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.
RELATED:
- Top 5 Lessons from a First Tesla Road Trip
- Tesla Road Trip Battery Range Planning
- Reasons to Have a Tesla Tire Repair Kit and 2nd UMC
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 escalated his monthslong feud with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey this week, pledging that his own AI video tool will produce a competing version before the year is out. Responding to a fan-made, AI-generated clip of the ancient epic, Musk wrote on X, “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”
In June, Musk quoted an xAI-shared trailer built entirely with Grok Imagine Video 1.5, a two-minute-plus reimagining of The Odyssey styled after a 1970s classical Hollywood epic, and predicted “full movies by the end of the year,” as Teslarati reported at the time. That trailer, built from 36 consistent shots by a single creator, was Musk’s proof of concept. This week’s pledge turns that prediction into a specific commitment, tied directly to Homer’s text rather than a generic demo.
Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer https://t.co/bVHzUmY9WN
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2026
When a fan separately proposed that Musk fund a live-action alternative, to “give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek,” Musk replied with two words: “I’m down.”
The Grok Imagine pledge lands as the tool’s underlying infrastructure has changed hands. Grok is no longer a standalone product, it folded into SpaceXAI after SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI closed in February, meaning the compute behind any Odyssey production traces back to the same Colossus supercomputers now bundled into SpaceX’s pitch to investors. Musk has separately said SpaceX’s own engineering data is being fed into the next major Grok training run, a two trillion parameter model he’s called the “2T run.”
Whether Grok Imagine can sustain a feature length narrative, rather than a series of impressive individual shots, remains the open question.
-
Cybertruck
Tesla Mobile App gets a new feature that wrap fans are going to love
Tesla’s Summer Update removes the USB drive step from customizing your car’s digital wrap design.
Tesla’s latest 2026 Summer Update quietly closes out one of the more tedious steps in personalizing a Tesla’s digital appearance. Uploading a custom wrap design used to require a USB drive. Now it doesn’t.
The feature is listed in Tesla’s release notes as “Send Custom Wraps from Mobile App.” The company described it plainly: “Skip the USB drive and upload a custom wrap of your car from the mobile app. Instructions for creating a custom wrap here: github.com/teslamotors/custom-wraps.”
The digital wrap tool has been around since Tesla’s 2024 Holiday Update, when it launched for Cybertruck owners first, as Teslarati reported at the time. Getting a design onto the car meant formatting a USB drive, creating a folder named exactly “Wraps,” dropping in PNG files sized between 512×512 and 1024×1024 pixels and under 1 MB each, then plugging the drive in and applying the wrap through Toybox. Tesla expanded the tool to other models and renamed it from “Colorizer” to “Paint Shop” with the 2025 Holiday Update, while also adding license plate and window tint customization alongside the wraps.
Custom wraps via mobile app https://t.co/5OydZ26g9p pic.twitter.com/uexU0ZePxu
— Tesla (@Tesla) July 22, 2026
The latest Summer Update removes the USB step from that process. Owners will be able to pull a design from wherever they saved it, whether that’s a download from social media or something built from Tesla’s own GitHub templates, and push it to the car directly through the app.
Tesla reveals 2026 Summer Update with crazy fixes to Nav and more
-
It’s a small fix relative to the rest of this latest release, which also included expanded Grok voice commands, automatic navigation that learns regular routes, and self-driving stats inside the mobile app, all detailed in our rundown of the full Summer Update. The USB requirement was one of the more common complaints about Paint Shop since it launched. Tesla did not say when the wrap upload change would reach individual vehicles, only that the broader update is rolling out now in waves.
Elon Musk
Tesla Diner is throwing a birthday party with a Franz-signed special treat
Tesla Diner turns one on July 21 with Optimus, roller skates, and a Franz-signed hat.
Tesla is throwing its Hollywood Diner a first birthday party on July 21 and the celebration comes with a guest list of unique items, including a limited run of Tesla Diner birthday hats personally signed by Tesla Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen for the first 50 customers who place an in-car order at midnight.
One year after lines wrapped around the block on Santa Monica Boulevard for a diner that most of the restaurant industry did not take seriously, Tesla is making the case that the concept was worth the years it took to build. The concept had been in Musk’s head since at least 2018, when he floated the idea of “an old school drive-in, roller skates and rock restaurant” on X, describing it years later as “‘Grease’ meets ‘The Jetsons’ with Supercharging.”
Tesla Optimus Gen 3 is coming to the Tesla Diner with new ambitions
What made the diner genuinely different from any restaurant that came before it was not the menu or the nostalgia. It was the ordering model. Tesla owners could place food orders directly from their vehicle’s touchscreen before arriving, a small feature that hints at something much larger on the horizon. As the Cybercab and unsupervised FSD expand across major cities, the diner model becomes a template for an entirely new kind of commerce. A robotaxi pulling in to charge does not need a human to walk up to a counter. The vehicle places the order, the food is ready on arrival, and the passenger never interrupts the experience of being driven somewhere else. It is the first glimpse of what drive-through commerce looks like when the car is doing the driving.
As Teslarati has reported, Musk signaled immediately after opening that the Hollywood location was only the beginning, posting that Tesla would expand the concept to major cities worldwide and along Supercharger corridors on long-distance routes if the first location proved successful. One year in, the birthday celebration on July 21 makes a strong case that it has. Tesla announced a full day of events including a Cybercab on display, a birthday menu, Optimus in attendance, face painting, a photo booth, roller skating servers, a light show, a Skypad DJ, and complimentary collectibles.
If Musk’s ambition holds, the Hollywood diner is year one of something much bigger. The birthday party is the proof of concept. The robotaxi fleet is the business model waiting behind it.
-
Tesla Diner is turning 1 on July 21st, so we’re throwing a party
Come swing by for a day full of fun:
– Cybercab on display
– Birthday menu
– @Tesla_Optimus
– Face painting for kids & adults
– Photo booth
– Servers on roller skates delivering your order
– Light show
– Skypad DJ… pic.twitter.com/TD8pOjihYs— Tesla North America (@tesla_na) July 18, 2026
Tesla claims supplier is holding Cybertruck production hostage
Tesla Full Self-Driving v14.3.6 review: a rare regression, but some bright spots
