There are lots of pros to buying an electric vehicle—saving money on gas and being environmentally friendly, for example. But do they stack up when it comes to traveling from city to city?
One TikToker is telling her viewers to beware of buying a Tesla if they plan on making long road trips in it. However, many in her audience disagree.
Musician, TikTok user, and new Tesla owner Cyny Carter, aka Cynybaby (@cyny.cyn), posted her opinions on her vehicle’s long-haul capabilities in a video from June 7. The TikTok post now has over 376,000 views and counting.
In the video, which Carter titled, “Things I Wish I Knew Before I Bought my Tesla pt. 2,” she states that she had been thinking, “I have 300 miles per charge. I’m gonna charge up a little bit; I’m gonna take a trip to Arizona.”
However, Carter says things didn’t go exactly as she had planned. “If you wanna go any further than, like, 200 miles out … [a Tesla is] not the car,” she claims. She states that stopping to charge the car along the way is “gonna add hours to your trip time.”
She says her trip to Arizona “was supposed to take two, like three hours” but that “it took seven hours” due to the charging time.
Some of Carter’s viewers agreed, such as Saint Lou (@saint.lou), who commented, “If a Tesla says you have 300 miles, you really have like 220-180.”
“Agree. Adds so many hours to trip,” another viewer added.
However, many viewers chimed in to disagree with Carter’s claims.
FFFjey (@fffjey) wrote, “It’s no different fringing on a long trip with an EV. Even in a gas car, u need to stop to get gas after about 3 hours. During that break, u will use the bathroom, buy a snack.”
One viewer wrote, “I just took mine to Vegas. Stopped at some cool roadside stuff while charging. It all depends on how you use that time.”
Another stated, “We did a 10 trip from Denver to Las Vegas and back in a rented Tesla. it did add some time but not 7 hours. we went up some pretty big mountains, too.”
The Daily Dot has reached out to Tesla via email for a statement.
@cyny.cyn Boy was I hot and tired 😩 never again! #teslay #tesla #teslareview #modelyreview #teslalongdistance ♬ Tell Me Again Freestyle – Cyny
Carter’s viewers aren’t the only ones to contradict her observations. In a 2022 article for electric vehicle community and news site Electrek, writer Jameson Dow claimed he took a “2,200 mile electric road trip with no prep” and “only ‘spent’ about 25 minutes waiting for the car to charge, total, over the whole trip.”
Dow does offer the caveat that the “25-minute number” indicates “the amount of time spent waiting for charging and doing nothing else productive. If we were getting a meal, that was ‘free’ charging time, since we need to eat anyway. In other words, time spent charging that would have otherwise been spent driving if we weren’t charging.”
Dow added that he and his companions “chose hotels with chargers (by checking PlugShare),” which allowed them to charge overnight.
A similar post on CleanTechnica noted that the author “relied on the Tesla navigation to plot our route through Tesla Superchargers” and would arrive “at each charger with somewhere between 5% and 20% charge left, charge up to 80% or 90% and get moving again.”
In an August 2023 Business Insider article, a Tesla Model Y owner said that getting comfortable with the learning curve of the vehicle was essential.
“After the first outbound trip when I was being very careful and charging to a higher percentage than necessary at each stop, I learned to trust what my Tesla was telling me about the state of charge, my expected range, and that there were chargers along the way,” he told the Insider.
The Daily Dot has reached out to Carter via TikTok comment and Instagram direct message for further comment.
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