High gas and diesel prices have us planning Tesla EV road trips
Posted By RichC on May 5, 2026
After a Tesla Mobile Service upgrade for our 2019 Tesla Model 3 last week, we made a couple of test stops on our weekend trip. The DC CSS Fast Charging at an interstate Wawa IONNA near Lima, Ohio (non-Tesla SuperCharger network) made an excellent stopping point for our 
slightly older “standard range” EV. Since we had never charged outside the SuperCharger network, this was more of a test for future travel, but with very clean bathroom, coffee that cost me only $1 and a very fair $0.39 kWh, this ends up being a preferred stop on our way up to see our granddaughters (more on 
the “piano recital” later this week).
We had great weather, but my heavier foot kept our speeds higher than EV efficiency.
Drew asked about our watt-hours per mile number as that is what he uses to evaluate efficiency and driving speeds. 
I mentioned to him that we had a strong headwind coming back for much of the drive south and suspected that may have dinged our energy efficiency. No matter how you slice it with fuel costing so much this spring, driving the Tesla and charging is A LOT less expensive than driving the BMW X5 35d “diesel” at $5.86/gallon! (data above was from our return).
One thing that I expected or may not have understood correctly is that “I thought” the CSS chargers with the NACS plugs (Tesla) would exchange billing data like the Tesla SuperChargers … making them plug and go. 
But no, the charging stations still require a transaction to occur as well as plugging the correct plug (or CSS adapter) into the vehicle if needed. Charges above were for our trip north to Toledo and back at the same location I used ApplePay on my AppleWatch for simplicity (receipts above) … besides the Apple Card currently rewards 2% back for fueling/charging vehicles.
I was also experimenting with a third-party “trip planning” navigation app called A Better Route Planner (ABRP) that includes a bit more planning data as well as charging stations other than SuperChargers. The FREE version seems to work just fine, even with the delays updates to every 5 minutes. I tend to turn off the iPhone display and didn’t have it charging in the car … BUT it was streaming SiriusXM radio via Bluetooth; I ended up with about 50% charge on my iPhone 16 Pro after the drive, so charging while using it might be a good idea (BTW: We are currently going without the $10/mo Tesla Premium subscription — so far, so good, but having traffic and re-routing would be nice).
Procedure: Pre-plan the trip on ABRP, imported the realtime car data to the app on my iPhone … and the calculations and future planned trips are updated. I think the software improves as more data is collected. We were not left stranded this time so that is a positive sign that it works (I reviewed and updated the Wawa IONNA entry with my photo). 😉
While in Northwestern Ohio, we charged at Katelyn and Drew’s house but also did a little driving around the Toledo area from Whitehouse, Ohio (church, Sidecut park, the piano recital and the grocery store — Meijer). Of course they happened to have a charge station next to the grocery store, so while the girls were in the store, Drew and I check out the new Rivian chargers next to the existing Tesla chargers. Nice … I even plugged in for 3 minutes or $0.43 cents worth of charge. I was good for a laugh.
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