Figured I'd make some extra money, I mean over $200 to do a route? Sure, it's 150 or so mile route up in farm country, but we've done that before.

First problem was getting out there, Doppel's never had great highway range, but with the new tire and wheel combo, it's noticeably worse. Of course I kinda new that, but hadn't worried about it as my regular gig has very little high speed driving, plus I didn't expect it to matter much on this, but I'd forgotten that in Illinois, most rural roads are 55MPH. Yeah, problem.

Still, manageable, until we got to Staunton, this is wear things really went pear shaped. I mean Worden was bad, connection problems, and the app is garbage, but not too bad. Staunton? Forget having a connection at all, for some reason it's a dead zone. Aside from by the Casey's, I couldn't get a signal, we're talking showing one bar of 4GLTE at best, but nothing actually working. Weirdly, just 3 miles out of town and across the border into the next county and I'm getting two to three bars of 5G, so this is really weird. Also the app had one stop in the wrong place requiring four miles of backtracking, and with the connection down and the app glitchy, I had to route m'self as best as possible which really wasn't all that great, adding more miles to the route.

After that, connection was sometimes bad, but mostly worked. App was still a dumpster fire until about ten stops from the end when it would finally show me what the route plan was so that I knew what it was doing and could correct it as necessary, a big improvement.

Finally get to the last stop in Carlinville, and I have... fifty-nine miles of range left. Lovely, nearest charger? Around 32 miles or so, and remember the highway range problem. We did make it there, with a little over twenty miles of range left... And the charger won't work with my car. Thankfully it was only about five or so miles to another charger, most of it low speed roads, so not as much range degradation. Still, finally arrived with all of eighteen miles left.

When I took the job, I was expecting to finish around two hours early, and I suppose I did, but once you take in the trip to the charger, which was basically on the way home, and the trip home, that ate up those two hours, so I didn't get home until... eightish I think. By that point I was too tired to care, got home, plugged in as I didn't bother fully charging where I stopped, enough to get home and then some, but not a full charge.

Yeah, that whole thing was one problem after another problem. Not doing that again, Staunton, only if'n I get another cell service, which is something that might happen, maybe a prepaid that's not tied to any one network, thanks to modern 5G that could work, as long as at least one of the companies has good service out there. There's also the possibility that @Vik-Thor / Lirleni Hankeshe and me might change service entirely, assuming we can save over Verizon where we're spending about $195 for 5G home internet, two cell phones and around 5 or 6 streaming service accounts I think. Yeah, getting a lot of services at a discount, so I doubt we'd find a better deal. I'd say that my next EV will get better range, but that's iffy, I'm looking at getting a Slate Van in 2027 possibly, and the standard range battery is only 150 miles, there will be a longer range battery, but price and range haven't been announced.

#electricvehcles #work #gig #driving #badday