Route idea
The big American route is really a collection of smaller stories
Great American Icons is the template closest to the original ChargeQuest idea: cross the country through places with a story, then keep going until the route becomes a story of its own. It is ambitious by design and personal by necessity.
Written by Anthony Pappano ·
- Route shape: A broad national loop
- Themes: Music, parks, cities, road history, badges
- Best use: Choose a spine, then make it yours
What the current template connects
The starting anchors are Nashville, St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, Santa Fe, Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Hollywood, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Yellowstone, Rapid City, Chicago, Canton, Washington, and Charlotte. That sequence touches several different versions of America rather than chasing only the shortest coast-to-coast line.
The template can support music history, Route 66 country, western scenery, Iconic Charger badges, the Pacific coast, national parks, football history, and the capital. Your job is to decide which of those themes actually belongs in your trip.
- Heartland and Rockies: Nashville, St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver.
- Southwest and California: Santa Fe, Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Hollywood, San Francisco.
- North and east: Portland, Seattle, Yellowstone, Rapid City, Chicago, Canton, Washington, Charlotte.
Choose the emotional anchors first
A route this large can become a collection of famous names with no personal center. Before optimizing, mark the three or four stops you would be genuinely disappointed to miss. Those are the route’s emotional anchors. Everything else should earn its place by connecting them or adding a story you care about.
For me, a national quest needs moments that feel different from each other: a music city, open desert, a major park, a coast, and a meetup that could not happen at home. Your list may be entirely different. That is the point.
Use competition strategy as a layer, not the whole identity
A broad loop can collect many unique sites and keep a long trip moving, but category strategy may pull the route away from the famous anchors. CORE can compare versions so you can see the cost of the competitive choice instead of hiding it.
Winning would be incredible. It is not the only win available. The strongest Great American Icons route is one you would still be grateful to have driven if the final leaderboard went another way.
A fixed CORE example, so the numbers have context
To make this concrete, I ran the template through CORE on July 19, 2026 using the same fixed setup for all three examples: Chattanooga start, September 1 departure, 60-day Longest Trip target, Tesla Model Y Long Range AWD, 245-mile practical range, balanced pace, five target driving hours with a 6.5-hour maximum, automatic stays off, and U.S. Superchargers only. The run used 3,146 eligible stations from the Supercharge.info feed.
Great American Icons is the broadest of these three templates, and the fixed run reflects that. The example is useful for comparing route shape, not for promising an exact odometer reading. A route saved in CORE should be recalculated with your real start, dates, range, stops, and current road data.
| Metric | Example output | How to read it |
|---|---|---|
| Planning distance | 7,890 miles | CORE estimate before live turn-by-turn road refinement. |
| Planned streak | 60 days / 60 unique sites | One new qualifying site is planned for each route day. |
| Average distance | 132 miles per day | The mean hides harder and easier individual days. |
| Average drive time | 2.19 hours per day | Based on the disclosed 60 mph planning assumption. |
| Average site spacing | 132 miles | Average route distance associated with each planned unique site. |