I’m now owning my Tesla for almost 2 years. It’s a shame that I waited so long to take it for my family holidays. Last year we still took the plane to Barcelona.

But this year I convinced my wife to do a 5 day holiday in France, about 500 km from home. Enough to take a sip of long distance travel in a Model S.

The planned trip looks like this:

The need for Plan B, Plan C and Plan D

I mailed the campsite to inform if I could charge my EV over there, but they kept forwarding me to the nearest charging station in Vesoul (about 25km away). This charging station was a Nissan Dealer with 3C Plug Charging station. This made me look for alternatives myself.

Plan B: CHAdeMO charger @ Aire de Service, Ecot (47 km away)
Plan C : Nissan Dealer in Besancon (57 km away)
Plan D : Supercharger in Mulhouse (96 km)

There’s no way I would get stranded at the campsite, so I had to test at least one alternative in my approach route.

This changed to the route to this :

This added roughly 200km to my route, but in my opinion they were for a good cause.

And off we went …

for a 700 km drive instead of a 500 km drive. This understandably annoyed my wife a bit.
Eventually we arrived at the Plan B point, to test the CHAdeMO charger. Unfortunate it had an error message, and I was unable to charge my car. We travelled to our destination, and luckily charging at a domestic plug at the campsite was possible. So the 200km detour was a waste of time. This even more upset my wife.

The next day we visited Besançon, and I took advantage of the occasion to use Plan C and charge at the local Nissan Dealer. So my battery level was over 70% arriving back at the campsite. Not a bad thing as it turned out.

Because later that evening …

I toasted my extension cord.

And no, it wasn’t the first time I used it. I even bought one with a 2,5mm2 wires and it served me well the past few years. But now I forgot to completely unroll the winder.

Unrolled I can charge at 3.5kW, but with most of the cable still on the winder, I should have limited 1.5 kW, which I didn’t. Luckily the winder has a circuit breaker, but the cable was hot, and after the incident I couldn’t charge faster than 6A, or about 5km/h. Any higher currents and the circuit breaker intervened.

But we had enough time to charge to car up to 90% before heading back home.

The journey home

was a delight. We only did 1 stop in Metz, and waited there for 45 minutes. During that time we had lunch. This is how real long distance travel with a Model S must be like. I hope the journey home made up for my clumsy planning and we’ll still use the car for long distance holidays.

N.B.
For those who want to buy a Tesla Model S with a 1.000 € or 1.000 $ discount, you can still use my referal link : http://ts.la/jeroen6468