NACSBuddy

A pilot-style trip planner for cross-country EV drivers. Built around the reality that elevation, speed, and wind resistance change range more than most navigation systems admit.

Who it's for

NACSBuddy is a trip-planning tool for vehicles equipped with the NACS (North American Charging Standard) connector. At launch the routing graph is the Tesla Supercharger network — the largest live NACS deployment in North America — and it will expand to every NACS-compatible DC fast charger as Ford, GM, Rivian, Hyundai/Kia and others come online with native NACS ports.

If you drive a Tesla today, you're the bullseye user. If you drive a non-Tesla EV with a NACS adapter or factory NACS port, you'll get progressively better coverage as the network and our dataset grow.

The model

The planner treats Superchargers as nodes on a graph. Between any two nodes, energy use is the sum of three components:

  • Faero = ½ · ρ · Cd · A · v² — aerodynamic drag, quadratic in speed
  • Froll = Crr · m · g — rolling resistance, linear in distance
  • Eelev = m · g · Δh — gravitational PE; descents recovered at a regen efficiency factor

Everything is divided by drivetrain efficiency to get pack-side kWh. HVAC is a flat draw stub for now. Real ambient-temp modeling is on the roadmap.

Roadmap

  1. Ingest the owner-group Supercharger dataset (live API).
  2. Build the US elevation tile repository from SRTM/NED.
  3. Enable accounts + saved trips via Lovable Cloud.
  4. Tessie / Tesla integration: live SoC, location, and battery health.
  5. Expand routing to non-Tesla NACS chargers as the network grows.
  6. In-trip recompute & "slow to X mph" alerts as conditions shift.

Status

V1 is a working wireframe with hand-picked Superchargers along the SF → SLC corridor and pure-TS range math you can stress-test from the planner. See docs/data-model.md for the target database schema.