Leaving one’s comfort zone on a longer distance trip requires some forethought. Where to charge and how far can I go between them, how long does / will it take and when are we going to get there.

Buzzing around the community, running errands, short hops are the majority of trips that you do. Planning is nil. At days end the car is plugged in and it charges overnight; ready to go by morning.

Leaving town: North Carolina to Massachusetts est. 700+ miles

Here’s the plan… there isn’t one

No need to go through the machinations of planning! Tesla has functionality that does it all. Enter a destination into Navigation and after a moment a route with stops is generated which displays on the map interface. Temperature, wind, slope, traffic are baked in.

Here’s the plan

Before Tesla’s app became polished and bullet proof, I used A Better Routeplanner (ABRP) an app that was/is quite good at making a plan. It is nice to have an advance look. Study and plan tweaks are best accomplished from the ease of your desk vs loaded up in the driveway anxious to get moving or later enroute with traffic concerns demanding full attention. There’s a graphical map presented along with turn-by-turn as one might expect. Here is a useful ABRP output detail .

Focusing on the column header, SoC (state of charge) in the summary table indicates that we are departing with 75% battery and will arrive at Colonial Heights, VA the first charge stop. This first leg is 149 miles and after an estimated drive duration of 2 hrs and 16 mins we arrive at the Colonial Heights Supercharger with 17% SoC. We are targeting 54% SoC so after a 16 minute stay we disconnect and depart for the next and so on.

Nice to know tidbits such as energy used , cost , trip distance/duration and predicted ETAs are tabulated. It is important to note that these data points, being estimates, are subject to variation. In other words, your mileage may vary. Increasing driving speed more than X above the posted limit is the biggest influencer.

Set intended speed of at least 105% in the ABRP option section.

The inevitable bumper to bumper crawl from a rush hour commute or fender bender lane closure will (no pun intended) impact the estimated time of arrival. Note that traffic tie ups do not have significant negative influence on battery range.

Learn more about: Range Anxiety – Energy Consumption

Planning on paper is subject to happenstance so for the real world add some extra energy at stops (for Mamma). Plan for the unexpected. Inform friends and family that your ETA is X but add in a 60-90 minute fudge factor. Plan ahead but plan on plan revisions to the plan. You have a plan.