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.
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- 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.
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Destination charging
Dirty and broken NEMA 1-30
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.
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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’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.
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.”
We took a ride on a robotaxi on the Suntrax course and it successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.
Impressive! https://t.co/FVAkzFLz3r
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) August 11, 2026
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.
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.
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.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
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.
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.
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.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
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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