Type a destination into your Tesla’s navigation and, if you need to charge to get there, it plans the whole route for you — which Superchargers to stop at, how long to charge at each one, and what battery percentage you’ll have when you arrive. You don’t have to plan a single stop yourself.
How it picks stops
According to Not a Tesla App’s breakdown of the feature, Trip Planner works from both the in-car navigation and the Tesla app: enter a destination, and it finds Superchargers along the route, shows an ETA, and tells you how much to charge at each stop and what battery level you’ll have on arrival. The car factors in your driving efficiency, terrain, and current battery level, and it preconditions the battery before you reach a Supercharger so it charges faster once you’re plugged in. If a Supercharger on your route has an outage, the car will flag it and try to reroute you to a working one.
What you can and can’t control
You can set your starting battery percentage if it’s different from what the car currently shows, and recent versions of the feature let you choose the battery percentage you want on arrival instead of accepting whatever the car defaults to. What you still can’t do from Trip Planner itself: add multiple stops along one planned route, manually pick a different Supercharger than the one it suggests, or see Supercharger pricing and total trip cost before you go — you’ll need the tesla.com/trips web planner or a third-party tool for a full cost estimate ahead of time.
Where to find it
In the car, just enter a destination in navigation as you normally would — if a charging stop is needed, Trip Planner adds it automatically. In the Tesla app, it’s under the navigation/location section when you search a destination. Neither requires a subscription; it’s built into every current Tesla.
Photo by William Hadley.