part of a large strip mall with anchor tenants like Staples, Outback Steakhouse, Walmart, Costco, and smaller well known stores like Radio Shack, Subway, AT&T Store, and others. Passing the three and a half hours needed to charge up to 13 bars was mind-numbing to say the least. I don’t think I’ve done that much aimless shopping in my life. Finally, I went back to the car and took a nap. I actually overslept the time I had planned to leave by about half an hour, but it worked out well because I had not accounted for the charger efficiency when I planned what time to leave. 24,000Wh / (208V * 40A) = 2.88hr but it should have been 24,000Wh / (208V * 40A * 83%) = 3.47 hours.
The rest of the drive was uneventful and the slow traffic between Salinas and Gilroy gave me lots of buffer between the indicated range and the Nav distance to destination. Driving in B mode, I rarely had to use the brakes in the stop-and-go and slow-and-go traffic. Strangely, the buffer was getting larger almost all the way home even though I had to turn on the A/C with ECO High and a low fan setting from Gilroy all the way home at 65mph cruise.
I hope this has been useful to people and at least mildly entertaining to read…
