Leeway plans road trips across the mainland US around the battery your
car has today. Then it spends a budget you set, in minutes, on the hazards
other planners route you straight through: the
unsignaled crossing of a four-lane road, the
left turn with no light, the
rail crossing. In California it adds live Caltrans
closures, which is the one piece of this no other state publishes.
A two-minute drive across the neighborhood. Leeway spent an extra minute
of it going around the block rather than crossing West Olympic Boulevard
with no signal, and said so.
It reroutes around dangerous crossings
Three hazard types anywhere in the country, a fourth in California,
each its own switch, with a detour budget in minutes. At +5 it avoids
anything it can dodge for five minutes or less and warns you about the
rest.
Built for a five-year-old battery
You give it the range your car shows at 100%. The Model 3 this was built
around left the factory rated at 263 miles and now does 205. Plan from
263 and the second leg comes up short.
Every prediction gets marked
Tell it what the battery read when you arrived. It keeps a running record
of predicted against actual, and tunes later plans toward your car.
Requests in plain English
"Add an In-N-Out after an hour of driving." Each result is priced by
routing to the door and back out again, then subtracting the drive you
were making anyway.
Start · the problem
Your car is not the car on the spec sheet
A 2021 Model 3 Standard Range Plus was rated at 263 miles
when it left the factory. Five years later the same car does
205. Batteries lose capacity as they age, and no two cars
lose it at the same rate.
Most planners still work from the factory figure. They hand you a route
with a charging stop you might not reach. Leeway starts at the other end:
you tell it what your car does at 100% today, and it works
out what will be left when you arrive.
Hence the name. What you get back is how much room you have when
you get there, rather than a yes or a no.
↓ main screen
What it needs before it can answer
Three things get you a plan: where you're going, what your battery
reads now, and what your car does on a full charge.
The card on the right stays empty until you press Plan this trip. Then it
fills with the arrival number, the gauge, and every stop in order.
The planning panel, the map, and the verdict card waiting to be filled.
↓ a real plan
Every stop checked before the plan says yes
Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, you'll arrive at
62%
0%reserve 15%100%
That is a 91-mile run by way of the Getty, and the arithmetic behind it is
on the card: two stops, 2 h 49 min including about 48 minutes plugged in,
96 miles to spare, range adjusted for 84°F and calm wind.
The verdict line reads Makeable with your reserve.
Under that sit the warnings it found on this route: a
9% grade descent that runs for a mile, with about
26 real bends after it, and a Caltrans lane closure on
SR-2. It also reports what it already did about them, which was to reroute
around two flagged spots for a combined four minutes.
Arrive at 62%, with the warnings found on this route underneath.
Same job on the other side of the country. New York to Boston, 223 miles,
two stops: a Tesla Supercharger in Connecticut and an EVgo outside
Worcester, picked from whatever network happens to be there.
New York → Boston · arrive at 54% · 81 mi of leeway.
↓ safety
How the avoidance works
Four hazards, each with its own switch: left turns across big
roads, unsignaled crossings of 4+ lane roads,
rail crossings, and active Caltrans
construction (California only). Next to them sits a detour budget.
Set it to +5 minutes and Leeway routes around any flagged spot it can avoid
for five minutes or less. Anything costlier than that, it warns you about and
leaves alone.
That +5 is the default, not flag-only. Someone who never
opens the options still gets steered around the hazards that are cheap
to avoid.
Traffic signals, lane counts and rail level crossings come from
OpenStreetMap. Closures come from the Caltrans feed. The turn geometry is
measured off the route polyline itself. The detour at the top of this page
came out of those three.
It does not reroute for everything. Steep descents, twisty sections, sun
glare and strong wind get a warning and nothing more. And on the days when
the OpenStreetMap servers are struggling, a hazard check gives up rather
than hold up your plan, which means a flag can go missing.
Flag only, or spend 5, 10, or 20 minutes avoiding it.
For each hazard below: ON = route around it when the detour adds 5 minutes
or less, otherwise warn about it. OFF = don't check for it.
Leeway, explaining itself
↓ four tabs
The tabs are for when you disagree
The defaults are already the cautious answer, so a good plan needs
nothing in here touched. Every control states plainly what it does and
what it costs you. A collapsed tab shows a green dot when
something inside it differs from the default, so it can never hide a
setting you changed.
Charging — networks, charge-to %, reserve floor, arrival minimum, slowest charger you'll accept.Route — stops along the way, tolls, highways, ferries.Trip — passengers, luggage, departure time, break rhythm, manual temperature.
80% is the fast-charging sweet spot - above it, charging slows a lot.
No plan will ever count on dipping below this. Lower is braver, not smarter.
Beyond the driver. A full car costs a few percent of range, not a scare number.
Three of the helper lines, verbatim
↓ finding a stop
Ask for a stop in a sentence
Type or speak into the bar above the map. "Add an In-N-Out stop after
one hour of driving." Leeway reads the sentence, including the budget
buried in it. "Won't add much time" means five minutes."I don't mind a longer detour" means twenty.
Then it prices them. "adds 4 min" is a routed figure:
Leeway drives you to the door and back out to your destination, then
subtracts the trip you were making anyway. Results are ordered by what
they cost you. If nothing fits your budget it says so
instead of quietly widening it.
Press add and the place becomes a real waypoint in the route list, ready to
drag into a different order or drop entirely.
Every result priced in minutes added to your drive.
↓ for the road
For the drive itself
The trip card cuts the plan down to what you need at a glance behind the
wheel. Leave with 68%. The Getty at 3 miles. The
Supercharger at 60 miles, where you arrive at 25% and charge to 80%. Then
28 miles to arrive at 62%. No map, no controls, nothing to
scroll. It is built to be screenshotted, because your car's screen can't
open a web app.
Everything the drive needs, on one screen that doesn't scroll.
Any single stop can also go out as a maps link, which the Tesla app and
most navigation apps accept.
The next time you open Leeway it asks how the trip went,
and puts what happened next to what it promised.
"How did that trip go?" and this one was spot on.
Those answers do more than keep score. After
three or more substantial trips, Leeway starts correcting
its own estimates toward what your car does, weighted toward recent
drives and deliberately cautious. A car that turns out hungrier than
predicted gets the full correction. One that does better
gets half, and never enough to make a plan bolder than the
stock estimate. When that correction is running, the plan says so.
The same care shows up in smaller places. Sample trips are labeled
"try:" so nobody mistakes them for their own history. When
the routing quota runs out, the verdict says planning couldn't run rather
than echoing your starting battery back as though it were an answer. A
failed search says the search failed, so you don't go hunting for a typo.
A suggestion pretending to be your history would be a small lie, and this
product doesn't do those.
From the source, on why sample trips say "try:"
↓ the rest of it
Sixteen smaller things
Find my real range
Don't know your car's true 100% range? Copy two numbers off the car's screen, battery % and the range it shows, and Leeway does the arithmetic. Every reading is dated, so the page doubles as a record of your pack's decline.
Dark mode
A proper night theme, down to its own night basemap.
Miles or kilometers, °F or °C
Switched independently, right on the map.
Recent trips
Your last routes sit one tap under the address fields. On a first visit you get clearly labeled sample trips instead.
Route alternatives
"See other routes" compares real corridors, I-5 against the 101 against the 99, then replans along whichever you pick.
Skip a stop
Don't like a charger it chose? Skip it, and the plan gets rebuilt around the ones you'll use.
Stops by hand
Click the map to drop a waypoint anywhere. Drag any point past any other to reorder, start and destination included. Three stops maximum, on purpose: past that you're planning a tour, not a drive.
Exact house numbers
When the usual geocoder only finds the street, Leeway falls back to the US Census one, which can place the number.
Departure time
Say when you're leaving. The weather becomes that hour's forecast, sun glare computes for then, and closures filter to what will still be active.
Break rhythm
"Break at least every 2h35" plans stops for the driver rather than the battery, for the trips where the driver runs out first.
Charger detail on the pin
Hover a stop for its network, peak kW, stall count, price where it's known, a photo if one exists, and a link out to Google Maps.
Color-coded pins
Superchargers are blue circles, other fast chargers orange diamonds, your own stops gray, hazards amber triangles pointing at the spot.
Accuracy record
Every predicted-versus-actual trip you log, side by side, with no favorable rounding. Leeway shows you its own misses.
Start from where you are
One tap makes your current location the origin, used once and never stored.
Share a stop
Any stop goes out as a maps link, which the Tesla app accepts.
No account, no tracking
No sign-up, no analytics, no ads. Your range, preferences and trip history stay on your device.
↓ on your phone
Installs on the phone that's coming with you
Leeway is a progressive web app. Open it in a phone
browser, add it to your home screen, and it launches full screen with its
own icon. The phone layout gives the map most of the screen and puts the
controls underneath.
There is also a native iOS build, the same app in a
Capacitor shell, which adds three things a website can't do. It schedules a
local reminder to log how the trip went once you should
have arrived. It opens the native share sheet, so a
charging stop can go straight to your car's app. And it matches the status
bar and safe areas to your theme.
Leeway makes no offline claim, because it could not keep
one. Every plan needs live routing, charging and weather data.
Arrive · what it's built on
Where the numbers come from
Leeway is free, runs on free infrastructure, and has no business model. It
covers the mainland US.
Routing
OpenRouteService, for geometry, duration, and the elevation profile the range math runs on
Chargers
Open Charge Map, for network, connector types, stall counts, power and cost
Weather
Open-Meteo, for live conditions or the hourly forecast up to 7 days out
Hazards
OpenStreetMap via Overpass, for traffic signals, lane counts and rail level crossings
Closures
Caltrans Lane Closure System, for active construction. California only: no other state publishes an equivalent free feed, so the switch does nothing elsewhere
Addresses
The US Census geocoder, for house numbers the primary geocoder misses
Stop search
Gemini, to turn a spoken sentence into a search Leeway can run
Built with
React, TypeScript and MapLibre GL on GitHub Pages; FastAPI on Render; Capacitor for iOS
