How To Stealth Camp In A Tesla To Save Money (With The Elegear Sleeping Pad)

In today's episode we are urban stealth camping in my Tesla Niren Anytime Fitness and it gets pretty scary as cops showed up because there was a fight down the street. Lots of people are also walking by that I like to call zombies and I give you guys some tips and tricks of how to stealth camp in the city the right way so you can save money on hotels or campground fees. What's up guys we're at an Anytime Fitness gym parking lot right now and most people think that you need an RV, an Airbnb, or even a house to stay overnight in the city. What if I told you that there was another way to overnight car camp in a city and stay for free basically? Well there's this place I want to show y'all it's called Anytime Fitness and it's $40 a month but you can pretty much have your own private shower room and a whole entire gym set up for just $40 a month not sponsored but this is how I travel all across the U.S. and for budget friendly. And there is definitely a right way to do this and there is definitely a wrong way to do this. I'll tell you guys a story. I car camped in the parking lot of Anytime Fitness before and I almost got robbed and someone tried to enter my car, a homeless man, and yeah the parking lots can be pretty shady sometimes. Like right now there was a fight over at the grocery store right there and the guy ran off but the cops came and yeah so some of them can be pretty bad. So what you want to do is you want to car camp in one of the neighborhood residential areas nearby and the way to do that is just go to google maps and then look for it on the map. Okay so before you leave your car you always want to put your window car covers up so you never know who's going to look in. Tonight's meal of choice. Prince crackers with some peanut butter. Just a little snack. I'm not too hungry. I already ate earlier so there you go. Peace. If I don't spill this... So the coolest thing about this setup is nobody knows I'm here. So we got our window car covers all the way from the front to the side and all the way to the back and no one can see through the moonroof so yeah. If you guys haven't watched this Netflix series, The Murder of Gabby Petito, oh my god. It's just so scary. It's about this van life girl that pretty much... I don't want to spoil it for you guys but it's about van life and it's a scary story that actually happened in Moab. All right so as predicted as the night goes on the parking lot gets a little bit more empty. As you can see there's barely any cars there now and we're starting to become the only one here. Okay I installed this light here and get more light. So this is all my clothes. This is my toiletry bag. So I have all this set up in here. It's an organized system. So basically like my shorts go in here. All the shorts go in one spot, right one bag. All the pants go right here. So this is my jogging pants and all my shirts go in here. So you see everything has a home and as I zip it back up these are my socks. So as you can see everything's compact. These packing cubes make everything more compressed therefore you have more room inside your frunk. So now we're entering the Anytime Fitness. So all these have a key fob so when you enter in just it's all 24-hour access so you can enter this anytime. Okay so you're probably wondering Niko why don't you use Planet Fitness instead? Well it's $10 a month over there versus this one is $40 but the key thing with Anytime Fitness is the key fob thing and you just have this private shower room. I know Planet Fitness has a shower area but it's not closed off like this like you could use this and be in your own zone basically. Okay here's the main event. Okay that right there and sometimes they have body wash and shampoo and stuff but this is what I'm talking about it has an outlet for all your stuff, has a sink, a toilet, and a shower so you can skip the campgrounds, you can skip the hotels. This is $40 a month and you get an entire private bathroom in every single Anytime Fitness all across the U.S. These are like franchised meaning they're owned by family-owned and so it's cool because each one is kind of different. Sometimes you get really nice ones like this one and sometimes you get really crappy ones like in the middle of nowhere but this is one of the nicer ones and I'm gonna take a shower basically and get ready for the night. My name is Niko Merlo and I created the world's first Tesla van by ripping out the passenger seat of the Tesla Model Y but also putting an entire bed frame in here so that way I can sleep in here and skip hotels while traveling. This is the problem and issue I'm having there's this gap right here that I just sink into all the time and it's very annoying. Today's sponsor is by Elegear and I'll show you guys the sleeping pad but when I put it in here it's a three inch memory foam mattress and it's self-inflated so you don't have to use like you don't have to blow into it. Pause. Okay so it comes in this giant carrying case and super convenient. So car camping is just another way to save money. I mean campsites are already like 10 to 30 dollars not to mention hotels they're like on average in the U.S. $150 a night so you might as well camp in your car use a sleeping pad like the Elegear pad right here and go save you some money. That's what I did. I went to a bunch of different national parks and just parked at Anytime Fitnesses and car camped in the parking lots. And so this is the part where you press this and then it'll inflate on its own. You see how it's rising right now? It literally took a couple seconds and now it's fully inflated and so just press down on these things and this has solved the problem now of not having a middle gap. All right and just for reference I am five foot eight and I'm gonna have a lot of room here. And uh just a huge thank you to Elegear for sending me this camping pad. Always have a hair dryer on you. I don't carry a towel I usually dry myself off with a blow dryer. Bam. Okay so the one thing I did forget was my lotion for my body and so I also forgot q-tips. So you'll forget a lot of things but once you get in the groove of things I can't do this for a long time because I actually took a break from car living and once you get in the groove like you won't forget stuff and you'll have a routine. A little sleep check. Always do a final sleep check because you always forget something. So when I went to Zion National Park last year there was actually Anytime Fitness nearby the park and I was able to use the gym and I was able to use the shower so it was very convenient for me. All right so we are all freshened up and now the semi-hard part is done. Now the super difficult part is to find a spot to car camp at which is in the residential neighborhood which is close by. Okay so I want to give you guys some tips if you guys are going to stealth camp. Tip number one is to get your setup all done at an outside parking lot first. Get everything ready to camp because when you are in a residential neighborhood you don't want to hang out have anything like your trunk open or your frunk open or anything open at all. You want to make sure you're super stealthy you're not making a lot of noise so you could be super incognito. Try to come in late and then leave early. And most of the Anytime Fitnesses are near residentials so you'll be having a good percentage wise of getting there. Tonight's spot I think so. Turn off our lights, fold the mirrors. Another tip would be the window car covers because to make sure that you're super stealthy everything in here is going to be covered so when people pass by you will not notice a thing. Another tip would be setting a driver profile. I set up an office where the seat rolls all the way back. All right so this is the camping pad that we have from Elegear. They pretty much sent it over and it's a 3.1 inch memory foam with a self-inflating feature so we're testing that out tonight and seeing how it fares. Gotta be quiet because we don't want to get caught over here. We're near a park and so this is a residential neighborhood so you want to be really stealthy and really quiet while you're here. Okay and another piece of advice would be have an exit plan so don't box yourself in into a parking spot. Always make sure that you have like one parking space in front of you open and if you don't it's fine just know that you need backup plans and also a stealth weapon. So right here I have a taser so if anyone wants to come and tase I can you know just jab them with this and it'll be fine. Okay but how cool is this guys? No one suspects a damn thing. We got our security cameras right here so you can basically see anyone walk up on the left or right or in the back. Check this out. Oh I heard something. Oh my god. I'm just gonna put that back on. I heard like a little crackle I don't know what that was. Damn this back window's tinted so bad. I wonder what that noise was. It's probably just a tree branch falling. Damn I'm good. Okay and another tip if you're stealth camping with a Tesla specifically you want to lock your car on the screen here and not on your phone because if you lock it on your phone the car is going to think it's you and someone else can open it from the outside. Okay we got some action here. I heard someone in the back. Who's that? Oh we got some people right there. Hopefully they don't suspect me here. I mean I have all the window covers up so I'm not gonna see nothing through that. Okay and another tip so obviously the goal here is to not die and survive the night but to check the neighborhood that you're gonna car camp in. Make sure there's no like cars that are like worn down. Try to avoid those if you absolutely can't find a spot. I personally what I did in Oregon I parked at a Love's truck stop and I was able to camp over there overnight and yeah or Pilot, Flying J, anything like that those truck stops are available across the country sometimes but yeah I've had one time where I didn't have a great neighborhood and it was run down in Oregon and I just parked at the Love's instead. Oh my god guys there was a dog that walked by and the dog like stopped right here and I was like oh does the dog sense me because you know dogs can like smell like really good like senses and uh they just walked away. I was like oh thank god this is like what I live for man. Stuff like this. Oh there's another dog over right there. See that? All right we got more Currently 8 30 in the morning and uh so this pad was okay. Let's say a rating of like a 7 out of 10. The car is not level and so when I'm parked on a slope a little bit so I'm kind of tilted so I had to put a pillow in the back right here. Okay so yesterday it kept sliding so this thing tends to slide a lot and so you can see how the um the blanket kind of went this way so I'm gonna put a comforter or something on this so it won't slide. All right so current temperature outside is uh 54 degrees. It did stay around like 52 degrees last night so I didn't need to use the climate control but it did feel a little bit cold so I used the climate control for maybe like three hours or maybe four hours in the middle of the night to turn it on and we were at 40% when we slept and now we're at 36% so climate control if you want to keep the heater or the a.c on it's going to take about one percent per hour so that's what we have woken up with if you can see that but uh it's 36% it's currently 8 43 a.m and it's currently Monday March 24th 2025. Now that is a nice view what a sight to wake up to. So I keep all my window car covers right here on the side so when I want to put them up in the morning I just have easy access to just put them up. I used to put them in the trunk but now they stay here because it's so more convenient. Okay the next thing that you might want to do is to check your sentry mode cameras when you slept and so this is what was at five o'clock in the morning. There's a random person uh walking by and uh you know sometimes a bit scary. Looks like we had a furry friend climbing up our hood last night. Isn't this the best? So the sink doesn't work. I put soap all over my hand and then I had to use the shower to wash my hands. That's what you get when you don't look up the sink is like out of order. Okay so I am on day number five of no stimulants like no caffeine no coffee and uh I think it's time um this is pre-workout but it's non-stimulant so it's just blood flow stuff um and uh yeah my first two or three days I was so groggy taking naps during the middle of the day but we're gonna have some non-stem pre-workout and uh I'm gonna be okay. I've always got my water right here. You guys don't know I love Ironman and uh you guys know me I love to have my quick oats. Quick oats in the morning uh and now that it's getting hotter um flies become a huge important factor when living in a car or car camping. In the winter there's not that many flies but in the summer or spring that's when all the bugs start coming out so on today's episode of cooking with Nico. Okay so protein oats is my main source of breakfast in the morning so add a scoop of protein powder some peanut butter about a double teaspoon and just put it in there with protein powder with quick oats and you got some protein oats in the morning two minutes in the microwave and you're in your bueno bam and this is a chocolate protein powder so don't be jealous just catch your own in the parking lot it's like a little sludge check me out okay my goodness delicious my god this is the best breakfast after a leg workout okay right now we're at 33 percent and I'll show you guys pretty much how much it costs to charge this thing plug it in it says it's going to take 30 minutes to reach 80 percent all right we're 30 minutes later and it's a total of 230 miles and the charging session was 15.67 cents so 15 bucks to get from 32 percent all the way to 80 percent so that's the charging cost that you're expected to have when having a tesla 15 bucks is not bad when considering that you're filling up your car right so that's perspective for you okay and if you guys want to watch the video where I was parking at an anytime fitness and a homeless man almost broke into my car I'll link the video right here it was kind of scary but the whole story is in that video and I just want to say thank you guys for watching we'll catch you in the next video peace