We started our Tesla road trip in Europe on the 8th of June 2022 with the Tesla packed full of gear and essentials. I made a rough route plan at home before we left which we followed more or less.
Because our Tesla has a maximum range of 320km we really needed to be cautious about our route. Even the Tesla supercharger network is quite good in Europe there are many locations that would be impossible to go to with that range. East European countries we had to take off the list totally because there isn´t good enough charger network.
The first night we took a Silja Line ship from Helsinki to Stockholm. These overnight ships are a convenient and a fun way to travel between Finland and Sweden. I also booked an overnight stay in Kristianstad Sweden and bought a ferry ticket from Ystad Sweden to Sassnitz Germany. For the way back I booked a one night stay in the Billund Legoland camping area. The camping in Legoland cost only DKK 1795 which is about 240€ and included a cabin with a buffet breakfast plus four entrance tickets to the Legoland theme park.
For the rest of the trip I didn´t make any reservations in advance.
Using apps to help with the planning
I used several apps during our trip for planning and booking. Nowadays it´s super easy and simple to do all the planning and booking while travelling and it also gives a lot of freedom to do last minute decicions. If you are travelling with an electric car I would defenately recommend to install some route planning aplications that show you all the charging stations near by. We noticed that it was easier to plan the route ahead with these apps than just to rely on the Tesla navigation to take us to the next supercharger station.
For planning the route I used:
- ABRB (a better route planner). This app was very usefull to see the superchargers on the way.
- Supercharged, also a good app to see the charging stations.
- Google maps
For booking accommondations I mostly used (I did use other webpages for booking too and I also did direct booking for the campsites):
- Airbnb
- Agoga
- Booking
The travel budget for a Tesla road trip
In total we spend 22 nights on the trip. Things that we spend money on were mostly food, accommondations, charging the car on the superchargers, entrances, parking fees and road tulls and some souvenir shopping. Europe is quite expensive continent to travel so we needed to do some planning for the budget.
During the trip we charged the car only on the Tesla superchargers or at the camping sites. In total we spend little less than 600€ for the chargings on our 6000km trip. The chargings at the supercharges cost between 10-20€ per time. There was good network of superchargers on our route and only once we had a problem with finding a charging station. Most of the other charging stations in the cities required an RFID which we naturally didn´t have, so relying on those isn´t recommended.
For the food I don´t have any calculation on how much we spend. I would guess we spend quite significant amount on the restaurants though. The breakfast we ate normally in the hotel restaurant or if we stayed in a camping site we bought it from a supermarket.
Accommodation costs during our Tesla road trip
The total cost for the 22 nights accommondations was 1881.43€. giving it an avarage price of 85€ per night. Most of the hotels charged an extra fee for the parking spot, aproximately 10€ per night. To cut some off the accommondation costs we took a tent and four sleeping bags with us. That proved to be a very good decicion to save some money.
In the camping sites parking was included for the price and also we were able to charge our Tesla for free in those places. I booked few of the hotels with breakfast, but I noticed later that it was cheaper to buy the breakfast directly from the hotel in the morning. Probably because we were travelling with two childrens, the applications didn´t give the discount from their breakfasts.
Most of the hotels were quite expensive and it took quite a lot of work to find accommondation for under 100€ per night. We were travelling during the high season, so finding a place for four people on a fair price was sometimes hard. My definite maximum budget was 150€ per night, which we only exceeded in the Billund Legoland camping.
In total we sleeped five nights in our own tent. We also booked cabins in the camping as they were good value for the money. Many of the cabins also had a kitchen so we were able to cook our own foods in those places.
We liked the camping areas also because they offered a lot of activities which were included for the camping price. Many of the camping areas had some farm animals, mostly goats, pools and waterslides and playing grounds for the children.
Here is a list of the prices for our accommondations and where I made the booking from:
- 55€ B-cabin (+80€ for the car) Helsinki – Stockholm by an overnight ship, Silja Line
- 61.77€ Kristianstad, Airbnb
- 23.50€ camping in our own tent, Werder (Germany), Airbnb
- 144€ ibis Styles Bayreuth, Booking
- 143€ Further Hotel Mercure Nuremberg West (Germany), booked directly
- 82€ Inn-side Adventure Cabins, Haiming (Austria), Booking
- 28€ camping in our tent, FBF Waldcamping, Feldkirch (Austria), booked directly
- 30€ camping in our tent, Vitznau (Switzerland), we didn´t do any booking in advance
- 60€ camping in our own tent, TCS Camping Bern (Switzerland), booked directly
- 76.44€ B&B Hotel Strasbourg Nord Industrie (France), Agoda
- 45€ camping in our tent, Camping Seasonova Les Porteles dÀlsace, Saverne (France), booked directly
- 51€ rental barrel, Camping Kockelscheuer, Luxembourg (Luxembourg), booked directly
- 111.63€ apartment in Brussels (Belgium), Airbnb
- 123.39€ Botel Amsterdam (Holland), Agoda
- 168,40€ 2nights in a cabin, Camping de Kleine Wolf, Ommen (Holland) booked directly
- 94,31€ A&O Hamburg Hammer Kirche (Germany), Agoda
- 78.99 apartment in Hejls (Denmark), Airbnb
- 240€ cabin in Legoland camping + tickets to Lego Land (Denmark), booked directly
- 88€ a&o Copenhagen Norrebro, Booking
- 95€ Cabin by the lake, Vadstena Camping (Sweden), booked directly
- 82€ B-cabin (+80€ for the car) Stockholm (Sweden) – Helsinki (Finland)
You can also check my post “Tesla road trip to Europe part I” where I tell about how we got the idea to go for a road trip around Europe with our Tesla model 3sr+.
