Last summer, Aaron Blank and his son hit the road between Seattle and Los Angeles for a baseball-fueled journey that had more misses than hits, thanks to repeated confusion and lack of charging infrastructure for their electric vehicle.
This year, Blank, the CEO and president of Seattle-based public relations firm Fearey, set out on the drive again, but he left his 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E at home and opted instead for a rented Tesla Model 3. The goal was to gauge just how big a lead Tesla has built on the competition with its vehicles and its robust network of Superchargers.
With his son Ermias, 11, friend Carson, 12, and family dog Gatsby in tow, Blank documented his journey again via a 42-picture Instagram Story, and in an interview recapping the trip for GeekWire.
“I’m not a huge fan of Elon Musk and all the antics that are surrounding him, but he certainly has produced a really good car,” Blank said. “The Tesla system is light years ahead. And by driving on the West Coast, you could simply see it.”
Blank, who owns his own Tesla, opted to spend $900 on a Hertz rental to save wear and tear on his vehicle. The drive from Los Angeles to Seattle and back totaled 2,250 miles, mostly on Interstate 5.
Blank was frustrated last summer in the Ford and the need to use universal charging stations. He came away feeling like the U.S. is “just not ready” for longer distance travel adventures in electric vehicles because of the lagging infrastructure.
From finding charging stations, to dealing with malfunctions at those stations, to downloading multiple apps, to calling customer support lines, waiting in charging lines, and waiting for his car to charge, Blank called parts of his 2022 trip a nightmare.
In the Tesla, he was wowed from the start.
“Tesla’s like an Apple. You plug it in and it tells you exactly what to do. It’s super smart,” he said. “The Ford is like you’re driving a car. Tesla feels like it’s a computer or a spaceship you’re driving.”
On the road, the biggest illustration of that was in finding Superchargers via Tesla’s Trip Planner software.
“We literally plugged in our address, where we were going, and in 10 seconds it told me all the charging stations along the route and how many chargers were in use,” Blank said.
He never waited for a station at a Supercharger location, which often featured anywhere from 15 to 30 chargers. At one hotel in California, three Tesla chargers were occupied and he was forced to drive 20 minutes to a Supercharger spot so that his car would be ready to go in the morning.
To avoid that hassle, he recommends getting a universal-to-Tesla car adapter on Amazon or elsewhere.
Here are some more of Blank’s notes and nitpicks from the road:
- Tesla has thought about the functionality of each charging station and seems to make an effort to place them in convenient locations with amenities nearby.
- That being said, the charging stations could use their own rest-stop-style amenities like a bathroom or a dog area or some food options. Be prepared for this.
- Tesla and most universal cars slow down the charge after they hit 80% of a charge. So, once you get there, it could take another 30 minutes to get to 100%.
- Book hotels that have your charger. You want to be able to take advantage of that in the evening so that your car is charged up in the morning.
- There’s an “electric ghost” that eats battery power at night. We had 42 miles of range one night when going to bed; when we woke up we had 29 miles.
- Varying charging speeds could be a bit frustrating. The Tesla charges at different maximum kilowatt-hours based on the car’s battery charge level, current energy use of the Supercharger station and extreme weather conditions, according to Tesla. Blank saw everything from 30kW to 200kW per hour.
Perhaps the biggest highlight was one the kids experienced on the trip as they discovered you could play video games on the Model 3’s video console while parked.
“I was talking to a guy at a Tesla station and he said, ‘Do you know your car is moving?'” Blank said. “The kids were moving the wheel back and forth playing a car game. They were driving it. It was pretty epic.”
