Last Friday we were supposed to fly to Detroit for the wedding of a good friend. But last Friday was the Crowdstrike issue. Yikes! Our flights were cancelled and there were no others. What could we do? Simple. Throw the bags in the Tesla, head on out to Detroit, 700+ miles in either direction.
How did it work out?
Superchargers network: Fantastic. This is the first time we’ve gone more than five hours from home. Based on those drives, we were not nervous at all. And it was correct not to be nervous, there weren’t any problems. The navigation feature that plots your routes finds the correct superchargers to stop at, how long to stay there, how much to charge up, etc. It has it all figured out.
There are plenty of superchargers along the way. All of the stops were very close to the highway exits, we never had to go far out of the way. All of the stops were near grocery stores, restaurants, or malls. There was always a place to eat and easy ways to kill time. Charging added somewhere around two hours to the total driving time in each direction. If you’re nervous about the network, don’t be. Relax.
Self-driving: The full-self driving is great. Eleven hours of driving was not the slog you might think. In fact, we had a fun time because we didn’t have to pay nearly as much attention to the road. We were more physically relaxed because the driver could move their arms and legs around, it’s not as physically demanding. The self-driving is noticeably better than a year ago, we didn’t have one “What the hell is it doing!!!???” moment.
Self-parking: Self-parking is a nice little sub-feature of the self-driving package. When you are near a parking spot, you can tap on a dialog, and the car will park itself. My daughter took her drivers test last month, and one of the main skills of backing into a space is already obsolete.
Dollars: Let’s break it down. We spent about $140 in charging, for about 1,450 miles of travel. We’ll call that one dollar per ten miles. Let’s say a gas powered car is 25 miles to the gallon (it’s mostly highway driving), that’s 58 gallons needed, at about $3.50 a gallon is $203. So the Tesla is under 70% of the cost of a gas vehicle. That’s honestly worse than I expected, I thought it would be cheaper by a factor of two or three. I’ve been spoiled by the electricity costs of charging through the house. Superchargers are more expensive — Tesla charges you a premium to get the car ready quickly (roughly twenty five times faster than home charging). It would have been better if the hotel had free charging, as many do.
So on straight up energy costs Tesla wins over gas vehicles by a good margin.
But driving has other costs. Besides the energy bills, we spent $70 to stay in a terrible hotel in Dayton, Ohio the first. On the other hand we didn’t pay Delta for two flights, nor parking our car at the airport. All in all, we spent ~$210 driving our EV compared to the ~$650 we would have spent by flying. Not bad!