I think I've been looking at this the wrong way, though. It has a lot of parts including Wh/mi, number of miles, time, the cost of your time, number of charging stops, and possibly the cost of fines for speeding if you're not careful. And I can handle it even less because I only needed that as a small part of the overall theory, which turned out to be even more complicated than I thought. In that case, regardless of power efficiency, it's always going to be cheaper to get there was quickly as possible because hopefully you earn more per hour than the billing rate for electricity (unless it causes you to have to supercharge so much more often that you end up burning more hours by going faster).Ĭlick to expand.I couldn't handle the math though. Of course the entire argument of efficiency goes out the window if you add in the value of your time. Then again, the theory could be completely wrong, and it could be that 80 mph does indeed use more than 4x the power consumption, and there's no escape from that if you want efficiency, you really do have to take the slow roads for the whole 4 hours.
What I was getting at is more or less something like if it takes 4 hours to drive somewhere at 20 mph, it takes 1 hr at 80 mph, and if the power consumption isn't at least 4 times as much, you save on total power consumption. Of course most people would consider that ridiculous because it would take forever to get anywhere. But if Wh/mi was always the absolute best way to measure efficiency for any sized trip, it would make more sense with a Tesla EV to always avoid highways entirely and drive everywhere at no more than 30 mph.