My Love with FSD

A 1,400-mile Tesla road trip, and what it taught me about pricing an experience

It's close to midnight, somewhere south of Medford on I-5. Rain is coming down in sheets, the road is pitch black, and I can barely make out the tail lights of the car in front of me. My kids are dozing in the back. And I'm doing… nothing. Hands loosely in my lap. Just watching.

A year ago, this exact stretch would have had me white-knuckled and exhausted. Tonight, I'm calm enough to be thinking about something else entirely: is $110 a month actually expensive?

Let me rewind.

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I am not a big fan of long road trips. So when we planned a 12-14 hour drive from the Bay Area to the Seattle area, I had exactly one thing decided before anything else — we were taking the Tesla Model Y. We'd already agreed to break the trip up with an overnight stop around the Portland/Redding area instead of doing it in one straight shot. The last call I made was to subscribe to FSD for the month. I'd gotten a 3-month trial when I leased the car and walked away impressed. Now I wanted to see what it could do on a real trip, under real conditions, with real stakes in the back seat.

We started on a Saturday. Between the kids and everything else that comes with kids, our planned morning departure slipped to about 3:00 PM PST. From the get-go, I turned on self-driving with Hurry mode on.

The way up

I'd charged to 100% before we left and we stopped twice on the way to Medford, OR — 15 to 20 minutes each. Just long enough to stretch, grab a coffee, and let the kids burn off some energy. The weather was perfect. Mount Shasta's peaks lit up in the late afternoon sun, and the passes through Redding, Ashland, and Medford felt more like a drive I wanted to take than one I was enduring. FSD didn't need me once. It even parked itself at the Superchargers.

(First comfort-vs-cost receipt: I arrived in Medford with enough energy left to actually enjoy dinner. Worth something, even if I can't put a number on it yet.)

We crashed in Medford and I used the Tesla destination charger at the hotel to get back to 100% overnight — no extra cost, no effort. Breakfast, then on to Bellevue, WA, with a planned stop at Silver Falls. There is a beautiful trail out to a cascading waterfall that's perfect for stretching your legs and eating lunch. FSD drove us right into the parking lot; I only took over to hunt for a better spot in the crowd.

We spent a couple of hours at the falls, then drove through Eugene all the way to Bellevue. 550+ miles that day, maybe two stops, all planned and executed by the car. My only real complaint: Bellevue's charging network isn't nearly as dense as the Bay Area's. I had to drive 7-8 miles from our hotel to find a Tesla Supercharger.

Seattle and the peninsula

We spent our first day in downtown Seattle. Even there — narrow streets, pedestrians, aggressive one-ways — the drive was seamless.

Day 2 was Olympic National Park. We started late, caught a ferry in, and let FSD handle the winding roads. We stopped at Dungeness near Port Angeles, which has a short trail down to a quiet beach with a lighthouse in the distance. You can walk out to the lighthouse itself, but it's a 4-5 mile commitment we didn't have the afternoon for.

We grabbed pizza in Port Angeles from Westside Pizza and pointed the car toward Lake Crescent. This is where FSD gave me its first honest limitation of the trip. The sun was setting straight into the windshield and the car threw a couple of warnings about visibility — likely a front camera issue I need to get serviced. I took over for a few miles. Worth noting, because honest reviews matter more than marketing ones.

Lake Crescent itself was worth every minute. No crowds, serene, that specific kind of still you only get in the Pacific Northwest. I felt like we could spend a whole day just sitting with the calmness and the purity of the lake. We stopped at a couple of viewpoints away from the lodge, then drove over to the lodge area and took the trail out to the falls. Two miles each way, but the mossy trees, the creek, the steel bridge, and the tiny wooden log bridge at the end make it the kind of walk you remember. The sun set through the canopy as we walked back to the car. I'll have to come back here and dedicate a lot more time to this park. We charged once in Sequim on the way back to the hotel.

Day 3 we took easy — Snoqualmie Falls, a short 30-minute drive away. We hiked down (steep at times) to the lower viewpoint, and it was worth it. 270 feet tall, apparently higher than Niagara. We stopped in the historic downtown for ice cream, then drove to UDub and wandered around. The view of Mount Rainier from the fountains at the university was amazing.

The drive home, and the moment that sold me

We started back with a planned stop in Redding to see the Sundial Bridge. Somewhere near Medford, the weather fell apart. Heavy rain, pitch dark, visibility maybe two car lengths. A year ago, I would have stopped for the night. I would have been wired, the kids would have felt my tension, and nobody would have slept well.

This time, the car drove. I watched. The kids stayed relaxed — they'd gotten so comfortable with FSD that a storm I would've white-knuckled through barely registered for them. We pulled into the Sundial Bridge parking lot in Redding, plugged in, and walked the bridge while the car charged. Stayed the night. Finished the drive home the next morning.

That rainstorm was the moment I understood what I was actually paying for.

Now the math — this is a calculators site, after all

Here's what the trip cost me, all in:

• Charging: ~$250
• FSD subscription (one month, with taxes): ~$110
• Total: ~$360

We covered roughly 1,400 miles. That works out to about $0.26 per mile for chauffeured, climate-controlled, kids-napping-in-the-back driving — through a rainstorm I would have paid someone to get me out of.

Compare that to what I'd have otherwise spent on stress, caffeine, an extra hotel night if the weather beat me, or the quiet tax of dreading a trip I normally dread. The dollar cost is one thing. The cost of the experience — the actual lived hours — is the number that matters.

99% of this trip was handled by FSD. It was sooo amazing and relaxing that long drives can actually become enjoyable. Can I ever go back to driving myself for something like this? Maybe not — if I can afford it, and if the charging network keeps up.

So — is $110 a month expensive?

That's the question I kept coming back to, and it's the one I want to leave with you, because the answer depends entirely on what you think you're buying.

If you commute 30-40 minutes each way through Bay Area traffic, $110/month is roughly $2.50 a workday to not have to be the driver after a long day at work. Most people pay more for coffee.

And FSD is only one line item. Think about the rest of what Tesla is quietly building: premium connectivity, Grok, the Supercharger network, solar, Powerwall. What happens when they bundle it all? One subscription, across every Tesla you drive, with the AI assistant, the connectivity, the charging — the way Apple locked a generation into iCloud + iMessage + AirPods + Watch. Tesla has the hardware surface area to do the same thing to the driveway.

That's the investment question sitting underneath a trip report. Not "is Tesla's P/E reasonable" — that's the wrong question. The right question is: what would you pay for an hour of your life back, and how many companies are selling that hour at scale?

If you think the answer is "a lot, and not many," Tesla deserves a serious look at a valuation that matches your own risk appetite. But the same logic opens up a second, quieter thesis — the picks-and-shovels plays that make the whole experience possible: semiconductors, batteries, and energy infrastructure. The companies selling shovels to the company selling the dream.

I'll break those down in a follow-up post.

For now, go run the math on your own commute. Take your hourly rate, multiply it by the minutes you'd rather not be driving, and tell me what $110 a month actually costs you.

That's the real calculator.