So many of these complaints seem to focus on edge cases, what proportion of car journeys would really trigger 'range anxiety'? Even in the US I imagine such long trips are the exception for the majority of car owners.
I understand that the issues faced by the author of the article were probably due to changing atmospheric conditions, but the Tesla should know how to include the effect of these in its calculations with reasonable accuracy, since they're a constant in all long-distance driving; weather is not going to be same 200, 400, or 1000 miles away from the starting point. I wonder if this is a learning issue, where the Tesla rates its battery based on the atmospheric conditions where it is most used, after sampling atmospheric data and combining that with battery learn data.
While other luxury cars may not be intended for long-haul drives, at least you can be assured that you'll get to your destination as long as you stop at a gas station when your car indicates that it's getting low. It doesn't seem one can trust the Tesla to know when it's going to need to be refilled.
http://www.teslamotors.com/findus#/bounds/49.38,-66.94,25.82...
you'll notice major corridors like I-64 from Lexington to St. Louis have no intermediate chargers, and from St. Louis to Kansas City on I-70 is similarly devoid. It would look like if you don't live on the north east coast or out in California, you'd be in real trouble. The chargers probably don't have to have the same ubiquity as gas stations, but having 400-500 miles of _interstate_ (god forbid you need to go somewhere like Ithaca, NY where no interstates run) without any way to refuel the vehicle still would certainly make me nervous driving it cross country.
Ithaca would depend on where you're coming from and where you're going. It's well within range of the supercharger at Paramus, NY or Syracuse. Coming from Pittsburg you'd have to detour through Buffalo.
However, the infrastructure is not that tough to build out. At the start of 2014 there were 50 superchargers in North American. Today there are 217. That's one company, funding them with the profits from selling cars. Give it another couple of years and the network should be nearly ubiquitous.
The good news is that this is the sort of problem that can be fixed with better software. The bad news is that Tesla's software isn't good enough to answer questions like "how far will my current battery charge get me" reliably already.