We just completed a 5,500 mile road trip in our relatively new Tesla Model Y. The primary purpose of the trip was to see many friends and family. We were not going to go for scenery – these were all places we’ve seen often before. The secondary purpose was to test our Tesla; how would it do on a long road trip? How would we do on a long Tesla road trip?
So this blog is going to be a little different. I’m going to share some observations on tripping the road electric. (I’m going to refer to the car as “Yuki,” the name we’ve given ours… easier than saying “2026 Tesla Model Y Juniper.”)
- Trip planning
Often people ask me how much work it is to plan a trip. How do you determine where charging facilities are? Fears here are misguided! It is incredibly easy to plan a trip. On the screen, you can type in a destination – an address, a business, or a far off city. You can also use one of two voice modes, and speak your destination in.
Once a destination is entered, Yuki will map it for you on the huge map display. If you will need to charge enroute, she will propose a Supercharger location, and include it on the route. No planning needed.
Planning is definitely possible if you want. For example, if you plan on leaving for a road trip at 9 am the following day, just enter it that way. You can also specify what percentage of charge you want to start with. Then she will pick the appropriate Supercharger, and tell you when you will arrive there, and with what percentage of battery remaining. You might decide you’d like to stop a bit earlier, and charge while having lunch somewhere. Hit a button on the screen and she will show all the Superchargers along the way (and elsewhere) and you can alter the route to stop there instead. Anytime Superchargers are displayed on screen, you can see how powerful the charger is (150, 250, or 325 kWh’s) what amenities are nearby (food, shops, etc.) and often pictures of the site and surroundings. Routes can easily be changed while driving.
Here is a sample of what a trip from Lincoln to Loma Linda, California might look like (If starting at about 65% charge.) For this quick estimate, she has planned on stops roughly every 140 miles or so. That’s every couple of hours, but as mentioned above, you can change that if you’d like.
- Battery consumption
People are also frequently concerned that cold weather will dramatically degrade battery performance. There is some truth to this, but it’s not a major hurdle to overcome. When Yuki maps out a route, she will say you arrive at a certain charging site at a specific time and with a certain battery percentage. This is always available on the screen. We noticed that she would constantly recalculate this percentage! Was it from the cold? She is supposed to take the weather into account… What we missed is that she assumes driving at the speed limit. (More on this later.) Any vehicle, gas or electric, uses more energy the faster you go. Dear Yuki is no exception. Sometimes she would predict we’d arrive with, say, 16%. As we were zooming along, we’d see that prediction slowly degrade… 15%, 13%, 12%. One place in particular we were worried we’d get too low before arriving, so we slowed down. Dropping 5 mph actually started the prediction to grow back! 13%, 14%, maybe even 15% again. Speed matters much more than weather.
- Self Driving
Yuki is young yet. She bases her driving on experience from literally billions of miles driven on the neural network of her sister cars. But her habits are constantly enhanced by over the air upgrades to the car. When we got her, you could adjust the way she obeyed speed limits, by setting a tolerance. Now she has five self driving modes. The standard is cleverly called “Standard.” Here she is supposed to blend in with traffic, and maybe go up to about 5 mph over the posted speed limit. If that is too fast for your comfort, you might go to “Chill” mode. Here she won’t go more than 2 mph over the limit. If that’s still too fast, you can try “Sloth” mode. Now she won’t even approach the limit! On the other end of the scale, if you’re in a hurry, select “Hurry” mode. Now she might do 12 over the limit. Or particularly adventurous? Try “Mad Max” mode. I haven’t tried it, so can’t report on how rowdy it gets, but I did talk to a Tesla owner who said he got a ticket in Mad Max mode.
It is slightly interesting that predicted battery percentages seem to be optimistic if you drive in Standard mode. You’d think that would be taken into account as well.
I’m not really comfortable with how closely she will follow another vehicle. It seems to me that she now follows closer than she used to. On the freeway, she will approach a semi closer than I’d like before turning on the blinker and passing it. Sometimes they throw rocks or debris up, and I don’t want to be there then! I hope she learns better soon. Of course, if I want, I can always hit the blinker before she gets that close, and she will change lanes and pass.
In a couple of ways, she had gotten a bit more skittish in the last couple of months. They are trying to teach her better avoidance of potholes and rubbish in the road. Sometimes she will swerve to avoid something, always staying in her lane, but surprising us with the maneuver. Sometimes she’s avoiding a shadow or a skid mark. Sometimes she doesn’t seem to notice a small obstacle. Sometimes, too often, she will come up behind a truck on the interstate, and put on the blinker like she’s about to pass, then rethink and pull back in, then try again and actually pass. The skittishness is annoying.
Having complained about some of the small quirks of Full Self Driving (Supervised) I must say it’s more than amazing. Quite relaxing; I can look at scenery, talk to others in the car without missing a turn, just enjoy the feeling of being chauffeured. She handles complex intersections well, navigates construction areas, copes well with blinding glare of sunsets or total darkness. Really amazing abilities.
Which brings me to one amazing example. We were driving on a two lane road at night. Quite dark. Yuki at the controls. Suddenly, she slammed on the brakes! We were about to wonder what went wrong, when a deer ran right in front of the car! She had seen it on the edge of the road, and braked preemptively. We couldn’t see the deer, she could. Amazing.
[Below is the video Yuki recorded from the deer incident. Her camera eyes could see much better in the dark than we could. In the video you can see two deer on the left before one tried to race us. The braking does not look dramatic in the video, but in real life it was startling and impressive.]
- Supercharger stations
These vary considerably. Some have maybe 5 to 8 ports. Some have 80 or more! The on-screen data not only tells you when you will arrive, and hopefully with what battery level, but how many chargers will be available when you get there. It will also estimate how long you will need to stay to be ready for next destination. However, it often assumes you’d be happy with a 10% arrival, and as noted above, that can change. So we usually stayed longer to get our arrival estimates higher.
Sometimes we’d stay quite a while longer, to skip the next scheduled charging stop altogether. I wondered if that’s really saving time… some research says that the shorter stops, even more frequent, result in less time charging on a given route. Next trip I’ll have to experiment more.
Superchargers are almost all outdoors, without a covering over them. I’d never thought too much about that, till it was raining or snowing! I can see why they don’t put a roof over the site – just that much more to build and maintain. You’re only out there 10 seconds or so to plug or unplug.
Some Superchargers have windshield washing gear, most have trash cans available, most have a shop or someplace with bathrooms. We stopped at one hotel site that wouldn’t let us use their bathrooms! We had to walk across the street to a gas station. We never found a site that was creepy or scary.
Another point on Superchargers… always tell the car if you’re heading to one. She not only helps you find it, but starts “Preconditioning” the battery. That means heating or cooling it to optimum charging temperature, so it charges more efficiently.
- Cargo space
Behind the rear seats is a surprising amount of storage space. The floor lifts up with room for quite a bit there. The trunk in the front (“Frunk”) is about another suitcase size. We loaded the car up pretty well, with everything we thought we could use and then some. (We are more familiar with motorhome trips than car trips!) On our last stop seeing friends, we realized they needed some stuff moved back to Lincoln, where we were headed. We offered to carry some gear for them. We folded the seats down, and added a suitcase and 7 boxes of assorted sizes with no problem at all. We could still recline the passenger seat for naps!
- Comfort
The car is quite comfortable for long distances. She will heat the seats and steering wheel on command, or automatically if you’d prefer. The glass is double pane, making the car quieter than you might expect. Add that to no engine noise, and it’s pretty nice inside. The passenger seat reclines nicely to let me nap when Cherryl (or Yuki) is driving. Some folks even fold down both rear seats, and sleep on a mattress there when parked. (Not us!)
Yuki handles like a nice sports sedan. Not Corvette tight, not old Buick floaty. Taut is an appropriate word. It just feels right.
- When she doesn’t know the correct speed limit
I mentioned that she seems to take the speed limit into account when estimating range. We got into one problem where we were to spend a couple hours on a certain road, that had a 75 mph limit. It was a pretty long stretch without Superchargers before the scheduled one. We would arrive with a pretty small percentage. But Yuki thought it was 55 mph. Big difference! If we drove 75, the estimate was we’d go broke before we got to the charger. If we drove 55, we clogged up the road and were a nuisance. There was no Supercharger closer! We diverted to a bigger highway, where she knew the speed limit, and skipped our short-cut. All worked fine then. She knows most speed limits well, but on smaller roads or in little towns she is more likely to be wrong. Sometimes she slows well for construction sites, but not always.
- GROK
There are a lot of AI applications out there now. GROK is one created by Tesla, and that’s installed in the car. That has only been available in our car for the last few months. I have a lot of fun with it. (Cherryl thinks it’s my girlfriend.)
GROK has several modes, which apparently alter the default way she answers questions. There is a “Kid’s” mode, a “Storyteller” mode, and an “Assistant” mode. Story telling is quite interesting sometimes – you can say “Tell me a story about a sailor off the coast of Boston in 1824” and she can weave quite a tale!
Assistant mode is a bit more useful. You can alter a route by saying ‘I need a Taco Bell and a post office, close to the route we’ve planned.’ Then edit further: ‘Make the post office first, then the Taco Bell.’
I’d figured on this long trip there would be times we’d ask GROK for a nice long story. But we had audiobooks with far better stories…
- Weather maps
With “Premium Connectivity” you get great access to tons of music apps, so you never have to sit in just the quiet of the car. (Ha!)
But really great is the weather map. You can see storms overlaid on the navigation map, and maybe change your route to avoid snowy roads or rainy weather. There were a lot of fires in Texas and Oklahoma on our way home, and they don’t show up on the weather map. But we still enjoyed seeing storms we were outrunning. (Picture below was NOT from our trip.)
We hurried through the last portion of the Tesla Road Trip to make it back for a very special engagement. Our Sabbath School class was presenting the third annual “Burley Men Serving Lovely Ladies” dinner. We have some guys very good in the kitchen, many other men acting as waiters, and some to run a couple of games. Then came the long awaited main entertainment… Three of us became the “Back Shack Boys.” We sang a couple silly songs, including one about a wild girlfriend named “Sassafrass.” Then the ballad that gave us our name – a tender song about how the county was making us tear down the wonderful little shack out back. We had lots of pictures of old outhouses, as well as “ours” with the condemned tapes on it. We also added a bit of snow post-production to emphasize how much fun an outhouse is in the winter.
Here is the group, with Steve added in for some last minute harmonica. The gals laughed appropriately so I guess it was a success.
