I quit short flights in 2019.
And I've never once wished I'd gone to the airport instead.
2019
Year I stopped flying short trips
6
Teslas owned since then
Tires
The only part I've replaced
—
Routes compared on this site
What a normal 500-mile trip for two costs
Cash out of pocket, priced by the same code as every result on this site.
Charging $49 · Food on the road $88
Rideshare to airport $30 · Airfare (estimate) $304 · Checked bags $70 · Rideshare from airport $30
I'm Keith. I grew up without much money. Flying wasn't a choice we weighed up and turned down — it simply wasn't on the table. I didn't get on a plane until I was in my twenties. A plane ticket is a privilege, and a lot of people still don't have it.
Driving wasn't easy either. I got my license at sixteen, in 2001, and almost immediately had to help drive across the country to Washington, DC. Hours of highway, my hands on the wheel, everyone in the car depending on me not making a mistake. I remember how nerve-racking it was. That's the part people skip past: driving was stressful too. So for most of my life, both options cost you something — money or nerves, usually both.
I bought my first Tesla in 2019. Since then I've owned six of them, and in seven years of driving the only thing I've replaced is tires. No oil, no belts, no transmission, no surprise invoice at a dealership.
What changed wasn't the maintenance bill, though. It was how I felt when I arrived.
It isn't driving versus flying anymore. It's two seats: one in a plane, one in a car that's doing the steering.
That's the whole point of this site. Airlines have had a captive audience for decades because the alternative was also stressful — hours of your own attention on a highway. With the car handling the boring part, that cost mostly goes away, and what's left to compare is money, time, stress and carbon.
So I built the sum I kept doing in my head. Give it two cities and how many of you are going, and it tells you what you'd save and what sort of day each one is. Every number it uses is printed on the site and you can change any of them — a figure you can't check isn't worth much.
It's a fan project. I don't work for Tesla and nobody pays me to say this.
One real trip
I drove to New Orleans instead of flying, and it was the calmer day.
Dallas to New Orleans is the trip that made me build this. On paper the plane wins the afternoon: two hours in the air against eight on the road. I took the car, and I'd take it again.
8h 43m
Behind the wheel
3
Supercharger stops
$93
Cost in the car
$248
Cost to fly
54 / 27
Stress — fly / car
Here's the part a calculator can't price on its own: I hate to fly. Not white-knuckle, not medicated, just a low hum of dread that starts at the security line and doesn't stop until the wheels are down. Nothing about that day is mine. The gate moves. The boarding group moves. The seat is the width somebody else chose.
The drive is longer and it is still the easier day. I leave when I'm ready. The car holds the lane and the speed on I-20 and I-49, and my job shrinks to paying attention. The stops are where you eat anyway. Nobody weighs my bag. By the time I'm over the water into the city I've had a whole day of my own instead of four hours of someone else's schedule with a flight in the middle.
I'll be honest about one thing, though: most drives are full of places worth stopping for, and this one isn't really one of them. There is not much to look at crossing Louisiana. The day still beat the flight — it just didn't win on scenery.
That's one person, though, and one person is an anecdote. So I went and checked whether it holds up. It mostly does: 48% of Americans name flying as the most anxious way to travel, against 14% for driving, and the tipping point where people say they'd rather fly than drive sits at nine hours and 39 minutes. New Orleans is inside that. The survey number describes an ordinary car with a person steering the whole way, which is why this site pushes the line further out when the car is doing that part.
Run this trip through the site today and it agrees with the day I had: 54 for the flight against 27 for the car, about 50% calmer on the road. On money it is closer than people expect — the car keeps $155 between the two.
None of that means driving always wins. Plenty of trips on this site go the other way, and the ones where the plane wins are the reason to trust the ones where it doesn't. It means the eight-hour drive stopped being the punishment it used to be, and the comparison deserves an honest number instead of a shrug.
Got a trip coming up? See what it's worth.
Four questions, about twenty seconds.