Liz Eselius-Naporano decided to buy a Tesla car some time ago. Now, she wants to share her important story with the rest of the world, as it’s one from which other potential EV-purchasers can draw important lessons. As a Tesla owner, she has discovered a few of its advantages and disadvantages, particularly when it comes to battery charging and gas money.
Eselius-Naporano’s trial by fire with Tesla began when she and her son went out shopping. While on their way to the mall to buy some clothes, they decided to stop by a Tesla dealership and check out the offerings. While there, she went ahead and purchased a Tesla Y model because her son is a fan of Elon Musk.
In some respects, she told Business Insider, the Tesla was an excellent choice. For driving around town, it’s a comfortable and cool-looking vehicle with a slick appearance, incredible acceleration, and the self-driving features are impressive and great for avoiding accidents.
Further, the internals of the Tesla cars are superb. The menus are sleek and easy to used, the app integration in it works like a charm, and she found the tool in it that displays the location of her children and the speed at which they are driving quite helpful.
But while the Tesla looked cool and had some neat technology, she also noted that it had some distinct disadvantages compared to gas-powered vehicles. Particularly, she tried to plan out a road trip to South Carolina and found that the trip would be painfully long thanks to battery range issues.
That realization came about when she wanted to go see a friend in South Carolina but then abandoned the idea after becoming concerned about traveling such a long distance in a Tesla. She realized she needed to stop to charge the battery, which would have added hours to her trip. So, Eselius-Naporano eventually decided that she needed to take a gas car. Reflecting on the matter, she recognized that while a Tesla might be great for some things, it is not a good choice for road trips.
But that’s not all. In addition to making road trips more difficult, she claims that the battery life is highly variable, changing greatly depending on how fast one drives the car, and that the severe cold of a Michigan winter makes the battery not perform as well as it should.
Then there’s the recharging issue. To be able to recharge the battery at home, she needed to install a 220-volt charger in her garage, which was a significant expense, costing her a whopping $1,800. So, while charging the car around her town of Detroit is not a problem thanks to the Supercharger available in the city, the significant expense of a home charger bit deep. Still, she thinks the EV will, in the long run, help her save on gas money.
So, what’s her verdict? She likes her Tesla and said that she would tell her younger self to purchase another one, and that she thinks having one would be great if she didn’t have to worry about road trips, or at a point when the infrastructure is better equipped to handle EVs. But, for now, the road trip problem is a significant one and the battery life issue is, at the very least, an annoyance.
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