Cross-Country in a Tesla: Fuel-Free Fun, If You’re Flexible By Email Parked on a bare-bones Bureau of Land Management site outside Zion National Park in Utah. Inside the park, you could use a Level 2 charger for $5 while you hiked the park’s trails. There were only two chargers, but luckily there were no other EVs lined up to use them. Photo by John Lazenby. People ask: What was it like to drive an electric car across the country and back? By which they mean: What was charging like when you are out beyond the back of beyond? Well, the short answer is that it was not a problem. At least it’s not a problem as long as you aren’t in a hurry, have a certain sense of adventure, and you are driving a Tesla or have access to Tesla’s charging network — and if you bring charging adapters to use other sources of electricity. Every now and then there was a wrinkle we didn’t expect, but the charging network works. We learned this during a trip of about 10,000 miles in a Tesla Model Y. In April and May, we drove from Vermont down across parts of the South and the Southwest to Utah’s national parks and then to Los Angeles; up to Portland, Oregon; then home on the northern route through an occasional snowstorm. It added up to about six weeks of navigating and charging. The only gas station stops were when there were Tesla Superchargers there, when we needed something in a convenience store, or when we had to clean off the windshield at the gas-pump windshield-washer buckets. We EVed to 10 national parks, including four in Utah that were somewhat off the well-beaten path of the interstate highway system. We charged at Tesla Superchargers in shopping malls, at Tesla and non-Tesla chargers at motels, and we used 50-amp RV plugins at state parks in the middle of nowhere. We found a charger at Old Faithful Lodge in Yellowstone, free with our cabin rental. We charged up using one of 68 chargers at a California truckstop and then headed across the Mojave desert. We toured Joshua Tree National Park after finding the Tesla chargers in 29 Palms, California. Tesla says our Model Y has a range of about 300 miles, but we weren’t always driving in ideal conditions. First, we were loaded down with pounds of camping gear, plus coolers, food, cameras, and everything else you bring on a trip like this. And we had two bicycles on a hitch-mount rack. And other things drag down the range: heavy rain, wind, having to climb a mountain. And then there’s speed. Out where the states are square, the speed limit can be as high as 80 mph, and although we usually kept it at about 70 mph that still uses a lot of battery compared with driving an EV around town. All of that seemed to bring the efficiency down to about 65%. Of course, all of those things also would also affect gas mileage in a car with an internal combustion engine. Although we traveled on smaller roads to get to parks, campgrounds, and other attractions, the bulk of the driving was on interstates, and that’s where the Tesla charging network shines. Whatever you might think of Elon Musk, the ubiquity and reliability of the Tesla network is an accomplishment. We never arrived at a Supercharger station that did not have an available charger. Anywhere. And we never encountered a Supercharger that did not work. That may change when Tesla opens its network fully to other vehicles, but despite a flap about firing the entire charging network staff, Musk has claimed that Tesla is going to continue building new chargers. Finding the next charger is simple, although you might spend time looking at a phone app instead of out the car windows. When you tell the navigation system in the car where you want to go, it tells you where the Superchargers are on that route, what maximum charge they can deliver, how many chargers are open, and what the price per kilowatt hour is. And the car estimates how much charge you will have when you arrive at the chargers it recommends you stop at. We also checked the Tesla website, which shows you where every Supercharger in the country is. And we used the PlugShare app now and then to check for all chargers, Tesla and non-Tesla. Once it steered us to a free RV plug sticking out of a coffee shop wall in Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado. A couple things to keep in mind: The cost of charging varies across the country. At home with a Level 2 charger (which provides a full charge overnight), we pay Washington Electric Co-op about 22 cents per kilowatt hour. But on the Supercharger network prices ranged from the upper 20s to well over 50 cents in places like California. Sometimes prices change depending on the time of day. The electrical cost seemed to relate to the gas price in the region. Charging usually costs about $10–15; once, in California, $20. But we also ran into several places where we could charge for free or almost for free: Some national parks had chargers that were either free or had a minor fee, like $5. Several times we stayed at motels with chargers that we could use with no additional charge other than what we already paid for the room. In one case, we were able to charge free at a motel we weren’t staying at, though most motels discourage that. And several times we got campsites that had 50-amp RV plug-ins that came along with the price of the site. A word about chargers: Superchargers, either Tesla’s or other charging stations with equivalent ones (called Level 3 chargers) can charge your battery to nearly full in from 10 minutes to about a half hour, depending on what you need. That’s longer than it takes to buy gas, but if you’re not in a hurry it’s not a problem. It lets you get out, take a stroll, shop or look around — like the time I strolled down the remains of Route 66 in Tucumcari, New Mexico. Level 2 chargers can charge you up in several hours (at around 35 miles per hour of range), so those are best for long stops or overnight. You can always charge from a wall socket (Level 1, at about three miles per hour), but that takes forever and it wouldn’t be worth it unless you were really stuck somewhere. We also had several adapters. With them, we could charge at non-Tesla CCS Level 3 chargers; at non-Tesla J1772 Level 2 chargers; at 50-amp RV hookups (at a campsite where we were staying anyway), and from a wall socket, which we never used. The NEMA 14-50 adapter that allows you to charge from an RV campsite plug-in. It plugs into the Tesla mobile connector and it saved the day several times, but you’d have to be willing to charge several hours or overnight to get a full charge, so it only really works when you are going to camp. Photo by John Lazenby. The non-Tesla charging stations were interesting. We found one (Electrify America) at a Walmart in the middle of Wisconsin that cost substantially less than the Tesla charger a few yards away. But the next Electrify America charger we tried cost substantially more than a Tesla charger. Basically, the Tesla network always delivered and we rarely had to go outside of it, but when we did, the adapters were important, and cheap, insurance. We also met people driving non-Tesla EVs who said they had had to stay overnight somewhere not because they wanted to but because they could not find a Level 3 charger. Did we spend less on electricity than we would have on gas? I’m sure we did, especially considering the times we charged for free, but it’s hard to quantify because the price of gas and the price of electricity vary across the country and we’d also have to make a guess at how many miles per gallon a Model Y would get if it were running on gasoline. The Tesla app estimates how much it thinks you have saved over gas, but I’m not sure it’s accurate. The wrinkles: Somewhere in Montana, we almost ran out of juice due to cutting things a bit too close. We ended up having to drive 55 mph on I-90 to get to the next charger. When we got there we had nine miles of range left, the equivalent of running on fumes. While camping in Bryce Canyon National Park, we had to plug in at a motel in town and ride the park shuttle bus to go for a hike while the car charged. We were lucky the charger was there. We arrived at an RV park outside of Mesa Verde at around 9 p.m., planning to stay there, charge up overnight from the 50-amp RV charger at the site, and tour the park in the morning. But when we plugged in we got the red light on the Tesla charge cable indicating that the car wasn’t charging. I think the ground-fault circuit interrupter in the Tesla cable (like the one in your bathroom outlets) had activated due to moisture from a rainstorm that afternoon. No matter what we did, the car wouldn’t charge. Luckily, we had enough battery to reach a lodge inside the park that had a Tesla Level 2 charger, and, luckily, they had room, even though we arrived at about 10 p.m. One place in eastern Washington had a Level 2 charger, but it was far enough off the interstate that to get an adequate charge we would have had to spend the night. We didn’t want to do that because we were headed home, so we just didn’t go and missed a visit to a 1950 Studebaker (that’s another story). If you’re driving a Tesla south in the spring (or anywhere in the summer), invest in the screen to block out the glass roof. It gets too hot otherwise and you spend a lot of battery to cool things down. The charging world is in flux. The situations we found will probably be somewhat different in a year. I’m under no illusion that driving an EV across the country is a benign thing: Everything we do has environmental impact, and this no doubt had a lot. There must have been times we were using electricity generated from coal-fired power plants, although coal now accounts for less than 20 percent of U.S. power generation. And I’m aware of cobalt mining issues and particles from the tires of heavy EVs. But at least we weren’t spewing noxious gases as we drove. If we really wanted to limit our environmental impact, we should have stayed home. And I know Teslas are relatively expensive, although Model Y prices have come down. The company has said it will sell a less expensive vehicle in 2025, something around the cost of a Chevy Bolt. Driving an EV daily brings with it a shift in mindset: You start out thinking gas stations are so plentiful that gas really is an easier alternative. But when you think about the refineries, the tankers, the trucks, the pumps, and all the infrastructure gasoline requires, you begin to realize something you might have forgotten about electricity: Though it has its own infrastructure issues and environmental impacts, it is even more ubiquitous than gas stations. Virtually every residence and business has it. And after driving so many miles in an EV you feel bad when you drive an internal-combustion car because you know what’s coming out of the tailpipe every time you start it up. UNDERWRITING SUPPORT PROVIDED BY