What Running Out of Power in a Tesla on the Side of a Highway Taught Me About the Road Trip of Tomorrow

It's 209 miles from the parking lot of a Chili's in Barstow, California, where we are, to the parking lot of a Carl's Jr. in Kingman, Arizona, where we need to go. I'm in a rented Tesla Model S, a sleek, battery-powered electric vehicle, with a travel companion. We're just about fully charged, and the car estimates it can travel 247 miles before we need more juice. That's a buffer of 38 miles, which should be more than enough to reach Kingman. We'll soon realize it isn't.

The seemingly random parking lots I'm traveling between are sites of a new nationwide network of fast battery charging stations for drivers of Tesla's Model S. The company calls them "Superchargers" — direct-current battery charging stations of a proprietary design that can bring a nearly dead Model S battery to full charge in a little over an hour. That's much faster than the roughly 8 hours it would take by plugging into a wall outlet in your garage. Tesla's official reason for building this private network of battery charging infrastructure (currently up to 80 stations and counting) is to encourage Model S drivers to take road trips — a concept otherwise unthinkable in a car powered only by a battery. I'm testing it out on a weekend road trip from Los Angeles into Arizona and back.