Out-of-Warranty Tesla Battery Life: The TRUTH

recently I surpassed 120 000 miles on my 2018 Tesla Model 3 that means the good news is I've saved tens of thousands of dollars by not buying gas or oil over the last five years but if you're familiar with Tesla's warranty then you'll know that the bad news is my battery warranty has expired yes driving an electric vehicle with an expired battery warranty is sort of like swimming in the ocean statistically you're probably going to be fine but there's always that fear in the back of your mind that a shark might rip your leg off sorry I have a weird phobia of sharks but you get my point and this analogy the shark is the possibility of the battery dying and needing replaced which is probably the biggest fear of people who are hesitant to buy an electric vehicle in fact in my recent video where I shared my total cost of Tesla ownership after five years the most popular comment I got from people who are critical of EVS said something like just wait until you have to pay twenty thousand dollars to replace your battery or why didn't you account for the cost of battery replacement and I totally understand why people would have this fear but based on Tesla's 2022 impact report they think it's a non-issue by showing that even after 200 000 miles their batteries only lose an average of 12 of their capacity well let's find out if this is actually a legitimate concern by using my Tesla Model 3 as a real life test and when I first got my model 3 the estimated range on a full charge was 310 miles but we all know that batteries degrade over time and hold less charge after a certain amount of Cycles I'm sure you have experienced this yourself with a smartphone tablet or laptop but the Lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles are not the same and are not used the same as those in mobile devices the chemistry is different allowing for more cycles and longer life EVS also have thermal management systems that ensure stable operation in optimal conditions and when it comes to electric vehicles the battery is by far the most important and most expensive component of the car if an electric vehicle were in NBA team the battery would be Michael Jordan the bottom line is that you definitely do not want something to go wrong with the vehicle battery fortunately for us owners Tesla has a really good battery warranty which covers the battery and drive unit on a Long Range model 3 such as mine for a period of eight years or 120 000 miles whichever comes first and this assures that the battery will have at least 70 percent retention of capacity over the warranty period so if my Tesla battery had below 70 retention when it hit 120 000 miles then it would be eligible to be replaced under the warranty but how do we determine the battery health other than estimated range well today's sponsor recurrent is a fantastic way to do that recurrent is a free software tool that generates battery performance reports to give you confidence during EV ownership it currently supports over 50 electric vehicles and all it takes is two weeks of battery data to begin providing a free monthly EV owner insights report that analyzes daily battery data and Compares it to thousands of similar vehicles to give helpful insights on the vehicle's range and charging now my model 3 Falls almost exactly on the average of expected range for a used 2018 version but it ranks in the 99th percentile in terms of odometer this proves a very important point from their research that odometer mileage is not directly correlated with battery health and range if I took my model 3 to a normal dealership they devalue the car for the high odometer but a convenient benefit of recurrent is their cell feature which connects EB owners to EV specialist dealerships who make offers based on the battery and range data that is validated by recurrent it's an amazing free resource so click the link below to connect your EV or check buyer offers in minutes so using an app like that is one way to track battery health another way is to do an actual real world driving test by charging to 100 and then driving at a relatively slow steady speed until the battery dies and see how many kilowatt hours the car used but there's also an even more official battery health test from within the car itself which I'm going to do right now we are here in my Tesla Model 3 we're going to do the official battery health test by hacking into the service menu let's see if we can get this thing to work to enter the hidden service menu we're going to tap the car icon go into the service or I'm sorry the software and then hold down the model 3 so in here we're going to type in service as the service code it says service mode should only be enabled by service Personnel to service or repair stationary vehicle are you sure you want to enable service mode caution do not enable service on public rows okay so at your own risk I'm going to go ahead and hit enable now we have the red service around the screen here now we're just going to tap on high voltage to go into the high voltage battery and tap high voltage system and here we have the health test for our battery so tap on that to authorize hold fully up on turnstock plus break plus key for 10 seconds unlocking and unlocked okay so now we do Health test so testimate take up to 24 hours so if you can do this make sure you don't have to go anywhere for 24 hours high voltage battery will be discharged and then charge the full heat will be generated outside the vehicle during discharge okay and now the health test has begun and we'll come back to this after it's done to get an official Health test from the Tesla Service menu okay it's been 24 hours now almost and the test is finally complete do you have any guesses of what the results are I was surprised by this seven percent wow that's what it says battery health seven percent so that's way lower than I expected but what does that exactly mean like is it is the battery approaching end of life you know because I'm still getting estimated range of pretty good of two around 280 miles which is around you know 90 of the estimated range of when I first got the car so the battery capacity as far as estimated mileage is is still relatively really good but the battery health seems pretty bad any Tesla technicians out there should I be concerned battery health seven percent that's really low should I sell the car now or should I keep it and risk it you know uh the battery health is probably not going to improve right so it can only go downhill from here for my personal situation I guess it comes down to should I just keep the car and just drive it as long as possible until maybe the battery needs to replace or will the battery ever need to be replaced you know can it can it survive another 107 000 miles with just a battery health of seven percent okay what if I lose another 20 30 miles of estimated range and I'm down to 250 miles of estimated range in another five years well that's still pretty good because there are new electric vehicles coming out right now in 2023 that have 250 miles or even less than that just think a 10 year old model 3 has will have the same amount of estimated range 250 miles plus access to all the supercharger stations which will definitely be a lot more five years from now so I think it's worth it just to keep the car that was my plan I want to keep this car for at least 10 years I think it'll last me that long but you know doing this battery health test kind of raised some red flags for me so my best guess is that this seven percent battery health is either a bug in this particular version of the test or I didn't perform it correctly or the percentage has some other mini tied to it if we assume the worst case scenario that one or more of the battery modules is indeed close to failing then that means I should expect to have a pricey battery replacement in my near future the model 3 has four battery modules that Elon said costs around five to seven thousand dollars per module but he said this back in 2019. however even if Just One battery module goes bad Tesla still replaces the entire pack because they want to be sure that the battery has 100 health and they can't really do that when they mix and match modules at the service centers instead they send the old battery packs to their battery plants to be refurbished now according to a Tesla invoice from 2020 shared by current Automotive a complete 75 kilowatt hour battery replacement for a model 3 called 16 550 which came to be about 2300 in labor and 14 250 in Parts with the actual battery costing 13 500. that's quite an expensive repair but I've always been adamant that I probably won't ever have to do a replacement on my model 3 battery based on my estimated range so far which has been quite impressive I try to follow healthy charging Habits by avoiding supercharging and charging mostly at home and only charging to 80 for daily driving and also rarely going below 20 state of charge and recurrence says my model 3 has an excellent range score of 93 and my expected range is around 280 miles which is only about 10 percent degradation so far after 120 000 miles I'm going to take the risk and keep driving my model 3 but what would you do in in this situation let me know in the comments below thank you so much for watching my name is Andy if you want more Tesla in Tech videos in the future be sure to subscribe give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it I'll talk to you in the next one

Channel: Andy Slye

Views: 227,354

Keywords: tesla, tesla model 3, tesla model 3 battery, tesla battery, tesla battery warranty, model 3, model 3 battery, model 3 battery cost, model 3 battery replacement, model 3 battery life, tesla model 3 battery life, tesla battery life, tesla battery health, tesla model 3 battery health, tesla model 3 battery degradation, tesla battery degradation, model 3 battery degradation, tesla battery replacement, tesla battery cost, tesla model 3 battery cost, model 3 range, tesla range

Id: xci8tFQf7ao

Length: 8min 58sec (538 seconds)

Published: Mon May 01 2023