Charging as a Tesla driver has always been pretty straightforward. You drive around until your battery is low, and then you either charge at home or follow the in car navigation to a nearby SuperCharger. You don’t mess with an app or credit card readers since the chargers know how to bill you once the car is plugged in. In fact, I’ve essentially stopped planning charging stops ahead of time on road trips now because it’s just so easy.

As a Tesla Model Y owner, I am always on the lookout for the latest and greatest gadgets and accessories to enhance my driving experience and personalize my car. One of the most important parts of any car is the dashboard, and the Tesla Model Y and 3 have a sleek and minimalist design that I absolutely love. There is no dashboard where you’d traditionally find one in front of the steering wheel, and instead all details are shown on the massive touch screen in the center of the dashboard instead.

Tesla is in a fantastic position in the market, recently lower the cost of it’s cars and offering several great options at competitive price points that are bringing more and more buyers to the Model 3, Y, and even S and X. As the market leader for electric vehicles, many new owners are coming to Tesla for the first time and may find that there are many differences from gasoline powered cars they’ve previously owned.

Everyone knows that kids are incredibly resilient and can be very elastic with adapting to changes and learning, but recently my kids have really demonstrated to me just how much they learn and how fast they can pick things up. This fall, my kids, the 6 year old twins and the two and a half year old, showed me just how fast they can adapt to other cultures and experiences on our trip to Europe as well as a long road trip and hiking in Acadia National Park, all while starting back up at school.

Kids are hell on a car. Ever since we moved to a Tesla Model Y from the 3, we’ve been using the car far more as a family and taking trips with all three of our young boys almost non-stop. But that means they drop drinks, crush goldfish into dust, and generally touch every single bit of the car with sticky fingers. I finally have a way to prevent these from destroying my car thanks to Tesla Shields’ floor mats.

I’m sitting in our apartment in Bergen, Norway and out the window, parked on the street, I can see a full range of electric cars. There’s a Kia Niro, Hyundai Ioniq 5, two BMW i3s, and both a Tesla Model 3 and Model Y. This is what the future looks like and it’s fully electric. With demand in the US growing, and now California banning the sale of internal combustion (ICE) cars by 2035, the US might look a lot like Norway in a few years.

For the last several years, owning an Electric Vehicle has been about as good as it can get. Sure, there are headaches still between the pain of ordering and actually getting one, the cost, and the availability of chargers everywhere you might want to go, but for the most part, it was a Golden Age where you could order and get a car fairly quickly, tax credits were widely available and simple, chargers were plentiful enough but never packed, and each car seemed unique and different.

It’s been almost two months since I last posted a blog. I’ve done a pretty decent job of writing most weeks since I started this project back in 2014, posting almost weekly for 8 years. But lately things have been hectic, I’ve been occupied with other hobbies and running the kids around, and I just didn’t know what to write about, so I stopped. In the meantime, several people have told me how much they enjoy reading my posts and I feel bad letting them down, so I’m pledging to get back to it now.

In 2019, I had just started working in New York City again, reducing my driving from around 60 miles a day to under 5. In a world pre-COVID and where I was in the office almost every day, my choice in car felt incredibly important. Tesla had finally become established enough that it didn’t feel like a huge risk for me to order one, and with my BMW 3 Series lease ending, it was time to try going electric.

Thanks to COVID, I’ve spent a lot of time with my youngest son over the last two weeks. My two year old had a COVID outbreak in his preschool class and ended up spending two weeks at home. Since I ended up getting it from him - at least he’s starting to learn to share - I ended up spending a lot of time with him to try to minimize his time with the rest of the family.