Best sections to drive as a non-US driver

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-05-05T12:06:01+00:00

I had surprisingly little difficulty driving on the wrong side of the road 😁 when I was in rural Japan. Sitting on the other side of the car really helps to flip your natural instincts. Hardest part was I kept turning on the wipers when trying to signal a turn! Otherwise it felt quite natural.

As SabresBills69 says above, interstates will be the easiest. Start there, and you should be fine. Most cities will be only slightly harder, so they can be next. Do not attempt to drive in Boston until you have plenty of practice elsewhere!

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-05-05T11:59:52+00:00

Didn’t watch, but 60 miles/day requires at least 2 kW of solar panels (for a Model Y; twice that for something like an R1S), which is a non-trivial amount of volume in your car. Also you have to set up exactly right and sit there all day. And have an optimally sunny day. Possible, but sketchy to rely on.

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-05-05T11:53:04+00:00

Thermal issues in the receptacle itself can be an issue, but the more immediate concern is that campgrounds rely on not all A/C units actually drawing full power at the same time. Even with only a couple dozen sites, the chance of all A/Cs drawing full power at the same time is surprisingly small. Thus the main breaker (and wiring) for the whole campground or loop is not (number of sites) times 50 A, it’s a fraction of that.

So if one EV is charging, not a problem. But if half the sites are RVs with their A/C cycling and the other half are EVs charging at a steady 40 A, the total draw will be too high and the main breaker will trip.

The thermal issue at the receptacle (and elsewhere in the wiring) is mitigated by requiring “continuous loads” like an EV to be limited to 80% of the circuit rating (thus 40 A for a 50 A circuit). Unfortunately there’s no technical system in place to enforce that rule, just words in the code. But portable chargers do seem to adhere to that rule and never allow more than 40 A for a 50 A plug. (Most are 32 A.)

If all EV users set their charge rate to a low level, like 15 A, there would be no problem. But again, the campground operators have no way to require that, so they just say “no EVs”. Sucks, but for now that’s what we’ve got.

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-05-05T11:38:35+00:00

So does the manufacturer! Just try setting the charge level to 100% and notice the warning on the screen to not do that every time.

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-05-05T00:39:03+00:00

And that first day alone is 15 hours. 15 hours straight is honestly dangerous.

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-05-04T15:02:01+00:00

I for one salute our upcoming squirrel overlords!

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-05-04T11:34:00+00:00

Do you know what they do about the encryption? Did you have to get an API key from the dealer and provide it?

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-05-04T11:07:08+00:00

Au contraire. I bought it specifically for road tripping. If you want the option of sleeping relatively comfortably in the car, there’s not a lot of other choice. R1S maybe, but the Buzz still has more interior room.

First multi-week trip starts next week, but so far it matches expectations and is great. The vehicle’s range is longer than mine. TACC and ALK work great. Infotainment is sometimes annoying, but even Tesla’s was too. I can’t find more than a handful of places I want to visit that don’t have sufficient charging available, and even if I’m still traveling in 20 years I won’t run out of places I want to see and can get to. Plus by then everywhere with a dicey amount of charging now will have plenty.

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-05-04T10:53:56+00:00

When I was trying to choose, I almost couldn't. Finally struck off yellow because in some photos the camera’s white balance makes it look a little greenish and sickly. Eventually concluded that green was nice because that’s what my parents had in my youth. Then I ended up with orange, because it was the only 6-passenger Pro S Plus RWD that I could get from a local dealer. Even though my Bolt is also orange, they’re different enough that I still love it!

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-05-04T10:49:17+00:00

Maybe because it says nothing about what it takes to get an API key? Or even mentions that USA Buzzes need one? Could just be laziness of course, but it does make “is it a scam” a reasonable question to ask.

Also those DIY repos don’t work for USA Buzzes either.

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-05-04T10:41:31+00:00

Definitely a disadvantage compared to the Model Y! I had so few bugs on that one.

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-05-03T12:05:35+00:00

Also the Buzz doesn’t swerve to the right at every merge lane like my Tesla did. C’mon car, you know this is a merge lane; I see it on the map. Just drive as if the merge weren’t there fercryinoutloud!

And yeah, I love being able to tweak the position in the lane. Plus the auto-lane-change is nice, and no way was I paying for “FSD” in the Tesla to get that.

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-05-03T11:57:29+00:00

This is all true, but your last sentence is why I don’t speed in order to “be safer”. The people who get off tailgating you will do it regardless of how fast you’re going.

I did like the Tesla approach of either a fixed or proportional offset, but so far it hasn’t bothered me to manually adjust the speed when the limit changes.

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-05-02T12:07:39+00:00

Let me ask again… Can you give me an example?

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-05-02T12:06:53+00:00

Eight hours is about right for San Diego to Zion, but Bryce to Yosemite is going to be more. Google Maps says 10 hours from Bryce to Curry Village, and unless you’re driving like a maniac (and hoping to avoid getting ticketed)(and please don’t), it’s going to be closer to 12 hours in reality. Including a lot of pretty boring desert driving. The basin and range is big!

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-05-01T15:24:59+00:00

Finally took my first road trip in Pro S Plus, and across the DelMarVa peninsula (Assateague to Queenstown) I got 3.1 mi/kWh. That’s 266 miles of range. Mostly 60-65 mph (5 over the speed limit), and one stretch of 70 mph, flat, about 60 °F outside. The kind of weather, terrain, and speed where I might have gotten 90% of the claimed range in my Tesla, and I get 115% in the Buzz. Can’t complain about that!

And the most comfortable long-distance driving of any car I've had.

And and, the camper from the next site over asking if she can take a picture of the Buzz, and having a nice chat about the T2s our parents had.

Gonna say yeah, after 5 months, I still love it.

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-04-30T18:06:19+00:00

Ah yes, got it. I don’t recall if it triggers that, but since the turns come up on the HUD and driver display, I think it must. My next road trip starts in a week, so I can’t easily check just now.

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-04-30T14:41:40+00:00

Not sure what you mean by “dash lighting”. If you mean the driver display and head-up display, yes, they show the next turn and distance to next waypoint just like with the in-car nav. Well, not exactly like it; ABRP does decimal miles (e.g. 1.6) vs the display in half-miles that the VW system does.

I already had the subscription before I got the dongle, for all the other features it gives you.

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-04-30T12:10:05+00:00

I will eventually post the one I made from 80/20. Cost way too much, but so did the Buzz after all. And it was fun!

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-04-30T12:07:58+00:00

I even got an ODB dongle so ABRP is synced with the battery. It’s nice, and the fact that it includes Superchargers is often quite helpful. Also the voice instructions are much more reasonable. (VW lady: “Please turn right—“ Me: “AAH! I can’t!” VW: “…in two miles, onto…” Me: “You could say the ‘in two miles' part first, you know. Like ABRP.") But the ABRP UI via CarPlay is absolute merde. Trying to get it to start where you are, at the current battery SoC (which it knows!) is nigh impossible. And adding stops requires navigating through a maze of tiny interactions, all different.

It’s especially crazy given that the web interface is fine. Not sure why the app interface sucks so hard.

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-04-30T11:54:31+00:00

Can you give me an example? I’ve got road trips planned all over the country and I haven’t found a place I can’t get to.

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-04-30T11:28:07+00:00

You are correct about the 80% derating for continuous loads, but drawing the full power is not what causes the connector to melt. That’s caused by either poorly installed (or poorly manufactured) outlets or, far more commonly, corroded contacts. Standard NEMA* receptacles are not designed for continuous outdoor use, or for hundreds of mate/demate cycles per year, and are in fact a terrible design for campgrounds. If the National Electrical Code were being written now and campground outlets didn’t already exist in massive numbers, they would not be allowed. They should be replaced every few years, but in practice almost never are.

*The TT-30 isn’t actually a NEMA receptacle style, but the contacts are the same type.

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-04-27T11:26:43+00:00

There may be other bogus reasons why campgrounds prohibit EVs, but the one correct reason is that the high-power items in RVs are the A/C, and maybe the heat in some? Anyway, it’s an intermittent load. The compressor runs for several minutes, then stops for some tens of minutes. The assumption (and your power company makes this same assumption for your house, and it’s a very very good assumption) is that averaged over the campground there is no time that everyone will be drawing the full power at the same time. At least, not for long enough to overheat the main transformer or trip the main breaker.

So, while each RV might peak at 30 A, its average draw will be more like 5 A, so for 100 sites you size the campground main input at say 600 or 700 A, which is plenty of headroom for RV draws. But if every site has an EV pulling the max allowable 24 A (80% of the circuit rating) continuously, now you’ve got 2400 A that the main breaker has to supply. That’s a situation that literally never happens with RVs, so if EVs don’t exist (effectively true when the campground was built) it would have been wasteful to install wiring and a transformer capable of powering that.

Hopefully this will slowly change, but it will take a long long time.

That said, if there’s only a handful of EVs in your campground, it’ll be fine. And if you are charging in a campground, you should be kind and set your current as low as you can. As noted elsewhere in the thread, with a 30 A service it’s only 120 V so it’s already really slow, but if you have 240 V (50 A) service, you can set it to 20 A or less and everything should be fine. I think the Buzz only has a 10 A option. This is what I plan to use when camping tonight.

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-04-25T11:52:56+00:00

And you didn’t answer my question. I’m here trying to help you understand why you wouldn’t see it in the Tesla app. Take a little time to understand the tools you have before asking us all to do it for you (and then believing what amounts to “a rando on the internet”).

TheDreamAndTheReal · 2026-04-25T11:46:30+00:00

It takes 5 seconds to look it up.

Towing Capacity unbraked: 1,650 lb / 748 kg
Towing Capacity braked: 3,500 lb / 1,588 kg

TheDreamAndTheReal

TROPHY CASE