An extremely dedicated group of Tesla owners in the U.S. is running a competition to see who can visit the most Supercharger locations — reports The Wall Street Journal.
Bighorn, Wyoming, resident Dr. Andy Hall, a retired ophthalmologist, is currently in first place having visited a whopping 1,504 Superchargers in the U.S. and Canada. That’s nearly all of the approximately 1,515 locations open in those countries right now.
Globally, however, Seattle-based George Abel takes the crown. Abel has been to a total of 1,620 Superchargers across the globe, 1,493 of which were in North America.
Both Abel and Dr. Hall originally planned to quit once they hit 1,000 Superchargers, but neither has been able to stop one-upping the other. “It takes two to not tango,” said Dr. Hall, who turned a recent 1,800-mile trip from his home to Washington, D.C., into a 10,000-mile, 15-day journey with over 80 stops to add as many Superchargers to his score as he possibly could.
Other notable players include Lawson Earl, who describes the unnamed contest as Pokémon Go for cars and is currently in fourth place with 1,147 chargers under his belt, and John Harris, who ranks fifth with 977 Supercharger unique visits.
The game was originally proposed by Butch Weaver, a former Qualcomm Inc. engineering executive, in March 2014 when he posted on the Tesla Motors Club forum with an idea for “a little contest for the most Superchargers used.”
Participants track their progress on a shared Google spreadsheet. For a visit to count, a participant’s car must draw power from a charger at the location.
Around a dozen die-hard contenders (and many more regulars) are vying for supremacy in this competition that has no prize (unless bragging rights and odometer miles count) or time limit.
The contestants are embroiled in a race where the finish line keeps being moved farther and farther down the track. Tesla adds new locations to its global network of Superchargers every week, and as of the fourth quarter of 2021, there are more than 3,500 Supercharger locations worldwide.
Dr. Hall managed to check off all but one of the Tesla Superchargers in the U.S. on two different occasions over the years, but Tesla opened new ones and he (or any other player, for that matter) has never managed to hit them all.
Some of the players share their locations when they are out on the road to organize meetups, track each other’s progress, and entice others to go on charging sprees of their own. The players also have an annual meetup in Custer, South Dakota.
Tesla Superchargers currently only serve Tesla owners in most parts of the world. However, the electric vehicle maker has started opening its fast-chargers up to non-Tesla vehicles in many European countries, a pilot that started with the Netherlands late last year.
