1,000 Mile Road Trip in a Tesla Model 3 (UK)

hello everyone it's spawnpoint and welcome back to another video and today i'm going to be taking you on a 1 000 mile road trip in my tesla model 3. so if you're wondering how easy it is to use an electric car for a road trip how long it will take and how much it will cost stick with me so i'm going to be going over how i prepped planned and completed this thousand mile road trip last week we had some interesting stops along the way and we even made a new friend so i live in york and i'll be driving to carbus bay in cornwall so it's 400 miles each way which for the uk is quite a big distance to cover in one direction so i've driven the same route more than 20 times over the years but this is the first time that i'll be doing it in an electric car i'll be traveling with my wife and two children so the car will be fully loaded with luggage toys wetsuits and all my important camera gear and tech items you know just in case so the first thing that you need to think about when you're taking a tesla or any electric car on a road trip is the prep before you leave now some of these will apply to non-electric cars too now the model 3 has a great boot space it's actually pretty big and i had no issues at all packing the car with everything that we wanted to take plus you've got the compartment under the boot floor which is huge as well and then you've got the front space too which is actually where i'm storing the charging cables i'll explain why i'll do this a little bit later okay so that's the boot fully packed not sure i could fit much else in here even if i tried i also always check my tires before a long trip this might need adjusting to accommodate the extra weight too so your tire pressures may need increasing so on a day-to-day basis i usually charge my car to 80 as it's rare that i need any more than that but for this trip i will be charging to 100 so i've plugged it in the night before to make sure that there's no reason that i won't be ready for the next day now as i know what time i will be leaving in the morning i've actually set the car to pre-condition and this will begin to warm the battery and prepare the car for about 20 minutes before i need it now this is the most efficient way to start your trip as you're not wasting 30 minutes of your actual trip getting the car and battery up to its optimum efficiency so while it's warming you will definitely hear it so just take a listen to this so i mentioned that i store my two charging cables in the front that's the three pin plug and the type two cable although most people store those in the compartment under the boot floor now the reason i do this is i rarely in fact never use the front to store anything else in but i do use the boot which means it's often covering the compartment that i need to lift up and while i'm on this road trip the boot will be rammed so i won't be able to grab the cable from the boot should i need it for an untethered charger you'll see why later along with the cables i've also got the safety bag from tesla and this contains a hi-vis jacket a warning triangle and some first aid items so the car is packed is on charge and it'll be ready for 8 a.m tomorrow when i need it the next thing to do is to plan the journey now this route isn't anything new to me but this time it's different i'm not just jumping in a petrol car and thinking about a 10-minute petrol stop i'm thinking will i make it where are the charges and how long will this actually take me to complete so the route is 399 miles each way google reckons it takes me about six and a half hours but honestly most years it takes me around seven to eight hours depending on traffic and the toilet breaks along the way now a great tool and app for planning your journey is a better route planner i've mentioned this in a previous video but it also allows you to put in your car details your departure time departure state of charge your estimated efficiency and the charges to avoid and various other options as well it then tells you which charges you should be using along the way and how long it will take including the charging stops so here it reckons it take me around six hours and 46 minutes and asked to complete the entire trip with a 30 minute charge at bristol alternatively you can use the in-car navigation simply choose your destination and it'll root you to any charges along the way now this is the easiest way to do it once you're in the car anyway so here on the in-car screen it reckons the same journey will take me about 6 hours and 37 minutes and that's with a 35 minute charge also at the bristol supercharger but on the morning of the drive i did have other plans i didn't want to stop at bristol cribs i wanted to go further and stop at the gordano services i decided to choose this charger as it closer to family that i planned to meet for lunch the navigation showed that i would arrive with just nine percent battery but i was gonna risk it anyway i mean what's the worst that could happen now i usually show my battery in percentage rather than miles but for this journey i'm actually swapping it over to miles instead and this will give a better indication of how many miles i'm using versus how many miles i'm actually covering one thing you'll notice which surprised me was a 100 state of charge in my long range model 3 is now showing only 301 miles i was expecting to see a little bit more than that so we got away shortly after 8 am and the first thing i need to do was to reset the trip this way i could see how far and how much energy was going to be used on this trip you just need to swipe right and tap the three dots to reset so our first mile of the journey through yorkshire's country roads on a typical summer's day i'll be honest even though i was anticipating arriving at the first charge with just nine percent battery i had zero range anxiety i'm not sure if that was me being naive or just blinded by holiday mode so in an ice car you'd look at the fuel range to get an idea of how far you can go whereas with the model 3 or any tesla you can see the predicted battery or miles using the energy graph but what's more is once you've set your destination the trip graph option is now accessible too you can actually see the trip graph to get a real idea of your current journey so we already know that we should arrive at the bristol porter's head charger with around nine percent battery remaining throughout the journey it's worth keeping an eye on this graph as it will update automatically depending on how you're driving and it will then give a more accurate estimate of your destination you'll see how this figure changes over the next 215 miles so a few things that gets highlighted quite often is whether you should be using the climate control or air conditioning on a long road trip and how efficient that will be well obviously having it off completely will be the most efficient but who wants to spend seven hours in a car too hot or too cold just to save a few minutes at a charger from my understanding if you have the climate control switched on it doesn't really matter what you have it set to you're still using the pump in the battery so you may as well make yourself comfortable speed is another huge factor for efficiency ultimately the slower you drive the more range you'll get but again you've got to be realistic with travel time versus charging time do you want to spend an extra hour driving versus charging so on the way down i drove at 70 miles per hour just to test out my efficiency and finally using cruise control and autopilot will make the journey and your efficiency even better motorway driving is perfect for this anyway and other than the odd lane change you can cruise along and let the car do the steering the braking and the accelerating for you so 100 miles in and the car has lost 117 miles in range but looking at the trip graph the projected arrival battery has actually gone up it's gone up from nine percent to 18 that's awesome whereas before i was thinking i might need to stop at another charger beforehand i've no concerns that i'll make it now we're approaching bristol now my hometown and as i've set the supercharger as my destination it would usually start to pre-condition my battery but i assume as i've been driving for three and a half hours now it doesn't need to do it but you'll always want to set a supercharger as your destination rather than just driving straight to it as your battery may need to precondition first well we're now five miles from the supercharger with a remaining range of 61 miles the predicted range is now shown at 20 on arrival we can also see how busy the stores are at the supercharger so i knew at this stage there were still two available upon arrival so as we pull up i can see that we've covered 220 miles already today and we've used 240 miles in range i mean that's pretty good going and as the stores were pretty busy when i first plugged in i was getting a slower speed at charging i was only getting 200 miles an hour instead of the usual 450 to 500 and this is because if you share a stall with another tesla you're actually going to get a slower speed than if you had one to yourself so if you can always choose a number that's not in use already now the charging limit will also default to 80 percent at supercharger but as i needed the 100 i did increase this anyway it predicted the charge would take around 50 minutes but as this was our first stop of the day that was enough time for us to use the toilets grab some lunch and spend some time with family they popped over to see us if you didn't need to do any of that we could have just sat in the car and watched netflix and youtube or stretched our legs for the hour within a few minutes the car was now charging at 450 miles an hour as i assume the other tesla must have left a quick note if you do overstay once you've finished charging you can be fined up to 70 pence or one dollar per minute so it's best to increase the battery percentage to 100 just in case even if you don't need it and plus the final 10 charge takes ages to complete and it reduces at one point down to about 50 miles an hour so 45 minutes later the car was nearly ready and we headed back to unplug it and you can see here that the final few miles is actually charging at 46 miles an hour and this actually slows down to about 10 miles an hour if you leave it long enough so the session would have cost me about 14 pounds 64 or 19 but as i have a few free miles on my account it didn't cost me anything at all now the screen will auto update later the show it was free but if you're in any doubt just log into your tesla account and it will show the cost in the history so i put the next destination in which is carbus bay and the final 179 miles taking us roughly about another three hours to do no stops are needed here so we should arrive with 27 battery so the second half of the journey down is my favorite part it just feels like home and it instantly puts me in holiday mode so where are you from where are you from in the world and where do you call home so we're now nearly 350 miles in and the arrival state of charge has once again increased from 27 to 35 which is good to see i mean at least it's better than going the opposite way as we approach the final 10 miles of the journey we've got loads of battery a shame the weather wasn't great but to be honest this place looks awesome no matter what we've now arrived with 31 battery or 92 miles of range we covered exactly 400 miles today which took us seven and a half hours including an hour stop for lunch on the charge that's pretty good going efficiency wasn't bad either at 259 watt hours per mile that's probably the best i'm ever going to see on a steady drive like this so while staying in carbus bay for the next 10 days i won't have access to charging unfortunately there's no charger installed at the property and it's too far from the car to use a three pin plug this means that i will be relying on the public charges instead so for the first few days i didn't move the car at all and i knew that i was going to be staying local whether that be on carbs bay beach or walking into saint ives but as the week went on i knew that i was going to be making a few trips out to places like st michael's mount penzance and cena and various other places as well so i had to plan my charging ahead so finding a charger is really straightforward and i use an app called zap map and i've mentioned this in a previous video as well it's a free app and it allows you to search for charges in your area you can search for the charger type you can search by the network type and it allows you to view comments and any photos that previous users have uploaded and this can be useful as well for locating the charger if it's say in the back of a car park or you can't seem to find it when you arrive so fortunately for me literally at the bottom of the road where i'm staying there's the carbus bay hotel which has two destination chargers available now i did message the hotel and they confirmed that the chargers were free to use and open to the public so one night i drove down i plugged it in at about 7pm unfortunately this was my first iced experience there were two vans in the bays meaning i couldn't charge the car at all now i did mention this to the bar staff and they very kindly did a call out and within 10 minutes both fans moved and then once i did get plugged in i was getting around 45 miles an hour started with a 90 miles of range i just left it there for a few hours and walked back to the house then at around 10 30 p.m i walked back down to collect the car it'd been on charge for about three and a half hours now and we're showing a range of 246 miles and that was completely free over the next few days we traveled around cornwall clocking up 200 miles and visit a few places that we go to regularly i'll tell you what you forget how narrow some of these country roads are these one track roads there were many occasions as well where i could hear cars coming around the corner but they couldn't hear me at all and these are some of the places we visited while we were down here if you're familiar with cornwall you may recognize some of these as well you've got mousehole which is a small fishing port and it's really really picturesque as well really narrow streets so if you are going to visit here it's best to park on the outskirts and walk in instead then we headed to cenon which is one of the furthest points in england and it's just walking distance from land's end and the views from here are incredible now there is actually a charger at land's end too but it's currently out of service according to the comments on zap map another day we got really early and we went into st iowa's on the train it's only one pounds each way and takes about three minutes now st ives is the place that i've always visited every year if you've been you'll know why it's very nostalgic for me it brings about load of childhood memories and if you've ever been down this way it's definitely a place i recommend visiting so a few days later we went into penzance and as i needed to charge the car i decided to park at tesco where pod point have recently installed some free chargers so i parked up plugged in using the cable which i obviously store in the front and left it charging for a few hours while we walked into penzance we had some lunch walked around the harbor came back did a bit of shopping at tesco and we added 90 miles to the battery again completely free so the rest of the week we just stayed local and the car didn't move too much so we had beach days and we swam in the sea well one day it was miserable so we actually decided to go for a drive and when we set off we had about 100 miles of range and we drove to nanjizzle beach the weather wasn't great to be honest so when we arrived it was absolutely hammering it down so we just had a picnic in the car and then when it finally cleared up we did go for a walk just down this dirt track it's about one and a half mile walk to the beach and the caves if you ever do visit nanjis or beach just be aware there's no car parks you literally just park at the side of the road and you just find a dirt track with a public footpath sign and just follow that for one and a half miles but it's definitely worth a visit now on the way back i had about 60 miles of range and i decided to stop off at asda in hail for just a quick top-up unfortunately it only has two chargers and they were both in use now i know a plug-in hybrid has the ability to use charges to top up their 30-mile battery but what's your opinion on them using public charges i mean they have the ability to use petrol or diesel so they aren't really relying on charges like a 4ev is now i was here for an hour in total and i waited for about 20 minutes before the kia moved and then the mitch wishy was still there when i left so i guess they really needed that 30 mile filling up so our holiday was now coming to an end and it was time to pack up and head back surprisingly everything packed back into the car first attempt so that's a first we were ready to leave around 1pm and the navigation predicted that the 399 miles back was gonna take us about another seven hours again including stops now unfortunately i didn't have quite enough battery to get me to gordano services again in bristol although i could have taken the car back down to the hotel the night before i did decide not to so the navigation was going to take me to lifton supercharger which is about 60 miles away it's the only one in cornwall and i would have been there for about a 35 minute charge is what it recommends and then on to hopwood but again as i was planning on stopping at the gordano services to see family i ignored the advice and did my own thing instead so i did still select lifton as my destination so approaching lifton the navigation actually took me the wrong way it took me behind the hotel and down some country lane and then into a cul-de-sac i eventually turned the car around and i did find the hotel on the main road instead and there were actually 10 stores available all located at the bottom of the hotel car park and considering there were no other tesla superchargers for 100 miles i was surprised to see it empty so while charging i was getting the usual 500 miles an hour and although it was asking me to charge for 35 minutes i knew that i wasn't going to be stopping long as i was going to the next supercharger on the route so i mentioned at the beginning of the video that i met a new friend on this trip and here he is so as you can see while i was trying to get some footage of the car this little guy came over and every shot that i tried to get he either appeared out of nowhere or he just continued to follow me around the car park and at one time he actually literally ran up to me across the carpet and he packed my ankle but this was a really nice stop and had the hotel been open it would have been the perfect place to eat too so after 20 minutes or so i'd charged enough i said goodbye to my new mate and we headed north for bristol so arriving at gordano services with 85 miles of range it meant that i would need around 50 minutes to charge it back up to 100 again typically this is not recommended as the final 10 or so just takes ages and you're better off doing a 30 minute stop here and then a 20 minute stop later but as i plan to stop here for lunch anyway for about an hour to see family i didn't mind the weight so while you're charging you will get a reminder when there's five minutes remaining so you've got plenty of time to get back to the car and move it to prevent any fines and an hour later we were at 300 miles and we were ready to leave so i selected home from the navigation and the final 280 miles and three and a half hours to go it estimated the battery arriving home was going to be about 13 so we're back on the road we've eaten we've got no intention of stopping until we get home now so we should be back for around half past nine now i'm using autopilot most of the time now it's just so much easier and it also prevents me from speeding or driving too slowly if i'm not paying attention to my speed so 30 miles in and the predicted state of charge has gone from 13 to 27 that's a huge increase already so we're about 80 miles and an hour and 20 minutes away from home we've covered 137 miles and we've used 154 miles of rain since the last charge on this second half of the trip so not too bad so far so my experience of using the navigation and the trip graph so far is it definitely overestimates how much energy it thinks that i'll use which i obviously prefer as it means that on every leg of this journey so far i've arrived with a lot more range than predicted so it's definitely better this way round than the opposite and worrying about the battery decreasing too quickly and panicking that i won't make it to my destination so we're now approaching the final 30 miles of the journey and we're going to be passing the 1 000 miles mark 2 for this whole trip leaving the motorway now and we're back onto the yorkshire country roads for the next half an hour until we get home in terms of range anxiety i've had none at all throughout this entire trip i knew that i had charges nearby even when i was iced and i couldn't charge at the hotel i wasn't really worried if i had to be somewhere the next day or i was desperate for a charge i could have gone elsewhere i mean there was a genie point rapid charger at the train station if i wanted to pay and that would have taken me from about 20 to 80 percent in about 90 minutes and it would have cost me around 20 pounds and pulling up at home we've arrived with just 55 miles of range there's also a warning on the screen and saying that the battery is really low and charging is recommended so it's a good job that i'm at home so we've covered a total of 1031 miles in total and the first thing i need to do is plug it in for the night and this is probably the lowest i've ever charged at so i reckon it's gonna take me around nine hours to charge it back up so how much did this trip cost me how much did it cost to cover 1 000 miles well i charged to 100 at home so that would have cost me around four pounds or five dollars as i'm with octopus go and by the way if you use my referral link for octopus we'll both get 50 pounds credit just for switching then on the journey down the supercharger cost me nothing at all and that's thanks to people using my tesla referral link then while i was traveling around i only use the free public charges including the tesla destination and the pod point charges and finally on the way home the superchargers also cost me nothing so all in all it literally cost me four pounds or five dollars to cover 1 000 miles compare that to a petrol car one that can say do 50 miles per gallon that would have cost me 118 pounds and 160 dollars in petrol or like my last car one that can do 25 mile per gallon and that would have cost me 235 pounds or 315 dollars through the same trip now if i had to pay for supercharging it would have cost me around 46 pounds or 60 dollars to use those the destination charging would have cost me about 20 pounds in parking if i needed to use it during the day but the other stops were free regardless so i guess this 1 000 mile road trip could have cost me about 70 pounds or 93 dollars worst case but it didn't it cost me four pounds i actually want to say a massive thank you though to the people that are using my referral link i couldn't have got free charging without you and every person who uses my referral link to buy a tesla we both get a thousand free miles added to our account and that's valid for six months i might even cover this in a future video as well if you're interested finally after 10 days worth of sea and sand the car looked a mess and if you've ever taken your car to the beach you'll know what i'm talking about sand just gets everywhere and i made no attempt at keeping the car clean while i was away but the next morning there was no delay in cleaning the inside and trying to get rid of every grain of sand and this is what it looks like now so the outside still needs to clean but it started to rain shortly after doing this so there was no time to do it today now would i do anything different next time probably not it took me about seven to eight hours each way to cover the 400 miles which included charging and lunch and we would have stopped for that anyway so driving the car was easy and it was pretty fun it's a really nice place to be now i didn't feature my wife and children in this video but they loved the trip it was probably the best trip i've ever made from york to cornwall and if you've made it this far thank you honestly there's probably not many of you so thank you for listening and watching this video right to the end i mean i knew this was going to be a long video but this is definitely the longest video that i've ever created but what do you think honestly are you surprised by anything did it look easy or too much effort to take a trip like this in a tesla and what's the longest road trip that you've ever done in a car that wraps up this week's video and if you've got any questions at all or suggestions for a future video just drop them in the comments and i will get back to you and as always thank you for watching and if this video was useful to you or you're interested in seeing more tesla and tech videos please don't forget to like and subscribe you can also follow me on my other social channels including instagram and twitter until next time you

Channel: SpawnPoiint

Views: 540,982

Rating: 4.9320512 out of 5

Keywords: Tesla road trip, tesla model 3 road trip, road trip, Tesla model 3, tesla, model 3, long range, long range awd, tesla model s, uk road trip, road trip in a tesla, tesla model 3 road trip test, tesla model 3 supercharging cost, st ives cornwall, tesla model 3 travel, tesla model 3 holiday, how long does it take to charge a tesla model 3, traveling in a tesla, traveling in a model 3, uk tesla, uk tesla model 3, spawnpoiint, tesla destination charger, carbis bay hotel

Id: SAoFCW2INHQ

Length: 23min 2sec (1382 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 30 2020