electric cars are no good for long distance the batteries Catch Fire you have to Chuck them away they expensive they cost more to run we hear all this stuff all the time but is it all true this is a Tesla Model 3 Performance that's now over four years old over 100,000 miles there it's one of our own cars we run it in the fleet here and it's still in daily use it's still dirty look but in this video I'm going to actually test this car going to plug it in and see exactly how the battery is holding up now this car I know already has had 38% of it charging via DC rapid charging more than most would a higher percentage and that's also a bit harder on the battery so how is that holding up what does it cost to run how much is it depreciated by what have we had to do to it to maintain it well that's all coming up in this video do we need to just Chuck this car away now because it's electric and it's no good for high mileage well I don't think so stay tuned to find out my name is Richard and this is RSV and this is our model 3 long range performance so we call this car Clint beastwood and uh it's been a great car we do like him but let's get down to the details the numbers will speak for themselves in a little bit before I get into some of the data behind it let's just have a look at condition now he's white and the benefit of white cars is that they really don't show much in the way of stone chips swirls you don't have to kind of look after the paint as much it's really good so actually white cars I know they're the most common color for testers it still looks good today there isn't really any particular Stone chipping it's obviously going to have a few little bits but he's looking good he's all right he's doing all right there coming around the side original brake pads original brake discs I'll come on to the maintenance that we've done on this car in the meantime he's looking all right the only bit really that's cosmetically a little bit challenged is that because this is an early car where it didn't fit mud flaps there's a bit of stone chipping on the front edge of this seal here so a bit of the paint Has Come Away there but to be honest that would be a really nice and cheap and simple repair later cars were fitted with mud flaps so that would usually prevent that but otherwise he done all right he never had any major accidents or repairs he used every day it's a family car a working car and he's all right the only other thing you'll find on some of the model 3 performances is that the lacquer can peel from this carbon fiber spoiler we had it on this one all we actually did in the end was just pick off the rest of the sort of flaky lacquer in fact the bits just come off there and then you just left with the carbon fiber it's been like that for a while now it's fine it's all good so actually is right now this is a Fremont made car in fact I know he was made at 11:58 p.m. on the 22nd of August 2019 that's just some of the data we can pull off the car when it's plugged in I can also even tell how many times these wiper blades have swept the windscreen so if you want to make a guess it's got 103 and half th000 miles in now how many times have these wiper blades SW the wind screen have a little think about that and I'm going to give you the answer later on in the video when we plug the car in what about the inside how is the steering wheel and seat held up I don't know if my phone on me to unlock it I'll going get that I'll tell you looking at the steering wheel here first really good condition it's got no issues all in fact it still looks fresh and new I have seen some where you get a little bit of peeling from the kind of top layer in here or sometimes scratches from people's rings but this steering wheel good as new it's not even shiny and then let's have a look at the seat because after 103,000 miles you expect the seat to be a bit shabby but you should be able to see here it's all fine the padding is still fine the bolsters haven't split there's no particular we that it's still supportive there's it's all good there's no there's no issues with it it's fine I've seen a couple of cars where you get a bit of wear as you come in from the edge here but this one again is all okay in fact Joe needs to vacuum in his car it's a bit dusty and dirty in here but you can see the wear and tear on it's really good I also would have thought this black sensor console that you got on these earlier cars would be really terribly scratched by now being glossy black but actually even this is okay so apart from showing dust and fig and prints that's okay it's actually held up really well and I can tell you now when you drive this car it doesn't squeak it doesn't rattle and everything still feels solid the steering solid the center console still solid see that doesn't move and it's held up beautifully well doesn't squeak doesn't rattle still drives really brilliantly no problem at all you might have noticed there's two small modifications in here that we've done ourselves this alcanta dashboard panel here replaces the original wooden trim that you get with the black interior cars I'm not a big fan of the wooden trim we sell and fit this Al Conta Dash and we've also swi fitted a u swivel screen here look so you can just move the screen slightly towards a driver and I really like having that especially as well if You' got a bit of sun glare you can just move that around that's a nice little mod but in here back seats as well everything is actually good I think if I said to you this car had 15,000 mil in it you wouldn't argue with me it all looks good all the switch gear everything is held up really well so does Tesla really have bad build quality I actually think it's very good sometimes people mistake this minimalist look for bad quality it just doesn't have all the pretend metal bit it's like you get on some cars but in terms of its durability and longevity I don't think you can fault it so let's talk about maintenance how much have we have to spend on this car it's still a car end of the day it still has wear and tear items that you need to maintain so uh the odd wiper blade tires well we run the Michelin Pilot Sport 4S's which were what were original on this car and they're the best tires the later cars had the pries and we're just not as much of a fan as them they got that kind of stretched Tire look and they we've done a couple of track days in this car I'll be honest with you uh and the so the PES were nowhere near as good as these Michelin so I recommend sticking to these Michelin tires and they're not particularly cheap they're £250 each how long do they last it depends how you drive it of course and if you do things like track days but typically I would say 15 to 20,000 mil it's often worth swapping the front to the rear uh about halfway through that time so then you replace all four at a time the reason for that is you can often get a bit of a deal if you buy four tires at once so typically about 15 to 20,000 Mi between these tires and these ones are bit expensive about £250 each but they're very very good right but what about other maintenance aside from wiper blaz and tires with Tesla at strange there's no real service routine you don't have to take it for a service every a year or 12,000 miles or anything like that there isn't really any servic in but you do have to maintain it and actually this is needed very very little we had to replace a seat pad sensor it's a pad uh sensor under the seat pad there which detects when you're in and out of the car it's really quite important because that's how Tesla knows you're out of the car and turn off and lock itself uh one of those 1010 and we actually changed it ourselves it's a bit of a fiddle you have to kind of take the seat base off but it can be done yourself or Tesla don't charge too much to do that we had also suspension bushes because really that's the one thing you do get on the model 3 it still has suspension bushes like any car uh and you do have to maintain repl your bush we only recently did that so it did about 103,000 Mi on this one I have heard of them need and changing before that so can happen before but this one actually is good um and we spent 1,165 plus vat having front lower arms RAR upper arms and then a four-wheel alignment after that as well so including that just over ,500 and then we also had to have one thing to repair I.E fix it isn't generally a wear into item and that was the oil pump and it sounds strange saying oil pump in electric car but yes there is a little bit of oil that circulates around the front motor and the output gearbox and the uh rear motor the output gear in there the rear oil pump on this fou the car didn't break down and I think it came up with a message on the dash Tesla remotely connected to that and then diagnosed it ordered the par in so it ended up going in I think pretty much next day and was done very quickly well done test brilliant prompt service there and that was a total of £ 397 plus that so not too bad so actually when you add all this up we spend under 2,000 in repairs and maintenance if you put tires and wiper blades aside from that so I think really very good I keep saying how reliable they are they are very good there's little kind of common issues that happen with the model 3s are very very good like that but how much does it cost to run and charging let's cover that one so there's a lot of variables when it comes to this because it depends where you charge and how much you pay for it you might have solar like we have now this is charging off our solar usually when you have an electric car you will have a cheap overnight electricity tariff or something like 7 and2 P per Kil but then you've also got supercharging which can be more expensive now like I say so many Vari let me give you a couple of examples here for it to cover 100,000 mil in 4 years um you that's 68 Mi every single day of driving it's obviously going to vary but let's average it out now if you did 68 miles every single day you could charge from a uh home cheap overnight tariff in theory you could then do 100,000 miles at a grand total cost of I've written it down did the calculations 2,419 but let's be realistic there's going to be days you don't use it days you longer Journeys and there's days where you can use public charges uh and that percentage will vary now this car has actually had quite a large proportion of fast DC charging primarily at Tesla supercharges 38% of his charging has in fact been by DC rapid charging and of course that's not so good for the battery and we'll come on to that in a minute but if you take a on a ratio of the days that you really are on a longer trip you're on a family holiday you're going to do a little bit and you're going to be charged for that and it's more expensive now I can't get the exact figures for this car because ultimately because of my Tesla referral code that gets used and I help people buy a new Tesla and they use my referral code which I put in the comments Below in the description it gives me some credits which I can then buy supercharging miles for so I've actually had free Tesla supercharging uh but a lot of people wouldn't and it would have to be paid for and depending on the proportion let's say you do about 15% of your charging is from DC rapid charging I think you should allow that if you're going to cover 100,000 mi in a car like this you're going to have a cost of about £4,000 maybe £45,000 there's going to be a lot of people that could probably comment below and put their running cost for their cars as really good examples and it all depends to say where you charge and how much it cost you for me though it's cost very very little and in fact by some of my quick calculations if you were to do 100,000 mi in a pretty efficient petrol or diesel car let's say a 45 m per gallon car that would probably cost you more like £5,000 just in petrol or diesel alone so some big savings to be had aren't there big savings and there's also other savings zero Road tax although Road tax is going to be implemented electric cars from April 2025 but we've had zero Road tax you also don't have to pay to go into Central London and other congestion zones if you run one of these uh you buy one through a business you could also claim first your Capital allowance when you buy a new electric vehicle so from new when this was £50,000 you could take 20% of that at the time it's now 25% uh of saving from first year Capital allowance now you do have to repay when you sell but if you keep the car long term you can make a massive saving and then if you drive one of these as a company car you're probably going to pay let's give an example about 20 per month in benefi and kind tax compared to probably £200 a month if you run something like a a petrol diesel BMW with a little bit of performance to it so there's some huge savings if you're going to drive one as a company car go electric it really is good and don't say you can't do high mileage because you can I picked up one of these brand new in 2019 from westron Tesla and it had a 100% charge in there and that showed 297 Mi of potential range so I'm going to charge this up now to 100% until it will not take any more charge and let's see what the car tells us then but then we'll go one step step further we're going to go and plug the car in and see exactly how the battery is standing up for usable capacity since it was new plus we've also got an independent uh battery health check so it's not just our data but an independent service which has actually connected this car remotely and read how healthy the battery is so I've got indication from that what it might be but let's find out those other comparisons in just a few minutes right so it's now finished charging it's gone as far as it can go until the car stopped itself so we're now 100% state of charge and we have 285 M of range compared to the 297 when it was new or when I picked up a new one it wasn't exactly this car but so that is 96% of its range but that's according to the car and what it displays what we've done now is we've connected a dongle for the ODB Port down here and serge here has got some numbers for us which we're actually reading the live battery data at the moment and so this should be pretty accurate now we've got here if we have look at the uh I'll tell you what let's do the how many cycles the mo the wipers have done now the interesting thing is we've plugged this car in before and it's changed quite a lot since then so I don't entirely trust this but according to this as we are now the wipers have cycled 561,000 times I think is only recently it said 318 it hasn't rained that much it's rained a lot but not that much so we don't quite trust that number but if you guessed half a million is then I'll give you a point right okay if you go to the uh current battery uh data then so this will tell us uh here that we've got a nominal uh sorry new battery capacity including buffers of 77.8 KW hours and that is located you can see it's a whole load of numbers and I've got to say every time people kind of interpret these numbers you do get variances and different opinions of how you should calculate it but um right battery when it was new uh we got there 77.8 all right now there is a 4.8 K buffer so you took that off of the 77.8 it end up with 73.7 2 K new now you can see here with 100% charged with usable 65.9 so 65.9 from the original theoretical 7372 usable that's 100% to zero remember the is this 4 K buffer but let's just use that that would give us 89.4% of battery remaining some say use the the full pack including the buffer because in theory if you charge as maximum it can go and keep driving until it literally doesn't move anymore you're going to use the buffer as well uh in in that case you're looking at 89.7% so we're looking just under 90% in theory battery health based on these numbers here uh right have that one back for a moment if you get any other good data oh yeah we'll come on to how much AC and DC charging but firstly uh we also had a test done on battery health by um via cleav and this is a test powered by Alum who do battery testing and they did this remotely actually connected the car remotely and gave us a state of health of 89% as well so again there's some different interpretations of data that's us looking at the battery now this was from uh about two weeks ago I think wasn't it something like that um so let's say G lost about 10% now what's really important here is battery degradation curves there's a lot of cars especially in the states with very high mileage and actually it's not a linear curve so every every 100,000 miles you don't lose 10% the data actually looks like you lose actually a bit initially and then it steadies off so in fact out of the 10% say this has lost just for take rounded numbers it probably lost 6 7% of that in the first 15 20,000 miles yeah and actually since then it's it hasn't been that much I shouldn't think and according to a lot of data that has already been gathered and presumably will continue to it will gradually uh lose a bit but probably at a much more steady so after probably another 100,000 Mi it might still be at 85% for example we'll find out probably we'll keep this car and keep running it uh so the interesting thing here is that let's just show the proof of how much uh DC versus AC charging uh so this is the DC charging total here 6 12,626 kwatt hours of DC uh versus 2,773 K hours of AC charging you see here we've also Regen 6, 655 kwhs so that is you lift off the the accelerator and rather than using friction brakes to slow the car down it's using the motor becomes a generator and it's created nearly 7,000 kilowatt hours of energy uh so that's good but what is quite High number there is the DC charging versus AC charging and that works out to something I did earlier 38% uh DC Which is far more than normal I think most people I mean some people very rarely DC charge some more than others depends what you have for work and home charge and that sort of thing but DC charging because it's rapid and this car can still pull 250 odd Kow charging speed can't it it's still good um it's a harder strain for the battery so this battery health is with a car that has been DC charged a lot actually we don't normally charge to 100% we normally do an 80 or 90% but the cars in regular use day in day out uh you know real world in that sense quite intensive usage but with quite a lot of DC again I will reiterate because I have some free supercharging miles on my Tesla account because of the referral credit use um and you can do the same if you can refer your uh code across and people use it you can buy yourself some free supercharging we've probably actually used supercharging more than most would because ultimately I've got to be honest you know I be traveling back from somewhere and I go well that's free I can do it a coffee and a break anyway so I charge it whereas if I was paying for it I'll be honest there's more times I'll travel home I've never done that when the superchargers are busy I will carry on just go home and charge there it doesn't cost much uh but yeah we we've charged more than normal and we haven't had this car from brand new as well so the most intensive mileage was actually the first couple of years of this car's life and um they obviously did DC charge rather a lot uh I do know I was in contact with a previous person about maintenance and they didn't have anything done which is good they did replace two Alloys because they damaged them other than that that was it uh so with some pretty intensive supercharging use 90% I think when you go 89 90% oh that sounds a lot but actually I I think it's all right um you know so let's talk real world numbers so the car might have shown 297 now shows 285 when I first got mine I remember realistically speaking you're talking a real world maximum range of kind of 275 280 that's kind of what I had um take 10% off of that you're looking at about 245 250 mile range which is I think is quite a realistic range for this car now so makes sense and then another 100,000 miles it might lose 5% something like that so uh is it an issue no it's fine still charges really fast after 250 Mi of driving that's still really a lot just here to the other side of uh leads you know it's more than the bladder can take and you normally stop to eat and drink anyway so breakfast lunch dinner so it is an issue that's why we continue to use the car day in day out there we have it that's the battery data so one other thing to consider is how much power you might lose from a combustion car over age and mileage just things wear out a little bit they tend to lose a few horsepower this should be pretty much exactly the same so we just taken out we've got our dragy here and we had a video from a couple of years ago where we drove a fairly new uh low mileage 2019 model 3 Performance we got 3.4 seconds KN to 60 real world not obviously the Tesla quote 3.2 at the time but that's kind of optimal conditions possibly including the one foot roll out this is actual not to 60 M an hour and uh we managed to get 3.45 just now which is only 5 100ths of the second difference so I would go so far as to say it's as quick today as it ever has been and you wouldn't get that a combustion car would you it's bloody fast in it of course one of the biggest costs for ownership of these is depreciation and we see about how electric cars are depreciated and such like so this car new is £50,000 today it's worth about 20,000 so it's lost about £30,000 in value in that four years £13,000 miles not brilliant but I tried to find some comparison so I was looking at an auto trader for example and trying to find cars of a good bit of performance so BMW M3 M4 I don't know something like that and you don't see those that are four years old with over 100,000 miles so if you broaden it out and you look at cars like maybe a BMW 330d nowhere near as quick as the 3.2 seconds of this not to 60 but nonetheless a pretty powerful car and you see some of those at about 4 years 100,000 miles and they've lost probably at least £30,000 from the ones I was seeing so the age of mileage for the distances covered and depreciation seems to be quite comparable to other things like that but what else is there that can do this kind of performance at that cost and it was actually when I was searching for those comparisons I realized there isn't anything else if you look at it there is not many cars that offer this level of performance with that level of running cost that little maintenance and the mileage this has covered it's just not out there and that's where I think you got to take your hats off the Tesla and that's where I think we have to appreciate what this car has done it's a very high performance car that it can take the kids to school but it can do a track day it's very cheap to Runs cost nothing to to maintain really in the scheme of things far less than a petrol and Diesel and yet we're here with over 100,000 miles now do I intend to sell it or get rid of it is it no good anymore absolutely not it's a brilliant car absolutely brilliant we still use it day in day out we don't intend to sell it the next question is what happens when the battery comes out of warranty I test a warrant the battery in this car until 8 years I think 120,000 Mi when you get to that age uh mileage there there are now third party warranty options again they can do a remote battery test and then cut you for a battery extension warranty and it's not that expensive we're talking few hundred pound not a few thousand pounds even then there are used battery packs there are Specialists that can change modules work and maintenance can be done of these the same as any combustion car at 2 or 300,000 mil might need some maintenance or engine work now apparently the batteries this quoted by Elon are good for 3 to 500,000 mil and then there will be options to repair and maintain or even replace it's not going to be in the world in the meantime we've just saved an absolute Fortune by having this car and it's just been brilliant to drive as well don't forget it's just a good car to drive so uh there we have it this is Clint it's covered a few miles it's done really well we love him he a great car and I think this is where we now recog in you can have the performance and high mileage and low running cost and who can argue that really I think it's great and we're going to keep him so I hope that's been a useful interesting video make sure you're subscrib to our Channel because we do lots of EV comparisons and reviews so make sure you're subscribed a surprising number of viewers are not so hit that button now also follow us on all social medias just look for R and then hopefully we'll see you in another 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