(The TL;DR version of this story is, Model X rocks, no more range anxiety, my LEAF feels like a clown car)
A little over three years ago my wife told me about some of her coworkers who were getting nearly free 2 year leases on the 2013 Nissan LEAF due to a $5k Georgia tax credit. Naturally I was skeptical, but after some research and an increasing number of coworkers taking advantage of the deal we decided to take the plunge and lease our first electric vehicle. Shortly thereafter I discovered Tesla and initially thought it way out of our price range, but we really liked the Model X prototype. After doing a little TCO calculations we decided that although Model X was a bit more expensive than some ICE SUVs we were looking at, the ability to drive all electric, with falcon wing doors, and all of the other advantages of Tesla were well worth it and we put down our $5k in Oct. 2013.
We really wanted to take our new vehicle on a road trip so when the first deliveries happened in September 2015 and volume production was expected late Q1 2016, we planned a trip for my wife, myself, our 14 month old son, and his Granddad to Disney for a few days and the Florida Keys after that. At some point after all the delays, we had to just decide on some dates for the trip and it would either be the first road trip in our new Model X or our last road trip in our 2009 Honda Accord.
Taking Model X truly came down to the wire as our VIN 39XX arrived in our nearest SC the Monday before our trip was scheduled to happen. As I read the reports of VINs well before mine yet to be delivered I don't know what we did to manage a delivery so soon, but Tesla made it happen.
Once we knew our very own Model X was in our home state of Georgia we scrambled to get our Accord ready for sale (huge shoutout to Mike Malone at
DentMagix for fixing up the Accord prior to its sale) and I finalized all of our Supercharging plans for the trip.
Delivery went great on the Wednesday prior to our departure and we set out Saturday morning from Marietta, GA. We hit our first Supercharger in Tifton, and met up with Granddad and his Ferrari California who would be joining us on this grand voyage. The car was charged enough for our next destination well before our toddler was done eating lunch.
We were able to skip the next supercharger and move right on to Ocala, FL, even with a side trip to Silver Springs, FL and a glass bottom boat tour (on an electric boat!). We were staying the night in Ocala, so we didn't have to worry about waiting for a full charge.
The next morning we headed on to Disney for two nights and even managed to plug in to a 120v outlet for about 40 hours. This allowed us to skip a planned stop at Fort Drum, FL and instead drive straight to our hotel in Plantation, FL since we were able to charge to 100% at our Disney resort. This leg of the trip was the sole instance of us needing to slow down to make our destination. We drove 75 most of the way but when we were getting close we had to drop to 70, and then even 68 when the speed limit dropped. We arrived at our hotel with 4 miles range late in the night and the next morning before breakfast we had 1 mile.
I made it to the supercharger in Plantation, FL no problem and Grandad shuttled me back to the hotel in his Ferrari so we could all have breakfast. Once we were ready to go we again had a nearly full charge and we headed down to the keys. We made a pit stop for lunch before we could make it to Marathon, but we eventually charged up there and headed down to Key West.
We spent some time checking out Key West, got our obligatory southernmost point pictures, had dinner on the beach, and then headed back to our hotel in Key Largo with a stop at Marathon on the way.
After a destination charger that was listed as 80A but was actually 40A, we found another 120V plug to charge overnight before we made the Key Largo to Atlanta trek the following morning.
On our trip back we hit Plantation, Fort Drum, Turkey Lake (only because the toddler needed changed and didn't eat well at Fort Drum), Lake City, and Tifton. Lake City was the only stop that we weren't waiting on our toddler and that is because it was raining at that 15 min stop!
Overall here are the highlights of the trip: No ICE, Autopilot, extremely minimum time waiting on superchargers.
The negatives at this point are the auto presenting door goes NUTS if I am trying to load my son in his car seat or am anywhere in front, the the side, or behind the vehicle. My workaround is to drop my fob in the driver seat in this scenario, but hopefully that won't be required in the future.
The final takeaway is when we returned home I needed to remove our LEAF from the garage so I could pull Model X in. OMG the backup screen was tiny! The car was tiny! Everything seemed like another galaxy compared to Model X, but I guess that is the new reality with electric vehicles ...
