The Good, the Bad and the Ugly on a Tesla Road Trip Across Europe

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The plan was simple – embark on a 4,500-mile road trip across Europe to Nazaré, Portugal. Given two cars, a gasoline-powered SUV and a Tesla Model 3 Performance, my wife’s choice was to go with the SUV – safe, comfortable, and “good range.” I was also leaning toward the safe option, but then I felt a little embarrassed about burning fossil fuels against everything I believe in. I suddenly remembered meeting a well-known CleanTechnica journalist and EV enthusiast (whose name shall remain a mystery) a few years ago while he was traveling through Europe with his wife. I remembered asking him what car he was driving and remembering his embarrassment when he admitted that he traveled in an internal combustion engine vehicle. I wasn’t that embarrassed. All I had to do was convince my wife that the Tesla was our best option. It worked. It wasn’t easy, though.

To make things even more interesting, I decided to only use Tesla Superchargers and hotel chargers at night if they were available. Here’s a quick overview of our itinerary with some tips and recommendations:

Tarnow (Poland) – Home
Katowice (Poland) – The first of many charging sessions to come CERN (Switzerland) – Large Hadron Collider Sad Hill (Spain) – Filming location San Sebastian/Mugarets (Spain) – Incredible cuisine Porto (Portugal) – Business meeting and a wine and shellfish museum Nazaré (Portugal) – Where the waves are at their highest Lisbon (Portugal) – Yellow tram and a divine New Year’s celebration Beaune (France) – Meat and red wine Veenheim (France) – Alsace at its best and white wine Stuttgart (Germany) – Porsche Museum Nuremberg (Germany) – Declaration of Human Rights, A. Dürer Prague (Czech Republic) – Beer and a Colombian movie star Tarnów (Poland) – The beautiful homeland

The good

The upside seems obvious. Tesla’s Superchargers are simply the best, thanks to the Plug&Charge system that makes the charging experience as easy as possible. The car tells me where to charge, whether there are chargers available, and if not, where to go next. You couldn’t ask for more. Well, actually, you can. I’d love to see charging centers surrounded by restaurants, shops, and hotels. I get that too. The direction of infrastructure development seems set for the better, and I like it.

When I add up Tesla’s fast-charger prices, you might start to think I’m getting paid to write this, but it’s simple facts. Nothing gets cheaper at this rate than fast charging. And whether you charge your car regularly in rich Norway, ambitious Poland, or wealthy Germany, you pay the same decent cost per kilowatt-hour. I loved it. My wife loved it, too.

Another good experience is the increasing number of charging options at hotels. Using a popular booking portal, we were able to filter our search for EV charging and make sure we were insured. But to be completely honest, I have to admit that we called the hotel every time to check what EV charging meant, whether a charging point could be booked, etc. There was still some misunderstanding about what a charging point was. Anyway, the bright side is that you usually pay reasonably for charging. For example, €15 for 60kWh and parking was the best we got. In San Sebastian, we paid double that but got a nice valet who drove the car to the charger and back. The most we paid for overnight charging was €40 at a hotel in Prague, at a fixed price. I’m still surprised that there are so many hotels, even large ones, without any charging options. It’s like not having Wi-Fi – which is unacceptable. Given the investment in a simple wall box, there seems to be no excuse. As electric car users, be sure to politely complain at every hotel without charging options. It will do the trick.

One of the surprising benefits of driving an electric car on such a long trip is what many people would call a disadvantage – more breaks than would be necessary in an internal combustion vehicle. The longest we drove in a single day was 960 kilometers (600 miles). It took us 12 hours and included four breaks to rest and eat (and charge, of course), two highway traffic jams, and a trip to the pharmacy. I’ve driven longer distances in a single trip in my life, but I know that was always extreme and on the edge. When driving electric, the pace is more reasonable and I was generally less tired. Sometimes, charging was too fast, and we needed more time to enjoy our meal at a restaurant and had to go and re-park to avoid blocking the charging cradle. Overall, whether it’s a matter of age or a more intelligent perspective, spending a little more time driving was more of a benefit than a burden. (Editor’s note: I had the same kind of experience and feeling when I drove a Tesla Model S from Poland to Paris, France, with a friend several years ago. – Zach Shahan)

My guilty pleasure to round off the good part of the story was testing my Tesla on sections of the German Autobahn where there is no speed limit. It was irresistible and I know you would all do the same. There was a stretch of about 100 km (60 miles) where I drove at 220 km/h (136 mph) with a few other cars, mostly combustion engines. As fun as it was to see how smoothly the Tesla accelerated to over 200 km/h, seeing the power consumption rise to 295 Wh/km helped keep my feet on the ground. The only consolation was knowing that the combustion counterparts consume several times more energy than I did driving at the same speed.

bad

Roaming charging is still bad. It’s that simple. Maybe it’s because I was spoiled by the ease of use of Superchargers, as I mentioned above, but out of curiosity, I tried a couple of other chargers on our way and failed both times. The simple fact is that European roaming either doesn’t work or the user experience is disastrous. I’ve read a lot of EV road trip reports by CleanTechnica, especially European trips by WysokieNapiecie.pl journalists (see here , here and here , for example) and I remember them reporting an improvement in roaming across Europe. I shudder to think of what it was like before the improvement then! Call me spoiled, but I simply don’t accept all the app installations needed to start charging, or blocking large amounts on your card to start charging, or some other silly issues like only starting charging when your car doors are closed (an Ionity invention!). All of this is bad and needs to be changed.

Since the trip was taking place during the cold season in Europe, we also discovered some of Tesla’s poor solutions. I could have gone on and on about the automatic windshield wipers. I really thought I had screwed up the settings myself because I couldn’t believe they worked so poorly beyond any modern standard. I googled the issue and quickly learned the drama surrounding it. I guess it’s one of Elon’s jokes on users, because he can launch rockets, design self-driving systems, and crash Twitter for fun, so his team should be able to fix such a mundane problem as windshield wipers, right? It should be a joke then. Thank you, Elon Musk. What fun we had and are still having.

Another issue is defrosting. I absolutely love this feature. The problem is that melted snow/ice seeps into the door areas, handles, roof and windows and freezes back there. We had difficulty opening the doors on several occasions for fear that it would crack or split the bodywork. Compared to the bloody areas, it’s still a minor issue, but it did cause some frustration.

Finally, the multi-destination option in the navigation system could work better. Since we were planning the trip with multiple stops at places of interest (the main reason we drove to Nazaré, not by plane), our driving plan was filled with stops and overnights at several locations. The navigation system didn’t seem to recognize the destination charging event even when it came from the Tesla. Again, it seems like an easy improvement to just add a hotel with Tesla destination charging, and it should factor overnight charging into the itinerary. Maybe someday….

The ugly

Our windshield was shattered when a rock hit us on the Bordeaux ring road in France. Given the number of miles we had driven, it was statistically possible for this to happen, but why us? We even had two rocks hit us in different places, but the last one proved to be the window killer. That was the ugly part of our trip through Europe. The rest of the trip was pure fun.

Here are some basic stats from a third-party app we used to monitor our drive:

Minimum consumption: 164 Wh/km, equivalent to 1.8 l/100 km (combination of motorways and country roads in Spain)
Maximum consumption: 295 Wh/km, equivalent to 3.3 l/100 km (German Autobahn, guilty pleasure) Average consumption: 189 Wh/km, equivalent to 2.1 l/100 km (full journey 4,500 miles) Example charging time: 30 minutes, 10% to 77% of battery, average 112 kW, maximum 231 kW, 55 kWh added, €19.8 (€0.36/kWh) Longest daily journey: 960 km, 12 hours and 20 minutes, including 4 Supercharging breaks of 2 hours and 34 minutes in total.

I’m really glad I was able to convince myself and my wife to go electric for this epic journey. If nothing else, the cost savings of up to 60% would please even the biggest oil fan. You may not believe in climate change, global warming, human influence on global CO2 levels, or the roundness of the Earth, but you have to believe in the value of the dollar. Save money, go electric.

Written by Maciej Cichowski