Lifestyle
Top 5 Lessons from a First Tesla Road Trip
Having followed my planning guide for taking a Tesla road trip, I’m happy to report that we made it to our destination and back, but not without a few lessons to be learned.
Adjusting the plan
In planning my first Tesla road trip I calculated the distance from my home to the first Supercharger and then to my destination. What I neglected to think about was that I also needed to go to work that day. Thats an 80 mile round trip that I had to add into my calculations. While I had a good safety buffer built into my plan, I didn’t have enough for an extra 80 miles. So I came up with three options:
- Take a different car to work. That would be no fun!
- Add an extra Supercharger stop at East Greenwich, RI.
- Grab some extra charge somewhere during the day before heading out on my Tesla road trip.
I went with option #3 and used the free HPWC at the local Tesla Store at the Natick, MA mall. I plugged in after lunch and range charged to the full 265 rated mile limit. It took me just under 2 hours to charge from 185 rated miles to 265 rated miles using the HPWC but other than the walk to/from the mall it didn’t disrupt any of my plans.
LESSON #1: Factor in any miles that will be driven prior to the Tesla road trip itself.
Supercharging along the way
Prior to this trip my only Supercharger visit was to the East Greenwich, RI Supercharger which took place shortly after I took delivery. The main purpose of that initial visit was to make sure Supercharging worked, combined with my excitement to witness first-hand what a Supercharging experience was all about.
On this Tesla road trip, Supercharging was required. I needed the range and it had to work. We arrived at the Darien, CT Tesla Supercharger with 66 rated miles remaining after driving 188 miles from MA. Of the six available spots, only one was occupied by an ICE car with a driver sitting in it. The Supercharger bays were all premium parking spaces right in front of the rest center, and we can see how this could be easily taken advantage of by non-Tesla vehicles.
- A Guide to Planning a Tesla Road Trip
- Reasons to Have a Tesla Tire Repair Kit and 2nd UMC
- Tesla Road Trip Battery Range Planning
- Tesla Destination Charging Tips
We backed in, plugged in and began our charge. I was accustomed to always charging to 90%, since my daily commute often required it, so instinctually I charged up to the same level later to realize that the painful waiting time could have been avoided.
It took us 49 minutes to charge from 66 rated miles (25% charge) to 238 rated miles (90% charge). I only needed 102 rated miles to get to my destination plus a safety margin. We all felt the pain of this wait which was compounded by the fact that it was very late in the evening and we had just drove through pouring rain in crazy east coast traffic. This rest area was nice but it only had junk food options and a coffee shop – nothing for a real sit down dinner.
LESSON #2: Charging more than you need is a waste of time, especially if there’s no intention to eat or rest while you wait.
After the charge stop, we headed on to our destination in NJ. There was a major accident on one of our highways forcing us to take a 12 mile detour. Thank goodness for the extra range.
Destination charging
I knew destination charging was going to be a challenge especially since patience was wearing thin for all passengers due to the slow and tiring drive in the pouring rain. Plus, I was in no mood to hunt for a wall outlet in the dark so I waited until the next day. But that also meant I would lose 12 precious hours of destination charging.
A careful inspection of the property the next day revealed a dirty NEMA 10-30 dryer connection that I couldn’t use. I ended up plugging into a standard 110V US outlet (NEMA 5-15) that would give me a dismal charge rate of 4 miles/hour. It turned out to be a delicate balance between when I should be plugged in (as much as possible) and when to drive out to sightsee.
LESSON #3: Know, in advance, the exact location and plug type for your destination charge and plug-in as soon as you arrive.
We ended up using a mini-van for our day excursions because of range concerns as well as questionable parking at the local county fair. The Model S stayed plugged into the wall out the entire day and added roughly 100 miles of range.
Supercharging on the way home
Supercharging on the way back was much less painful because I had learned to charge up to the amount I needed (plus a 25% safety margin) to save time. We arrived at the Darien, CT northbound Supercharger with 72 rated miles remaining and charged up to 202 rated miles in a painless 30 minutes. We shaved 40% off the charge time from the last time we were there which made it feel remarkably faster and more bearable.
One of the Supercharger stall was ICE’d (parked by non-Tesla vehicles that can not utilize a Supercharger) with nobody in the car while two other stalls had cones in cones in front of it. It turns out that the cones were there to discourage ICE’ing.
LESSON #4: Don’t assume a Supercharger is out of commission if there’s a cone in front of it.
After charging up to 202 rated miles, we had enough to get home. It was going to be dinner time soon so we decided to grab a quick meal at Panera at the East Greenwich, RI Supercharger. If we were going to stop and eat at a Panera, why not charge while we waited?
While Tesla advertises 170 miles of rated range added in as little as 30 minutes, this rate of charge only takes place within the “sweet spot”. The analogy that comes to mind is – imagine filing a bucket of water with a fire hose. You’ll fill it quickly while the bucket is near empty but as you approach 80%+ of fullness, you’ll need to dial down the flow in order to not spill the amount you’ve already put into the bucket. The same goes for filling up the Tesla battery.
Each time I charged from about 70 miles of rated range to about 200 miles of rated range it took 30 minutes.
LESSON #5: Keeping your battery within the sweet spot will yield the fastest Supercharging experience.
Thanks to this extra Supercharger pit stop we arrived home with 165 miles of rated range left, plenty for the next day’s commute.
Summary
We drove 687 miles on our first Tesla road trip and were able to take away several great lessons to be learned. We only saw two other Teslas – one P85 at an ice cream store in NJ and another S85 at the East Greenwich Supercharger – during our journey across five states.
We experienced ICE’ing of Supercharger stalls at every Supercharger station we visited, presumably because there still aren’t that many Teslas out in the North East relative to the West coast, but also because they’re positioned in prime parking locations. I’d gladly park my car at the back of the lot and walk further if I could encounter less ICE’ing.
Tags: UMC, road trip
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.
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.
Lifestyle
Police sergeant recounts his Neuralink journey with Elon Musk’s brain chip
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.

