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Comment by clamprecht | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I had no idea their network was already this good:

> The network is already robust enough to support long-distance drives on the most popular routes across America, wherever it be a cross country trip from Los Angeles to New York, an East Coast jaunt from Rhode Island to the southern tip of Florida, or an epic 12,000-mile journey to every corner of the United States.

I'm not sure if I've just been out of the loop, or if they aren't doing a good enough job pimping their supercharger network. This removes one of the perceived problems with electric cars - long road trips. Does anyone here have real world experience doing a long road trip with a Tesla S, using the supercharger network?

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There's a nice interactive map here: http://www.teslamotors.com/supercharger

It looks like you can do cross country road trips if you take a specific route through the middle of the country. By the end of this year, it looks much better.

I am impressed. A yearly trip of mine is from Raleigh, NC to Long Island by way of Norfolk, VA, CBBT, Delmarva peninsula, Cape May ferry and Garden State parkway. That'll be doable by the end of the year if I'm reading the map correctly.

The decision to bypass the I-80 corridor in favor of a more northernly route is curious. Wonder what spawned that?

Possibly population and buyers.

The norther route puts you close to Minneapolis and Madison / Milwaukee. Larger populations, also more liberal, generally, than a slightly more southern route.

The I-80 corridor fills in if you go to the end of 2015.

Prioritization.

Yeah, that's odd. You could move those five stations from I-90 to I-80 and the trip would be a bit shorter.

Maybe South Dakota is cheaper than Nebraska. Or they wanted to show that you could go to the National Parks.

Also Wall Drug. They should have a charging station at Wall Drug.

Affluence.

You would think they would be convincing magazine editors to doing a long-form 'we drove a tesla across the US' type article. I'd be very interested in reading something like that - what its really like to string together a long trip using supercharger stations.

Tesla recently completed a cross country road trip using the Supercharger stations. They put up a bunch of blog posts and videos about it.

Episode 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou46vykyIAk

Any objective magazine would pair it with a gas or diesel car and do a "Top Gear" style race, and compare and contrast the tradeoffs.

Well, from a purely 'distance covering' point of view, clearly a liquid fuel car would win because of faster refueling, higher range and speed limits.

I was more thinking of a road trip article, where the travel itself is the focus of the article. Is the car comfortable on long trips? Are the superchargers always easy to find? What sort of characters and people do you meet at supercharger stations? Did the forced longer stops make the journey better or worse?

It's a big difference to 'who got there faster'. That would be a foregone conclusion.

They did this before with the nytimes and it didn't end the way Tesla would've liked. The writer had a number of problems, and Elon Musk accused him of being dishonest to create a story.

Here's the original article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/automobiles/after-a-chargi...

And here's some coverage of the controversy:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/automobiles/after-a-chargi...

I've done SF -> LA and SF -> Vegas without any issues.

The supercharger in Folsom enables Tahoe, and was one of the first to go in. But because of the cold and the elevation change, you have to stay there for more than 2 nights to make that one practical (or stay at the Ritz, which still seems to be the only hotel with >110v charging.)

I'd love to know if they bought trip data from places lie AAA to determine the best places to put a station...

I'd love to see their method of analysis on this...

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