Taking electric vehicles on long-distance trips is not something for the faint-hearted. While range anxiety remains a very real obstruction to some, others consider this as only a temporary stumbling block as with adequate preparation and determination, these can continue on their journeys, leaving others trailing in their wake.
A typical electric car which is best suited for such trips is Tesla Motors’ Model S, a sedan with a capacity of 85 kWh and an EPA rating of 265 miles. It is therefore an ideal car to take on a long-distance trip such as a trip from coast-to-coast through the US.
Even though travelling from Portland to New York is quite a long distance in itself, the electric coast-to-coast trip was to pass through Louisiana, Arizona, Virginia and other states in between to make the trip even longer.
Drivers Tina Thomas, Luba Roytburd and Peter Soukup started the trip on December 26, taking the West Coast route and utilising to the best of their abilities the charging posts in California and Oregon.
Continuing through to Los Angeles, they would pass by the Tesla factory in Fremont. They thus made good use of the new Supercharger stations by Tesla which is tweeted about as being “so easy it feels like cheating”.
Ever since, their route has been through Arizona, passing through Austin and Albuquerque with the team’s twitter page indicating that they are just around the outskirts of New Orleans. This coast-to-coast trip in the Model S, dubbed the Electric Road Trip S is only the second such trip using a Model S, after the Model S XC was used in September.
That trip started in San Francisco and took drivers Jesse and Steve as far as Washington D.C.’s Tesla Store. It is unlikely that these will be the only long trips undertaken by owners of Tesla’s Model S. Best wishes to the team in completing their journey.
