Odometer: 1,668

I’m now roughly 6 weeks into my Tesla ownership. I’ve been in Chicago the last week, so I haven’t had much time to drive or blog. However, I have recorded a few observations that I thought would be worth passing on.

• Turning off “Creep”. When I first started driving the car, I used the default driving settings which make the car creep forward when your foot isn’t on the gas. This emulates the behavior of an ICE car, so it’s familiar to most folks. However, I’ve never really liked this feature, I suspect because I originally learned to drive on a standard transmission where this was not the default. I now have disabled the creep behavior, and the car only moves when I push on the gas pedal. My wife disagrees with me on this (she likes creep), but for me, it makes more sense.
• Dialing down Summon. The ability to summon Lightning into and out of our garage is one of Tesla’s unique driving features. However, the default settings look for a clearance of around 12 inches from all obstacles, and our garage opening is only about 4 inches wider than the Tesla itself with the mirrors folded out. I’ve now dialed down the sensor clearance to the minimum value (about 8 inches), and I can always successfully summon Lightning out of the garage (as you can see in this video. Getting Lightning to park inside the garage is a little trickier because we have a lip between our driveway and the garage entrance. When we first started, Lightning would abort the maneuver about 50% of the time because of the lip, but nowadays we’re seeing about a 90% success rate, assuming we get it lined up properly to begin.
• Using Autopark. We spend an afternoon up at Tower Hill Botanical Gardens in Boylston, MA. It was there that for the first time, I saw a big square P show up on my dash, indicating that Lightning saw an opportunity to autopark perpendicularly. It was pretty freaky at first, especially because you have to have cars on either side of the space for it to enable the function, but once we got the hang of it, we did it three times more. What I found most interesting is that it doesn’t have to get it right the first time; autopark will attempt to cut the wheel to make it into the space, but if it can’t make enough of a turn, it will do exactly what a human would do: it will stop, pull forward, and then back into the space a second time. It’s pretty awesome.

While July has been kind of a bust for Lightning driving, we’ve now planned a couple trips for August:

1. A trip to Bar Harbor, Maine at the end of August as we drop off David at University of Maine, and
2. A trip to Montreal, Canada to drop off Robert at the Montreal airport.

While our Maine trip could be a bit challenging (as we noted on our prior trip to UMaine, Maine has but one Supercharger in Augusta, which is more than 100 miles from Bar Harbor), we’re staying overnight at the Seawall Motel on the other side of Mount Desert Island. The Seawall has had the foresight to install 4 EV charging stations including two Tesla chargers and outfitted the lot with 100 amp, 240 volt service. So while we will be staying about 100 miles from the Augusta Supercharger and plan to do some touring around Acadia National Park, we will be able to charge overnight while we sleep and eliminate any concerns about running out of electrons.

Our other trip we’re planning is a quick jaunt up to Montreal, Quebec. While one might think an international trip like this might be more challenging, it’s actually a lot simpler logistically than the Maine trip. Unlike on the Maine trip where we have to plan around a single Supercharging site, we will pass no fewer than 3 Supercharging stations on the Montreal trip: Hookset, NH, West Lebanon, NH, and Burlington, VT. Further, Montreal itself has not one, but two Superchargers in the city itself. So driving to and from Montreal will be a lot like driving an ICE car: we just jump in the car, plan to stop for food and electrons in West Lebanon, and then drive to our destination. It should be a piece of cake.