I have a Model 3 and have gone on multiple long-distance road trips (>1,000 mile) with it. It's an absolute pleasure to drive with AutoPilot. Plus, most people already stop every 3-4 hours for bathroom/food breaks anyway, so if you use the in-car nav system (Google Maps), it will make it so those stops are at superchargers. The supercharger stops are almost always in high-density places with plenty of restaurants and usually are ~30minutes which I've found is the perfect time to do all the bathroom/food purchases you would need for the next leg of the trip. Plus with Supercharger V3 rolling out in the next few months, those stops will shrink to just 15 minutes for 80% battery.
on longer trips it can be a bit annoying, having done a sixteen hundred mile round trip my advice is, travel when stuff is open. That was you will have something to do on the thirty to forty five minute charges. Fortunately for me my US route; mostly along I75 but crossed Ohio and back; meant the super chargers were located in shopping centers where some place to spend time was a simple walk across the lot
I know people love to say, we all stop for this, that, and the other thing, but the truth is on most longer trips most people just want to get to the end and adding stops of thirty minutes or more can impact a schedule. I cannot imagine it without access to the charging speed my TM3 can do let alone its range. Since a destination is not always guaranteed to have charging opportunities you are pretty much anchored to the closes SC.
with regards to AP. Love it, so nice to have a system always aware. my usage is to turn it on but act as if I were driving. it certainly has removed any panic issues where you take your eyes off the road and the situation changes badly.
Are there any problem on long trips if it is to some event that is drawing a lot of people?
A couple years ago, when I was planning a trip to the middle of some rural area to see a total solar eclipse, I checkout out of curiosity what the electric charger situation was to see what the trip would be like in an EV.
At the time the Tesla network was sparse enough in that area that you'd need to get pretty full charges to make it from charger to charger. After the eclipse you'd have everyone leaving at about the same time, and so arriving at chargers at about the same time, and so it seemed you might get some long lines.
30 minutes to charge isn't bad if you can plug the car in and go eat or use the bathroom while it charges. But if you have to wait for two or three cars ahead of you do their 30 minute charges, can you do something while you wait or do you have to stick with your car to move it up whenever the line moves?
In situations like this regular gas stations also can have lines, but usually you can drive a bit away from the main highway and find a less busy gas station.
> But if you have to wait for two or three cars ahead of you do their 30 minute charges, can you do something while you wait or do you have to stick with your car to move it up whenever the line moves?
This seems like an ideal use for self driving technology - park at the tail end of the queue and your car moves itself forward.
You can always have an attendant plugging and unplugging the cars (at the busiest stations where queuing is necessary), until that technology is ready.
Some gas stations still have pump attendants, after all!
I can't speak about the solar eclipse specifically (though, my drive in an ICE vehicle during that went from what should have been a 4 hour drive to 12 total), some events do cause backups at chargers.
Having done this drive after the eclipse (and beaten the wave of traffic back to Portland on US-26), using a Model S you might have been able to make it, definitely with the P85 battery pack and no AC (which was not necessary in Madras).
The main concern would be not getting trapped in traffic hell, like any other driver. Getting slightly north of Madclipse and other camps, then immediately getting on the road post-eclipse meant almost empty roads for us. Alternatively, waiting till that evening to leave worked for our friends.
> Getting slightly north of Madclipse and other camps, then immediately getting on the road post-eclipse meant almost empty roads for us
I was in that general area. I was in a farmer's field that had sold overnight parking spots for $50, and allowed sleeping in your car. Here's where it was [1].
I heard the first cars starting to leave the instant totality ended.
I waited until about 4 PM to leave, but still got seriously bogged down on 26 heading north only a mile or so away. It stayed bad through the reservation, then got pretty good until it turned to stop and go for large parts of the way through Mt. Hood National Forest. Cleared up well before Portland and was doing great up until Washington, at about 7 PM, where it was crappy most of the way to Tacoma. I'm on the west side of Puget Sound, so that's where I split off to 16, which was fine. It looked like 5 going from Tacoma to Seattle was still terrible...and this was something like midnight.
Ah, we left the campsite in Madras an hour before the eclipse, stopped off in Warm Springs for food and got north of there before the eclipse. Stayed in Portland the rest of the day (people to see and such), avoiding any traffic on I-5.
Unfortunately, it's not true. On a standard (US) home outlet (120volts), you charge a Model 3 at about 5 miles of range per hour. So, if I get home from dinner after work at 8:00pm, and have to leave for the office at 7:00am the next morning, my car only adds about 55 miles worth of charge.
As an example, I went for a longer drive on Saturday, and it took 37 hours to charge at home (right through Monday morning.)
(I live in a place where I'm currently unable to install a high-capacity charging outlet.)
My Model 3 adds 17km/h at 220V (EU). => 200 km range if you arrive at 6pm and leave at 8am. THis is not a full charge, but it is more than enough for my daily routine.
But I understand, there might be some use cases where this is not enough.
Random road trips? AutoPilot? Random stops at high-density places to get ready for the next leg of the trip?
Seriously, what kind of heaven do you people live in? I can't even travel 2 kilometers without getting lost in unhabitable middle of nowheres or being asked for a visa and turned back.
Driving from Dallas, Texas, to San Diego, California, is a three-day drive if you stop overnight, or 19+ hours if you drive without unnecessary stops. And that's only halfway across the USA, essentially horizontally. A drive from Seattle to Miami or San Diego to Portland, Maine, would be much longer.
The US Interstate Higherway System means that even on long stretches of road where nobody seems to live, the roads are still maintained, with stops every so often.
And of course, no visas or even passports required. Just a driver license if you're driving, or no ID at all if you're a passenger.
The Tesla Model 3 is very capable of long road trips, especially in the summer, with a range of 500km or more. The only exception would be if you’re driving in very remote areas with no charging infrastructure, but that almost doesn’t exist any more in Western Europe.
The Tesla Supercharger network, combined with its ability to charge on CCS charging networks like Ionity, make it uniquely suited to long distance travel.
And it will only get better over time as more, and faster, charging stations are deployed. (The Model 3 is capable of up to 250kW charging - twice the speed of what most of the current Superchargers can do).
You can drive a manual in stop and go traffic (and I don't mean that suburban sprawl "run through the gears between each stop light" type of stop and go you get in some places, I mean like going 10-30ft at a time between stops). That doesn't make it not obviously worse for the task than an automatic.
The extra cognitive load of having to worry about range and where you're going to charge is a pain in the butt that most people will opt out of, all else being close to equal.
> You can drive a manual in stop and go traffic. That doesn't make it not obviously worse for the task than an automatic.
It's weird, I've never actually thought of changing gear as a hassle or something that makes driving un-fun. Stop and go traffic is a game, where the goal is to not brake. Gears give me an additional way to achieve that goal. For me it's way more engaging and helps me pay more attention to the road...
Have you driven a motorcycle or a high horsepower car with a stiff clutch in stop and go traffic? I developed leg problems from my Cobra a decade ago. Sitting in traffic was absolutely miserable. Same with bikes, except there you're also covered in sweat the entire time so it's even less pleasant.
My DCT BMW was also annoying in stop and go traffic and I didn't even have to manipulate the gears.
I still find shifting to be fun, I mostly drove my BMW in manual DCT mode (dual clutch). But in traffic? I don't want to go near a manual.
I'd just caution against doing this in some areas.
A member of a group I used to ride with decided to stop riding when someone opened their door to stop him from splitting in PA. He smacked into the door, was physically okay, but ended up getting charged with something like "illegal lane change", had his insurance prices skyrocket, and decided to stop riding as he had to drive for his job, and he was worried that another 3-point ticket would get him a 30 day suspension and he'd basically lose his job.
The driver who opened their door is very lucky nothing serious came of it. Many motorcycle riders would treat that as an attempt on their life and react accordingly, probably not working out well for the car driver.
As a bicyclist, I was surprised by the sheer number of drivers who seem intent on punishing bicyclists, often for actions that are not illegal. So, given this experience I am not surprised to hear the same is true for motorcyclists.
I've had people do very close "punishment passes" on me because they thought I was going far below the speed limit when in reality I was going roughly 17 mph in a 15 mph zone. This is not some sort of isolated incident. I've spoken to several of them and it's rare that I get an apology for it.
Add on top of that the people who pass me closely while yelling things like "get in the bike lane!" when I'm riding in the sharrow lane and there is no bike lane.
I’d say it probably wouldn’t work out well for anyone.
Where I live, ~50% of motorists are armed and no permits are required to do so. Road rage never ends well for anyone involved here.
The moral of the story is: be respectful of others. If you’re a motorcyclist in a state where it’s illegal to lane split, don’t do it. If you’re a driver in a state where it is legal, don’t be a dick to motorcyclists if they are lane splitting.
I’d also like to add that I think lane splitting is wildly dangerous and dread driving in California. Surely motorcyclists die from this every year?
>I’d also like to add that I think lane splitting is wildly dangerous and dread driving in California. Surely motorcyclists die from this every year?
So it's a bit contentious, but from what i've seen, it's safe as long as it's done safely, which is a dumb sentence, but let me explain:
There are really 2 things that people talk about with "lane splitting":
* Filtering - moving up between stopped cars at a light to the front of the pack, and then driving away when the light turns green. Generally you aren't passing other moving vehicles when filtering, or if they are moving it's a few mph at most.
* Lane Splitting - This is when you are driving between lanes passing other vehicles that are moving.
Filtering is considered to be safer than not filtering. It reduces rear-end accidents (people tend to "look through" bikers, and will pull up behind the car in front of them like they aren't there, there's also your "normal" rear-end accidents, but they are much worse for the biker...), it reduces traffic (bikes accelerate faster, so getting them out front is helpful to reduce the rubberbanding traffic), and it's obviously nicer for the biker as they get where they are going quicker.
Splitting on the other hand is contentious. On the one hand I believe there have been studies done that shows it reduces fatalities. But at the same time it does actually increase accidents, but those accidents tend to be much less dangerous. Since a splitter should only be going 5-10mph faster than the cars, any impacts should be kind of like 10mph impacts, and are much less dangerous (obviously still dangerous, but much less than being rear-ended, getting left-turned into, or rear-ending something, etc...). And it greatly reduces low-speed rear-endings while sitting in traffic (a fairly low-speed fender-bender can be a lot worse when a small bump can throw you backwards off the bike and onto the ground!)
But splitting does have other benefits other than safety. It's obviously much faster for the bikers, reduces traffic for everyone, and therefore reduces environmental impact in many cases (less cars AND bikes idling in traffic). And there are also second order benefits that it encourages more people to ride bikes, which just increases the above benefits even more.
Still, it's my opinion that both Splitting and Filtering should be fully legal everywhere. It doesn't really impact drivers or those who don't split to have it be legal beyond a possibly slight increase in small accidents (there's an argument that if it is much more dangerous then it could increase healthcare costs for everyone too), and those who are okay with the risks can do it.
And obviously at no point should anyone ever be flying between cars going 20mph+ faster than the cars around them. That's not safe splitting, and that's not what I want either.
I appreciate the in depth reply and hadn’t considered the different types of splitting.
> And obviously at no point should anyone ever be flying between cars going 20mph+ faster than the cars around them. That's not safe splitting, and that's not what I want either.
I think this is what I’m mostly referring to. We can definitely agree here! It seems to happen all too frequently when I’m driving in CA (mostly LA and SF, some SD).
I thought it was a pair of motorcycles side-by-side according to mutual prior agreement. That would be understandable.
Those other things are crazy. Unintentionally, I will kill you. I hope the law would agree that it is 100% your fault, because I would want to sue your estate for damages both physical and mental.
This is not how the law works in most countries and in California. You are also more likely to unintentionally kill me if I don't lane split.
Anecdote: a motorist lost control of his vehicle at highway speeds far ahead of me, causing everyone to brake suddenly. I split into the braked cars and slowed down.
The car I had been behind was rear-ended violently. If I had not lane split, I would have been rear-ended violently. I will take an unlimited number low-speed side scrapes over being hit from behind by a two-ton car going 30 mph faster.
I'm paying attention to the road ahead, so I wouldn't rear-end anybody. On the other hand, I have huge blind spots to the side and anyway my attention is mainly to the road ahead. I barely fit in the lane, and would easily crush you with my 3 to 5 tons. Recently I was driving with about 4 inches to the adjacent vehicles on each side. You don't fit in 4 inches; this is not a scrape. That came up unexpectedly, as the lanes narrowed and other large vehicles were beside me.
And lane splitters are paying attention to the road ahead, and are watching to make sure they have enough space, that they have an escape, that there is nothing in the way, and that nobody has a turn signal on or has room to suddenly change lanes. And if any of those isn't true, they stay in their lane and don't split. Lane splitting sounds terrifying if you've never done it, but it's actually very straightforward and boring.
You as a 4-wheeled vehicle driver have to do nothing differently to accommodate lane splitters, they will go around you when it is safe, and as long as you follow the other rules of the road (use your turn signals, and don't suddenly jerk around wildly within your lane), everyone can be happy.
And if you live in an area where lane splitting is legal, and you want to be nice while you are sitting in traffic, you can stay to one side of your lane matching the other drivers ahead of you, so that while you are mostly still, bikers can continue past.
If you had an escape, it wouldn't be lane splitting.
Picture four lanes with four vehicles. You decide to go right down the middle. The outermost vehicles change, being replaced by larger vehicles, but the innermost vehicles haven't seen you. The innermost vehicles move inward to have more distance from the outermost vehicles. The resulting space is physically too small for your body.
There is no escape. You go crunch.
I wouldn't mind if this only affected you, but it isn't harmless to me. Now I have to pull over and wait for the cops, ruining my schedule. I'll need to get my van repaired. I'll need to sue your estate for damages. If things go very badly, I may be wrongly blamed for your crash.
Stay in your lane. We mark lanes for a very good reason.
>Picture four lanes with four vehicles. You decide to go right down the middle. The outermost vehicles change, being replaced by larger vehicles, but the innermost vehicles haven't seen you.
This might be part of the disconnect here. You aren't "sitting" next to cars, you are passing them. If you aren't actively passing cars, you aren't splitting and should get in your own lane.
A rule of thumb is that you should be passing cars in about a second or so. So any "crunching" would have to happen within that second of time, or the motorcycle will be out in front by the time any contact would have been made.
But in reality that just doesn't happen. Mirrors stick out, and it is extremely rare for 2 cars to get close enough for their mirrors to touch, let alone have a mirror touch the other car.
But also cars just don't go from driving straight to instantly swerving toward another car in the next lane, they have "tells", they start drifting from the driver not paying attention, they act erratically, they have turn signals.
A safe lane splitting scenario that I do is like this.
* Cars are in both lanes, fairly close together so there is no room for people to try and shoot across to fill a gap in the other lane (if the cars are "staggered" like 2 sides of a zipper, that is a dangerous situation that I don't split in, because that is when people are likely to try and shoot into the next lane without any warning!)
* Cars are traveling about 15 to 30mph in both lanes, and there isn't a large speed differential between them (again, if one lane is going 15, and the other 30, people in the 15 lane are likely to try and shoot over to get in the "faster" lane, and sometimes people in the fast lane will try to shoot in to the slow lane so they can get off the next exit)
* I can see several car lengths ahead of me on my bike (bikes sit higher than cars, so you can often see much further ahead and can see over many cars. This also means that splitting is not okay on curves, hills, or when there are big trucks obscuring your view ahead, or if the drivers ahead are staggered in their lanes blocking a nice clean path)
In that situation, I go about 10-ish mph faster than the cars around me (a rule of thumb is you should be passing a car within a second, that equates to around a 10mph speed differential), and while doing this i'm looking at tail lights 3 or 4 cars ahead to see if anyone is stopping suddenly, turning, has a signal on, or is doing anything weird. if at any point things don't look good for splitting any more, I slowly drift back into my lane, slow down to match speed with that lane, and i'm no longer splitting.
If at any point things go really bad, say someone starts getting over toward me, or there is an accident ahead of me or next to me, I grab the brake and very quickly the bad stuff will pass me. And if it doesn't in time, then I'll get munched! That means yes you'll have to go through the insurance stuff for the scrapes and dents in the side of your car, and I'll probably have a broken ankle or a small neck injury, but i'll be alive. Contrast that with the alternative of not splitting where that same accident happens (because if you are drifting into another lane with another car in that lane and you don't see the biker in time, chances are you aren't going to see the car in time either and will smack into it), and when you slam on the breaks because of that, I run into the back of your car at 30mph and am in a LOT worse shape than i would have been in the splitting scenario.
But just like how we have lane markings for a reason, in many areas we also have laws that allow splitting for a reason, and you can't selectively pick and choose which laws you want to follow!
Your "safe lane splitting scenario" is compatible with my scenario, the one where you get squished flat. It's also not OK to snap off my mirror or gouge a groove in my paint.
I'm not "drifting into another lane". I'm using the space that is rightfully mine. No, I'm not going to signal. I'm not leaving my lane. The whole lane is mine; it is my safety margin.
If a truck on my right gets closer, then I will move left, and suddenly the space to the left of me becomes zero. If the vehicle on my left (not counting you) does likewise, then he isn't leaving you any room either. The gap closes to zero. You die.
You also aren't leaving room for actual emergencies, in which case I may swerve over the line. If you are in the proper position, there will be 4 to 6 feet of safety margin, or double that if you also swerve.
You claim that your behavior is safe, but there is a good reason that 98% of the states in the USA do not support it. You can lane split in Bangalore... and the insane road fatality rate tells the story of how well that works. There are more than 10 times as many deaths per vehicle in India as there are in the USA. Besides the hazard to yourself, you are causing distraction and stress to the other drivers. You may cause a crash and not even know it.
You responded to a very educational comment with this. You should apply your comments to the other user’s decision-making process. Either one or both of the cars in your example will be giving hints that the gap will close, let alone the trucks. If the motorcyclist is behind you, he will see that something’s wrong. If he’s starting to pass, he will brake. If he’s in the middle of the pass, he will clear before the gap closes. In very unusual circumstances, you will be forced into the other car by some sudden circumstances and the motorcyclist might get caught, but you should know from driving much of your life how likely this is, and some aggregated data is also available.
Your other example about arbitrarily using the edge of the lane would be even easier to detect using his framework.
I wouldn't call it educational. It was motivated denial.
It was also unfairly presuming that motorcyclists are more alert/careful/skilled than other drivers. This is clearly not the case.
Just a couple months ago, I suddenly had a 4-inch gap on either side. (confirmed by my son in the other front seat) Perhaps the road was badly designed or built, but that happens.
It's 20 feet from one end of my vehicle to the other. Escaping that isn't so easy.
What a disappointing thread. You two should try harder to understand what the other is saying, rather than just digging your heels in and pretending your words are the only ones in the conversation that matter.
The opportunity for a great discussion was there, because both of you have relevant experience and have thought carefully about the situation. Oh well. Instead you just spent paragraph after paragraph trying to set the boundaries of the discussion in a way that excludes the other.
I think the difference is cultural. I cannot accept lane splitting at high speeds (35mph+) as long as humans still have license to drive. Once we rescind all humans the license to drive, I'm OK with lane splitting.
Think of it this easy. In the four car scenario: how would a bike pass cars that are at the speed limit? By going over the speed limit. Lane splitting by humans (not talking about filtering) ought to be against the law.
Yes, in a scenario where I'm next to 2 cars on a highway and during that one second that i'm passing them they both immediately turn toward the inner edge of the lane with no warning and within a second are as close to that inner lane as they can each get, I will get hit.
But that scenario is insanely contrived, extremely unlikely, and damn near impossible to happen and also not result in any contact without the motorcycle (if you and another driver both move toward the "inner" edge of your lane at the same time as far as you both can without "leaving" your lane, you will collide).
>You also aren't leaving room for actual emergencies, in which case I may swerve over the line. If you are in the proper position, there will be 4 to 6 feet of safety margin
This brings up another cool point that is really counterintuitive at first! Motorcycles who aren't lane splitting shouldn't be in the center of the lane, it's one of the most dangerous areas for them to be! Generally they want to be on a side closest to other traffic, the rule of thumb is to "act like your bike is the left or right side of a car in that same lane".
When a bike is in the middle of a lane, people often try to merge into it and don't see them until it's too late. By riding the inside edge of the lane, you make yourself visible to drivers that would otherwise not be able to see you. The center of a lane also has the most gravel, oil, and other stuff on it. So no, you wouldn't have 4 to 6 feet of safety margin. Hell according to your logic that entire lane should be mine, so you have zero feet of safety margin.
>You claim that your behavior is safe, but there is a good reason that 98% of the states in the USA do not support it.
And 98% of the rest of the world does. Take Norway for example. Lane splitting is legal, and there are 3 deaths per 100k vehicles there (compared to 13 in the US, and 130 in India). And that's not just one country. All of Europe is safer to drive in (average of 19 deaths per 100k vehicles) than the US, and just about all of Europe allows lane splitting. Even the NHTSA says that lane splitting "slightly reduces" accidents.
This is 100% hoss. If it isn't straight out of some "how to lane split safely" guide, it should be. This is literally everything that's going on in my head when I'm riding through traffic.
That isn't about the fuzz. People who live in States/Cities (everywhere but CA, right?) where lane splitting is illegal aren't used to lane splitting. They aren't sitting in their cars watching out for bikers and they'll make abrupt lane changes without even looking for you. That's incredibly dangerous. I moved from FL (lane splitting is illegal but people seem used to it) to TX (no splitting) and doing that is a death wish here.
Obviously you know your areas driving culture better than me but there's definitely places I wouldn't do that. Hell you'll probably just piss off people in TX and they'll run you over out of spite. Territorial drivers.
I've approached the practice with caution every time I've moved. I'm currently in California, and drivers here are more accepting of the practice due to legality, but for every three drivers who move over to give me more room, there's one who's texting and swerving.
Anyone riding a motorcycle who is simply blindly counting on other drivers to see them, follow all the rules of the road carefully, and never do anything unexpected, is not going to last long. Everything motorcyclists do has to be done in such a way that it will still be safe even if the other cars around them are all but actively malicious. Fortunately, motorcycles are extremely agile, quick, and small, so it's easy for the attentive, cautious rider to anticipate and avoid most hazards. The trick is just managing to always be sufficiently attentive and cautious.
Thank you. I suppose for me the 'cognitive load' of parsing whole parenthetical phrases and double negatives is more taxing than shifting from 2nd gear back into neutral.
If cognitive load is what you care about, you should try autopilot’s cruise control with distance keeping. Stress erased from driving and cognitive load lifted almost completely.
The win from this overcomes any cognitive load from thinking about charging by a factor of 100 or more in my experience. Most people are blown away by this when they get it. Of course it’s not unique to Tesla but it’s a big benefit.
You mean the cruise control that's already killed people? The cognitive load of not trusting cars around you is now increased by having to worry about not trusting your own car. That's crazy to me.
I'm pretty convinced most stress caused by driving is just people driving way too aggressively.
> I'm pretty convinced most stress caused by driving is just people driving way too aggressively.
In my experience, the exact opposite seems to be the case. Aggressive drivers tend to move with a purpose, pay attention and react logically (even if recklessly) to events on the road. By contrast, the bored people zoning out while driving, the people stuck on their phones or just clogging up the fast lane while driving under the speed limit are unpredictable (and when they do wake up, they tend to panic) and cause problems all around themselves as everyone else is forced to adjust. People who can't be bothered to care about driving while doing it are much worse than people who care too much.
Sorry I realized my comment could be read two ways.
I meant to say that I think most stress is caused by the person who is stressed driving too aggressively. They care way too much about saving 2 seconds by passing/riding up on people constantly.
The conversation was about using AP in very heavy traffic, which has killed nobody.
> I'm pretty convinced most stress caused by driving is just people driving way too aggressively.
In my experience it is much more stressful to be on the lookout for drivers that just aren't paying attention. They exhibit no bad behavior until the poorly timed lane change, missed light, etc.
Assuming you’re talking about Florida car-under-semi and California car-into-divider (the only Tesla fatalities that come to mind) I think you have an incorrect understanding of those incidents. Those were not cruise control and both were driver error.
Having just done a 1000 mile (1600km) road trip through Oregon, it wasn't really that big of a hassle. I told my car where I wanted to go, the tesla routing software put down pins on where to charge and told me how long to charge. That was it.
If anything, planning for gas stops is much more of a burden, because usually as you are driving, once you get to ~1/4 full you are thinking to yourself "Ok, where can I stop to get gas? Is there a place close enough? Which stations have the best price?"
With this, all of that cognitive load was gone and handled for me by a smart routing computer.
I had this exact problem in my gas-powered rental car recently, driving between Vegas and LA. The gas stations along the 15 were hectic, and I was planning to turn off onto a more scenic route which, I imagined, would have low-key, low-traffic gas stations. Surprise--there wasn't a gas station for over 100 miles! Double surprise--there was no cell reception either!
If you are on a highway with 1/4 tank you are likely to have a number of options before you get close to running out an you can be taking just about any route you want. With a supercharger dependency you are highly limited.
Charging is really not much of a “cognitive load” in my experience. The navigation system can plan it for you, suggesting exactly where you should charge and how long it’ll take.
As for extra time spent charging? I guess there are those out there who really do drive more than 4-5 hours at once without stopping for a meal, stretch, toilet break, etc. But surely they’re a tiny minority.
Do you really always stop for your meal break somewhere there's a supercharger? A meal and a charger are not located in the same place for most people most of the time.
For a Model 3 even with readily available charging that still means ~1 hour waiting on a supercharger per charge, and you've gotta do that 2-3x to get from, say, Amsterdam to Kitzbuhel for a skiing road trip. Figure 15 Euro minimum to use the charger during that time? (I'm using range numbers and charging costs available on the web to run this calculation)
I know it's _possible_ to get somewhere without range anxiety but 20% added time plus 30-45 Euro for the privilege to do that is a serious downside.
If you only do this a couple times a year and the rest of your driving is local then this makes sense, but I don't know that for regular long-range drivers this argument works.
I drove from San Diego to SF in one of my many long trips and most of my charging stops were 10 minutes. I also had two 20 minute stops, one 30 minute, and one 15 minute. The 30 minute stop was near the end where I wanted to arrive home near half full.
Food, checking out local shops, and coffee + bathroom break for those three longer stops. For the short stops, it was just get a bit of charge, maybe a quick stretch or bathroom visit, and on my way.
People have the most bizarre misconceptions about Tesla charging, I think because they assume you have to charge from 0 to full at every stop, which truly would be slow. It simply doesn’t work that way if you do it properly.
I mean seriously... most of my stops were 10 minutes. Quite a contrast from what people think. Plugging in numbers from a map and going by total charge-to-full time overlooks the way charging is so much faster at the bottom of the range.
On the other hand taking a trip to New Mexico and back from California, many stops were 40 minutes to an hour because the chargers are spaced further apart in some of the desert states. YMMV. It depends on your route but the chargers are getting dramatically faster very soon, AND the charger network is getting more and more densely built out.
Correct me if I misunderstood (or read things too literally), but you're saying you stopped more than 8 times in a 500 mile trip? That seems like a lot, especially if they were for recharging. But I don't know the charging rate so maybe it was a case of many short sessions vs. 1 or 2 long ones?
Note: I got >8 because you said most stops were 10-min and then listed 4 stops longer than 10-min.
Yes it was 9 or 10. But I was having fun checking out the different charging locations since it was only my second time on that route. There still are plenty more stations on that route that I haven’t been to yet, btw.
I was going off of a brand new Model 3 performance review on TopGear.com from the Fremont factory to LA design center, which indicated it was closer to an hour with a single stop. (Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gsS-Q3j_Pk)
I saw that review too. It’s a bit deceptive because it’s not optimal to charge all the way up to ~100% on a supercharger. He could have saved a lot of time by stopping twice (2x 15-20 minute stops instead of one 50-60 minute one)
Most people who drive from SF to LA take more than one break, and if it is only one it will be long with a meal and bathroom breaks, plus some walking around to overcome having sat for so long.
> that still means ~1 hour waiting on a supercharger per charge
In a normal car, you fill the tank to full, burn the gas until you're low, then fill it to full again.
EVs aren't the same way, and Teslas on road trips definitely aren't. You don't charge to 100% -- you charge only long enough to reach your next supercharger. Because of the charge curve, you charge at the fastest rate when your battery is low. If you try to charge to 100% every time like you'd do in a gas car, you're gonna have a bad time.
This was the hardest thing for me to get used to in daily driving -- you have to be opportunistic about charging. Whenever you can plug in, plug in. At 70% and there's an empty charger? Plug in. You'd never go to the gas station with a 70% full gas tank, but it's just a different beast altogether.
I think the idea is that you use the superchargers as part of a meal stop that you would make with an ordinary car anyway. If you stop every X km with a regular car for breaks, and Tesla's network ensures you can always find a supercharger in these steps, you can stop, eat / refresh yourself and by the time you're done your car will be ready to make the next leg.
When was the last time you saw a supercharger in a fast food or restaurant parking lot? I live in a part of the Northeast where Teslas are very popular but I haven't seen one.
It may not be for you. It’s fine for me. (FWIW, I also politically strongly disagree with EU’s draconian emission standards that are attempting to push EVs on people who don’t won’t EVs.)
The route you mention is full of Superchargers. You absolutely don’t need to wait an hour for a charge, and that’s a bad way to charge (lower rate of charge on fully empty and mostly full batteries). And you depart your hope fully charged and then charge in your Kitzbuhel hotel. On the way, there’s plenty of opportunities to stop for a 15-20 minutes charge and a coffee+bathroom break.
I can’t drive more than 3, 4 max, hours without taking a small break. Most of the time, the damn car is notifying me it’s all charged and ready to continue before I am done with my coffee. It’s fine for me.
My brother, who routine goes Prague-Amsterdam overnight in a single go, would probably hate the wasted time. It’s not for everyone.
"added time plus 30-45 Euro for the privilege to do that is a serious downside"
So would you rather pay €30-45 for charging, or ~€150 for petrol/diesel?
And of course it's only added time if you weren't planning to make stops anyway. Most drivers take breaks, and arguably it's unsafe to not do so over such long journeys.
That's a 10 hour drive! You're genuinely choosing a personal vehicle on its ability to drive literally all day?
I mean, sure. Everyone has their own preferences. But this is a wildly beyond median data point. Most people will take a trip like this once every few years at most. The vast majority are going to look at that trip and fly/train and rent a car in Austria.
Buy the car you want. But arguing on the internet that "I can't use an EV because it doesn't do this one incredibly rare weird thing I want" seems like poor form.
My family's done this drive a couple times for vacations. Much easier / cheaper than flying and renting with all your gear, etc.
In the United States I routinely am in the car for 8-10 hours each way to visit family, but most of my daily driving is short distances. I don't want to own two cars.
I agree with you completely - buy the car you want. What I am hearing from a lot of folks here though is "I bought the car I wanted (for most of my driving) but I'm also saying it's the same or better on long road trips"
Yes yes, lot of people do everything. The question is whether or not something you do once every two years (my educated guess based on that kind of trip frequency per net passenger car -- and I live in the western US!) is a critical requirement for a passenger vehicle to be driven every day.
There are all sorts of things your car can't do that "many" other people do. All I'm saying is stop the nonsense that pretends this is specific to EV's.
This is the logic that demands everyone have a pickup truck, or 4WD, or passenger van, or, hell, private aircraft. Use what you need. But (1) don't pretend that what you need is what I do and (2) be realistic about what you "need". Like, seriously, you really can't take a train to the Alps? Seriously?
I don't know when you last tried to engage in winter sports and public transport, but to carry all that equipment to and from public transport is a lot of work. Even with Ubers at either end of the train, it's still a lot of work shifting all the bags.
Right - the thing I am rebutting is this from the original parent quote:
> "The Tesla Supercharger network, combined with its ability to charge on CCS charging networks like Ionity, make it uniquely suited to long distance travel."
I just checked a couple of the routes I have planned for this year, and there are supercharger points sufficiently close on them. They would add minor detours or alternative routes - for example heading to northern England would require taking the M1 rather than the A1, but it seems do-able. Maybe in a couple of years if I trade in my current car...
> I'd like to get one but it doesn't fit my use case (namely long road trips in the summer).
I own a P3D, facing the same issues of long road trips 1-2x a year I concluded that I'll just spend the few hundred dollars and rent a car for the deep edge cases of my driving and the other 99% of my time I'll enjoy driving my Tesla.
99% of my normal day to day driving I just charge at home at night, I've used the supercharger network on a long road trip and it was surprisingly little-hassle.
I am bit conflicted about the opinion on long road trips is because now I cant think of any other car other than Tesla for Long Road Trips because
1. Auto Pilot takes so much stress away. For starters consider it as ADAS
2. Never had problem with charging where i live. 10 to 20 minute stop for another 4 hrs drive in average.
I did a long road trip from San Diego to Breckenridge more than 2000 miles (round trip) and never had range anxiety and trip was more enjoyable than any other car
rent a car if that's the issue. As a daily driver it makes so much more sense and all the "but the roadtrips" people vastly overestimate how often that actually happens. I know because I used to be one.
Except for the spontaneous brake checking. That's like waiting for someone to hit the "zap them" button. Got me most recently coming across a bridge. Sigh.
Why buy a car you'll own and pay for the whole year based on the usage for a few weeks? Wouldn't it make more sense to rent a road trip car when you need it?
Yes! This is something that I have wondered for a long time. Why do people buy a car that covers all possible usecases for all year around instead of buying one that is ideal for daily use and then rent a bigger car for the week or two when you need it? It would be better for the wallet and for the environment.
Because there are many great cars that fit all those requirements and that are usually cheaper than a current Tesla, better equiped than a Tesla (autopilot being the single exception, even though BMW, Porsche, VW and many others already have lane assist which is basically a little worse (but still comparable) version of Tesla's autopilot). Why bother with renting when you can just take your own car?
"basically a little worse (but still comparable)". No, not even close. I had an M5 with BMW's latest lane keeping assist. Tesla's Autopilot is exponentially better. Especially in the last two weeks with unattended highway lane changes. It is night and day different.
What does it mean practically? What do you mean by "exponentially"? VW, BMW, have lane assist. It means the vehicle will stay in the lane. Autopilot will also stay in the lane. Let's say on a 30 minute drive, autopilot will disengage 2 times, VW will disengage 6 times. Is this about right? I don't see an "exponential" difference here, care to explain? I have tried several vehicles that have this, but for short periods of time.
The point is, none of the vehicles are truly automatic yet. I've seen videos of recent automatic lane changes too, there seems to be problems with proper speed and accurate changes, unless perfect road conditions...
I mean exponentially as in the experience is radically different. VW, BMW, etc will disengage multiple times during a trip by itself. Autopilot does not. 99% of my trips, I do not have to take over from autopilot. It just works. Sharp curves, stop and go traffic. The intelligence of the system - Tesla will look at cars in adjacent lanes, detect a blinker and slow the car to allow a merge. Tesla will look at cars approaching from an on-ramp merge and slow down to properly zipper merge. Tesla will detect a car in a blind spot during a lane change and automatically steer to avoid a collision. And yes the automatic lane changes are even further. They don't require perfect road conditions and there are no issues with proper speed or accurate changes. For me in SoCal traffic, the car will drive onramp to offramp, changing highways and avoiding slow traffic without me doing anything. This is what I mean by exponentially different. It is night and day.
I don’t talk about Tesla. I am talking about a small car, electric or not, that cost a fraction to buy, drive, insure and will be easier to park. And then renting for that fishing trip or long road trip when your small car won’t do.
I looked at this for a fun car to use at the weekends twice a month but it wasn't cost effective.
To rent for a weekend:
- Rental: £300 (dependent on the car, but £300 was the cheapest)
- Fuel: £100
To do it twice a month, between April and October would cost £5,600. Instead I picked up a fantastic car for just under £10,000 with less than 50,000 miles on it.
One small tip for renting cars is to look around at a few rental places, ideally in lower-traffic or lower-population areas. £300 for a weekend seems pretty high (but comparable to e.g. renting from the local airport here), whereas I could take an Uber to an Enterprise just outside of town for ~$30 and get a "premium" car for $140 for the weekend (48 hours at $70/day).
This is for renting sports cars (fun cars) for weekend use. Enterprise and the like don't have such cars available in the U.K, it's more of a specialist market.
If you actually use the cat like that twice a month for a big part of the year it of course makes sense to buy one. But most people use the car for that fun drive maybe twice a year (even though they of course dream about doing it all the time when they buy their expensive car).
I have a car payment, pay to maintain my car, and fees to drive it. Why would I buy a car knowing I would have to rent a car several times a year to go on vacation?
One reason I do is to avoid the mileage I put on a vacation car. I could travel 1,500 miles across several states while on a vacation trip. That’s 1-2 months of normal driving that I instead put on rental car for about $150.
Plenty of rental car companies offer unlimited mileage (especially in the US, Avis in particular).
I spent nearly a decade as a consultant traveling extensively throughout the US and Europe--and unlimited mileage rentals could be had for a reasonable and often surprisingly cheap price. I never understood why people opted to pay by the mile.
I don't know about Switzerland, but renting a car is pretty expensive in some countries. So buying something like a Tesla, or another car, with high resale value may be the better deal, even if you only need it for a month or two a year.
I know I'm a tiny minority on this usage, but I own cars because I like cars; as in tinkering with them. My two cars are pre-2000, and I only drive them rarely. But when I do, I usually cover several hundred, if not thousands some times, kilometres before I put them away again. But I take the train or bike to work.
While I am not on long trips with them, I instead tinker with them. However, buying a used car can often be a lot cheaper than buying cheap modern car + renting one for road trips, that will cover usages (daily and road trips) decently.
I do use the car outside the long trips. Looking at my mileage graph over the past 5 years[1] my usage is short trips in the winter/spring then much longer road trips in the summer/autumn. The spikes you see on it (2,000km plus) are generally single road trips.
I drove from the UK to Ålesund, Norway and back in a Model X, which was about 1,300 miles in each direction. Did it on the way home with two kids in the back.
The USA prices are always without taxes while European prices usually contain VAT, which can be as high as 20%. On top of that there are import duties at least into EU countries. Most importantly, the deliveries in Europe started with the AWD configurations which start at $50k in the US too.
Some of us don’t pay VAT on business purchases either.
It’s customary in US, and evil genius in EU, where consumer prices must be shown with VAT. It hides the tax (surprisingly many people, even those you would expect to be financially literate, aren’t aware of the sheer amount of it - see any online bitching about Apple’s EU prices).
And that’s how you end up with 19-25% taxation of everything you buy in EU. US sales tax is acutely visible every time you buy something, it’s much harder to increase it, politically.
I like how you manage to turn this around so skillfully.
The US sucks because you never see the actual price of something you buy: you just notice it at the counter. When you ask why they don't just label the product with the final price, they say: we can't, it's too complicated. I doubt that.
The real reason is probably that the retailer wants to show the lowest price. Especially for people who might choose to cross-shop different stores.
The legitimate reason is that sales tax in the US can vary by city, or county, or state. Personally I think they should include both prices on the tag. I suppose if you live somewhere that has sales tax you get used to doing the math on the fly. I live in a state with no sales tax so it always surprises me when I shop out of state.
> Im guessing its at least a double of a promised $35K USA price?
The low-end 35K model 3 (Standard Range RWD) isn't available in Europe yet. For 60k CHF including taxes you get the version that costs $48500 excluding taxes in the US (AWD long-range).
It seems like it. If I go to tesla.com/model3 and start the process for a base (standard range = 220 miles) RWD sedan, it's $35k before $3750 federal credit and $1750 state (PA) rebate.
You can get it any color, as long as it's black. Any other color costs $1500, and getting rims different from the total black stock ones are also $1500.
The interior is black cloth with manual seat adjustments and "basic audio." At least on this version, there are no options to change that. Ahh the next step up trim level is "Partial Premium Interior" for $2500.
Some states have sales tax on cars and others do not. My state Georgia has a 6.5% sales tax (might be more in 2019). We used to pay a yearly tax on the average value for you make/model/year but now you just play a flat rate at sale time.
Your county or city could also impose a tax on top of the states rate. It’s complicated and I’m sure it’s why car companies don’t list taxes in the US on their websites.
For my last roadtrip I got a rental car with Subaru's EyeSight adaptive cruise control and lane-keeping. After a day of driving with that I was noticeably less fatigued, and could afford to actually look out at the scenery every now and then.
Definitely worth it, I imagine Tesla's system is even better.
I found fatigue mostly depends on the other traffic. In my 2003 Volvo S60 I can do 800km [500mi] of Autobahn with virtually zero fatigue (basic cruise control and better seats than in my living room) -- with little traffic and mostly cruising at 110km/h [70mph] (or faster if traffic demands it). Though there is not much difference to 140km/h [87mph] besides 20% better fuel economy.
Now, same car, same weather, but 50km (read: fifty) of heavy stop&go on a three lane Autobahn -> Kill me, please.
I'm looking forward to my next car with adaptive CC, that should eat a lot of the stop&go stress (also on my daily commute). But - to get to the point - I don't think that Autopilot will make things much better than that, since I still need to be aware of traffic and anticipate potential stupidities committed by other drivers -- and that's what's causing most of the fatigue for me.
Actually not. Subaru's EyeSight is currently the best system available. Especially in local traffic on detecting bicycles, kids and all those things even at night time.
Users of autopilot probably have faith in it, although in some cases (like the guy running into the concrete divider) this caused their deaths.
I guess your mindset is different to the grandparent poster's mindset. He thinks autopilot is as reliable as a human chauffeur, to you (and probably to me too) it'd be like having a driver which you can't communicate with and might suffer epilepsy and fatally yank the wheel at any point, so you have to keep paying attention to his driving.
Interestingly this mindset difference also exists in Tesla, the marketing department promotes 1 version, and the legal department says the other...
I hear a lot of this from people who've never tried Autopilot, and yet everyone who has tried Autopilot loves it.
My best guess here is that "babysitting an epileptic chauffeur" may sound scary, but in practice it's a lot less stressful than actually driving. Not needing to focus on lane-keeping and maintaining safe following distance is probably a lot nicer than you might expect – you still have to pay attention to lane-keeping, but that might even be easier when you're not forced to focus on the mechanical part of it.
And your still driving - you just don’t micromanage trivia (which turns out is pretty exhausting). That increases your cognitive capacity to observe the road ahead at a higher level. You now see things you could have missed when focusing on low-level steering, especially when tired. You notice a weirdly behaving card ahead of time and take over. You see the road is getting a bit more complicated, or congested, ahead and take over. Traffic too heavy for Tesla’s cautions lane changes or overtaking, you take over.
Not at all. The only place they ever "veer" is when the lane markings are lacking, which isn't very common. It is especially uncommon on the long, boring stretches of interstate that seem to drag on forever when driving.
It's extremely common to have worn out lane markings in the snow belt. New paint only lasts one winter before the plows scrape off most of the reflective beads. Rain driving in the dark then becomes a guessing game no machine can handle.
It also makes things more comfortable - you can stretch and change position on long drives. In three hours of motorway driving on Sunday, I was only driving for about three minutes - the rest was Autopilot.
Many other manufacturers have the same functionality that tesla calls autopilot. It is called "lane assist". The car steers itself and keeps inside a lane. Tesla's might be 10%-20% "better" in terms of which roads it will stay on, but since a human needs to keep attention on it anyways, it is basically same functionality.
>I'd like to get one but it doesn't fit my use case (namely long road trips in the summer).
Yeah most electric cars aren’t ideal for long road trips, but I wouldn’t generalize that to a Tesla. Definitely the long range config is a good one to get though. The extra money you spend will be made up on maintenance savings and fewer surprise breakdowns from bad gas, watered-down gas, or other issues on those long trips.
A colleague of mine bought 2x 2018 Chevy Volts recently - after all rebates came out to $18000 cash each for a brand new Volt.
Thats a no brainer to me - at 2000$ gas / year - the car pays for itself in 10 years.
Unfortunately for most people out there the economics does not work the same way - they cant get to this pricing. But if they could USA would have a much larger share of electric cars.
I'm curious, how do you get a $33k MSRP Volt down to $18k? Was it second hand? (if it was then you don't get any federal/state credits, those are claimed by the original owner)
yes brand new cars - combination of federal and state rebates on electric cars. if this was available to everyone - we'd have a much larger share of electric cars in USA TODAY. pretty much buy one get one free in this case - two great electric cars for the price of one. INSANE.
- I see a handful of Teslas around the village. I would guesstimate 5 local residents own them.
- The local taxi firm has a couple even.
- Filling stations on the autoroutes have the charging points (at least in Romandy)
- The country is small so, hey, it seems ideal
I'd like to get one but it doesn't fit my use case (namely long road trips in the summer).