I am now three months in on ownership of my Tesla Model Y Long Range (MYLR). Seems like a good point to take a look in and see how things are going.

Usage

As I indicated originally, my primary purpose for this vehicle is as a work car, and that has been the bulk of its activity thus far. I’ve driven it back and forth to my primary worksite a handful of times - about a 60 mile round trip. I’ve been down to Springfield, IL on one occasion, and I’ve taken work trips into the wilds of Wisconsin as well, into the Janesville, Madison, and Milwaukee areas. My longest single-day round trip was 431.9 miles.

As of this writing the car has 3,649 miles on it. It had 15 miles on it when I picked it up, so I’ve put 3634 miles on the car myself.

That calculates out to 1211 miles per month, which puts me on track for an annual mileage of just over 14,500/year. This will probably seem like a lot to some people, but it’s actually in the neighborhood of about half of my pre-pandemic work mileage. I use cars pretty hard.

Charging and Costs

One of the biggest questions people will wonder about is what the car will cost to operate. After all, you are plugging it into your house electricity, so while there are no costs for gasoline, there is cost on the electric bill. And I know that many of us are not fans of our electric companies…

Costs for charging are reflected in two separate areas: Cost for home charging, and cost for charging on the road.

Home charging is how the car gets powered up for the overwhelming majority of my usage. I’ve established a pattern where, when I get home at the end of the day I pull the car into the garage and plug it in to the home charger. Most of the time I have the car set to charge up to 90% (this is Tesla’s recommendation), and when I know I will have a longer trip, I bump that up to 100%. The car easily charges overnight - probably the longest home charging session I’ve had, bringing the car up from 23% to 90% after a longer trip, took just over 6 hours. If that seems like a long time, keep in mind that it’s all during time that you aren’t using the car - it would just be sitting in the garage either way.

Total home charging cost for the first three months is approximately $108.62.

It’s approximate because I don’t yet know exactly what my electrical costs will be for the last 2/3 of June, so I’m estimating based on the month before, but while it varies, it’s generally pretty similar from month to month.

To put that in context of the electric bill itself, that means an increase in electricity cost of about $36.20/month. So the electric bill does go up (of course). But I’ll compare that to equivalent gas costs below.

The majority of my trips are well within the range of the car, and as such have not required a lot of charging on the road. Still, I have had some longer trips - five, to be specific - that have made it necessary to stop at a supercharger.

And everywhere I’ve gone has had more than adequate support for charging on the road. Tesla’s Supercharger network was a major reason behind my choice of the MYLR, and it’s proven out thus far. With one exception, which was ultimately a learning experience for me, I’ve had no trouble locating a charger when needed, and often times I’ve found that there are options of more than one along the way. In my five stops I’ve only had one instance where the charger I plugged into did not appear to be working, and the one next to it did. And frankly, this is comparable to my experience with gas stations, where it’s not all that unusual to pull up to an open pump only to discover a bag over the handle, and realize that the pump was “open” because it’s out of service.

That learning experience? I learned that you want to be sure to have some information about the charger location before you go there. Because they are different from gas stations - no need for tanks in the ground - they can be just about anywhere. Often they’ll be in the parking lot of a hotel or a grocery store for example.

The navigation system in the car will guide you to the location, which is great the majority of the time. But on one occasion I followed the navigation system, and when it said that I’d arrived there was… nothing. I couldn't see any chargers in the area, nor an obvious spot for them - no large parking lots, for example. I drove around the block, up and down a couple of side streets, and just saw nothing.

Then I pulled over and googled the site I was at. It turned out that the charger was on the third floor of the parking garage I was driving around. Once I sorted that it was a non-issue. I drove up, charged, and it was fine. But I know now that I want to get the lay of the land ahead of time when I’m going to be stopping in an unfamiliar place.

This is not hard to do, incidentally. The navigation system figures in the charging stops when you put in your destination. You can easily know in advance where it will recommend that you stop. And it’s pretty conservative - it looks to me like it tries to keep you up around 10% or more at each charging stop, so you aren’t running on empty if you are having trouble figuring out where the charger is.

In fact, it’s so conservative that I have, on multiple occasions, turned off the charging points on the map (it lets you do this), and found that I can actually get home without making the charging stop it is recommending (albeit with a lower battery charge than some people might be comfortable with). They clearly want to ensure people don’t run dry on the road.

In terms of the charging experience itself, it’s been just fine. People sometimes express concern about how much longer it takes to charge a car versus filling up with gas. The thing to keep in mind here is that, in general, you are not filling up. Most of the time at a Supercharger you are just adding enough juice to get home. My charges have generally been less than 15 minutes long, which frankly just leaves enough time to get a bathroom stop in, and maybe grab a bottle of water. On one occasion I had lunch while the car was charging, and the car was done well before I was done eating (risking an “idle fee”, which was graciously waived because it was my first time).

So, all that said, what has it cost to charge on the road? $71.13

Over five stops that comes out to an average of $14.23/stop

Add that $71.13 into the $108.62 for home charging, and my total “fuel” cost for the car over the first three months comes out to $179.75, or just under $60/month ($59.91).

Comparison to Gas Equivalent

My prior primary car (which I still have) was a 2011 Subaru Outback with the 3.6L flat six-cylinder engine. I’d argue that this is a very comparable vehicle. The MYLR and the Outback are comparable in size (the other reason I chose the MYLR - room for my trike) and cargo capacity (the Tesla technically has more room, but that’s spread around multiple cubbies; the Outback is arguably more flexible for carrying large items). So I’ll use that for comparison.

Average regular gas price in the Midwest for April and May 2023 (June isn’t available yet) was $3.415/gallon. My average in the Subaru was 22.77 mpg. To travel the same 3,634 miles in the Subaru would have used 159.6 gallons. At $3.415/gal that would generate a cost of $545.03 over 3,634 miles. That’s $181.68/month.

So - I’ve saved $365.28 in fuel costs over the first three months of ownership, or about $121.77/month. Stated differently, the Subaru costs three times more to fuel up than the MYLR.

I should also note that these numbers are based on my mpg in the Subaru. The EPA rates the 2011 Outback at 20mph combined city/highway. I tend to drive for mileage, and I have a higher than usual percentage of highway driving than most. Your mileage, quite literally, may vary.

Needless to say, I’m pretty happy with all of this. I’m saving money in fuel costs, spending a lot less time at gas stations, and I have a vehicle that is always fueled up when I leave the house. Thanks to the Tesla Supercharger network I’ve experienced nothing like range anxiety - the car can get me to where I need to go.

I’ll write more about the general experience of owning and driving the car down the road. It’s probably pretty clear from what I have here that I’m pretty positive about the experience, but it isn’t perfect - there are flaws, and we’ll discuss those too.

When I decided I wanted to go electric for my work vehicle, one of the top items on my list was having a vehicle that my Catrike Expedition would fit inside of. Often, when I travel for work, the end of the work day provides opportunity to ride in places that I wouldn't otherwise, so I needed my work car to facilitate that.

To sort this out I spent some time online trying to find the cargo dimensions for the (5 seat) Model Y. The challenge is that most sites that report this information give you some variation of cubic dimensions - cubic inches, feet, liters, etc. Some of them cleverly use things like suitcases or beer boxes. Oddly, none of them list how many Catrike Expeditions you can carry…

The thing is that knowing the cargo area is 68 cubic feet doesn’t tell me anything about the shape of the cargo area or the size of the opening. If you can’t get the trike into the cargo area, it doesn’t matter whether it’s big enough otherwise.

Fortunately I found the Tesmanian site, which handily provides pretty much all the dimensions - in inches and centimeters - that you could ask for, including the height of the hatch opening. In sum, with the rear seats down, the dimension are:

Length: 78.7” (200cm)
Width at narrowest point: 37” (94cm)
Opening Height: 27.6” (70cm)

2023 Tesla Model Y Cargo Area Dimensions

My Catrike Expedition’s measurements, when set up for me are:

Length: 80” (203.2cm)
Width: 31” (78.74cm)
Height: 26.5” (67.31cm) at the top of the rear rack

2019 Catrike Expedition Width (and yes, it needs to be washed)

2019 Catrike Expedition Lenght and Height

So, by measurements alone, I knew it should fit, with the expectation that the rear wheel would come between the front seats, and that I would fold the neckrest down (I have to do that in my Outback as well). And I’d seen someone post a picture of their trike in the back of a Model Y on a Facebook group some time ago, though I don’t recall where it was and I wasn’t able to turn it up again with a search.

For some reason I did not take the trike along with me when I went for my test drive of the Model Y. I did do that when I got my Mobile Trike Garage (2011 Subaru Outback), and it was great because then I knew without a doubt that it would fit.

Fortunately, it does:

Catrike Expedition on board - Trike in Tesla Model Y

Although the Model Y and the Subaru Outback are of similar exterior dimensions, the Model Y is narrower in the cargo area. The Model Y also has a sloping back end, while the Outback, true to its station wagon nature, has a roofline that runs parallel to the ground nearly all the way back to the hatch. So I was a little concerned as to how well the trike would manage with the hatch closed:

It fits just fine. Tesla uses large expanse of glass along the roof and hatch (which is why you see sky at the top of the picture). It’s visually dramatic, of course, but it also adds for considerably more vertical interior space than you would get in the same car with a traditional headliner.

And as I’m showing it here, the rear wheel does come up in-between the seats just a bit:

It isn’t far enough into the cabin to be very physically intrusive. The main downside is that the rear cargo bags completely block the view out the rear view mirror. However, the view out the back is really just a slit anyway - that sloped hatch glass is so steep that it only provides a tiny opening. But the car has back up cameras on the rear hatch and the sides, so this is largely a non-issue.

In my Outback I deal with the rear view issue by putting the Expedition in at an angle, horizontally speaking - essentially, putting the rear wheel in between the back of the front seat and the door. I hadn’t given that a try yet, so I went ahead and gave it a shot.

And it works. I could not get it to fit in and safely close the hatch with it angled to the driver’s seat in my driving position, but I could do it with the passenger seat moved up a bit:

And that gives back the tiny view out the rear:

You get the rear view back with the trike at an angle. And we also learn that I cannot figure out how to get the phone to focus on the image to the rear…

I’d prefer it behind the driver’s seat because then it doesn’t obscure the view out the passenger rear windows - e.g. where you look when you finish passing someone on the left. But again, the Model Y has side-view/blind spot cameras to help with that. And the front seat is not too far forward - at 5’8” I can sit in it comfortably, and the only likely passengers with me and the trike in the car at the same time are My Lovely Wife or my offspring, and both are shorter than I am (we are not tall people). And with the trike at an angle there’s a little more usable cargo space in the back as well.

So - long story short: It fits! Any trike the same size as the Catrike Expedition or smaller should be able to fit as well - for example, I’m certain MLW’s Catrike Pocket will fit also.

A couple of things to note here - the cargo measurements are without the aftermarket cargo area protective cover shown in the car here. The cover does eat up a bit of vertical space, but the trike still fits. And I will note that I’m reporting the length from the Tesmanian website above, but I don’t know how they decide where the end of the cargo area is at the front end - my trusty Stanley tape measure makes it seem a little longer, and obviously the front seat positions will make a difference as well.