Telemetry · 56 days, 599 drives · 6 min read
What would happen if the car did most of the driving and the driver supervised every mile?
4,765.5 miles across 599 drives.
The miles, and who was driving
- Driven4,766 miles599 drives in 56 days
- On FSD (Supervised)4,541 miles511 of 599 drives
- The driverAttentive.FSD (Supervised) needs an attentive driver for every mile.
Operating area
Six towns, seven corridors. Line weight is trip count, so the thick line is the one that pays for itself. Orange rings mark places the car has charged.
measured from 519 trips. Corridors are city to city.
Miles per day
09/04
measured. The longest day is September 4, 350.1 miles, on the road trip to Birmingham.
Efficiency by day
10/19
measured. How much of the rated efficiency the car returned on each day it drove, with 100% the rating itself. The days before September 6, the first full shift day, came to 92% of rated, and the days since to 91%.
Share of miles on FSD (Supervised)
10/19
measured. The share of each day's miles on FSD (Supervised). 39 of 51 days were at 90% or more, and the lowest was September 28 at 0%.
What it costs to park
08/25
measured. Range lost while parked, 347 miles over 56 days. It is roughly 6 miles a day of standing still. The full series is on Battery.
Where the range went
Of the range this car used, 29% went to easy drives, 39% to medium ones, 26% to hard ones and 6% to sitting parked.
modeled. An easy drive used no more energy than the car is rated for, 100% of rated or better. A hard one used a quarter more or worse, under 80%. Medium is between.
Miles on FSD (Supervised)
95.3%
4541.4 of 4765.5 miles, across 511 of 599 trips. On the charge cycle of September 3 it was 97%.
Longest unbroken stretch 102.4 miles. Nine days in a row.
Every corridor
| Corridor | Trips | Miles | Avg |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brentwood to Franklin | 136 | 535.9 | 3.9 |
| Brentwood to Nashville | 58 | 748.0 | 12.9 |
| Franklin to Nashville | 12 | 198.7 | 16.6 |
| Brentwood to Lebanon | 8 | 333.2 | 41.6 |
| Franklin to Lebanon | 5 | 210.7 | 42.1 |
| Lebanon to Nashville | 4 | 104.4 | 26.1 |
| Franklin to nearby towns | 3 | 90.3 | 30.1 |
| Brentwood to nearby towns | 3 | 99.6 | 33.2 |
| Athens to Brentwood | 1 | 85.2 | 85.2 |
| Athens to Birmingham | 1 | 103.0 | 103.0 |
| Birmingham to Florence | 1 | 130.6 | 130.6 |
| Brentwood to Florence | 1 | 120.4 | 120.4 |
| Murfreesboro to nearby towns | 1 | 27.4 | 27.4 |
| Lebanon to Smyrna | 1 | 33.1 | 33.1 |
| Lebanon to nearby towns | 1 | 45.9 | 45.9 |
| Between nearby towns | 1 | 7.8 | 7.8 |
measured. Short hops inside one town: 282 in all (117 in Brentwood, 100 in Franklin, 45 in Nashville, 9 in Lebanon, 5 in Birmingham, 4 in nearby towns, 2 in Florence).
A weekend road trip, worked out modeled
At a home rate, this car's cost advantage is clear and consistent. A genuine road trip changes that math. This one was worked out, not driven: Nashville to Gulf Shores, AL, about 460 miles each way from the Brentwood area, by I-65 South and I-10 East (a real source puts the Nashville-anchored drive at about 470 miles and a little over 7 hours). The trip this car did take, to Birmingham, is below.
- Driving
- This car7–7.5 h
- A gas car7–7.5 h
- Stops
- This car2 each way, 25–35 min each
- A gas car1 fuel stop, 10–15 min
- Door to door
- This car8–8.5 h
- A gas car7–7.5 h plus the stop
- 920 miles, round trip
- This car276–331 kWh, about $155–185
- A gas carES300h (44 mpg) about $76; ES350 (25 mpg) about $134
- The stops: this car's comfortable range between fast-charging stops, on a 20–80% pattern, is about 250–270 miles at highway speed, so a 460-mile leg needs roughly two Supercharging stops each way, 50–70 minutes of charging in all. Superchargers sit along I-65 in Athens and Huntsville near the state line and in Birmingham, and at The Wharf in Orange Beach, at the destination. The car's own trip planner would pick the actual stops.
- The time: the honest cost of going electric on a trip this long is about 45 minutes to an hour. Not nothing, and not the multi-hour ordeal it is sometimes made out to be.
- The cost: 920 miles at this car's real-world 300–360 Wh a mile and its own Supercharging rate of $0.56 a kWh; gas at Tennessee's $3.64 a gallon average. For a Supercharging-heavy long trip, this car can cost more to run than either gas car, not less. The savings live at home, at the lower off-peak rate (What this car costs to run); on the road, at full Supercharging price, the advantage is not guaranteed.
Winter range modeled
Everything above assumes mild weather. This car does not have a full winter of its own logged range yet, so this uses published data: Recurrent's analysis of 30,000-plus real vehicles, from fleet telematics rather than a lab test, found EVs retain about 78% of maximum range at 32°F and roughly 70% at 20°F.
| Condition | Range retained | On this car's 310-mi EPA rating |
|---|---|---|
| Mild weather (baseline) | 100% | 310 mi |
| ~32°F | ~78% | ~242 mi |
| ~20°F | ~70% | ~217 mi |
- A floor, not a forecast: the carmaker is called out as one of the stronger performers in that data set, largely because of the Octovalve thermal system it introduced in the Model Y in 2021, which this 2024 car has. These percentages are closer to a conservative floor for this car than a precise prediction: it likely does somewhat better than the fleet-wide average, not worse.
- A short trip: against an 82-mile round trip, even the 20°F figure leaves a wide margin. Cold weather does not meaningfully threaten a drive that short.
- The long trip: at 217–242 miles of cold-weather range instead of the 250–270 miles used in the road trip above, the same 460-mile leg would realistically need three to four Supercharging stops each way instead of two, adding real time to an already longer winter drive.
What happens next
Want to follow the next project?
Everything here started as a what-if and became a record. The crew hears the day the next one opens.