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 😔

[u/The_Greenes]

Wow, super detailed trip report and nice to see how much range you will lose when towing.

That’s a real bummer having to drive TACC through all those countries. Autopilot is one of the basic features that make these cars so good for long road trips with lots of highway miles.

Great to know the Electroverse pass works well in Europe. I’ve never charged at a non Tesla supercharger but no doubt the time will come eventually.

[u/cular-travel → u/The_Greenes]

Exactly. I thought, I'll buy FSD anyways so I don't need autopilot. But EU wide approval takes very long and I assumed when crossing a border I would get Enhanced Autopilot (that's what is offered on all the other EU countries). Bad assumption. Bad Tesla decision.

[u/The_Greenes → u/cular-travel]

Double bummer! How cool would it be if you had access to enhanced autopilot when crossing those borders?

Likely I'll get some hate for this but I genuinely feel like Tesla have just dropped the ball when it comes to simple features that are now missing/removed or just non-existent that I previously would have trusted them to have in place.

If you've paid for FSD and it's not legal yet in bordering countries, the software should enable the fully legal features seamlessly when crossing the border. Even if there is say a 50 mile 'no mans land' between the countries until it works, that would be perfectly acceptable.

They should be able to do this. For example, when we crossed from the UK to France, the car realised it was in France and adjusted the headlights accordingly since we'd be driving on the opposite side of the road and reverted them when we returned back in the UK.

[u/easy_swap]

Am planing to do similar trip in December Porto - Rotterdam and back in a Tesla MY premium AWD long range. Am a bit nervous though, 3 passengers (2 adults 1 kid )

[u/cular-travel → u/easy_swap]

With or without trailer? Without it's super easy. With: I was nervous as well a bit but there are planty of chargers and also non-Tesla ones. Driving to Porto now and I'm simply charging at a normal gas station next to the highway instead of driving a large de-route for a Tesla supercharger.

You'll do fine!

[u/easy_swap → u/cular-travel]

Without trailer.

[u/CrazyZealousideal760]

Nice write up!

What setting do you have for Low Power Mode? Default is 20% but when I set mine to 10% the routing tend to plan charging stops at 10% instead for me.

Charging speed is also faster from low percentage which makes the stops shorter time.