Lifestyle
A Guide to Planning a Tesla Road Trip
Prior to taking delivery of my Model S I was the guy who suffered from incessant thoughts of range anxiety, which soon disappeared as I grew into my ownership experience. I charge daily to 90% in my 85 kWh Model S and drive about 100 miles a day commuting, running errands, etc. I return home with about 140 miles of range left every day which is enough to do it all again without charging. There have been a few longer round trips where I did about 180 miles round trip, and one intentional (but not required) visit to a Supercharger, but none of my trips have required charging en-route or at the destination. As the end of summer approaches I intend on taking two Tesla road trips – one to New Jersey, about an hour east of NYC, and another road trip taking me one hour northeast of Pittsburgh. The New Jersey trip will be taking place this week hence it’s the subject this post. The Tesla road trip to PA will be the subject for of a future post.
Tesla Road Trip Planning
The first thing to consider is the overall distance of your road trip. With any trip, there are a few routes that one could take, and in my case it’s approximately a 244 mile journey to my destination. If I range charge, I’d have 265 miles of rated range which is merely a prediction of how far I could travel based on many assumptions. It’s not representative of the actual miles that can be driven. Rated miles do not take into account terrain, traffic, air conditioning, pit stops/detours etc. Using EVTripPlanner I determined that I’d likely need a charge along the way just so I can have a safety margin.
Assuming I leave with a 90% state of charge, I’ll need to charge after depleting 160-190 rated miles just so I can maintain a comfortable buffer. Experienced Tesla road trip veterans are probably much better at estimating the amount of buffer needed based on time of year and weather conditions.
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The next thing I researched are the number of Supercharger locations along my route. There are a many ways of doing this, so I’ll just mention two:
- Google maps – Enter your start and end addresses and then type “Supercharger” and have Google find Superchargers on the map along your route. Pick a good one (or more if needed) as waypoints.
- EVTripPlanner.com – This is a useful EV trip planning site put together by an enterprising 16 year old. Enter your start and destination addresses, select the type of car you’ll be using, and click the “Route through Superchargers” button. This will guide you to your destination through routes that have access to Tesla Superchargers. It’s not perfect and it can add more pit stops than needed so be sure to validate the results and adjust accordingly.
I used EVTripPlanner and found that while it wanted me to stop at both the Milford and Darien, Connecticut Superchargers, I technically would still have plenty of range and be able to skip Milford. From my home to the Darien Supercharger it’s 147 miles but EVTripPlanner estimates 161 rated miles needed. Considering we’re charged to 90% (240 miles), we’ll have plenty of buffer to fulfill the 1st leg at 147 miles.
How Much Charge Do I Need?
The rate of charge in an EV taper offs quickly as it approaches a 100% state of charge. This may add a significant amount of time to your charge. Also EVs charge faster from near empty than they do from half full. When you look at charge times and rates on Tesla’s site, those are generally based on ideal conditions assuming you’re using the latest Supercharger technology and you’re not splitting the charge with someone else that’s in the same Supercharger bank.
ALSO SEE: Top 5 Lessons Learned from a First Tesla Road Trip
In summary, I start with 240 rated miles on a 90% charge. I drive to the Darien Supercharger and use 161 rated miles. I have 79 miles of rated range left. Not enough to get me to my destination hence the reason for my stop. EVTripPlanner estimates 93 miles needed with no safety factor. Safety factors are generally added to standard (not rated) mileage. I need to add some safety factor so lets take the 2/3 approach. 93 x 3/2 = 140 miles of rated range needed to arrive at my destination. So I need to add 61 miles of rated range at the Supercharger to get to my destination and still have a good safety margin.
Tesla claims 170 miles of rated range added in 30 minutes, but as we’ve mentioned above they might be overly optimistic with this. Even so, planning for a 30 minute stop is very reasonable.
Destination Charging
Unless you’ve “gifted” a charger setup to the people you’re visiting (several have done this), you’re likely to find some poor charging stations at the destination (if any at all). I’ve accepted the fact that the best charge I’ll probably get (at my destination) is from a 110V 15A plug that adds about three miles of rated range per hour.
I’ll definitely poke around when I get there to see if I can find a better charging station / wall outlet, but nevertheless I need to plan for the worst. If I charge the minimum at the Supercharger to get to 140 miles of rated range, drive and use the estimated 102 miles of rated range i’ll arrive at my destination with 38 miles of rated range left. On the way home I need to go back the same route and I need that 140 miles of rated range for the distance plus safety. Oops — I can’t get home.
So I need to add 102 miles of rated range while i’m there. More if I plan on doing things with my car while I’m there like showing it off with test drives, going to dinner, etc. Lets say I need 50 miles to use while I’m there, plus the 140 to get back to the Supercharger. I need to add 152 miles of rated range. At a charge rate of 3 miles/hour, it’ll take approximately 51 hours of charging to regain 153 miles of rated range.
Options:
- Find a Supercharger near my destination – NJ only has one and its more than an hour away. No good.
- Find a faster charger nearby – A local college has a J1772 reported at 30A/240V which would give 18miles rated/hour added. But I’d have to leave my car there or sit there for the charge. Better, but not great.
- Charge more at my Supercharger stop on the way down and arrive with more left.
Charging up more at the Supercharger seems like it would be the best option. I’ll charge back up to 90% (240 rated miles), use 102 rated miles to get to my NJ destination and have 138 rated miles left. If I don’t go anywhere while there, that leaves me with plenty of charge to get back along with a safety margin. If I want to drive around while I’m there, I figured an additional 50 miles of charge will suffice which equates to 16 hours of charging (from a wall outlet) or two overnights. That’s doable.
Planning Complete
The return trip home should be pretty uneventful assuming I did all of my Tesla road trip planning correctly. One last thing to consider is detours along the way. On our way down to NJ we pass by a favorite Sushi place we like to visit in CT. The restaurant is a bit off route and will add a couple miles so I planned for this as well.
I also considered the unlikely scenario where the Darien, CT supercharger was offline when I arrived. What would I do? Fortunately there’s another one on the Northbound side of I-95 and then another only a few miles away on the Merritt parkway. Unlike MA and NJ, CT is pretty blessed with Superchargers!
This will be my first real EV road trip. Relative to the the epic 12,000 mile Tesla road trip taken by the Recargo folks, and many others that are happening daily, mine will be tiny but just as fun. As a new owner that still occasionally struggles with range anxiety, it has been an eye-opening experience having to think about options and and fall back plans – things I never once thought about in an ICE car. A Tesla road trip takes a little more planning. Thanks to the growing Supercharger network “filling up” my Tesla along the way is a minor inconvenience. Oh, and did I mention that using the Tesla Supercharger is free for life?
Tags: road trip, battery
Elon Musk
The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville
The Boring Company’s Prufrock MB2 is commissioned and ready to mine beneath Nashville’s streets.
The Boring Company’s second tunnel boring machine, Prufrock MB2, is officially ready to dig in Nashville. The company confirmed the news on X, posting: “Prufrock-MB2 is ready to mine in Nashville! MB2 commissioning is complete, including the brief 11 rpm rotation shown here. Will MB2 catch up to MB1, who had quite the head start? And Prufrock-MB3 ships in August!”
MB2 arrives with meaningful improvements over its predecessor. Lessons learned from the launch and operation of MB1 have already been applied to MB2 to improve efficiency and prepare the machine for launch.
Traditional tunnel boring machines operate in a stop-and-go cycle, digging roughly five feet, halt, erect precast concrete segments to line the tunnel wall, then resume. That repeated interruption is one of the main reasons conventional tunneling is slow and expensive. Prufrock is designed to install the tunnel liner simultaneously with mining, eliminating the need to stop every five feet. The machine also skips the need for excavated launch pits. Prufrock arrives on a truck, tilts down, and launches into the ground within 24 hours. And when the tunnel is complete, it emerges from the ground and drives to its next launch site on a trailer, eliminating the need for expensive cranes or pit excavation. The machine is also fully electric and runs with zero people in the tunnel during normal operations, controlled remotely from a surface operations center.
Prufrock-MB2 is ready to mine in Nashville! MB2 commissioning is complete, including the brief 11 rpm rotation shown here.
Will MB2 catch up to MB1, who had quite the head start?
And Prufrock-MB3 ships in August! pic.twitter.com/TTrMql2aRg
— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) June 17, 2026
It won’t be long before we hear of another major update on The Boring Company’s Music City Loop project – a planned underground transit network beneath Nashville that would move passengers in electric vehicles through a series of tunnels at highway speeds, and bypassing surface traffic entirely. Nashville was selected in part because of its strong rock conditions that suits the Prufrock machines well, and relatively less regulatory hurdles.
Progress has been steady on multiple fronts. All 37 permits and approvals required ahead of tunneling have been obtained, out of 45 total. Key wins include a fully executed TDOT tunnel permit authorizing 25 miles of tunnel, unanimous airport authority approval for a Nashville International Airport station, and the city’s first residential station agreement serving downtown tower residents.
With MB1 already tunneling, MB2 now commissioned, and MB3 shipping in August, Nashville is becoming something of a live proving ground for scaled tunnel boring. The broader ambition is not limited to one city. The Boring Company’s stated goal is to make underground transportation a practical alternative to surface roads across major metro areas. Nashville is one of many cities, including a successful Las Vegas tunnel system, where that idea is being put to the test at real speed.
Investor's Corner
Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”
Tesla’s folding Supercharger just arrived in Europe and it changes how fast charging expands.
Tesla’s Folding Unit Supercharger has officially landed in Europe, with the company teasing a new installation in its effort for a broader rollout targeting major motorway rest stops across the European continent in Q3 2026. The arrival marks a notable shift in how Tesla is thinking about network expansion, moving from hardware performance alone to engineering the logistics chain itself.
While Tesla did not reveal the exact location for the new folding Supercharger in Europe, the photo shared on X heavily suggests that this maybe somewhere in Norway. Historically, whenever Tesla rolls out an entirely new infrastructure architecture in Europe, whether it was the original Supercharger stalls years ago or these brand-new modular V4 “Folding Units”, Norway is almost always the designated launch pad because of its unmatched EV adoption rate and supportive infrastructure
The Folding Unit, introduced in March 2026, is a factory pre-assembled V4 charging station built on an industrial hinge system mounted to a heavy-duty concrete base. The entire assembly arrives on site ready to unfold and connect. Tesla confirmed the units feature telescopic light poles specifically designed for easy transportation and fast on-site deployment, a detail that signals how carefully the logistics chain has been engineered alongside the hardware itself. The design allows 33% more stalls per delivery truck, cuts installation time roughly in half, and reduces overall deployment costs by more than 20% compared to traditional installations.
Tesla’s newest “Folding V4 Superchargers” are key to its most aggressive expansion yet
Tesla also noted telescopic light poles which provide benefits over traditional Supercharger installations that require fixed-height poles that are awkward to ship, slow to position on site, and often require separate crews and equipment to erect before charging hardware can even be staged. By engineering poles that compress for transit and extend on arrival, Tesla has removed one of the quieter bottlenecks in the physical deployment process. Every hour saved on a light pole installation is an hour redirected toward getting stalls energized. At scale, across dozens of new sites per quarter, those hours add up to a meaningful acceleration in how quickly a location goes from approved permit to serving its first customer.
Each Folding Unit pairs a single V4 power cabinet with eight charging posts. The V4 cabinet delivers up to 500 kW per stall for passenger vehicles and up to 1.2 MW for the Tesla Semi, supporting twice the stalls per cabinet at three times the power density of its predecessor. Longer cables make every new station immediately usable by non-Tesla vehicles, a priority as Tesla continues opening its network to Ford, GM, Rivian, Hyundai, Stellantis, and others.
As Teslarati reported when the Folding Unit was first unveiled, Tesla’s Gigafactory New York produced its final V3 Supercharger cabinet in March 2026 after more than seven years and 15,000 units, completing a full pivot to V4 production. The European arrival of the folding design is the next chapter in that transition.
Faster and cheaper deployment means Tesla can justify building in markets and corridors that were previously too expensive to serve, filling the coverage gaps that have slowed EV adoption outside major urban centers.
First Folding Unit Superchargers in Europe 🇪🇺 https://t.co/KNfYWJukkL pic.twitter.com/YR1udIpH1i
— Tesla Charging (@TeslaCharging) June 10, 2026
Elon Musk
SpaceXAI just launched into your kitchen with their new app
SpaceXAI just powered its first consumer app and it predicts what you want to buy.
SpaceXAI just made its first move into consumer AI, and it involves your grocery cart. On June 3, 2026, Gopuff and SpaceXAI announced the launch of Go, a Grok-powered shopping assistant built directly into the Gopuff app that predicts what you need before you even start searching for it.
Gopuff is an instant delivery platform that operates more than 400 micro-fulfillment centers across the U.S., delivering everyday essentials, snacks, drinks, and household items in as little as 15 minutes. It is not a restaurant delivery app or a marketplace. It owns its inventory, controls its warehouses, and handles its own logistics, which means it has built one of the most detailed consumer behavior datasets in retail over its 13-year history.
Go combines SpaceXAI’s advanced reasoning, voice, and image generation models with Gopuff’s dataset of hundreds of millions of orders and real-time cultural signals from X to prepare a suggested cart the moment a customer opens the app. It learns each shopper’s habits and automatically builds a personalized cart based on time of day, location, order history, and real-time indicators. Returning customers can check out with a single tap.
Rather than searching for specific items, users can describe a situation like a game-day party or the desire for a healthy breakfast and Go will assemble a cart automatically. It can also predict when shoppers are running low on items like coffee or paper towels and have them packed and delivered in under 15 minutes. Grok voice integration lets users talk to the app in plain conversational language and check out completely hands-free.
Gopuff co-founder and co-CEO Yakir Gola said: “Today, we believe the greatest friction left in commerce is not delivery or instantaneous access to the essentials customers need. It’s the moment before: the thinking, the deciding, the remembering. We’re combining Gopuff’s demand intelligence with xAI’s frontier reasoning to create an everyday shopping experience that feels like a true extension of you.”
Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO
The timing carries context beyond the product launch. SpaceXAI was formed after SpaceX completed an all-stock merger with Elon Musk’s xAI earlier this year, folding one of the most advanced AI labs in the world into the same corporate structure as the company preparing what could be the largest IPO in history. SpaceXAI is dipping into consumer-focused AI just as it prepares for its public debut, and while Musk has openly discussed building an everything app, this launch uses Grok to power another company’s product rather than launching a standalone consumer platform. Every consumer-facing deployment of Grok ahead of the IPO roadshow adds tangible evidence that SpaceXAI is not just an infrastructure play but a direct competitor in the AI application layer where OpenAI and Google are already fighting for dominance.

