Last month, my wife, Fabiola, my step daughter Khloe and a group of friends that we travel with decided to take a ten day trip: first to New Jersey, then to Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and as a group our last destination would be to Martha’s Vineyard. My family would then however go to New York and then finally back home. The catch of this story is that my wife and I would be doing a lot of driving and it would be mostly my wife because she is better at directions then I am and at the time she had a valid license, and I didn’t because of the pandemic. So Fab didn’t want to drive all that way so after talking with me about it, she decided to rent a Tesla Model 3 with autopilot. Problem solved right, no. As excited as my wife and I were, we ended up stopping and charging the Tesla probably about fifty times and our friends always beat us to our destinations by an hour.
If you decide to take a Tesla on a long road trip, then one thing you need to do is not miss an exit to go and recharge; because if you do you might start to panic a little bit. With a Tesla, before you go on a road trip, you have to plan everything, you can’t just be spontaneous about it. My family and I learned that the hard way. Also, if you go under 40 miles of battery, apparently Tesla will charge you, which I think is ridiculous. Don’t get me wrong, I completely agree that electric cars are the future, but you should not be charged for the future for trying to help it after you spend thousands of dollars on your electric car for trying to help the planet. Also the super chargers need to be more super and we need to have more of them. If you get lost in a Tesla, you can’t just look up the nearest gas station if you are running low on battery. You will most likely run out of battery and then you have to call a towing company to be towed to the nearest super charger.
The navigation system is also confusing at first. My wife and I would put our destination in the car and then it would say an hour or so. So at first we thought, oh, we are closer than we thought. However, then we started to think and just to compare, so we would put the destination in our phones and it would actually say 6 six hours and hour hearts would sink; especially when you are traveling with an eight year old. When you do get to the super chargers, the only thing you can do for your child is to give them a smartphone or an iPad, because if you don’t, there going to get bored real quick. So we waited for about thirty minutes or so for our car to charge and then we were off again. The first thing that we noticed is that the battery starts depleting right away. Then when the battery got down to half way, we decided to charge up again and when we finally got to the place we were staying on the cape, we found one building outlet that was outside and used that. There was a little bit of relief even though it took us about 10 minutes to find one, and it was actually one of our friends that found one; when we plugged it in, the car said on the screen that it would take 24 hours to fully charge it. So my conclusion into renting or taking a Tesla on a long road trip...don’t; at least not now. I believe in probably about five or ten years, then things will be much better. But for the city, they are great.
I had to republish this piece because I deleted my old account to start off better.