Maybe a Tesla can make a trip in the same time as an ICE, but only if you normally stop frequently. I'm a "drive straight thru" kind of person, and road trips in my Telsa frustrate me.

A few times a year, I make a ~950mi drive in my 2017 MX 100D (~295mi rated, ~220 maybe at 75 mph). In an ICE car its 13.5 hours of driving, and about 4.5 hours of charging. I frequently find myself wishing I owned an ICE car when I'm on the trip. Especially when the weather is cold, and I'm debating the range impact of turning the heat on vs 12 more hours of not being able to feel my toes. Or when the supercharger is busy and it ends up taking 2x as long to get from 5% to 45% because I'm sharing... or the anxiety of trying to make it one more charger to be able to save time by charging 2% -> 55% rather than 12% -> 65% (to avoid charging past the taper..)

I'm hoping the new models coming with 500 or 600 miles of range improve this. I'd probably only need to charge 3 times.

You need to develop a relationship with a car rental agency. And maybe an airline or rail carrier. You are putting a lot of miles on your car, reducing its value unnecessarily.

That seems unlikely to work out in their favor, if for no other reason than that car rentals turn a profit on top of depreciation and a ton of other overhead, and the cheapest rental cars are only a few times less expensive new than their Tesla.

As a ballpark estimate, each such trip would cost at least $50 after taxes and fees for a budget car rental (ignoring gas vs supercharging or any other fees that would be incurred in both situations, assuming there aren't one-way fees, etc). After 100 such trips you'd have paid $50k in rental fees, vs simply having a Tesla with an extra 100k miles. Resale value is a nonlinear function of a lot of variables, but linearizing a few portions of the parameter space for the current market an extra 100k miles would only devalue the car by at most $16k (less if they intended to hold on to it for a few extra years instead of selling it immediately while the mileage depreciation matters the most).

What they said was "a few times a year". Rounding up, that would be 25 years. In a few years, there will be plenty of electric rental cars and charger stations, and the batteries will be much better.

Right now, the most expensive wear in a Tesla is battery cycles.

The point wasn't that it works out in their favor if they make a ton of trips but not if they make a smaller number. Those figures were approximately a best-case cost for the rental and worst-case cost for mileage-induced depreciation at any point in the depreciation parameter space. If they only added 10k miles then they'd incur $5k or more in rental fees and $1.7k or less in mileage-induced depreciation by the above math.

I did misplace a zero though for what it's worth. A budget rental would only cost $500 or so over 10k miles, not $5k, if they're making the entire trip in a single day and returning it to the same place they picked it up. If that's the case the budget rental would probably be worth it financially (unless they were planning to hold the Tesla for awhile so that it hits a more favorable point in the depreciation curve), and if not then the extra rental fees are likely such that especially counting gas vs supercharging it's approximately a wash one way or the other.

I’ve owned three Teslas and I can tell you that road tripping isn’t at all as convenient in a Tesla as an ICE.

I agree, though I'd concede that we enjoy taking the Tesla on road trips because our kids are young. Stopping at the McDonalds next to the supercharger for a restroom break, sometimes lunch, or a romp in the play area for half an hour works really well for us. If our definition of roadtripping was drive-pee-drive-pee-drive-pee-drive with no real rest stops, it would definitely be faster to take our pickup (the only gas vehicle we have left).

I can tell you quite definitively that a tesla with the maximum range possible will still not be able to get you to and from a great deal of small cities and camp grounds in the US, especially if you live outside California.