Our last road trip was a while back. After we returned from South America, we planned that our next big trip with the Büssli would be to Scandinavia. But we figured that family holidays with small kids are better stationary at one camp ground. Now that the kids are old enough, we didn’t trust the Büssli enough for such a big trip. Reliability of the vehicle becomes more important the more people are traveling. Since we have now a very new (for our terms) vehicle, we figured it was time for our next road trip. Let’s drive to Norway with the Tesla!
Many people still think electric cars are not suited for long trips. That might be true for some, but a Tesla is up to everything.
First the important facts:
Duration: 15 days
Distance covered: 5’000 km
Electricity charged: 1’088 kWh
Waiting time for charges: ZERO
Cost for charges: approx CHF 40
Our route on a map
Transit
We knew that it would be a long trip from Switzerland to Norway and back. The kids need to be able to run around every day. So driving it in one go was out of the question. Also my wive is not comfortable enough to drive the new car in a foreign country yet, hence I had to drive it all by myself. She also didn’t want to drive during the night. So we had to expect some traffic jams, and split the distance roughly in half. Both ways we slept in the Hanover area. We chose not do drive all the way around trough Sweden, but take the fairy from Denmark to Norway. To make the route in Norway more like a one way, we took the fairy back from Bergen to Denmark. Spending the night on the boat, we were ready to drive trough Denmark in the early morning.
Charging
While on the road, we mostly charged at the Tesla Superchargers. The navigation system does a great job, planning the required charges. The Superchargers once again proved to be just great. If possible we also charged over the night. But we didn’t stay in the fancy hotels, that have destination chargers. Instead all we got on the camp grounds were Schuko outlets. Not only is the charging slow, but often the charge stopped in the middle of the night because a fuse blew. Iit was always enough to reach the next Supercharger. In Bergen the main parking provided 54 free type2 chargers with 30A one phase. The only two other charges were in the Stavanger area. We stayed at the Lysse Fjord for a few days, and the next supercharger would have been more than half an hour away. Stavanger is Norway’s offshore oil industry center. So it is not such a big surprise that there were less EV’s in that area. I ordered a free RFID tag from Fortum before the trip. They have a decent charging network in Norway. So I charged twice with Chademo.
We tried to charge while having our meals, when shopping, and when somebody needed to go to the toilet. When we came back, the car had always enough energy to continue the trip. We NEVER had to wait for it to charge. I think this is a big takeaway from our trip.
Environment
Obviously an E.V. has no emissions. But this is only fully true, if the electricity doesn’t come from a coal plant. We have a reasonably clean electricity mix in Switzerland. Mostly hydro power, some nuclear and a tiny rest. Tesla promised that on the Swiss Superchargers, they only use energy from renewable sources. I recently confirmed that the electricity we use and charge at home comes exclusively from hydro, mostly local.
Norway has a massive amount of hydro power plants, and considerable wind power. I would be surprised if they had any electricity at all from non renewable sources.
But Germany has a dirty energy mix in general. They burn lots of coal. In the past decades they made huge progress in efficiency and reducing pollution. But that can’t do away the CO2. I read an article from 2015 that Tesla Germany was in the process of migrating all the sources of the electricity for their Superchargers to renewable. So I assume that they should be complete by now. In fact I saw massive solar arrays adjacent to many Superchargers and wondered if they were related. I assume the same holds true for Denmark.
That leaves me with the 10kWh that I charged over night from a regular German power outlet, which probably contained some coal energy. This equates to 1% of the electricity of the entire holiday trip. Plus the fairy boats burned some form of oil. Their use per passenger is difficult for me to quantify.
climate neutral
A few days later by coincidence I found MyClimate where you can compensate the CO2 pollution of a variety of activities. That brought me to the idea, that I could make our holiday climate neutral. They have calculators for different types of emissions. Although not exactly the ones I was looking for. For the fairies I used the cruise ship calculator, and for the brown electricity the house heating calculator, that allowed me to specify German electricity and how much. The calculated sum was 0.966 metric tons of CO2. To compensate, I donated CHF 27 for climate protection projects. What really surprised me was how much pollution a cruise ship emits, even compared to a gasoline car.
Kragero
The first destination in Norway was Kragero. It has some nice islands in front that are part of a nature protection area. The flat that we booked over AirBnb had a nice view over the sea. We visited a small island that was connected with a bridge and hosted the remains of an old fortress.
Dalen
There is not a lot of Bitcoin activity in Norway. But on coinmap.org I found a camp ground. It is run by Dutch people. My wive was pleased by the clean toilets. As chance would have it, Dalen also has the most beautiful hotel in Norway. We didn’t stay there, but we had a drink in comfortable leather seats while listening to the piano in the big hall.
Farsund
After the shower facility of the cabin we booked didn’t meet my wives expectations, we drove on to Kristiansand. All the way we tried to find a place to spend the night. In the rural areas there were many signs for cabins. But we saw none of them when we got closer to the sea. We ended up in a camp site with a beautiful beach. The sanitary installations were far worse than what we dissed before. But it was too late to search something else. When we arrived a 9pm, I set up our tent. The night was too cold for my wife even though she was the only one with a sleeping bag for sub zero temperatures. So this was to be our only night in the tent. The next morning we went to the beach, but the sea was just too cold for us to swim.
LandaLand
The famous Lyssefjord is a very touristic area. Thousands of people walk up to the Preikestolen every day. We had a small room at the LandaLand for three nights. The first day we drove around the fjord trough the mountains and down the 27 steep curves. From there we took the fairy trough the fjord.
On the second day we hiked to the Preikestolen. We started early through the well prepared trail in light rain. There were lots of people, but not nearly as much as in the stories of other people.
The third day there was a nice event in LandaLand. The kids could shoot with bow and arrow, and cast some tin. Later we drove to Stavanger and visited the oil museum. It was very interesting. They seemed to be open to all the questions about the environment. But of course their angle is slightly different than ours, driving an E.V. I was mainly interested in the technical aspects of the drilling platforms and submarines and stuff. These parts were very informative. Finally we had a delicious dinner at the food festival.
Voss
Norwegians love outdoor sports, and Voss is most known for it. On the way there we saw some more beautiful fjords and waterfalls. Every camp ground and every hotel and every holiday flat in the vicinity of Voss seemed to be fully booked. After a long search, we found a family room in the youth hostel. I could finally make the first flight with my paraglider in Norway. Since all the cable cars were closed, I had to walk up. This marked the 20th country for me to paraglide. Numer 19 was Korea in 2009. Initially we planned to stay some days in Voss, but the weather was getting worse and the city center was not that great. Since we saw lots of fjords already we thought the Sognefjord couldn’t be that much different. So we decided to spend the last few days in Bergen.
Bergen
We were very lucky with the accommodation that we found on AirBnb. We spent two nights in a nicely prepared basement apartment hosted by a lovely retired lady. Also the city was nice. In Bergen we saw way more electric cars than in the regions visited so far.
Payments
One strange thing was that the restaurant where we had lunch in Bergen didn’t have a toilet. So we went the the shopping mall. But the toilet had a card reader attached. It wouldn’t work with a regular Maestro card. And I had to try multiple times to figure out how to open the door with my Xapo Visa debit card. Even the toy cars where the kids can ride in the shopping mall are card operated. In Norway almost everything is payed by card. Some might call it progress, to me this is completely derailed.
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