At least the views are breathtaking as they wait.
Arctic Charging
A daring team of three Tesla enthusiasts is taking the EV maker’s Cybertruck hundreds of miles into the remote Canadian wilderness.
Their six-day and 460-mile journey, set to kick off later this week, will take them from a Klondike gold rush town in the Yukon across the Arctic Circle and to the edge of the Arctic Ocean, an unforgiving and extremely lonely part of the world.
At first blush, the Cybertruck seems like a poor vehicle of choice for such a journey. From the factory, the divisive truck has a pitiful real-world range of less than 250 miles, and working chargers are few and far between, as the team has already found out first-hand.
Besides a lackluster range, if something were to go wrong with the truck’s infamously finicky software or stainless steel trim pieces that can fall off, it’s also not exactly repairable on the side of the roadway.
Bear Witness
In fact, the team is already struggling with the extremely underdeveloped EV charging infrastructure in northwestern Canada as they make their way to the starting point.
One of the team members, who goes by Bearded Tesla on X-formerly-Twitter, has been documenting just how tricky it’s been to keep the Cybertruck’s batteries topped up, especially when it comes to non-Tesla Supercharger stations.
Tesla’s official map of its charging network shows that its Superchargers are noticeably absent in Canada’s northern provinces.
“We are in the Yukon, which is pretty cool because all the chargers are free,” he said in a recent video. “It’s free because it’s one charge post. I waited an hour to be able to plug in here and I will have to change for like two and a half hours to make it to the next charger.”
Before even getting to the Yukon, Bearded Tesla was battling with a charger that was shutting off every five minutes.
Another team member, who goes by Teslatino, reached out to the British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority to ask when the province would be getting Tesla-compatible connectors (NACS) for new charging stations.
In a separate video, he revealed that it took five tries and two different stalls at a BC Hydro charging station to get an adapter for the station’s CCS connectors to work.
How the team will fare once they’re really off the beaten bath remains to be seen. If anything, the group has already inadvertently demonstrated just how difficult it is to take an EV on a longer road trip through Canada.
At least the views will be stunning.
More on the Cybertruck: Cybertruck Spotted With Built-In Laundry Machine
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