The first stop they made after the border was a small hotel. They were planning a short biological break and something to drink but then ran into a group of … American tourists.
Here we come with the final stage of our CleanTechnica Tesla Shuttle Adventure. Our previous entries attracted a lot of attention in the countries we visited and the photo of the Polish tourist in Macedonia was a Twitter hit. We also received emails from concerned EV enthusiasts from Hungary, who were sorry to hear about our difficulties in Debrecen.
Where did we leave off? Right, in beautiful Romania. Since then, the reports we are getting have become somehow more chaotic. It could be the heat, it could be the tiredness, or it could simply be excellent wine. We will never know. Anyway, in the last entry, I said we would save driving on your last kilowatts for later, and here we are.
As we are receiving regular reports from Tomek and his fellow travelers, we can now put together a few stories from the first couple of days on the road with the Tesla. The most important news is there’s no real news — the first day driving through Poland was simply smooth and easy. There are two reasons behind this: Tesla’s range and GreenWay infrastructure. As Zach was already pointing out in the opening article, GreenWay has done a good job developing a network of fast chargers in Poland and Slovakia. It may still be challenging in a Nissan Leaf or Renault Zoe to get from charging point to charging point, but not so in a Tesla.
As reported a few days ago, my colleague Tomek Gać is “conquering” 12 Central & Eastern European countries in a Tesla. The home base — starting and ending country — is Poland, so we thought a handful of notes about Poland might be of use to kick things off.
Some people seem to be born with a particularly adventurous, exploratory gene. I get the sense my colleague Tomek Gać, another Tesla Shuttle co-founder, is one of those people.
As many of you know, we’ve got a Tesla shuttle service that we’ve been rolling out in Central Europe — it’s called Tesla Shuttle. We’ve gotten many questions about whether we offer service in other regions — the UK, USA, Australia, etc. We get the inquiries from people interested in using such a service, people interested in driving for such a service, and people interested in partnering in other ways. After numerous inquiries and a little bit of thought, we’ve decided it could make a lot of sense to expand our vision.
We’re approaching one year of operation with Tesla Shuttle — city-to-city transport in a Tesla, airport pickups & drop-offs, special event show & tells, and a bit of Uber use. Just passing 50,000 kilometers of service and approximately 100 passengers, it seemed like a good time to reflect on some of the lessons learned and customer reactions.
Some other members of our Tesla Shuttle team installed Tesla software updates on our Model S earlier in the year, but the first time I personally did so was the day after Christmas (or 2nd day of Christmas as some people call it). I was a little uncertain whether to do the update at that time — we needed to leave approximately 2 hrs later and the car said it would take 1 hour and 40 minutes. Additionally, I was a little concerned about how much energy it might take. We had an 85% charge but quite a ways to drive. “How much energy does a Tesla software update take?” I had never thought to ask and didn’t recall seeing this information somewhere, so I searched online. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an answer.
A New Go Ultra Low cost calculator finds that the typical 100% electric car in the UK could cost on average just 3p per mile to run. That is a notable bit of savings compared to 9p for the comparable diesel car. The first savings, in my experience, regard the smell, the lack of particulate exposure, and freedom from the filmy dirty feeling of gas in the car and in the air.
