How to Most Efficiently Road Trip in a Tesla

Hello, this is Alan Meyer of TesCalendar (find me on X @TesCalendar1) and I am proud to be writing my first blog post for Jowua! If you are willing, please check out my shop (https://tescalendar.com/shop)! Every order goes towards fighting climate change by planting trees! Now to the blog…

Evolution of Road Tripping in a Tesla 

Here in 2024, road tripping in a Tesla has become commonplace. This is really quite amazing considering just 12 years ago, not a single direct current fast charger (DCFC) existed. In the last 12 years, Tesla has built out over 50,000 Superchargers (globally) making road tripping almost anywhere possible!

Today, you can simply just hop in your Tesla, type in the location you wish to travel to, and the Tesla navigation will automatically figure out how to get you to your destination adding Supercharging stops if the location is outside of your current range. This is an absolutely amazing feature ESSENTIAL to selling mass market EVs.

However, it's not the most efficient tool to use on longer road trips. Here's how you can make you road trips in Tesla much more efficient:

1. Get a Third-Party Route Planner

Although the navigation will get you almost anywhere without any thought or extra work, this will almost certainly not be the most efficient way to travel to your destination as the Tesla navigation lacks many features such as:

• Custom destination arrival state of charge (SOC)
• Supercharger arrival desired SOC
• Travel speed
• Whether you want a few long stops or more short stops
• Other charging network options other than Tesla
• Maximum Supercharger SOC limit
• Extra cabin weight (cargo)

This is where A Better Route Planner (ABRP, website and/or app) really helps you plan your trip most efficiently to your needs!

Be sure to use their website or app and play with the settings. You can easily change settings (many listed above) and see how that will affect your overall travel time to your destination.

2. Ride Your Tesla's Charging Curve

One thing to really keep in mind when going from Supercharger to Supercharger is how your vehicles charge curve works.

Below shows an example of a charge curve from a Tesla Model Y Long Range charging on a V3 Tesla Supercharger (Image credit: EVKX.com).

As you can see, the major peak charge rate is from 5-30% and falls off dramatically from there.

To minimize the time spent at a Supercharger, the goal is to always arrive at the Supercharger with the lowest SOC possible, without running out of energy (of course).

3. Optimize Your Downtime

For longer trips, you may drive multiple days and stop and rest at a hotel overnight. This is an amazing time to recharge your EV overnight so you can wake in the morning with a full charge!

The best way to find a hotel with EV charging is to use the app/website, PlugShare. PlugShare has been around since 2009 collecting data from millions of check-ins. They are an incredible resource for all destination and DCFC charging options!

If you plan ahead, you can figure out what town you want to stay in overnight or how many hours you’d like to drive before getting a hotel.

Once that is determined, you can look on PlugShare for hotels with destination chargers.

WARNING: be sure to read the reviews for that charger on PlugShare before relying on it. Hotel chargers are notorious for not being taken care of and often have issues. Reading a few reviews goes a long way.

If you don’t plan ahead, you can still easily take advantage of this charging opportunity! Again, check the town you wish to stay in on PlugShare and follow the same process as above!

My Ohio to Colorado Family Road Trip 

Here is an example from a road trip my wife and I recently took to Colorado from Ohio.

At one of our stays, we got a LaQuinta hotel for just $74 that had a free Tesla destination charger! We rolled in at 3% and added 71kWh while staying overnight (12pm-7a).

Please note, there was a Supercharger within 3 miles so we could easily make it there if we had any issues with this charger.

This energy would have cost ~$25 at a Supercharger in the area. We also got free ice ($5 value) and a free breakfast ($20 value). That’s $50 in value so I figure our “real” cost of the hotel stay was just $24!

All of the items listed were needed and would have been purchased regardless, but this is just another way EVs help you save money (other than the obvious gas savings).

4. Pick the Perfect Charger for Your Situation

As you saw with the example above, Superchargers are not the only solution to long distance travel. There are other examples of this too!

So many people believe super-fast EV charging is essential everywhere BUT that just isn’t true! On our latest road trip to Colorado, I was truly able to see a few examples of the perfect charger at the correct location.

1. A ChargePoint 62kWh station near the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, MO.:

We were exploring Gateway Arch National Park for just over an hour and were able to get a full charge in that time!

We were able to skip a Supercharger stop doing this and we were already planning on going to the arch!

Not only was this convenient, but the rate for this charger was $0.25 instead of the Supercharger down the road that was $0.35!

2a. Hotel destination charging:

I stayed at several hotels with charging ranging from 7kW-12kW. All of them we able to get me a full charge by the time we woke up! See more info on one of the hotels above.

2b. Campgrounds (NEMA14-50):

We stayed at 3 different campgrounds (tent camping) on this trip which all allowed us to charge on a 50A outlet.

Campgrounds are designed to power inefficient RV air conditioners that use a lot of power! Charging your EV actually uses a very similar amount of power!

Charging at 7-8kW, we were again able to get full charges overnight!

3. And yes - obviously Superchargers!

Near highways for road tripping Superchargers are needed, and the network is already awesome.

Superchargers (or most DCFC) Advantages:

We actually love stopping at Superchargers because it forces you to pick where you're going to eat lunch / dinner.

Like most couples, my wife and I always struggle to pick where we are going to eat! This was mostly solved on our road trip home from Colorado!

• Friday night, we stopped at a Supercharger in Kansas near a Qdoba. That's where we ate!
• Saturday mid-day we stopped at a SC in Missouri near a gas station. We grabbed a snack from there and rolled on.
• Saturday night the SC was at a Culver's in Indiana. Again, that's where we had dinner!

It was as easy as that! No discussion or argument! Now, this doesn't work 100% of the time BUT for us it does about 90% of the time.

EV vs ICE Road Tripping

As mentioned several times, we just took an amazing road trip to Colorado. During this trip, I collected a fair amount of data documenting our Tesla road trip experience.

Tesla Model Y 2024 Colorado Road Trip Data:

• Total miles: 4249
• Energy consumed: 1196kWh
• Average consumption: 281Wh/mi
• Total charging cost: $257.30
• Cost per mile: 6.06¢

Please note, we added 462kWh for FREE via destination charging at hotels and campgrounds.

Is EV Road Tripping More Expensive than ICE Road Tripping? 

I’ve had a lot of people tell me that traveling with an EV is now more expensive than driving an ICE car. Assuming the national average of $3.45/gal of gas and 35mpg for a comparable sized ICE crossover, travel would cost 10¢/mi.

The way we travel, we just did this trip for 6¢/mi in our Tesla Model Y. That’s a 40% lower cost to travel with our Model Y!

Does EV Road Tripping Take Longer than ICE Road Tripping?

Many people have asked me "yeah, but how much time did you spend charging!?!?" 

We stopped at 17 DC fast chargers (Superchargers and ChargePoint) for an average of 20 minutes each.

During this time, we spent very little time waiting on the car as it usually took us most of this duration to use the restroom and get our next meal.

We also utilized 10 destination chargers which cost us zero extra time.

So, on an average it didn't take more time than it would have in ICE Road Tripping. But compared to our previous trip to Florida and back, this average fast charging time is actually 3 minutes more per stop.

That's because on the Florida trip we had almost all V3 Superchargers and on this Colorado trip we went to about 1/2 V2 chargers.