Took my first road trip to Santa Monica from the Bay Area and wanted to share a few thoughts.
We have another home in Paso Robles so it was a natural stop to charge up and spend the night. There is a 250k charging station right next to Lowes heading out to 5 South so that was very easy. I think I started out at about 90% and as I was driving I started getting constant alerts to reduce my speed to 75 Mph than 70Mph and back and forth for a while to make it to our destination. This was pretty annoying. As we got closer I decided to look for SC so when I arrived in Santa Monica I would have something left in the tank to drive the car out for dinner w/o worrying about juice. We stopped in Santa Clarita where they had 150K and 250 K charges and took about 30 minutes to get back up to 80%. That way I would be good for a few days.
What you notice right away in LA is there are so many Tesla's on the road and that is a good thing considering the air quality issues that plague this city. I never imagined this many. In fact, as we were leaving LA I passed 3 Tesla Cargo transports with 9 cars each heading into LA.
As we were leaving I had about 90 miles left and we were heading back to Paso it routed me back to Santa Clarita SC to fill up. Again, about 30 mins and when we got to Paso I topped it up.
A couple of things I wanted to mention, Leaving the Sentry Mode on seems to drain the battery more than expected.
It looks like with the amount of Tesla's on the road I think infrastructure is going to suffer rather quickly. Only a matter of time before wait times for chargers may become an issue.
As I was driving on autopilot I could not understand when the line on the right side of the car may have been wider than normal the car would want to track that line rather than stay with the one on the left. This happened often on this trip and was concerning.
Lastly, the City of Santa Monica traffic enforcement is targeting Tesla owners and issuing tickets for no front licence plates at a cost of $25 unless you get it placed on the car and have it signed off which will still cost you $10. Be warned.
We have another home in Paso Robles so it was a natural stop to charge up and spend the night. There is a 250k charging station right next to Lowes heading out to 5 South so that was very easy. I think I started out at about 90% and as I was driving I started getting constant alerts to reduce my speed to 75 Mph than 70Mph and back and forth for a while to make it to our destination. This was pretty annoying. As we got closer I decided to look for SC so when I arrived in Santa Monica I would have something left in the tank to drive the car out for dinner w/o worrying about juice. We stopped in Santa Clarita where they had 150K and 250 K charges and took about 30 minutes to get back up to 80%. That way I would be good for a few days.
What you notice right away in LA is there are so many Tesla's on the road and that is a good thing considering the air quality issues that plague this city. I never imagined this many. In fact, as we were leaving LA I passed 3 Tesla Cargo transports with 9 cars each heading into LA.
As we were leaving I had about 90 miles left and we were heading back to Paso it routed me back to Santa Clarita SC to fill up. Again, about 30 mins and when we got to Paso I topped it up.
A couple of things I wanted to mention, Leaving the Sentry Mode on seems to drain the battery more than expected.
It looks like with the amount of Tesla's on the road I think infrastructure is going to suffer rather quickly. Only a matter of time before wait times for chargers may become an issue.
As I was driving on autopilot I could not understand when the line on the right side of the car may have been wider than normal the car would want to track that line rather than stay with the one on the left. This happened often on this trip and was concerning.
Lastly, the City of Santa Monica traffic enforcement is targeting Tesla owners and issuing tickets for no front licence plates at a cost of $25 unless you get it placed on the car and have it signed off which will still cost you $10. Be warned.
