Tesla Chronicles #52 - Gatlinburg TN Road-trip

It has been several months since my last blog entry. To be completely honest, it feels like there just isn't much new to really say about the daily driving of an EV/Tesla. I am seeing more and more Teslas and EVs on the road every day. The number of EVs in the parking lot at work has doubled at least in the past year, so that is great to see. Our Tesla now has 63,000 miles on it, and beyond tires, I have not had any issues with the vehicle.

I have been an FSD subscriber now for about a year or more, and have really seen some solid improvements in FSDs performance. For $99/month, I find it to be very worth the money. I let it drive almost completely now from my driveway to Harrisburg a couple of times per month (nearly 100 miles). The one item it still needs to improve upon is speed control on all secondary roads. It tends to chose to drive what it considers a safe speed over the speed I am asking it to drive, which means more often than not, it will drive below the posted speed limit when I believe it shouldn't have to do that.

So, our most recent adventure in the 2021 Model Y LR was to Gatlinburg TN to celebrate our 29th Anniversary (a little early this year). Susan and I embarked on this 1600 mile road-trip right after Hurricane Helene hit the Gulf Coast of Florida before it totally destroyed western North Carolina. Up until a few hours before we left Harrisburg, we weren't sure we if it was a good idea to still go, but after calling our hotels, we decided it was safe to go, and we were so glad we went. It turns out that Gatlinburg was spared from the Hurricane. The roads into the park were closed the first day or two there, but we believe that was because all search and rescue teams and first responders were deployed to Asheville, NC to help with the devastation there, and they just didn't want people up in the parks.

So, after spending the weekend in Harrisburg for a family reunion, we departed from there on a Sunday afternoon (2pm) to get as far south as we could possibly drive in an afternoon/evening. In 7 hours, we covered 408 miles and made it to Abingdon, VA. I have spent well over 30 days on travel over the past year for work, so we used my rewards points to stay at a pretty new Marriott hotel that had 4 Level 2 chargers on-site. We could have made this trip in 2 charging stops if I new for certain the hotel chargers were going to be available, but since that is never a guarantee, I had to make sure we arrived with at least 15-20% just in case to be able to get to the next charger if needed, so we ended up stopping a 3rd time for 6 minutes on the final leg just to make sure we had a bit of a buffer. Total charging time was 48 minutes (22 minutes, 20 minutes, and 6 minutes). I have said this many times, but I needed a bio break at the first two stops, which is roughly 10 minutes for most people. On the second stop, we would have needed GAS in an ICE which would have increased the stopping time there, and it felt good to be out of the car to stretch out our legs. Driving the EV on this leg added at most, about 20 minutes to a 7 hour drive.

It rained like made all day on this first leg, and I would like take this moment to say that FSD in the rain really needs to get better. There were many times where we were just experience road mist and not much rain, but for safety reasons, FSD wouldn't even hold the speed limit. I hope this changes in future updates.

The next morning, we departed the hotel Monday with full battery. We arrived in Pigeon Forge in 2 hours, traveling 120 miles using 56% of the battery. We spent some time at the Tesla Supercharger there while checking out the local shops and hitting the restrooms there. We took our time and after 45 minutes, we had nearly 100% again. This was total overkill, but we weren't in a hurry so we shopped. Our goal was to get into Gatlinburg for lunch before heading up to our lodge for the week.

We stayed at the Buckhorn Inn just to the northeast of Gatlinburg and had an amazing time there. There was no opportunity to plug-in the vehicle there, even with a 120V outlet, but we brought along the 3.6 kwh battery pack on this trip which I would charge in our room and roll it out to the car. I managed to add about 40% to the battery throughout the week, which was very helpful, but not enough to prevent us from needing one charge during the week.

On Tuesday, parts of the park started to open up, and we did about 55 miles of driving and did the Roaring Forks Motor Nature Trail loop outside of Gatlinburg and the bypass road above town, and only used about 30% that day.

Pictured Above: One of the many small parking spots along the motor trail.

On Wednesday, we spent the day in Gatlinburg and found a new parking lot that had L2 chargers that gave us a good charge, but mostly allowed us to keep the car cool (we hadn't unloaded the wine we had purchased). Toward the end of the day, we drove up to Kuwohi (formerly Klingman's Dome), and we drove a good 70 miles or so that day, but all of the driving we did was at fairly low speeds where we rarely got above 40 miles an hour. In fact, we used like 30% of our battery to get up to Kuwohi, but because it was all uphill, we actually arrived at the Inn with about the same SOC that we had when we turned around to come back because the car was regenerating energy the whole way (can't say that for a gas car!).

On Thursday, we drove out to Cades Cove and did another 90 mile day or so. We hit a few wineries and shops on the way back and decided to get a little bit of a charge at the Pigeon Forge Supercharger again while doing so.

On our final morning in Gatlinburg / Pigeon Forge, we did a few wineries and the last of 5 on a wine trail so that we could get our Free T-shirts. I happened to be located at an outlet mall that had free L2 chargers, so we got a pretty nice little kick in power before leaving the area and heading to Knoxville to visit with friends. Our trip there required one stop to make sure we had enough charge to get back out of our friends neighborhood to the nearest Supercharger. Our friends ended up letting us use the 120V outlet by their garage. We were able to add 35% in a day and a half of charging. It would have been more, but again, we had stuff in the car we needed to protect, so we kept the AC running in the afternoon on Saturday, and that chewed up a good 15% or so.

Our return to PA started on Sunday morning. We didn't know when we were driving on Friday that our friends were just barely over the border into the Central Time zone, so that sort of messed up our return drive timing. We left by 8:30am (9:30am Eastern). We covered 500 miles in about 10 hours, but it took 12 hours because we got trapped on I-81 for almost 2 hours due to multiple tractor trailers on fire which resulted in shutting the highway down (later found out it was closed for over 8 hours I think). We really didn't travel very efficiently this day at all. We needed 4 charging stops which averaged about 25 minutes. The first stop was 27 minutes because we wanted to explore the Buc-ee's (Susan has never been to one) resulting in overcharging to 91%. The second stop corresponded with our lunchtime. Given our options were to find something at the Royal Farms, or to walk up to McDonald's (not much better), we chose to walk. This resulted in another long, inefficient stop up to 91% again. Our next stop came almost 4 hours later due to the I-81 accident, and we were in no hurry to get back in the car and we needed dinner anyway. So another long charging stop. Our final stop of the day was fairly quick, but was necessary because our hotel for the night wasn't going to have any charging and we needed to make sure we had enough to allow the battery an opportunity to warm up enough before we get to our first charger the next morning. There were a couple of hotel options that we could have selected that had charging, but they weren't nearly as close to the Highway as the one we ended up choosing. Since we were traveling on my Marriott points, we decided to opt for a hotel which cost us fewer points over ones that had charging.

Overall, we had an amazing 10 days or so of travel. Driving in an EV continues to be easier and easier and having the luxury of Full Self Driving available which does the majority of our driving, makes doing road trips in the Model Y a no-brainer. More and more hotels are installing L2 chargers which really helps. The one thing that I noticed on this particular trip is that there are plenty of chargers along I-81, which is very Rural once you get south of York PA, to drive an EV on this route, but there aren't enough chargers to do the route efficiently. What I mean by this is that the fastest way to travel in an EV is to stop and charge up about once every 100 miles or so, but along stretches of I-81 in VA, the chargers aren't well spaced or aren't very close to the off-ramp of the highway, which is adds time to the trip. Sometimes the spacing is spread just a bit further than you might see on I-95 for example. I found that the combination of these two factors ended up forcing us into longer, less time efficient, charging stops. We are probably talking about the difference of maybe less than 30 total minutes for maybe and end to end 13 hour travel day total, but it is something to note. As more and more chargers are installed at basically the same locations as easy to access gas stations along the rural highways, this will become a non-issue. We stopped at 16 Superchargers I believe and only 1 of them was busy, and this was likely because of location and timing. I had to wait less than 5 minutes for a charger to open and it really wasn't an issue. We needed just a little bit of charge to top off at this final stop on Friday on our way west of Knoxville (it was early afternoon, which is probably why it was busy).