Seattle to Vancouver – 141 miles (227KM)

Sunday, Feb. 17th. We are off to Vancouver, BC, Canada from Seattle. It’s a short drive of only 141 miles, but we need to pass through the border and border control. Juan is driving and I’m busy on my computer. The Tesla Model S has a 3G data connection, I believe with AT&T, but the car does not (yet) offer the option of creating an internet hotspot, so I must work from my phone hotspot to use my laptop. Juan’s Iphone works with AT&T and my Motorola Droid Razr Maxx runs on Verizon. Between the two of us, we hope to have continuous data coverage for much of the trip.

With a full charge on the Tesla battery and no worries about traveling this short distance we travel a little faster than the speed limit. We are still getting use to operating the 17″ capacitive screen mounted in the middle of the dash and the numerous controls and settings of the vehicle. I explain to Juan how Creep Mode works and we experiment with setting up our phones on blue tooth. We are both ride motorcycles and drive cars with manual transmissions, so Creep Mode in off position and we are completely comfortable with no Creep as well as with the regenerative braking feature. These settings as well as numerous others can be custom set for each driver profile.

While playing around with the Bluetooth connection we note, Juan’s iphone runs the Pandora app and displays all of Pandora’s info onto Tesla’s 17″ screen, while my Razr Maxx Andriod Pandora app doesn’t quite manage the same sophistication and fails to display the song name/artist.

One funny note. Arrive at the US/Canadian Border Control the Canadian immigration agent requests us to “Turn off the Vehicle”, so he could walk around it to read our temporary license tag. Upon hearing the agent’s request, Juan & I gave each other a blank stare and say, “no problem officer.” On or off, the car makes the same amount of noise, which is none at all. So a person standing outside the car cannot tell if the car is On or Off. After a few more questions, he waves us through. Upon entering Canada, right at the border stop, in the visitor parking area, we come across a sign mentioning electric charging. Turns out to be just a 110V outlet, good for an electric bicycle I suppose.

Upon entering Canada we switch the car controls from miles over to kilometers in order to match the Canadian road signs which are in KM. This is accomplished in moments with a few taps on the Tesla monitor. We arrive to Vancouver in time for dinner, stopping at my cousin Debbie’s house- I got lots of cousins in Vancouver. We are lucky to receive both a dinner and sleep over invitation. No need to Priceline tonight.

Charging in Vancouver turns out to be easy. My cousin house is a 5 minute drive to Vancouver City Hall, where several Chargepoint charging stations are located. Later that evening, everyone piles into the Tesla for a test drive and to drop the car at city hall for overnight charging. We have perhaps half a tank, but the plan is to charge the battery at every opportunity and you never know with a full charge will come in handy. Debbie, her husband Yair, and their cute Japanese exchange student guest, Yuca all accompany us to the EV station. We run into a small snafu with the Chargepoint app, this being our first time using it. Contracting Chargepoint customer service, Sunday night at 10pm Vancouver time resolves the issue and gets the charger going. Seems they have solid customer service!! Unfortunately, the Tesla mobile app is not working in Canada, or rather our 3G data is not working, so we can’t remote monitor the charging. We neglect to call Tesla to find out if we can get data service in both Canada and USA at the same time.

After crossing into Canada, stopping at first charger station we encountered. That's Juan on the left.