Alaska Confidential: Getting There in a Tesla
Just you, the open road, and several charging stations
We’re all familiar with the prevailing truck advertisement: A handsome guy with a nicely shaped beard wearing a flannel shirt, trekking through a mountainous region with his generic family and maybe a dog in tow, our hero on his way to another grizzled adventure.
The new Tesla Cybertruck, starting at $80,000 for the base model, is following a campaign similarly pandering to an audience not too secure in their masculinity, with a new ad featuring blue collar workers doing nondescript construction projects and hauling the materials around in their Cybertruck, a scratch on the bed likely representing several months to a year of their salaries.
Also the truck looks ludicrous and you’re a tool if you think it’s rad and people secretly hate you.
Telas’s website boasts that the Cybertruck is robust enough not just for any terrain that the earth might present, but for “Any Planet,” and is “durable and rugged enough to go anywhere.”
This seems to be a recurring issue with the (government grant benefiting) businesses run by anti-government activist Elon Musk, invoking the eventual move to other planets when they haven’t yet tackled the issues on earth.
For example, the Cybertruck, apparently already unchallenged by the earthly environment, and capable of going “anywhere,” can’t actually go just go to most places on earth, or even everywhere in the country where you bought it.
It can’t make it to Alaska, for example.
I checked out Tesla’s trip calculator, it’s header, again, is “Go Anywhere,” and even a current Model S sedan, far superior in battery mileage to the Cybertruck, can’t make it to anywhere in Alaska or north or south of the border.
But don’t worry, they’re “working on it.”
It’s interesting that such a truck, with a market trained on freedom loving adventurers, can’t make it to a place that actual freedom loving adventurers dream about visiting, or actually do visit, especially since I’ve made the trip from the contiguous United States to Alaska a dozen times, not even in a truck, but a regular car, the bulk of them in a two-thousand dollar used Volvo.
If you have never driven the Alcan, the Alaska Canada Highway, it’s a unique experience.
You pass through British Columbia and into the Yukon, across gorges and turquoise glacial lakes, not seeing another car for hours, either in the freezing pitch darkness or the midnight sun, nothing but moose, deer, the open road.
Maybe that’s why I’ve always equated owning a car with freedom.
The freedom to go wherever I want, whenever I want. I’ve been to all four corners of this country on the highway, and there’s something invigorating about it, the untamed expanses really put things into perspective.
Of course, while you can’t go just anywhere in a Tesla, you can still go to a lot of places.
Let’s say you want to hop in your car on a whim and go to Yellowstone National Park!
Merry Christmas kids!
You’re our hero Dad! I love you Honey! We’re so spontaneous and adventurous!
Let’s say, hypothetically, you’re leaving for Yellowstone from Los Angeles. If you’re leaving from somewhere else, you just might not be able to go.
In your cool car.
Again, according to Tesla’s convenient Trip Planner, to get to Yellowstone from LA you’ll only have to make seven stops to charge your Tesla, totaling three and a half hours of excruciating minute-counting boredom; in Baker CA, Las Vegas, St. George UT, Beaver UT, Nephi UT, Tremonton UT, Pocatello ID, and West Yellowstone MT.
That’s assuming you don’t have to wait for a charge.
You’ll also have to stick to the route Tesla can accommodate and be unable to deviate from the major highways without running out of a charge, which isn’t very adventurous, so you’ll have to skip the Grand Teton National Park in favor of sitting in a Taco John’s parking lot for half an hour while your piece of shit car charges, you fucking loser.
You’re also making the borderline insane leap of faith that the Tesla charging station in Tremonton Utah, population seven thousand, will be fully operational and not conked out or vandalized with a Maintenance sign on it, and you’ll probably end up having to call Triple A or just have a meltdown and get run over on the highway, and your family is going to start wondering why you’ve ruined everything.
Also, once you get to the gates of Yellowstone, you won’t be able to explore it very much, because you don’t have enough range, so you may end up renting a car somewhere and really pissing everyone off because that will take another twelve hours.
But, still, you can get to Yellowstone in only twenty-four hours of drive time.
If you weren’t a pathetic, gullible, superficial pawn of the advertising industry and the cult of Tesla, you could have done this in fifteen hours, or about half as much time.
So, you might think you’re really cool in your Tesla, a real adventurer in your big Cybertruck, but I can go wherever I want in my Camry, including to Alaska, I barely have to plan it out, and I only have to stop for gas for five minutes every three hundred miles, so who’s cooler, now that you ruined your family trip because you thought you were going to impress your new female intern with your truck, and I’ll be driving past you while with my arm out the window while you’re sitting in a parking lot charging your stupid car with your stupid family who hates you.
Musk a homophobic, narcissistic, fascist racist who only deserves our scorn.