Friday, October 7, 2016

A Tesla road trip?

We recently took a long road trip from Park City to Banff, in Canada, that was mostly improvised on a daily basis and I recently wondered how that loosely planned escape would have been possible if we had driven an all-electric Tesla automobile instead of our gasoline powered car.
I guess that my need to find places to recharge my vehicle would have defined my itinerary as well as my travel time, and that I would seen a much different scenery if had been behind the wheel of an electric car.

First, the Tesla Supercharger Stations are few and far between between Utah, Idaho and Montana and there was just one around Banff, in Alberta. Of course there are a fairly large number of regular charging stations, but they take time to “fill up” the battery and one must be always cognizant of issues like maximum speed on freeways, charging time not to mention heater use.

While the regular S model is given a 200 mile range by the EPA. It takes about 40 minutes to get it fully charged at a Tesla Supercharger Station while you can count on 7 hours to do the same inside your garage as long as you have a 240V outlet. If you must rely on a public charger station, as you travel, count on a rate of 22 miles per hours.

So when you look at it, recharging a Tesla is not yet that easy or that worry-free; I'll wait a little more before I order mine...

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