Lifestyle
Can you use Tesla Superchargers for your daily driving?
There’s been a raging debate going on for the last couple years in the various Tesla forums about whether its good form to use Tesla’s Superchargers for your daily charging needs. When the second Supercharger in Massachusetts opened in Auburn, MA not far from my daily travels I started to think about this topic more and wanted to share my thinking.
Tesla’s position on Superchargers
Free Supercharging for life is included with the 85kWh battery versions of the Model S, and it’s an add-on option for $2,000 for the 60kWh version. In both cases there are no limitations or restrictions on how often or for what purpose you use the Supercharging network.
The Supercharger network is a huge selling point for Tesla and being able to make reasonable road trips in an EV is one of Tesla’s big draws.
Everyone who is using a Supercharger has paid for that unrestricted right in one form or another.
Are Superchargers only for road trips?
Source: TMC
Some owners will argue that the Superchargers were created just to support road trips where you need a fast charge. They’ll argue that’s all they should be used for. I look at this as the “purist” argument to Supercharger network use.
It’s certainly true that you need the speed of Superchargers on road trips unless you have a ton of extra time available to you. I agree with the concern that daily drivers shouldn’t use up all the Supercharging spots and potentially block other owners who are a long way from home and in need of a charge. Practically I don’t think this scenario happens much.
On the East Coast, finding another Tesla at a Supercharger is a rare event, but even on the West Coast where Tesla’s are more common, owners are generally civilized in organizing a line when the station is busy. Owners are helping other owners out when they may have different priorities and needs. Tesla also continues to add stalls and additional Superchargers nearby when they see heavy congestion. The battery swap option, if it ever becomes real, would also take load off the system.
As the number of Tesla’s on the road increases and the masses join the EV revolution this could become a problem but it doesn’t really exist today.
Superchargers are not just for road trips – they’re for whenever you need them and you paid for the right.
Are frequent Superchargers taking advantage of Tesla?
Source: Twitter
Another angle that is argued is that some people are taking advantage of Tesla for free energy and that excessive use of the Supercharging network for things other than road trips is abuse of the intent and bad for the company.
Some people that charge regularly at Superchargers have exceptionally long commutes or take frequent road trips. Others have no way to charge where they park their cars – in their city garage, on the street, etc. In this case the Superchargers are bridging the gap until infrastructure catches up. In other extreme cases people are driving all over the country for months, camping out in their Tesla’s and charging for free when they can. Regardless of the use, each has paid for the right to charge.
Some owners are definitely getting more value out of the Supercharger network more than others but that’s also true of the Model S itself. Like many, I paid almost $100,000 for the car, but I’m driving it 100 miles a day and getting a lot of use out of it for my money. Others paid the same price and drive it only 20 miles a day. Am I taking advantage of Tesla’s unlimited mileage guarantees by putting a ton of miles on the car and getting a lot of use out of it? I don’t think so, I believe I’m getting great value for my money and the story is the same for those using the Supercharger network. Similar analogies can be made to unlimited cell phone plans, the unlimited 3G Internet in the Tesla itself, etc. Ultimately the argument doesn’t hold.
Owners are not taking advantage of Tesla; they’re just getting more value for their money than others may be.
Tesla is charging for the use of the Supercharger network, did they price it correctly?
Let’s take a brief diversion and look at some numbers. There are a lot of factors here including things like upfront capital expenses to create the Supercharger network, ongoing maintenance costs, Tesla’s cost for electricity etc. I don’t believe anyone outside of Tesla can answer this question well and I’d guess that even inside Tesla it’s still something being studied and analyzed. Tesla is also still in the build out phase of the network and most installations are missing the solar panels to generate the power needed so they’re not as efficient as they will eventually be if their stated plans come true.
Let’s just look at the basic numbers. Tesla charges $2,000 for the Supercharger option on the 60kWh so lets assume that’s the price and that it’s also somehow part of the 85kWh model price.
Next you have to figure out what kind of range efficiency you’re going to use for the calculation, so lets take the simple approach and use the rated range use at 300 Wh/mile.
Finally you need to look at the cost of electricity. This is complex as it varies greatly across the world. Even within US states like Massachusetts there are huge variations.
I’m currently at $0.241 per kWh right now which hopefully is the temporary winter rate hike that National Grid claimed it is. My rate before the hike was $0.167 per kWh and that is still above the US national average, but let’s use that number to do some math.
Taking the $2,000 I essentially paid for Supercharging when I bought my S85 and then dividing by my local electricity rate of $0.167 per kWh the math is telling me I paid for about 12,000 kWh of Supercharging.
Now I divide 12,000 kWh by 300 Wh/mile and get 40,000 miles worth of Supercharging.
You paid for 40,000 miles of free Supercharging
I drive a lot at 30,000 miles a year. This included Supercharging mileage is over a year’s worth of driving for me. For some this would be several years worth of driving. And for most, including me, it would be almost impossible to “use” all those miles.
The calculation is optimistic in the 300 Wh/mile value – you can’t average that over a year in New England for sure. But it’s also pessimistic in using an electricity rate above the national average that doesn’t factor in negotiated (by Tesla) discounts etc.
It seems clear to me that the “bet” on $2,000 price for the Supercharging “feature” to owners is a safe one assuming the infrastructure is built and you’re not in growth mode building out the network. The bet is even better if you add electricity efficiencies with solar panels, long term electric contracts, etc. Long term Tesla will make a profit on Supercharging, both from Tesla owners as well as and potential licensees – investors take note.
As a side note it would make sense for them to roll out solar panels at the sites with the highest electricity costs first (i.e. near me!).
The cost of Supercharging seems to be well priced in that few could possibly take advantage of 50,000 miles of Supercharging during their period of ownership and even without outliers the average is guaranteed to be well below the 50,000 miles.
Is daily Supercharging practical?
This is where I get to my “much ado about nothing” statement. As a test once the Auburn, MA Supercharger came online I tried to only charge at it for an entire month. That Supercharger is 5 minutes from my daily route.
Supercharging daily requires planning.
You need to think about when to charge and how often. I pass close to the Supercharger every 100 miles. So if I plan wrong I’m in trouble. In the summer I could get a couple days out of a charge, but in the Winter I need a daily fill.
Supercharging is most efficient when you’re charging from a near-empty battery that is fully warmed up. Driving on a near-empty battery is scary. Less so if you’re hopping from Supercharger to Supercharger, but more so if you’re picking just the right time in your normal driving to make the stop. Practically it’s nearly impossible to pull off well. On average I had 20% to 40% battery left when I started charging up. Keep in mind that in the winter I’m using about 60% of my full battery capacity each day.
My test was during January 2015 in New England. Here in New England, unless you’ve just charged, your battery is not likely to be at an ideal charging temperature unless you’re on a road trip or a trip of 40 miles or more. I can drive 45 miles from home to work and still not be up to the correct battery pack temperature on really cold days.
At the Auburn Supercharger, my average charge time was 43 minutes adding an average of 148 miles of rated range with an average charge rate of about 200 miles/hour. I generally started charging after 45 minutes of driving.
As I’ve said before I drive about 100 miles a day. That’s about 2-3 hours in the car depending on the traffic. Daily Supercharging adds almost 45 minutes to that time. For my pattern, Supercharging makes the most sense in the mornings. The Auburn, MA Supercharger is located at mall that isn’t open when I charge. The local coffee shop (Dunkin!) is a good walk way, sidewalks aren’t plowed, and its -7F. All this generally means I would sit in the car for 45 minutes more each day checking emails etc. and working much less efficiently than I would at my desk.
Let’s get back to the math again. At a more realistic 330 Wh/mile for those 148 miles I added I’m getting a “free” 48.8kWh from the Supercharger. At my current crazy electric rate of $0.241/kWh those 148 miles I’m adding would have cost me $11.76 if I had charged at home. This equates to an hourly rate of $16.41. Even lower for people who live in more reasonable locations.
My time is worth a lot more than this. Daily Supercharging is also very inconvenient with all the planning, waiting, scheduling etc. I’d much rather find a way to save money by going solar or reducing my usage to offset the additional charging costs. Daily Supercharging takes away from the joy and convenience of starting each day with a full tank (charge).
Daily Supercharging isn’t going to practical for most people.
This also feeds back into the thoughts above about concerns around overuse of the Superchargers, the correct pricing of the feature by Tesla etc.
Summary
While the debate rages on about daily Supercharger use and the impact to Tesla and other owners, the reality is that it’s much ado about nothing.
Concerns about overuse of Tesla’s Supercharger network are misguided.
Tesla charges appropriately for Supercharger use, they place no restrictions on its use, and abusing the Supercharger network would take a whole lot of effort and idle time which most (especially those that can afford a $100,000 car) don’t have.
Don’t think twice about using a Supercharger. It’s there for you and you paid for it and you will not likely ever use all that you paid for.
Lifestyle
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.
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.
Tailgate Utility Trackhttps://t.co/PCAYXlFBvS pic.twitter.com/sCV2NVxf1W
— Cybertruck (@cybertruck) September 3, 2026
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
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.
Elon Musk
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.
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.
But we do need to act much faster than that if people still want to live where the beach is today. We have about 50 years or so to take action, which should be more than enough time for the space satellites to solve any heating problems. https://t.co/xhrVQALwQw
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 30, 2026
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.
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.
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.
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.
Elon Musk hints at Tesla Cybercab’s next market
Tesla Cybercab improvements are already on the minds of company engineers
