Tesla FSD Road Trip: 1,400 km from Toronto to Ottawa and Montreal on Full Self-Driving

Published Sep 15, 2026 · Updated Sep 28, 2026 · 19 min read

This is the story of a summer 2024 trip; FSD versions and prices are as they were at the time, with a 2026 update at the end. Disclosure: some links are affiliate/referral links, and we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. See our disclosure page.

Life in Canada can be dull or delightful, and a road trip is one of the better cures for the dull part. I have been to a lot of Canadian cities, but almost all of them sit in Ontario or BC: Toronto, Vancouver, Markham, Mississauga, Hamilton, Windsor, Burlington, Oakville, Kingston, plus plenty of towns I only passed through. That summer I added four more to the list: Ottawa, the national capital; Gatineau on the Quebec side of the river; Montreal; and Laval.

I rarely write travel diaries and I do not particularly enjoy driving long distances. Writing is tiring; a thousand-kilometre drive is more tiring. This trip was different, because it was the first time I let Tesla’s Full Self-Driving do the driving. We left Oakville, Ontario, covered about 500 km to Ottawa, then another 200 km to Montreal, Quebec, and came back the same way: roughly 1,400 km in total. I wanted to find out, honestly, how much FSD is worth on a real long-distance trip.

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📋 Contents

1. Range, tires and the stuff you pack before a long EV drive
2. Hotels
3. Day 1: Oakville to Kingston to Ottawa
4. Ottawa
5. Montreal
6. Trip summary
7. Frequently Asked Questions

Range, tires and the stuff you pack before a long EV drive

Range anxiety is the obvious question for any long EV trip, especially if you are heading into a colder city like Montreal in winter. My experience is that cold weather can cut a Tesla’s range by about 25%. The Model Y Long Range is rated for 497 km, but in a Canadian January you are realistically looking for a charger around the 350 km mark. Picking summer for this trip was partly about getting the full range out of the battery.

One quick note on preparation: Teslas do not carry a spare tire, so I keep a JOWUA 100W portable air compressor in the trunk (USB-C rechargeable, so you are not hunting for the 12V socket; use code TSLNA for 5% off) and top up all four tires before leaving, plus a Slime tire repair kit in case of a nail on the highway. It costs very little and it buys a lot of peace of mind.

A few months earlier a friend had suggested driving from Toronto to Vancouver for the summer. Some people can do that; I am the kind of person who feels wiped out after three hours behind the wheel, so 4,000-plus km was never going to happen. This trip was different because I was not planning to drive it myself. Tesla had started rolling FSD out broadly across North America in April 2024, and after a few months of daily use I had enough confidence in it to say that in some situations it already drove better than I do. If FSD had not arrived, this trip would probably not have happened.

At the time, buying FSD outright cost CA$11,000, down from CA$16,000 but still a lot of money. A subscription was more flexible, so I paid CA$99 a month, about CA$112 with tax. (July 2026 update: the outright purchase option has since been discontinued; subscription is now the only way, still CA$99/month, and new cars come with a 30-day free trial. In hindsight, subscribing instead of spending CA$11,000 was the right call.)

Our destinations were in the French-speaking part of the country. I do not read French and I did not know the local traffic rules, which made me lean on FSD even more than usual.

Hotels

We booked two Hilton properties in advance: the Hilton Lac-Leamy just north of Ottawa, and the Hilton Laval north of Montreal. Both nights were covered with Hilton points and free-night certificates we had saved up, and Diamond status added breakfast and lounge access, so accommodation cost us almost nothing out of pocket.

Lac-Leamy is a casino resort on the Gatineau side of the Ottawa River. Ottawa is split by the river: Gatineau, Quebec, to the north speaks French; Ottawa, Ontario, to the south speaks English. Downtown Ottawa has several Hiltons, but based on past stays in downtown Toronto and Vancouver, those tend to be plain to the point of shabby, so we chose the nicer property across the river.

Lac-Leamy is not cheap: the lowest rate I found online was about CA$450 a night without breakfast. The Hilton Laval was around CA$300.

Day 1: Oakville to Kingston to Ottawa

I charged to 98% the night before and we left home at 9 a.m. FSD was engaged from the end of the driveway. As usual, it followed the navigation route onto Highway 403, changed lanes, overtook, yielded, and after a little over three hours we were in Kingston.

Kingston is a small city of about 136,000 people at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, home to Queen’s University and the Royal Military College of Canada. Elon Musk spent two years at Queen’s after moving to Canada as a young man; a short stay, but one that set up the rest of his story.

We stopped for a Supercharger session and lunch at a KFC. Canadian KFC is nothing like KFC in China: the restaurant was dim and nearly empty, with what looked like two staff on duty. Between the accent on their side and mine, ordering took a lot of pointing and guessing. Two meals came to a little over CA$30. Canada is a very multilingual country and getting comfortable with every accent is a real life skill; I am clearly not there yet. I ran into the same thing again in Montreal, where English arrives wrapped in French.

Ottawa

Another two-plus hours after Kingston we reached Ottawa. The hotel was north of the river, so we had to cross downtown. Traffic picked up noticeably, but FSD kept rolling at around 80 km/h. Then, in the city centre, it made its one mistake of the trip: at a fork where we needed to take a ramp onto a narrower road, FSD hesitated. With cars all around us I did not want to find out what it would do, so I took over. By the time I had decided whether to turn, the ramp was behind us and we ended up going straight and crossing downtown on another street.

That was, genuinely, the only error FSD made in 1,400 km. Later, in Montreal, I was the one who picked the wrong road and FSD quietly steered us onto the right one.

For most of the trip FSD sat in the left lane at up to 120 km/h. On one stretch it slowed right down and would not accelerate even when I pressed the pedal; only then did I notice the posted limit had dropped. It was, in effect, keeping me from getting pulled over. When a faster car came up behind us, the rear camera picked up the intent to pass and FSD would move over to the right lane, let them by, and then return to the left lane. It really is starting to drive like an experienced driver.

Passing the University of Ottawa and the ByWard Market, we drove through a block where dozens of people struggling with addiction were gathered within a hundred metres, about a kilometre from Parliament Hill. Toronto and Vancouver have the same problem, but there it tends to be scattered; here it was concentrated and hard to look at. Ottawa has recorded more than 450 opioid overdose deaths in the past three years, most of them involving fentanyl, and many more people have suffered brain injuries from non-fatal overdoses.

After checking in we went out to try Ottawa’s buses and LRT, walked downtown and through Chinatown. It is a small city of roughly a million people, comparable to a third- or fourth-tier city in China. Outside the Parliament Hill area, which shows off Canada’s history, politics and modern side all at once, a lot of it looked a bit tired.

Honestly, Ottawa did not leave a great impression. Of all the Canadian cities I have visited, it felt the most on edge. I had expected the capital to be a model city; it was not quite that. The most obvious example was crossing the street: drivers here do not seem to yield to pedestrians much, and I very nearly got hit once. If it had happened once I would call it a one-off, but it kept happening, to the point that by the end of our stay I had learned to jaywalk and run lights with the locals. It reminded me of my years in Yiwu, a county-level city in Zhejiang where you would see one or two collisions on the road almost every day. A set of 2017 figures I found put Yiwu at 34,211 minor accidents in a year, about 94 a day. Ottawa, with a metro population around 1.4 million, is not that bad, but it gave me a familiar feeling and knocked a few points off my first impression.

We had dinner in Ottawa’s Chinatown, which is small and feels a lot like Toronto’s, or like a Chinese street market from twenty years ago. Dinner was CA$70 with a CA$10 tip. We chatted with the server about tipping: many Chinese diners skip the tip in Chinese restaurants while tipping as usual in Western ones. I do not mind tipping; someone provided a service and it is part of North American culture. We took an Uber back to the hotel and talked the whole way with the driver, a friendly guy originally from Haiti who came to Canada through Quebec because he speaks French. Uber was a weekend side job for him; the city, he said, has plenty of “crazy guys,” and driving was just a way to keep up with the cost of living.

Back to the hotel. The walk-up rate that night was about CA$540 before Quebec’s 14.975% sales tax. We paid with 50,000 Hilton points instead, and Diamond status included breakfast and the executive lounge. The front desk upgraded us to the 17th floor with a beautiful view across the river to Parliament Hill.

Most of the other guests were retirees; at that price point that is probably who can afford it. I had planned to try the outdoor pool, but it was small and full, so we went up to the 18th-floor lounge instead and looked out over the city.

The rooms themselves were ordinary, a long way from the Hilton properties I have stayed at in China; by Chinese standards this would be a four-star at best. Chinese travellers sometimes jokingly call North American five-stars “roadside inns,” which is unfair to the inns but captures the gap in expectations. If you are coming from Asia, do not expect luxury from a North American five-star hotel.

Breakfast was CA$25 per person; Hilton Diamond members get it free at hotels outside the US (US properties give a credit instead).

Montreal

Ottawa is small, so one day was enough. We checked out late the next morning and let FSD take us the roughly 200 km from Gatineau to Montreal, a little over two hours. The thing I remember most about that leg is the police. Every so often there was an officer with a radar gun on the shoulder.

Oddly, we had not seen a single police car on the Ontario side, but on the highway into Montreal we passed at least three speed traps, two in cruisers and one on a motorcycle. Fortunately FSD was driving, and FSD is cautious: it adjusts to the posted limit and mostly held 110 km/h. Around 2 p.m. we arrived in Laval, north of Montreal. There is a CF mall across from the hotel with Tesla Superchargers, so we plugged in first and went inside for lunch.

Old habits: we picked a Chinese restaurant called Shanghai 360 and ordered udon and a two-dish combo. Funny detail: there was not a single Chinese person working there, so authenticity was not on the menu. The food did its job of filling us up.

Quebec’s sales tax is higher than Ontario’s at 14.975%, so a perfectly ordinary fast-food lunch came to CA$42.52. We wandered the mall afterwards. Compared with Toronto, there were very few Chinese faces; it felt like a different country’s shopping centre.

We stayed at the Hilton in Laval, on the north side of the island. Again the hotel was a lot plainer than expected, closer to a budget chain than what “Hilton” suggests, and still around CA$300 a night. We had originally looked at a downtown hotel for more money, but Montreal’s traffic rules differ from Ontario’s and it is easy to make mistakes, so we stayed north and took the Metro downtown instead.

Montreal was once Canada’s largest city, and you can feel the history even though the glory days are gone. Two things stuck with me. One was the Notre-Dame Basilica. The other was how slow some things are: Metro tickets are still sold by people at windows, and even with machines available, three windows had long lines. Coming from China, where every subway city has long since automated this, the gap was striking.

The Basilica is probably the one must-see. We spent the rest of the day walking downtown, riding the Metro, exploring the Underground City and following the St. Lawrence waterfront.

One more note: French is the first language, but most people we met also spoke English, just with an accent that took some effort to follow. The bigger takeaway is that Montreal feels like a different country compared with the Toronto and Vancouver most newcomers picture when they think of Canada. It is easier to immigrate to Quebec if you speak French, and the cultural fit is stronger for francophone newcomers. Chinese residents make up only about 3.3% of Montreal’s population, versus roughly 11% in Toronto and 20% in Vancouver.

Trip summary

On a long drive, FSD makes the whole thing dramatically easier. For me it has gone from a nice-to-have to a must-have for road trips.

If you live in Canada, and especially in Ontario, and you need a car, Tesla is the only brand I am willing to recommend. I made a separate video on why, and it comes down to four things: smart, theft-resistant, time-saving and hassle-free. If you are still shopping, the Model Y Canada guide covers current trims, taxes and rebates, and the Montreal & Quebec buying guide explains the provincial incentives.

The one caveat: avoid long winter trips in Canada if you can. Range anxiety is real, and Superchargers are not as common as gas stations. In Montreal at the time there were only a handful, and if you run low you may have to drive tens of kilometres to reach one.

The small gear that earned its place

Beyond FSD itself, a few items in the car genuinely pulled their weight over 1,400 km. I buy all of these from JOWUA now: they make accessories specifically for Tesla, moulded for each model year, and they ship to both the US and Canada (free shipping over US$130, DHL Express in 5–7 days, duties and tax included). Use code TSLNA at checkout for 5% off.

• 100W portable air compressor: top up the tires before you leave and again before the drive home. Correct pressure is free range.
• Foldable car tray: turns a front seat into a small table (rear seats too, with the add-on kit). A 30-minute charging stop becomes lunch or a bit of laptop time instead of standing around the Supercharger.
• Tesla neck pillow: with FSD driving you relax, but hours of sitting still get to your neck. One for the passenger seat and one for the back kept the family quiet.
• Invisible foldaway phone mount: retracts out of sight when you are not using it, so the minimalist interior stays minimalist; one-handed in and out. Handy for double-checking a route on your phone in a French-speaking city.
• Model Y trunk liner combo (2018–2024): two families’ luggage plus snacks and drinks, all on a waterproof liner you pull out and hose off when you get home. There is a separate version for the refreshed 2025+ Model Y.

Browse everything by model year on the JOWUA site (code TSLNA). For a fuller list of what a new owner actually needs, see our Tesla owner gift guide.

Two years later: the July 2026 update

This diary covers a summer 2024 trip. Two years on, a few things are worth adding:

• The car that carried us 1,400 km was running FSD v12. FSD (Supervised) is now on v14.3.x, and the hesitation at city-street forks and ramp merges that caused our one error has improved noticeably. The subscription is still CA$99/month; the outright purchase option is gone. See our FSD guide for the current state of things.
• The referral program changed too. The cash discounts mentioned back then (CA$1,300 in Canada, US$1,000 in the US) are long gone. As of July 2026, ordering a Model 3 or Model Y through an owner referral link gets you three months of FSD (Supervised) free, worth about US$297.
• The Supercharger network toward Quebec has filled in considerably. The Ontario–Quebec corridor is much more relaxed than it was in 2024, though “leave extra margin in winter” still applies.
• If you are planning to buy in Quebec: the provincial Roulez vert rebate drops from CA$2,000 to CA$1,000 on August 1, 2026 and ends entirely at the end of the year, and the federal EVAP CA$5,000 incentive currently applies only to the Berlin-built Model Y RWD among Teslas. The Ottawa buying guide covers the Ontario side.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can Tesla FSD really drive from Toronto to Montreal by itself?

In our experience, yes, with one intervention over 1,400 km, and that was in downtown Ottawa rather than on the highway. FSD (Supervised) still requires you to stay attentive and ready to take over, but on the 401 and Autoroute 40 it handled lane changes, passing, speed limits and merging on its own.

How far can a Model Y Long Range go between charges on this route?

The 2024 Long Range is rated at 497 km. In summer we comfortably did Oakville to Kingston (about 300 km) on one charge with plenty left, charged during lunch, and continued to Ottawa. In winter, plan on roughly 25% less range and start looking for a Supercharger around 350 km.

Is it worth subscribing to FSD just for a road trip?

At CA$99 a month you can subscribe for the month of your trip and cancel afterwards. For a trip of this length, the reduction in fatigue alone was worth it to us. New Teslas also come with a 30-day free trial, and cars ordered through an owner referral link get three free months, though the two generally don’t stack.

Do I need special accessories for a long Tesla trip?

Not many, but a tire inflator and a puncture kit are essential because Teslas have no spare tire. A tray, a neck pillow and a trunk liner make the hours more comfortable. The items above are the ones we actually used.

Sources and timeliness: prices and program details come from Tesla’s Canadian site and referral program page, the Government of Quebec’s Roulez vert page and JOWUA’s product pages, checked in July and September 2026. Tesla pricing, referral rewards and FSD subscription terms change without notice; check the official pages before you buy. Photos are the author’s own from the July 2024 trip. This is a personal travel diary and not professional advice; always supervise FSD as Tesla requires.