Tesla road trip 2018

Written on 1 September 2018, 11:53am

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Here are a few notes on the road trip I recently took through the Central Europe with my Tesla Model S 75D.

The route along with the superchargers data points
The trip segments – 2992 km in total
  • The Tesla superchargers infrastructure is ready to support road trips through the Central Europe (Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg)
  • Free supercharging is awesome 🙂
  • In order to avoid waiting times to pay road tolls, I highly recommend alternatives like this 
  • Trip segments longer than 2-2.5 hours are really difficult to manage for families with kids, which makes it perfect for stopping and re-charging
  • The Supercharger locations are really nice. Ranging from nice hotels to commercial centers, they completely change your long trip experience (no more crowded and dirty toilets in gas stations)
  • Supercharging is really fast. It happened several times that the car had to charge more than needed to continue because we were not ready
  • The Superchargers are conveniently located along the highway. 5 to 10 minutes is the average detour
  • The Superchargers are not clearly marked, and that’s one of the few annoying bits. The Tesla navigation brings you in front of the hotel / commercial center, but I only saw indication panels on few locations. Maybe it’s on purpose to avoid non-EV to occupy the space?
  • Still on negative points: the Arlon supercharger was marked as ‘Reduced capacity’, making it unclear if I should use it or not. Fortunately a phone call to the hotel cleared things up
  • Charging your car on top of the Grossglocker road is awesome
  • Seeing your range increase when you come down the mountain is  satisfying
  • The luggage load does not have a big impact on the autonomy. But going 170km/h in Germany certainly does 😀
Charging at 2369 meters, on top of the road offering a view to the spectacular Grossglockner peak
After coming down the mountain – negative consumption for 42 kilometers!

Overall, I was really impressed with the trip. I had to spend more time planning, but I enjoyed a completely changed road trip experience, with smooth and silent driving and no range anxiety.
The future of transportation is here, and I am happy to be part of it!

Tuscany sunset

PS: In case you plan to order a Tesla, you can use my referral code … 

8 December 2018: scratch that. I cannot recommend buying a Tesla. Not for the moment at least.

Unexpected ways the technology gets intrusive

Written on 10 January 2017, 09:27pm

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Just a quick, did-you-know type of post written because the technology below is way to cool not to share 🙂

1. Did you know that the wi-fi routers can be used to identify faces, recognize keys that you type or read lips?

Researchers from the Northwestern Polytechnical University in China used WiFi signals to identify people. This identification was made based on the shape of people that was read as radio waves bounced back and forth, as well as by the specific way in which people moved. The success ratio was 88.9% to 94.5% in a domestic environment. One potential application is that of having a super custom-made smart home which adjusts lighting, temperature and even music based on the person(s) gait walking through the room. Or you can just use it to spy.
[…]
A system developed at the University of Berkeley uses distortions and reflections in Wi-Fi signals made by moving mouths to essentially lip-read. This setup was used to tell which words a single person was speaking with 91 percent accuracy. The accuracy was 74 percent when three people were speaking at the same time.
http://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/wifi-routers-for-spying/

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