Charging Cross-Country

Electric Cars Are the Future for Commuters,but Can They Go the Extra Mile on a Road Trip?

- Brendan Leonard

AS I UNPLUGGED the cord from my Tesla SUV on a sunny afternoon in May, I struck up a conversation about electric cars with a gentleman in his sixties who was charging a Porsche hybrid next to me. We were parked at one of the most picturesque vehicle charging stations in America, under thousand-foot-high red sandstone cliffs at a lot inside Utah’s Zion National Park.

“You won’t get much charge for that here,” he said, nodding at my car. The station delivered a meager 16 miles of battery life per hour— fine for a gas hybrid but not for us. I laughed in agreement and explained that I just needed to make it to my next Tesla Supercharger station, 109 miles up the interstate. Such is the reality for electric-vehicle owners who want more than just a daily commuter.

After we juiced the car, my girlfriend, Hilary, and I loaded our camping and climbing gear into the Tesla’s front and rear trunks, bade our neighbor goodbye, and pulled away—reveling in that stealth electric-car silence. We had set out from our Denver home five days earlier on a six-day road trip in Tesla’s new Model X 100D, the automaker’s bid to reach a more adventurous demographic. It’s a black pod with all-wheel drive, a panoramic windshield, touchscreens everywhere, and Tesla’s Falcon Wing doors, which open upward like on the famous 1980s DeLorean from Back to the Future.