This seems pretty simple - Tesla put Superchargers where their customers are and where they most travel. I'm sure that we're all thinking the same thing that Elon's cross country trek will be a publicity stunk that will garner press attention and highlight the reality that Tesla has NO all-electric competition. I'm looking forward to a stock price bump when it happens . . . and I feel sorry for the kids having to sit in a car for that many days.
Well, they actually have quite a few Mass customers but haven't pushed their popular New England routes, focusing insread on the cross country route, which is actually LA Chicago, Chicago DC, because those routes include more customer travel while givig thempublicity of cross country travel. New England will come in mud season, I hope. It would be ideal to have them all done for Memorial Day, butit certainly dkesn't look like it.
But, following the Supercharger rollout, we can see that Tesla is currently working on the full Arizona map so they don't seem to have sacrificed everything for the road trip. With the cross-country route Elon route just needing Cranberry, PA, I'll be interested to see whether they keep up the pace, it'll drop off or it'll accelerate along with the additional production later in the year. Assuming $2k per car, 25k cars sold, that's $50M in the pot and they've built 85 with 11 under construction. At 6000 sales per quarter they'd add $12M per quarter, and if $250k per site, they could build 16 per month. Given ongoing site rental and operational costs, you could see only 2 or 3 Superchargers per week until sales pick up with increased cell supply and manufacturing capacity at the end of Q2.
Back to the main thread topic, I think it's really worth pressing Tesla on the routes you, as an owner, will want to take, because owner routes wouldn't be the same as the general population. If don't think it's unreasonable that a 60 owner should be able to travel from a node to any other node without needing perfect conditions or undue diversions and for contention and warranty sakes, I don't think Tesla will want to have lots of people range charging for an hour, blocking SCs so I assume they'll make adjustments to avoid some of the 200 mile hops that map is currently suggesting.