Doing a Road Trip in an Electric Car (Ep. 3)

Joe (00:00):
Hi, I'm Joe Hackman, happy Tesla owner, and you're listening to Travel Fuels Life.

Drew (00:16):
Hello everybody, and welcome to Travel Fuels Life Show. We share stories, tips and inspiration to help you live a travel lifestyle. I'm your host, drew Hanish. Have you been thinking about maybe buying an electric vehicle? Well, I really haven't been because I like doing road trips a little too much and I just don't have confidence that an electric vehicle is going to get me where I need to go on these long haul trips where I'm going to be spending a lot of time charging the vehicle up. Well, recently I found out that my friend Joe Hackman had actually gone out and purchased an electric car. And not only that, but he decided to take a trip across the southwest US that was very similar to a trip I took in a dinosaur churning engine, and he did it with an electric car. And I'm sitting here thinking, am I going to be able to get from fuel stop to fuel stop? And he seemed to be able to do it. So we're going to find out how that car did on these long hauls. We're going to compare the power of that car to a fuel burner. And we're also going to maybe discover what it's like to take your hands off the wheel for a while and go on autopilot. Yes, he bought a Tesla. So from my home here in Greenville, South Carolina, it's time to pull up the laptop, jump on the worldwide web and connect with my good friend Joe Hackman. Joe, welcome to the show.

Joe (01:50):
Thanks Drew. Thanks for the warm welcome.

Drew (01:52):
Joe. I wanted to get into a little bit of a discussion about your trip because I just find this absolutely fascinating and you've been in it for years, so you have this need to always be kind of looking forward. So it shouldn't surprise me that you were ahead of the curve in terms of technology, and I always think of electronic cars as kind of the future still because I didn't feel like the technology had really caught up. So now you've taken this drive across the southwest, and if you had to rate your experience, say on a scale of one to five in terms of the quality of this drive, how would you rate it?

Joe (02:37):
Oh, I would give it a five. And it's actually funny because not that long ago I felt exactly like you. I just thought, oh, EVs, that's pretty cool. Te Tesla's got some neat cars. It looks like people seem to, they seem to have good performance and yeah, they've got these superchargers and that sort of thing. But I didn't picture myself earlier this year owning a Tesla and having already logged a 3,400 mile trip in it. Certainly. So you're not alone. So it sounds like you're probably closer than you realized to maybe being an EV owner yourself.

Drew (03:23):
There might be something sitting out in my driveway that I'm not expecting at Christmas time.

Joe (03:29):
We can only

Drew (03:30):
Owe. Wouldn't that be nice? The Tesla elves will bring it, I guess I'm not not sure how to, well, I'm

Joe (03:35):
Sure they would deliver one to your house, but they might want a thing or two for it.

Drew (03:40):
That's true, that's true. So being a new Tesla owner then, it's kind of interesting, we chatted a little bit before about this, but kind kind of give us the experience because as you know, I think the traditional way of buying a car is to just wander into the dealership, look around, take it out for a test drive, get a feel for it, try to not get overly saturated with sales, talk from the salesman and then end up buying a car and hopefully not regretting it when you drive home. So what was your experience with buying the Tesla? Yeah,

Joe (04:19):
So actually buying a car in many ways has gotten easier. I think a lot of the dealerships now have internet sales and they have people that aren't really salespeople. They're kind of tech people. And you go online and you get your Costco price and it's a pretty good deal. You don't have to deal with a lot of hassle, but there is still some hassle. So that to me, the Tesla experience was part of the whole thing. And so the way this all came about actually was we were just kind of thinking down the road like yourself. Yeah man, maybe EV would be cool. Tesla has that model three, let's, let's go test drive one. So my wife went on the Tesla website and what the model threes were so constrained at the time that they didn't even do test drives. So she scheduled a test drive with the Model X.

(05:23):
We're like, yeah, okay, that's cool. Mean she wasn't really care for the S Body style. I didn't really care either way. I mean for me, I am kind of an SUV guy. We still owned ANS SUV at that time, a German car. And so we ended up you going and test driving this car. And the thing that was really cool about it, number one is everything was done online. So you just show up, you have an appointment, they greet you. The people that work there seem to be happy. That's a nice thing. Nice. It's not like there's a couple guys, you feel like you're meat walking into the predator den kind of thing at a lot of dealerships. But in this particular case, everybody's just easygoing, happy, just relaxed, and they offer you water and things like that while you're waiting. And there's cars there in the showroom to look at and all that.

(06:26):
So then we get to actually do the test drive, and that was when the car kind of spoke for itself. We were both thoroughly blown away by pretty much every aspect of it from the interior, the quality of all. It has leather that it's not natural, it's like a vegetable leather or something. But it's super durable and comfortable and the seats were really comfortable. And of course you got that nice big screen in the middle to look at and it's pretty amazing. You turn on the rear backup camera and you can really see what's there. It's very high definition. So it was just from start to finish, it was a great experience. The car itself, I was pulling onto the freeway near Rockland, California with a Porsche, I don't know, nine something, a nice one. I don't even know the models. It wasn't your standard Porsche.

(07:32):
And I felt bad for the guy because I didn't have to work at all. And I just basically kept up with them the whole time. And I could tell they were really enjoying driving that Porsche. And to me it was almost funny that here I am in this car. It is a performance vehicle, but it's not by any means. Does it have that mystique that a really expensive Porsche. I would say it was one of those 150, $200,000 Porsches. And I'm having no trouble at all casually pulling onto the freeway behind this thing. And this car is just handling like it's on rails and it's so fast. Wow. It's just unbelievable. And just the whole thing was just a phenomenal experience and it really opened my eyes to how far Tesla has come and how viable an EV can be. I mean, it fun to drive great performance, great features, comfortable, pretty much checking all the boxes, but then of course there's always that range fatigue, that number one problem. And maybe we can talk about that's, I'm sure we'll be talking about that. Cause it was a 3,400 mile trip, and if you're going to drive 3,400 miles, including through Death Valley and other things, range fatigue might certainly be an issue. I did not have any,

Drew (09:04):
It's definitely where my curiosity is because I mean, my experience with electric vehicles up to this point has been, well, let's see, where can I go within 200 miles and then do I have a place I can stop and make sure that I can get it recharged and all that sort of stuff. So I definitely want to get into that. But the first question, which you may not think would be the most obvious question is do the dials really go to 11?

Joe (09:37):
The dials go to 11? Yeah.

Drew (09:39):
I hear the heat dial and the radio dial go to 11.

Joe (09:43):
Oh, I, I've never turned any of the dials up past seven or eight,

Drew (09:49):
So

Joe (09:50):
I don't know.

Drew (09:51):
So I'm going to teach you, so I'm going to teach you something about a Tesla. I was watching the Graham Norton show the other day, and Jamie Lee Curtis was on there and her husband, Christopher Guest was in the movie Spinal Tap and in the movie Spinal Tap, have you seen that?

Joe (10:11):
I saw it when I was much younger. Yeah.

Drew (10:14):
So the whole gag was, he'd walk over to his amp and he'd turn it up to 11, and it's a rock. It's a documentary, but more of a joke. And so he's like, yeah, I mean, everybody else plays it to 10, I'm going to get it to 11. And apparently Elon Musk is a really huge fan of that movie. And so he decided that his dials would go to 11.

Joe (10:42):
Oh, that's so funny. It doesn't surprise me at all. They put all kinds of little interesting things in there, and they're adding new things all the time. The version nine upgrade had a few Atari games that you could play or that your children could play while you're charging your car or something. So there's a lot of just cool. And actually not being that far off an age from Elon makes it, from my point of view, so much of it I get, but I forgot about that scene. So I did not, I didn't really, but I love that story. But technically, I don't know if I'll ever put the dials at 11 because when I don't run the fans that high, when I'm adjusting the climate controls, I don't run the volume unless I'm on my cell phone. That's what I turn it up the highest to. But that's seven or eight and just about five is this, five or six is the sweet spot on the music and podcasts. So

Drew (11:48):
How cool is it to own a company where you can design something and can put your favorite movie into it?

Joe (11:56):
Exactly,

Drew (11:57):
Exactly. So I think what you're saying is that this is really a car for the up and coming generations because I mean, it's really going away from the old school thinking in not just moving to an electric vehicle, but in everything about it, how it's built.

Joe (12:20):
There's zero compromises. Tesla has the three safest cars by the National Highway Traffic Safety Association. They have the number one, two, and three crash ratings. They're phenomenally, the resale value's. Incredible. And a lot of people have been saying for years that the resale value on a Tesla's going to crash, it's going to tank. It just hasn't happened. They, they're worth more to the shareholders than gm. And a lot of people diss them for not making money. They're making money now, in my opinion. It's a company that's got everything going for 'em, and I just don't see anyone ever catching up with them. I think what's going to happen in the future is people will choose to partner with them. Even Daimler in the last couple weeks kind of alluded to that. Oh, well, we we're not ruling out partnering with Tesla. They probably figured out what it was going to take to put together a charging network that was even half the size. And they thought, wow, we really better keep our door open with Elon and Company if we want to have a chance to actually have a viable EV that can go anywhere outside of a hundred miles.

Drew (13:42):
All right. So let's talk a little bit about the trip, because this is, like I say, it's fascinating for me. When I took a trip to Alaska about 20 years ago, I learned that I needed to always have my gas tank full because you didn't know where the next gas station was going to be. And I've carried that philosophy even when I took my trip to the Four Corners I went through and I used gas buddy and I figured out where the lower prices were for gasoline and where I could stop. And I plotted out every single gas station. So I made sure that after 300 miles, I had a gas station, so I wasn't going below half a tank wherever I went. And then I see your Facebook post and I go, wait a second. Now how is he doing an electric car through the same route that I'm going when I'm a little paranoid about running out of gasoline? So I guess the first question is, because obviously you made it because you're here to tell us the story, and you're still bragging about Teslas, but how did you go about doing your planning? I mean, is there an app that you can go out or and use, or do you have to plot them all out ahead of time? Or how does that work?

Joe (14:56):
Yeah, so I think maybe just I'll give you a little context of the overall purpose of the trip and how that all came together. And so first thing, I guess I had a kind of perfect storm, and I viewed it as an opportunity. So I had two back-to-back jobs, one in Arizona, one in Colorado, and I basically within the previous two months, bought this Tesla model X. And I'm like, okay, what a great opportunity. I can't really want to ship my tools back and forth, my tools and equipment between two places over a weekend and take a flight into one area and then over to another. Just to me it was like, I've been through most of these areas. I'm going to drive, okay, I'm going to just take this Tesla and check it out. So I'm actually a member of a, there's really good group in Facebook, Tesla tips and Tricks.

(16:01):
I think community, I'll, maybe I can get it, get you the actual address Yeah. Before you publish this. But I got all kinds of information from these guys. And one of the things that people told me, some people say, oh yeah, just use the Tesla navigation to figure out, no, the Tesla navigation is fine, but there's a website called literally a Better Route Planner that you can make aware of your car. In other words, you associate your car with your login, and so the website knows your charge, it knows your location, and you can put in all kinds of other assumptions about weather, wind and stuff like that. So my goal with this trip was to not go on roads that I had gone on before whenever possible. So I didn't just do the standard fastest route. I went down through Death Valley. In fact, I camped in my car one night just to experience that.

(17:09):
Nice. Because one of the kind of tips that you can do with a Tesla is you can actually charge it pretty fast at an RV park, I think it's about three or four hours, you can charge it pretty full. Whereas at the supercharger, the most you're ever going to wait is probably an hour. So you know, have an avenue to charge your car pretty much anywhere in the United States because there's RV parks everywhere and major interstates, they're completely covered. So I basically used a better route planner, and I planned my trip to go on the backside of the Sierras through Death Valley and down over into Arizona using a different route than I've ever used previously going that way. And same on the way back, I took 50 back from Pueblo, Colorado, which was absolutely gorgeous. Oh yeah, unbel, unbelievable drive. I missed the autumn colors in the Rockies, and it was still beautiful. And I can only imagine what it was like a few weeks or a month before on the western side of the Rockies. It was still full blown autumn, the great yellows and whatnot. But

Drew (18:31):
I was going to say, if you ever need timing tips, I hit all the places at just the right time. It was so beautiful. I mean yellow, yellow trees everywhere. Yeah, it was amazing.

Joe (18:45):
That's cool. Yeah, that's cool.

Drew (18:47):
So of all the, yeah, and that drive down Highway 50, I went US 50 from, I went down to the Royal Gorge Bridge, and so I don't know if you stopped off there or not, but that was fun. And then just the drive through there, I kept stopping the car over and over and over again to get out and take pictures, and I'm like, maybe I should be on a bike or something, because as much as I'm stopping now, it's like, geez, it's just everything is a photograph here. So you had no real tension when driving those back. And you mentioned something to me before this about how you would charge the car down, that you wouldn't let it run down too much, and what was the benefit of that?

Joe (19:36):
Yeah, so I mean, you don't really have to run it down. So there's always, you can drive, I have the 100 model, which has a bigger range than the 75. You can drive the 75 on the trip that I took.

(19:52):
So just for starters, but the nice thing about the 100 is obviously you have a little extra, so you can always extend things out if you want to. Normally the Tesla navigation wants me to basically skip a charger here and there, and I would rather, well, for one, I wanted to see him, so I stopped at more chargers. But also, and I don't know if this is a net benefit on time or I don't know if it's good for the batteries. I'm sure all kinds of people will pick it apart and say, oh my gosh, that guy's an idiot. He shouldn't have done that because it is just inevitable. It's 2018, but I wouldn't run the battery way down and I would charge it, and I wouldn't charge it way up, which in theory is a good thing because lithium batteries don't like to be too low or too high.

(20:49):
But it was nice because when you first plug in, your charge rate is a lot faster and it really slows after say 70%. So you already know when you're sitting there charging how long you have to charge to get to your next stop. But it also updates. So one of the nice things is you're looking in the navigation and it's always telling you either before you leave or after you've left and your route is going, it's telling you what your arrival charge is going to be at the next stop. So I always shot for minimum 20%. I didn't want to go below 20% for anything. And I don't think I ever did on that trip. I don't think I even came close because I was stopping at chargers and checking 'em out and stuff like that, or grabbing a coffee. Yeah, I put in some long days, I drove a lot. Yeah, I went, got to Arizona in two days, got from Arizona to Colorado in two days of driving, and then I got all the way back to California in two days from

Drew (22:00):
Colorado. So you're doing, yeah. You said, what was your longest day, would you say, in terms of that? So

Joe (22:06):
The longest day, so there was a reason why I had injured my shoulder. So I was anxious to get back and get that looked after and just get off the road, because driving wasn't necessarily fun, although it wasn't, the autopilot really saved me, and we can talk about that more if you like, but I drove from Pueblo, Colorado to Elco, Nevada, which is 800 miles in one day on Friday. Wow. Yeah, I didn't have, and I had no caffeine.

Drew (22:41):
Oh my goodness. By

Joe (22:41):
The time I felt like I needed caffeine, which was only from the very far eastern part of Nevada to Elco, by that point, I had not experienced any fatigue. And the fatigue reduction with autopilot is, I would say minimum 90%.

Drew (23:06):
Wow.

Joe (23:06):
It literally keeps you in your lane. It slows you down if you're getting too close to the car in front of you, and they added a new feature. Now this navigate on autopilot, it'll even make lane changes and stuff. It'll ask you to confirm by doing the blinker. So it literally does on-ramp to off-ramp navigation. Now there's a little nag step. You have to be touching the wheel. You have to, it's looking for input because it wants to make sure you're not just sitting back taking a nap. Well,

Drew (23:38):
And that was my question was, I mean, what happens if you doze off? Because I mean, if you're just, one of the things that keeps me engaged on a drive is that I have to pay attention and look in my mirrors and do all of those functions. So what happens if you doze, I

Joe (23:54):
Think you'd be in trouble if you dozed off, because even I, you would hear some sounds, if you came close to an object and we're going to hit an object, it would try to automatically stop. But I could see it going terribly wrong because the steering portion of the autopilot, if you don't put input, I believe, and I think it actually turns off. So I'm pretty sure that feature turns off. So wherever the car was going to drift, it would still drift, although it would slow down if it saw an object, you could end up in a bad crash even with it. But you're definitely safer than you would be in a usual car. And probably those audible tones would be enough to alert you that you're snoozing.

Drew (24:49):
I just keep thinking of this problem. We have these days of people texting and driving that they could be texting to their heart's content and I wouldn't have to worry about them.

Joe (25:00):
Right. Yeah, no, you're a lot safer if somebody's texting while driving in a Tesla. I took liberties. Let me tell you, I took liberties on this trip. If I needed to pick something up on the floor, on the seat next to me, they were calculated risks. It wasn't like I sat back and tipped my seat back or anything, but I would reach and grab my cooler and keep my eyes more or less on the road throughout most of it. But I took out my phone and took pictures. I would never do that in my normal car. I took pictures while I was driving because I, that's part of why I wanted to drive the car a lot. I wanted to see how well the various features worked. I wanted to see what the limits were. And there are situations where it, it'll freak out if somebody crosses an intersection ahead of you and have autopilot on the car will break like hell. I mean, it'll literally like, you're going to die.

Drew (26:09):
Oh, my

Joe (26:09):
Stop. And it's like, dude, I'm like, relax car. It's okay. The car's not going to be there by the time we get there. But it's not teaching anyone a lesson and getting close to them. It's not taking any chances, which if you're going to have technology like that, that's probably the way you want it now. I think those braking settings, they have thresholds minus not set to the lowest end, and it's not set to the highest end. I think I'm at the default, which was moderate or something like that, so I could get it to not break as radically in those situations. But at the same time, I would prefer that than, let's say my eyes had shifted off the road and or I got distracted by a passenger or something and the car noticed that and stopped. I'd prefer that over the alternative, so I'll take it. Right.

Drew (27:06):
So did you have any crap moments while you were driving it where you were like, what am I doing?

Joe (27:14):
Well, yeah, I did learned, there was a couple things. I think the biggest, oh crap. Things for me were anything. So for example, a failed lane change where the car jerks. So if you're in autopilot and you turn on a blinker, the car will merge into the lane that you put the blinker on.

(27:40):
Yeah. But sometimes if you're near other cars or it detects something that it thinks might be a potential hazard, it'll swerve back and it's kind of nerve wracking. And it's really, really nerve wracking when your shoulder hurts like hell. Because anything that causes a jerking motion, like that example I gave you earlier where it was literally panicking, doing panic braking when the car pulled that hurt like hell, and just any jerking motions, but wasn't a normal driver at that point. So it's not like the car is going to put on kid gloves for me. So I had to deal with that. But all in all, I learned that when you're passing other cars and you want to merge back into that lane, wait longer,

(28:33):
Just make sure that the car in the lane to your right, and I wasn't even close when it would jerk back, it did it a few times and the car was, but give it a little extra time. So it's not even a consideration. It seems to run that algorithm in a much easier way. And I didn't have a single situation where it jerked back after I gave it 10 car lengths instead of seven or six or five. So I think it's mostly it's detecting the car that you passed and it's saying, okay, something ain't right.

Drew (29:09):
Yeah. So I mean, any car you buy, any new car you get, there's going to be things that you just kind of have to get. I mean, the first time the antilock brakes came out and I actually had to use them, and the car started jolting, it just freaked me out. I'm like, okay. It wasn't a situation where I really needed the antilock brakes, but I had hit that threshold and the car started to just do, its kind of jumpy, like

Joe (29:35):
The pedals shaking. Yeah,

Drew (29:37):
Right, exactly. So your 800 mile day now, how long were you on the road that day?

Joe (29:44):
So I left Pueblo, I left my customer at I think eight 30, and I think I got to Elco somewhere around 1130 at night.

Drew (29:56):
So in doing that, because this would be a fascinating case study for recharging your car because it's a lot of distance, 800 miles to go. Do you remember how many times you stopped to charge?

Joe (30:10):
I stopped a lot again when I could have gone to, I just went to one and I wanted to check out the charging stations, so I knew which ones to come back to, because some of them are really cool, and if you're traveling with your family or something like that, there's charging stations where there's stuff where you can really spend a long time and be very comfortable doing it. So you might come in low to say Lone Pine, California, which was one of my favorite stops. Or you might go come in low at Green River in Utah, which was another really cool stop. So just really, I wanted to check 'em all out, and I'll tell you, I'll avoid Reno. Reno was kind of out of the way, and it was at a casino, and it took me a while to find it. I was like, that one was kind of annoying, but I did win $60, so I guess it made it worth

Drew (31:08):
While. But What game were you playing? What game were you playing? Roulette. Oh, okay. All right.

Joe (31:12):
Roulette.

Drew (31:13):
Yeah. Very good. I'll have to teach you how to play bacarra, my casino game. Oh, yeah.

Joe (31:19):
I've watched people lose a lot of money on that game.

Drew (31:21):
Oh yeah, for sure. So how long would you spend at a recharge on average on that day?

Joe (31:31):
I would say on that day, probably average was 30 to 40 minutes. And in some cases I took naps during that, just sort of set the clock on my phone to wake me up around the time that the charger was anticipating I would be done charging. Okay.

Drew (31:50):
Well that stops you from dozing off later, right?

Joe (31:53):
Well, it certainly reduced, and it definitely extended my day taking extra stops. And so it wasn't really, I mean, had a long stop in where I picked up a sandwich and walked around in the Rockies, I forget the name of the town. It was past a large kind of resort town off 50, probably the biggest one you'll see off 50. But it was a neat little area, and I just walked around just to get a feel for it. Probably walked a mile or mile and a half, something like that, and just kind of hung out and then talked to people at this little store where they sell, they make you sandwiches and stuff. So I got a sandwich for the road there. So I mean it just very different amounts of time just dependent on where the next charging was and whether I really wanted to be, whether I really wanted to go to that one or I wanted to try to stretch it out. So

Drew (32:56):
For me, I learned a long time ago when I took a trip through the Rockies, and for some crazy reason, I was in Bozeman, Montana, and I had a trip planned to the next night I was going to stay in Missoula, which is across the state, but it's not like a crazy long drive. But I decided that I was going to drive up instead into up to Lake Louise in Banff near Calgary. And I ended up with a 16 hour driving day. And I can tell you that by the last hour of that drive, I was seeing things in the road that were not there.

(33:41):
I mean, it's right. We have a threshold ourselves of how far you could actually physically drive your body to pay attention to curves in the road and be on top of your driving skill. And so it's interesting to hear about that autopilot feature because I can imagine that if you could just give your mind even smaller breaks or even the idea of stopping at the charging stations to get little power naps, all of these things I think would, not that I would ever advise people drive that much in a day, unless they just absolutely had to. But I mean, it is almost its own little safety feature to force you to have to stop the car occasionally and get out, walk around or refresh yourself somehow.

Joe (34:33):
It really is, and it really does have that kind of an effect. Just the stops also are big fatigue reducers. But that combined with the autopilot is, and just the options you have, because you can listen to music, you can listen to podcasts. Some of the stations, they have this eighties alternative station. This is so good. It was just, I mean, there was so many songs I probably hadn't heard in 20, 30 years, and I was just like, wow, it's so great. It's so great to hear these songs.

Drew (35:12):
And I have similar music tastes in many ways. So that was one question I was going to ask you. What was the song that you heard on the road that was most memorable to you, that when you think of this trip, that song's probably going to pop in your head?

Joe (35:29):
Oh yeah, I got it. I it for you. And it's an artist that I don't remember thinking that much of at the time, but man, I liked his Generation X more than his solo stuff, Billy Idle,

Drew (35:45):
But

Joe (35:45):
Bi Billy Idle Blue Highway. Oh

Drew (35:47):
Yeah. Hell yeah. That's a great song. Yeah.

Joe (35:51):
Oh, it is a fantastic, I forgot how good that song is, and I don't want to overplay it. But when you're in this new car that you have and you're this whole experience and you're seeing thing, I saw a bald eagle fly next to me for a while over the Arkansas River that was so freaking cool. But when you have all that, and then a song like Billy out of Blue Highway Oh yeah, that you haven't heard in forever, comes on the radio and you're like, man, that has a sound to it. That is a great song. That was super cool. But there was many songs I appreciated. But when you said that I immediately thought of Billy Adam Blue Highway, and I skipped a lot of idol songs because I just wasn't interested.

Drew (36:37):
One of those songs that I have to be very careful that I don't get a lead foot and get a ticket when I'm listening to the, in fact, there is a song, I got a ticket to back many, many, many years ago, and I was driving out of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and it was starting to drizzle down rain, and I was listening to a rush album, and it was Force 10 was the name of the song. And it just had such a driving beat to it that I didn't realize that I was doing 80 miles an hour down this back road. And then here I see a whoop, I see a policeman, I'm like, oh my God, he's going to get me. There's no doubt. Yeah.

Joe (37:21):
And paid for that one.

Drew (37:22):
Yeah, absolutely. But those are memories. And sometimes it's funny because every time I take a trip, there's usually a song or an album or something that I attach to that trip.

Joe (37:33):
Yeah. I had one years ago where it was was Depeche Mode Violator, that album. Yeah, that that's a phenomenal album for, it's not one you want to listen to all the time, but bust that out on a trip that can be very entertaining. So

Drew (37:52):
Where were you on that trip?

Joe (37:56):
I believe that one was between San Diego and the Bay Area. I drove back and forth several times when I lived down there and had family up here. So it was probably going back to visit or coming back from a visit.

Drew (38:12):
So this is an interesting question for somebody who lives in California, when you're taking that trip, do you just go down I five or do you drive down the Big Sur and do the whole Capistrano and all that?

Joe (38:26):
If you want to take more than one day, yeah, you take the coast, but if you want to get there in a day, right, you just take five. Yeah, you suck it up and you take five. But taking the high coastal highways in California, they're incredibly windy and many places, and especially north of the Bay Area, maybe not so much south. It's a little better. Maybe I'm wrong about that. I think I've driven the whole thing at some point, or the majority of it.

Drew (39:06):
It took me two trips, but I came up from San Diego to San Francisco one year along the coast, and then I had a convention in San Francisco, and I drove from San Francisco to Seattle along the whole route. So it took me two trips. This that definitely would be a hard trip to do in one big vacation because somehow you got to get back home.

Joe (39:26):
Yeah, exactly.

Drew (39:28):
Well, this has been a great conversation. I appreciate you giving me a sense of what the future of driving will be. I mean, a part of me wonders how long will it be, and there probably are already are places you could go and rent a Tesla if you wanted to for your trip. I mean, if you go overseas, you can rent an Aston Martin, so I'm sure somewhere you can go rent a Tesla, but definitely not mainstream at this particular time. So it's fun to get a glimpse into the future and see what we'll be doing. Especially, I mean, would you consider yourself a road tripper? Is that really your thing? Or you just doing it every once in a while, but you, you'd rather travel by plane or

Joe (40:20):
I would say, yeah, I guess you could categorize me as somewhat of a road tripper. Yeah. We're planning a trip next year where we're going to go in the Tesla this time. We have a camper, a trailer that we pull behind a truck. In fact, we're actually thinking we're probably going to sell the camper the trailer and start doing our road trips in the Tesla just because of the range that we have and all the advantages that the car gives us. It's, it's a great car for a road trip, which is R really probably counter. And I just want to say one other thing. Okay. Because you're still in that future mindset. Go. And if anyone who's listening, if you go and you test drive a model three if you like, or want a inexpensive sedan and relatively inexpensive, they're all expensive, right? Or a model S or a model X, and you're really in the market, you will probably buy one. So if you don't want to buy one, don't test drive one. And I'm not joking. And when it turns out right, thank me anyway. Right. Gosh, Joe, thanks for saying that. I went and test, I loved it. I own one now. I'm so happy. It really is such a cool vehicle in so many ways, and there's not a whole lot that can go wrong with it. And there is a lot of electronics, but it's not like with a internal combustion engine where you have a bazillion things that can go wrong. So if something does go wrong, it really should not take much to get it fixed.

Drew (42:04):
Yeah. It's that whole feeling of I'm getting a software download to my car, and I just think about sometimes how my computer operating system works, and I think, do I really want to be driving around something running off of a computer operating system? At least it's not Windows, right? Yeah.

Joe (42:22):
I think it runs some kind of Linux or something like that.

Drew (42:25):
Yeah.

Joe (42:25):
And I had one weird glitch with that. If you hold down both wheels, if you have a glitch, if you hold down both steering wheel wheels, it reboots everything, but the car doesn't just stop running it. It keeps going. Okay.

Drew (42:39):
It's not like the

Joe (42:41):
Screens are blank and the air conditioning shuts off, but the car keeps on driving. But

Drew (42:45):
That's better than the Toyota I was driving, which I have really long legs. So there were a couple of times I was driving down the road and I would reach into my pocket for something and my knee would go up and it would hit the key. And I drive an alt, I drive an Altima, and the Altima has a push button start. So it's me getting used to a key again, but it's this big long flat key. And my knee went up and it bumped that key and shut the car off while I'm doing 50 miles an hour down the road. And I'm going, wait a second, this isn't good. Oh my. Yeah. And I'm like, that's scary. And I don't know exactly. I mean, sometimes when you shut ignition, ignition off, brakes stop working and that kind. But in this case, luckily I didn't run to any of that kind of situation, but that happened twice on that trip. And I thought, dang, that is just way too easy for somebody to be able to bump their knee up there and shut the car off. So yeah, these little things, all cars have flaws. The question is, are they fatal flaws or are they things you just got to get used to and deal with?

Joe (43:59):
Sure.

Drew (44:01):
Well, cool. Well, again, thank you so much for being on the podcast today and introducing us to all of this. It's great to hear your enthusiasm about it and really get a little bit more insight into the vehicle.

Joe (44:18):
Yeah, I'm just getting started, but it's been my pleasure and it's always good to talk with you, drew.

Drew (44:24):
Oh, same to you, Joe. I do appreciate this so much. And if somebody wanted to reach out to you because they maybe had some questions that I didn't ask and you could provide some answers for, what would be the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Joe (44:38):
Yeah, probably the best places for people to catch me would be for just my personal blog is just joe hackman.com. Okay. And then my work website, if people are curious is managed solutions.com and drop me a note. They can drop me a note through the contact forms on either one. Say, Hey, I heard you on the podcast and I got a question about this, or whatever. I'm totally approachable, so no sweat.

Drew (45:06):
All right. Excellent. I will post all of that information as well on our show notes on travel fuels life.com. So if anybody needs a refresh on that information, then I should have it posted there as well. Well, thanks again, Joe, and I appreciate it. And happy motoring,

Joe (45:24):
Thanks to you too, drew, and thanks to everyone who listened. Take care.

Drew (45:27):
Well, that's going to close out today's episode, but join us next time when my guest is Christopher Mitchell of traveling mitch.com. Now, Christopher has traveled 79 countries and five continents, so he got a lot of experience there. But my main interest in this conversation is going to be a little bit about his hometown of Toronto and also the three years that he spent as an expat in Istanbul, Turkey. And we're going to find out about language and about culture and being safe in a region that maybe has a bad rap, and figuring out how to maybe get your street smarts up in terms of understanding how you deal with going to a country, which sometimes may have a bit of a reputation. So I'm looking forward to that conversation with him. So until next week, thanks for joining me. Drew Hanish here on Travel Fuels Life. Have a great week.