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Comment by hliyan | Hacker News Reader

> I drove 1200km today in a Tesla

Sorry, was this in one day, with a single charge? Or over multiple days (ending today), with charges in between?

I drove ~1050km, SF -> Portland in my model 3 in one day. Around 11 hours total with a ~30 minute charge stop every ~2.5hrs. This was before the V3 superchargers.

Why the skepticism? It's pretty obvious from the car and supercharger stats that this is trivial to accomplish. I had an easy 700mi day trip years ago in my m3p and the range and chargers are better nowadays.

> I had an easy 700mi day trip

I'm pretty good at long distance driving (e.g. 14hrs of driving with no stops except gas and bathroom). I could drive 700 miles in a day in an ICE vehicle, but I'd never call it easy. Add in any charging time, and it gets even less so.

Might be me. I've semi-routinely made day trips of 1300mi, and I've done a few out-west road trips that involved long bouts of driving.

I'm not happy with FSD yet, but Autopilot is excellent and really helps with driver fatigue. The charging stops don't really change anything. You just stop when you would otherwise bathroom break or eat.

It is hard (or maybe it was hard) to average more than 60mph on US interstates, including gas/pee/food stops. 1300 miles @ 60mph is 21hrs. Unless you plan to not drive the next day, that's a LOT of driving, and definitely not easy.

Yep, 1300mi isn't easy. (I said 700mi was). You're correct, for me, it's mostly been non-stop interstate travel on a lot of midwest/western interstates.

What FSD issues are the most problematic?

Tesla has Autopilot. My 1200km day was the car driving itself 90% of the way. Of course I was paying attention and ready to take over, but the effort is reduced. Still, I agree... not easy. It still sucked.

Fast chargers exist. One could drive 1200 km in an EV in a day.

The Cross-US race in an EV managed to average 66 mph - 80 mph average while driving, with twenty-four 18 minute charging stops.

Obviously a 1200 km drive could do even better than this - since it could start the day at 100% and end at 0%, saving ~25 mins of charge time.

One day but multiple charges. Got up at 7am and got home at 1am. Port Macquarie to Melbourne. I was bringing the car home from buying it interstate. On autopilot probably 95% of the time.

I charged 6 times that day, but those were around 40% to 90%, not 0 to 100. It could have been 3 charges if I risked getting closer to zero and spent more total time charging.

The car mapped the charging stops out for me. Sometimes multiple supercharger stops are better as the car can charge faster when the battery is low - I.e. 30% to 40% is quicker than 90 to 100, so if they're not much out of the way it's quicker to stop for 6 quick charges than 3 slow ones.

For additional data, when we go visit my wife's family that's a 2,400 mile trip (3,800km) that we usually do in 3 long-ish days (8am-10pm) if I'm with my family, or around 40 hours if I'm going solo. This is in a 2016 Model S 75D (smaller battery).

I mean, who drives 1200km in day anyway? But it is doable with todays EVs, many of which have ranges of around 500km or more, and only need a couple of hours of charging to drive 1200km (after starting with full capacity), during breaks you would mostly take anyways. Teslas, VW's ID.4, Hyundai's Kona electric and many more come to mind. Cheers for Toyota's research, though.

In the US, long drives aren’t crazy. This year I’ve done 4 single day drives in excess of 1400km. The furthest I’ve ever driven without stopping was 2500km, but that was with 4 drivers, and I guess a “day” isn’t quite right bc it took us like 27hrs.

750 miles are still fairly rare, as a fraction of all road trips. We'll hear from everybody who does it in this thread, of course, but on average it's definitely an edge case.

However, it doesn't matter, I could do 750 miles a day in my Model 3 just as easily as my gas car. It would be more comfortable in the Tesla, too.

More comfortable than which other car?

I've driven lots of cars and nothing beats the comfort of a premium German station wagon such as a Mercedes E class for long trips followed by Volvo ones.

A model Y or 3 are in a very different tier of cars.

Everyone likes Volvo, but I continue to find them very underwhelming. Mercedes is good, but they have really fallen behind the other German manufacturers in many ways.

A Model 3 is decidedly in the middle, I'll grant you, but it has adaptive cruise and lane centering, which makes long cruises effortless.

But before I'd take a Mercedes E class or any other station wagon, I'd take an F150 King Ranch ;-). Truly that is the land yacht of the modern era. Inefficient, expensive, but there aren't too many cars more spacious or soft for cruising down the highway. In the US, obv.

> I'll grant you, but it has adaptive cruise and lane centering, which makes long cruises effortless.

That's all stuff that Mercedes cars have since decades?

The first radar-based dynamic cruise control was implemented on the 1999 W-220 S class. Mercedes cars had lane centering and even automatic lane changing since 2013.

Even today Mercedes is the first and only manufacturer to offer level 3 automatic self driving.

There's lots of things that Mercedes has been doing wrong in years (design wise especially, but engine choices on AMG models have also been questionable lately) but the safety and comfort of their premium cars (E class and upwards) is still at the top end of the industry.

I've driven 1600km/1000mi in a day multiple times. I don't find driving that far in one day fun but sometimes it's a better choice than dealing with hotel rooms, especially with pets.

>who drives 1200km in day anyway?

Lot's of people all the time? Perhaps you live in a small country or have all your important people quite close to you if these numbers don't seem reasonable. I must make 1-2 road trips like this a year to attend family events, weddings, funerals, etc. It's not fun to drive 12 hours straight, but it's doable, especially with 2 drivers.

I live in North Dakota, so if I want to get anywhere I usually drive. I did Fargo to Bozeman by myself last year. Have driven Fargo to Yellowstone in a day. Fargo to Seattle in 2 days with another driver. Chicago is a 9 hour drive. Denver is 13 hours. Long road trips are a regular part of life when you live in the middle of nowhere.

I've done a 1600km trip 6 or 8 times in a 2017 Model X 100D. I do it in one ~18 hour drive. About 3.5hrs of that time spent charging. Charging has never been a problem. I think the worst experience I've had was a few years ago, on a V1 charger that had > 1/2 the stalls occupied, so I needed to share a 120Kw hour charger.

I've spent the last 40,000 hours on the phone. With breaks, sleep, meals, adventures, and some charging in between...

Personally, I want the boutique car shops of the early 1900s style to re-open - whereby they build bespoke vehicles on a standard EV sled, such as this or the Tesla sleds that they open sourced their patents for back in the day...

I'd love to be able to literally design and build my body-work around a safety-rated-regulated frame/sled - and then have these made - the problem with this idea is the advent of monoquoque frames which is the frame and major body-panels are all one-piece, which then required the advent of automotive robotics to be able to pick-up the frame and turn it at angles where the degrees-of-freedom assembly arms can reach, insert/weld things...

but I'd rather have a "tesla" or this "toyota" guts with a custome body set that I can design with a studio, have them fabricated/printed and affix to the standard mounting holes/brackets of my safety-cage.

I especially would like to do this for what would be a camper-van design where you plop the van body atop the sled, have some interconnects for internals to controls etc... and then have the van body mount in a sensible manner...

This number is plausible to reach on one day while stopping for charges.

My median driving is very short (<30km/week), but I'll make one way drives of 1800km about 6 times a year. I did lots of research about the long range capabilities of Tesla when making my last purchase.

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