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Tesla Road Trip Battery Range Planning

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Tesla road trip out of battery rangeMy Tesla road trip down to NJ was a success, for the most part, but it didn’t come without some high stress range situations due to some poor planning on my part.

The Setup

Tesla road trips for me almost always takes place after a full day’s worth of work which includes 100 miles of driving, something I always have to factor in with my range planning. At the time of writing, there are no Superchargers anywhere near my home or work which makes Tesla road trip planning slightly more difficult.

On my first road trip I charged up to 225 miles at the Tesla store near my work before heading home and beginning my road trip. But this time around, I wasn’t so lucky since every charging spot at the Tesla store was taken.

Knowing this might happen, I had a “plan B” which involved leaving work early and charging at home to give me enough buffer range before heading out again on my Tesla road trip. Unforeseen circumstances at the business left me staying much later than I wanted to. It also happened to be the day leading up to a holiday weekend so traffic was terrible.

I got home with about 140 miles of range left – far less than what I started with on the prior trip. The family and I were in a rush since I got home late and we were all anxious to get out of town.

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EVTripPlanner indicated that I needed 122 rated miles to get to the first Supercharger in CT which meant that I had approximately 18 miles of wiggle room.

While I had another “Plan C” which would route us through the Greenwich, RI Supercharger, the downside was that it would take us into some high congestion areas and add additional time to the commute.

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Time was ticking down and I needed to get out of town within a reasonable evening hour so I decided that 18 miles was plenty of buffer. We stuck to the original plan and went for it.

The Countdown

Tesla road trip cold battery warningJust like on our previous trip, we stopped at our favorite sushi place, Hanami, along the way. There was 44 miles of range left and 29 miles remaining before reaching the Supercharger.

The Model S was already getting cranky at this point due to the low state of charge along with the nighttime temperatures in New England. I didn’t think too much of it since we were just stopping for a quick dinner and the outside temperature was still above freezing point (32F).

My mind ran rampant over dinner and I couldn’t stop thinking about the remaining battery range. I knew there was a Level 2 charger nearby (but not walking distance) that could add a whopping 17 miles per hour had at the expense of waiting in the middle of nowhere only to make a small dent in range. It didn’t seem worth it so we got back in the car and decided to head directly to the Darien South Supercharger.

The next 30 miles would take us on a heralding ride as we watched the battery range countdown at a rapid rate, as we traversed hilly portions along the journey, and approach the actual miles remaining before reaching the Supercharger. In the back of my mind I knew the Model S has a 10-20 miles of buffer but I really didn’t want to count on it. I slowed my driving speed to stretch my range as much as possible.

As the range crept into the single digits the dashboard indicated that the Model S would begin trimming my energy usage (disabling unnecessary energy drawing features). This was just one more blow to my confidence.

The Arrival

Filling back upWe made it to the Supercharger with 2 miles of range to spare and with great sighs of relief from all.

While we only needed about 130 miles of range to get to our final destination of this Tesla road trip, the first leg of the journey left some battle wounds. My daughter literally refused to get back into the car until it had 200 miles of range left on it.

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The rest of the journey along with the return trip was pretty uneventful but I think we’ll all remember this thrilling incident for a very long time to come.

Unlike ICE cars, there’s no quick fill for a Model S except for Superchargers. While there are alternative charging stations everywhere, they’re so slow in charging that it becomes nearly useless, in terms of practicality, especially as it relates to long-range Tesla road trips.

Either way there was lessons learned: don’t take shortcuts and spend the time to charge; I should have given a large enough buffer by stopping at the closer Greenwich, RI supercharger or even slept at home and left early the next day with a full charge.

With new Superchargers popping up all the time hopefully we’ll have less and less opportunity to make poor decisions, but even Elon can’t protect us from our own mistakes.

"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 Cybertruck targets job site crews with new Tailgate Utility Track and Bed Gear Box accessory

Tesla launched a $350 tailgate track and a $985 lockable Bed Gear Box for Cybertruck.

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Tesla Cybertruck construction site

Tesla’s Cybertruck team added two more items to the Tesla Shop, targeting job site crews and owners who use the truck bed for actual work rather than just showing it off. The official Cybertruck X account posted the Tailgate Utility Track and the Bed Gear Box within minutes of each other, part of a five item batch that also included a reflective jacket, a spray paint hat and an updated reflective tee.

The Tailgate Utility Track runs $350 and turns the folded down tailgate into another mounting surface. It’s a single aluminum track with a T-slot for sliding accessories and two L-track attachment points, plus two load stops included in the box. The pitch is straightforward: strap down oversized cargo, like lumber or a cooler, that hangs off the back of the bed without it sliding out mid-drive. It bolts onto the existing tailgate and works on every Cybertruck trim.

The Bed Gear Box costs $985 and is a different kind of accessory. It’s a lockable aluminum storage box, 55.78 inches long, 19.8 inches wide and 7.79 inches tall, that mounts to the bed’s L-track rails and comes with two internal bins for smaller items. According to Tesla, at just over 57 pounds empty, it’s meant to stay in place rather than come in and out with each trip, giving owners a factory-fit alternative to loose totes for tools, recovery gear or emergency supplies. Tesla’s listing notes that Long Range and Dual Motor AWD Cybertrucks need the L-Tracks accessory installed separately before the Gear Box will mount, since L-tracks come standard only on certain configurations.

Tesla Cybertruck bed gear box accessory

Tesla Cybertruck bed gear box accessory

Both accessories lean on the idea Tesla has been building toward since Elon Musk first described the Cybertruck’s third-party attachment strategy at the 2023 shareholder meeting, when he said the truck would ship with mounting points so outside companies, and Tesla itself, could keep adding gear without redesigning the bed. That’s the same L-track backbone underneath the tailgate shield and jumpseats Tesla launched last year, and the off-road armor package that arrived through the same X account in 2025.

Owners looking to round out the rest of the L-track ecosystem, cargo dividers, MOLLE panels, bed racks and similar gear, can find a wider range of options through our Cybertruck accessories collection.

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Elon Musk says he knows how to save Earth for a billion years

Elon Musk says sentient AI satellites launched from the Moon could keep Earth livable forever.

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Elon Musk spent part of his weekend describing a plan to keep the planet livable for roughly a billion years, and it starts with satellites that can think for themselves.

In a post on X, Musk argued that swapping fossil fuels for solar and wind power will not be enough to protect humanity from what he called extremely severe extinction events, the kind that occur roughly every 100 million years. His fix is what he called sentient satellites, or solar-powered satellites, controlled by AI, that would sit in a fixed spot between Earth and the Sun after being launched off the Moon using a giant electromagnetic catapult instead of rockets.

The satellites’ onboard AI would make continuous, small adjustments rather than waiting on human instructions. The mass driver is Musk’s proposed way of getting the raw material there cheaply by using an electromagnetic launch track built on the Moon, where lower gravity and no atmosphere make it far easier to fling cargo into space than it is from Earth.

Musk shared a Grok generated estimate suggesting roughly 5 percent of Florida’s land, or about 1.68 million acres, could face regular flooding by 2070 under a high sea level rise scenario, and said humanity has about 50 years to act before coastal living looks very different than it does today.

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This is not the first time Musk has floated the idea. He raised a similar concept in November, describing a solar powered AI satellite constellation that could make tiny adjustments to incoming sunlight to fine tune Earth’s temperature. Musk has also tied planetary risk to his broader vision at SpaceX, where his compensation package is explicitly linked to establishing a self-sustaining Mars colony, one he has described as an insurance policy against the kind of extinction event he referenced this weekend, and where he has said humans could set foot within five to seven years.

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Police sergeant recounts his Neuralink journey with Elon Musk’s brain chip

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A former Vancouver police sergeant with ALS accounts his journey to become a patient for Elon Musk’s Neuralink wireless brain-computer interface technology.

“I’m texting you from my brain right now.” That was the first message Lee Marten sent after waking up from Neuralink surgery, five hours and one migraine after dozens of threads were stitched into his motor cortex.

Marten, a former Vancouver police sergeant, is one of the first Canadian ALS patients to receive Neuralink’s N1 brain implant, and the 26th recipient overall. He tells his story in a first-person account published by Maclean’s.

Marten recounts how he was a healthy, athletic Vancouver police sergeant until April 2022 when symptoms of muscle twitching and balance loss, were followed by a bad fall that broke his leg. He would eventually be diagnosed with ALS in early 2025 at the age of 47. ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that progressively destroys the motor neurons controlling voluntary muscle movement, eventually taking away a patient’s ability to walk, speak, swallow and breathe. There’s no cure, and most patients live two to five years after diagnosis.

He describes the devastation of the diagnosis and how he began preparing for it while connecting with other young ALS patients through a WhatsApp group called Young Guns. Through that group he learned about a Neuralink clinical trial at Toronto Western Hospital and, after a roughly seven-month vetting process (physical assessments, psychiatric evaluation, a final interview with the Neuralink team), was accepted this past April as the trial’s 26th recipient and the first Canadian ALS patient to get the N1 implant. He recounts the May surgery in detail, including the robotic system that stitched 64 threads into his brain, and describes the app, Link, translating his neural signals into cursor control, which he was using within hours of waking up.

Marten walks through what daily use looks like, including weekly “brain training” exercises, a real-time neural-activity display, charging the implant via a beanie-mounted MagSafe charger, and using the implant for emailing, texting, social media, and gaming via a “Magic Box” that connects it to other devices. He also gives brief context on brain-computer interface history and quite candid about Musk, calling him “divisive” but saying he found him “easy to admire.

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The piece closes on a heavier note, with Marten seeking to pursue medical assistance in dying as his symptoms progressed, noting that he’ll be able to communicate his final words to his family through Neuralink rather than facing a silent decline. He expresses hope the data from his case will help future ALS patients, even without a cure in his own lifetime.

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