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A Guide to Planning a Tesla Road Trip

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12 years ago

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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

EVTripPlannerThe 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?

Tesla Road Trip Supercharger

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.

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Destination Charging

ChargepointUnless 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

Tesla Road Trip

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
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"Rob's passion is technology and gadgets. An engineer by profession and an executive and founder at several high tech startups Rob has a unique view on technology and some strong opinions. When he's not writing about Tesla

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Tesla’s driverless Cybercab just passed a big test with State Governor

Florida’s governor rode Tesla’s Cybercab at a closed test track and called the experience impressive.

Published

4 days ago

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August 13, 2026

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rode in a Tesla Cybercab on a closed test track this week and came away impressed, posting on X that the vehicle “successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.” He called the ride “impressive.”

The stop was part of a broader event Monday at SunTrax, a 775 acre state owned proving ground in Auburndale that Florida built specifically to test autonomous and connected vehicles before they reach public roads. Standing next to a gold Cybercab, DeSantis described the car in plain terms: “You go in there and you just sit. You have a screen. There’s no steering wheel, no pedals. Clearly these things could be very beneficial.”

DeSantis paired the praise with a caveat that has followed autonomous vehicles since the category existed. “You don’t want to be in an autonomous vehicle and it drives you into a ditch. That would not be good,” he said, framing safety validation as the gate before wider deployment.

SunTrax, the 2.25 mile oval which the state calls the only high speed autonomous vehicle test track in the Southeast, can simulate rain, pedestrian crossings, hills and crowded urban conditions at highway speeds, letting companies push a car past what an early public rollout would risk. Tesla, Waymo and Beep all use the facility, and Florida’s regulatory approach, among the most permissive for autonomous vehicles in the country, doesn’t require a human operator inside a fully autonomous car.

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Tesla has reason to want the blessing of Florida and states beyond, as the Cybercab entered volume production at Gigafactory Texas this spring and has since self certified as SAE Level 4 under Texas law. Public road testing so far has kept a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and Florida is where Tesla has been expanding its existing Model Y based Robotaxi service instead, adding Miami in July and then Orlando and Tampa two weeks later. A closed track endorsement from a sitting governor doesn’t change any of that, but it does put Tesla’s newest hardware in front of a state that has already shown it will move fast on rules.

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Elon Musk

The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space

Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.

Published

7 days ago

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August 10, 2026

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Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.

The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.


The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.

By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.

SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete

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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.

None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.

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Elon Musk

The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it

The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.

Published

1 week ago

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August 7, 2026

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The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.

The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.

The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.

The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.

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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.

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