I woke up just outside of Savannah and hit the road, headed due North for the first time. 570 miles to reach DC.
By now the routine of long distance Tesla driving is completely reflexive, second nature.
Pull in to the Supercharger. Pop the charge port and plug in. Watch the voltage and amperage ramp up to make sure it's a good strong charge. Switch to the map screen and find the next Supercharger station. Read how long the Nav system says you need to charge to make it there - ten minutes, twenty minutes, thirty-five minutes, an hour. Get up and stretch the legs, find a bathroom, find coffee, find food, wander. Check email. Read. Journal. Think.
Plenty of time to think profound road trippy thoughts. And take selfies.
A Tesla isn't the ideal vehicle if you need to get somewhere far away in a hurry. But somewhere between Albuquerque and Baton Rouge I settled into the rhythm imposed by the car and the Tesla infrastructure. I couldn't rush, so I wasn't rushed. I got there when I got there. My body felt pretty good at the end of the day because I was stretching and getting my blood moving every two hours. My mind was remarkably clear and free of it's normal frantic task-switching tendencies.
It won't always be this way. Soon the range of a standard EV will be 500+ miles, and battery-swap stations will cut the "recharge" time to two minutes. Superchargers will be in every town and Range Anxiety will be something that everyone completely forgets about, except for a few crusty old early adopters who talk about how it was back in their day when they had to fight gas cars that would park in the precious charging stalls sometimes.
Kids will stare at the ludicrously complex internal combustion engines on display in museums, and wonder how we ever made it down the road without something breaking or blowing up in a gigantic fireball. By this time of course, the notion that humans once had to drive the cars themselves will seem antiquated. I imagine the thought of gas-powered human-controlled cars will seem as savage as how we now think of surgeons who didn't know about washing their hands before sticking their fingers into someone's guts.
I pulled into Old Town Alexandria just across the river from DC around 8pm. I stayed at Holly and Thariq's (my girlfriend's sister and her husband) beautiful restored row house there.
The next few days of Greenbuild were a blur, as they always are, which is why this post is late coming. The numbers from my trip, as close as I can reckon, are these:
3,800 miles.
8 days of driving.
32 Supercharger stops.
18 hours of Supercharging.
4,800 milligrams of caffeine.
$0 direct fuel cost.
The End.