u/electricAGENT

My laptop let out the magic smoke today and I wanted to remove battery and harvest my hard drive. I unscrewed the back cover and new I was in for a spicy surprise when the cover popped up when the screws loosened. Time to take a trip to the hasmat drip off, and if course the laptop was just charged up.

Bought this thing from someone about 6 years ago, I believe it was made in 2016. Might be able to scrap for parts and remove the i7 and 2060 from it. Wouldn't power back in via AC so I think the motherboard popped a cap somewhere (could smell the magic smoke) RIP Legion, you were a good PC o7

Just wanted to share my 2025 EV6 Wind AWD trip and give some info to those who haven't attempted a trip yet. For context, we planned a work trip to NOLA and decided to try out the range on the ev6 and see how it handled on long trips. We chose my car over my wife's gas car for a few reasons - Gas is expensive rn (although when we actually left in June 10th the prices dropped a little from when we planned), we didnt want to fly, the car basically drives itself via Highway assist, etc. We charged it too 100%, used ABRP to plan and took off.

Pro tip - if driving to New Orleans, park at US park and save tons of money on hotel valet fees. Most if the city (at least French quarter) is walkable and the streetcar is 3 dollars for a day pass. Parking for 5 days, thursday to Monday , booked early was only 50 bucks. Valet prices are like 40 dollars A DAY.

ABRP was a fantastic tool and was crucial for planning out the stops easily. It took 100% of the guesswork out of where to charge up and HIGHLY reccomend using it to track energy, stops and routing. Bonus points for the paid version for 5 dollars to use it with android auto, it was flawless albeit a bit less map-feature heavy as opposed to google maps (but nothing functionally wrong). I used an OBD2 dongle to connect to ABRP and is extremely useful. I also have enode as a back up but didn't really use it too much as the dongle did everything it could do, but ✨️better✨️.

Total trip took about 12 hours for us. The charging was not the bottleneck here for the extra time, we were adding time due to lunch and extra charging at my discretion. If we stuck to the plan, I have no doubt we would have made it at the time it said at 11.5 hours. We just weren't in a rush and took a whole day as a travel day.

I-55 has plenty of chargers to choose from and we had many DC chargers to choose from. My favorite were the GM energy chargers at the Flying J stops as they were the 2nd easiest to use, by far the fastest and very reliable. I used a card and a CCS to NACS adapter (A2Z) to connect. Each stop took only a few minutes to initiate and about 10-20 minutes to charge to max out at 240kw charging speeds then following the curve. 10/10. Tesla chargers were ny second fav as they are very reliable and plug n charge (i used the app for discounted rate, so i didnt use that feature besides the first stop because i forgot the membership doesnt transfer to PnC) works every time. Still slower at only 126kw because 400v architecture but still pretty quick at about 18 minute charge ~35-80%. Least favorite was EA. Very fast charger but starting the charge is always a major pain in the ass for me, idk why. But still, all chargers worked and were mostly free besides rush hour at our last stop (just poor timing on charge needs). Overall, it was a great charge experience!

The car was suprisingly much more comfortable to drive long distance than I thought. Besides my butt hurting from sitting for that long, it was great. The car itself did 90% of the driving as it was just 1 interstate all the way and I could not be happier with the experience. Being able to chop up a long trip into 2 hour chunks is great for us as instead of dreading seeing the total time dwindle, seeing the time to the next stop helped mentally accept the trip better and made it into a fun little checkpoint game. Helped me get through it more than I thought :)

Total cost to drove down was probably around 100 factoring in tesla membership (12.99- very worth it for charging at least 2 times with tesla chargers) and ABRP subscription. Summer range really helps here too. Avg mi/kwh was about 4.2 even with driving in average about 70-75 mph. Probably could have gotten away with faster speeds but diminishing returns with charging needs/time recovered from speeding didnt seem to be worth it but I havnt done the actual calculations. Doing the math, the realistic money savings vs ICE driving was more or less the same (for now) but driving EV vs flying saved at least 250 dollars. The fact that I barely had to drive myself was a HUGE selling point of taking the car and I dont regret it at all.

TlDr: Fantastic driving experience, infrastructure issues were minimal, ABRP is a must for planning trips, takes the anxiety and frustration of traveling. 10/10 would reccomend and I would 100% do it again. I love my EV and cant wait until battery technology gets even better and reduces travel time even more until it truly is the best way to travel by automobile. I hope this info helps someone out with planning their roadtrip and gives some insights to traveling long range via EV :)