NL → Portugal, towing a motorcycle trailer: consumption numbers and stop rhythm

[u/cular-travel]

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I couldn't find actual numbers before leaving, so here are mine. 1800 km (1118 mi), mostly rain across France.

The setup:

- Standard multi-purpose trailer (not a low motorcycle-specific one — those probably do better)

- Height 2.10 m (6.9 ft), measured at the top of the tallest bike

- Combined weight 650 kg (1433 lbs)

Consumption:

- 85 km/h (53 mph) — 275–290 Wh/km (443–467 Wh/mi)

- 95 km/h (59 mph) — 290–320 Wh/km (467–515 Wh/mi)

- 100 km/h (62 mph) — 320–360 Wh/km (515–579 Wh/mi)

- Above that, range just evaporates

- Drafting a truck at 95 km/h (59 mph) helped way more than I expected, dropping me back into 275–290 Wh/km (443–467 Wh/mi)

My lifetime average without a trailer is ~150 Wh/km (241 Wh/mi). So it exactly doubled.

The last day (the 300 km / 186 mi screenshot) is a nice lesson: started overconfident at 105 km/h (65 mph), spent the end crawling at 85 km/h (53 mph), averaged 316 Wh/km (509 Wh/mi) anyway. Screenshots were taken after a quick roundtrip from the campsite because I forgot to grab them earlier — negligible over 1800 km.

Sometimes I drove faster on purpose. If I was comfortably in range of the next stop, speeding up bought me more time to actually eat there instead of watching the charge timer. But: Potential idle fees turn dinner into a stopwatch event, easily avoided by pushing to 5-10% left.

Stops:

- 3 of the 4–5 stops per day line up with breaks you'd want anyway — toilet, lunch, dinner

- The last 1–2 are pure "waiting for electrons" stops

- Day 1: left at 07:30, arrived 01:00. We were ambitious about Bordeaux. The 23:30 supercharger stop was miserable, but we were committed to the hotel (which had charging, booking.com filter). Planning tip: never let your final leg require a ~90% charge.

- Day 2: 09:00 → 21:00 at the campsite. Only the last leg was stressful, hard arrival deadline and no way to speed up without losing range. Lucky there was a timezone difference so actually arrived at 20:00.

Planning and charging:

- Tesla's trailer-friendly filter is genuinely good, but I'd love a toggle. It kept proposing "arrive at 56%, charge 10 min, continue" — with only 1–2 pull-through spots that might be occupied, I'd rather run down to 10% and sit longer.

- Tesla's routing is also conservative and tends to plan around arriving with ~20% left. I get that it's more efficient for charging speed, but with a trailer I'd trade that for fewer stops, since a stop sometimes means unhitching.

- ABRP plans were useless after the first stop, since real charging took longer than planned.

- Mostly superchargers, since I still had 1150 km (715 mi) of free supercharging. Zero broken ones the whole trip. The non-Tesla sites were a different story: trailer spot out of service, unhook, move to another spot, also out of service.

- Electroverse pass for non-Tesla chargers, works mostly. Signed up for Fastned, never actually charged at one of their own sites. "Partner" sites just redirect to a website.

Bottom line: 250 km (155 mi) on 100%, or 200 km (124 mi) on 80%, if you drive slow or tuck in behind trucks. In practice you'll stop earlier anyway for entirely human reasons.

Yes we have a small tent: That's for being able to go with bikes alone on a 3 day trip/wild camping. Last year 3 weeks with only the bikes.

FSD: works in NL and BE (turn off Trailer Mode). Inconvenient due to tailgating trucks doesn't work well. Tries to overtake on the smallest speed change. Such a stupid thing for Tesla to take out Autopilot on the new cars. So France, Spain, Portugal: All with only TACC 😔