Ten miles north of Wickenburg, Arizona, our disheleved-looking Tesla Model Y “Long Range” had a silicon crisis of confidence. My son and I had spent the better part of an hour at a Tesla Supercharger, broiling beneath a glass roof with no sunshade and watching our fellow pioneers of the inEVitable electric future in the stalls all around us trying everything from mirrored plastic to black tarps to keep the heat out. I’d given the Supercharger an extra twelve minutes past the center screen’s confident assertion that we could CONTINUE ON TO THE DESTINATION, because if I’d learned anything in the five days up to this point it was that “Tesla range miles” were like “Tinder height inches” or “LPSG bone pressed measures” — don’t ask — in their willful ignorance of reality.
The smart thing to do was to turn around and charge to a full 310 miles indicated, which would add perhaps 70-80 minutes to our trip. There was just one problem. John and I had already spent nearly five hours getting from the Pima Air and Space Museum to Wickenburg, a trip that takes literally half that in a gasoline car.
“Well, it gets worse. We also have to turn off the A/C.” There was a disbelieving snort from behind me.
“Isn’t it, like, 100 degrees out there?”
“No. It’s 112. And we are in a glass fishbowl. Do you remember when we saw the glass cockpit bubble of the late P-47 at Wright-Pat and you asked if it got hot flying that plane?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Well, you’re about to find out what that’s like.”
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