Range Test! How Far Can a 430,000-Mile Tesla REALLY Go? Episode 2

[Music] this is our ultra high mileage Model S and it's done 430,000 M that's like climbing up and down Mount Everest 40,000 times that's like traveling from London to Australia and back 22 times it's traveled a long way but how far can it travel on one charge time for a range test we're going to do a range test a health check performance test we're going to find out exactly what makes this car tick original battery original Motors so this has had a couple of repairs we' got ourselves a set of cones and a stopwatch literally nothing's happening I get the feeling it's not going to [Music] charge we're not quite going to the Moon today but we are heading from Richmond in North Yorkshire to our test center in central bedfordshire a distance of exactly 200 Mi most of of it will be done on the motorway and we're aiming to end up at our base where we can do further testing with this ancient electric vehicle to see how well or how badly it's aged and it makes perfect sense to kick things off by seeing how far you can go on a single charge of its old [Music] battery okay so I've reset the trip I've programmed in the satinav for our secret test facility down south and we are on the the move I've chosen the motorway because I think it's important when you're talking about range to talk about Motorway range that's the thing people really focus on when they're doing long distances can my car get me from A to B the problem is electric cars don't really like motorways what they like is a and b roads driving at relatively low speeds doing brake regeneration what they don't like is sitting at 70 mph for extended periods but that's what I'm going to do and guess what I'm not even going to hesitate at to use my heating if I want to if I want to use the third lane the overtaking lane I'm just going to do it I'm just going to drive like a normal human being to give us the real deal range in this old school high mileage Tesla First Impressions what is it actually like does it feel like a car that's done nearly half a million miles in some ways yes the first thing that I notice is the steering which has a lot of play around the center you can move it quite a lot and the wheels don't actually turn I don't know if that's this specific car or whether that's a Tesla thing from back in 2016 I suspect that this one's old so it does feel like that um but also the seats ergonomically not the best mine's kind of angled slightly that way and also that way so my body is kind of contorted in a strange way um again not sure if that's because the car's been around the world a couple times or if that's how it came out of the factory I'm going to give it the benefit of the doubt apart from that there's a few squeaks and rattles you can hear my seat there's some rattling from the dashboard I mean it's not the end of the world but the problem is because it's such a quiet car all of that rattling is kind of Amplified but I still think it's quite forgivable because this car is from 2016 so yeah all in all it feels fine with that being said I wondered whether I should give it the benefit of the doubt about actually making it all the way to my destination not in terms of the battery range but mechan ically would the car actually last the distance but after some consideration I came to a little Revelation the one thing I will say is that I trust this more than I would trust an equivalent ice vehicle with a ton of miles on the clock reason being if I'm in an ice car that's done nearly half a million miles I'd be constantly listening for things going wrong in the engine the sound of a pump failing or a fan belt about to pop or something a head gas get about to go but in an EV it just sounds like an EV so you never ever worry that it's suddenly going to conch out hadn't thought of that but that's quite a big [Music] thing so quick update we've been driving for 1 hour and 8 minutes we've done 64 mil and the dashboard is reading 146 mil so actually the car is so far being really accurate in terms of the amount of energy we're using it's currently saying that we've views 285 W hours per mile Tesla don't do miles per kilowatt hour which is the figure that I understand in my head but that actually translates to 3.5 roughly m per Kow so it's actually being a lot more efficient than I thought it would be this is good all was going well then I didn't need a recharge stop but I did start to wonder how much it might actually cost to fill the battery if I did Motorway recharging points are notoriously pricy but one of the beauties of this OG Tesla is that charging it from a Tesla Supercharger is absolutely free for Life the chat that owns this car Paul he a taxi driver this is the taxi said to me that he charges his customers around 240 to go from his base in Chesterfield to London Heath roow a lot of his rivals in Mercedes s-classes for example will charge nearly $5 00 to do the same trip so he's able to pass on those savings to his customers and the reason he can do that is because he's getting free supercharging for life with this car so not only is he benefiting the environment he's also benefiting his customers massively an electric Tesla might seem like one of the worst possible choices for an electric taxi but actually it's one of the best another thing people complain about with EVS is the availability of chargers at charging stations so with that in mind I began heading to a supercharger that I knew not to charge but to have a look at how busy they were for research purposes before I continued my journey this is one thing that has just popped into my mind EV Skeptics often think of electric cars as being slightly disposable in other words they're good for 50,000 100,000 miles and then after that you basically scrap them and then you got to buy a new electric car with a new battery that you've got to have mined out of the ground Etc but this high mileage EV illustrates the point perfectly that EVS don't have to be disposable so I was well into the test and things had been going okay but that early efficiency I was getting began to take a slight turn for the worse it started to rain and the temperature dropped slightly but it was around this point that the car seemed to become far more conservative ative about its range estimates perhaps estimating down from the driving style of the previous owner to the type of driving I'd been doing for the last couple of hours whatever was happening things weren't looking quite as rosy as before and I think we can probably put some of that down to the fact that I was now having to use the airon which uses extra energy to stop the windows steaming [Music] up all right so you know I was talking about superchargers earlier well I had one programmed into the satinav not cuz I needed one but because I wanted to go to one to see whether there was a massive queue cuz that's something people often complain about um I've just had a look at the range and we are no longer on track to make it the weather's changed it's got a bit cooler and I'm not sure we're going to make it to our final destination so it looks as if we're going to have to go to that supercharger and actually use it but doesn't matter whatever range the car gets is what I'm going to tell you guys and it shouldn't be an issue cuz that supercharger is pretty much spot on in terms of the range the car is showing so good to go just stopping cuz it's a precaution okay so the charg is down here it's actually not looking too bad because it says I've got 1 mile left and the charger is probably what less than half a mile away so what I'm expecting is that in these cars when it gets to zero miles you have probably what a 10 m buffer or something that's a similar situation to what happened in the Nissan Leaf that I tested a while ago so not entirely worried right now I'm actually flooring it and it's not going much faster than 25 mph that's hilarious but yeah all good one mile remaining and the Chargers I can see them right now just up there on the left maybe it's not looking so good cuz it's actually saying to me now I should stop immediately oh my it's actually looking a lot tighter than I expected okay now we are right next to the Chargers though so stop immediately that's fine that's fine it's fine it's fine keep going keep going keep going keep going keep going don't do this don't do this literally right there literally right there there's a bunch of Teslas at the supercharger but then it happened okay okay okay no no no no no no no no oh my it's dead it says it's got one mile left but it's not nothing is happening the wipers are going but literally the car's dead can I push it oh no it says I've got a mile of range remaining and I it it won't go into reverse it won't go into drive literally nothing's happening like the boot op so there's some power in it [Music] but oh I'm so mad I am so mad at this car it says I've got one M it says I've got one mile of range remaining and the car is literally nothing is moving I've got to push it somehow yeah that's definitely not in neutral oh God no no that's not moving yep I was well and truly stuck and the only logical step was to turn to the internet to figure out a way to get the car into neutral with my efforts failing how do you get a Tesla into neutral a fellow Tesla driver came to my rescue explaining how to get the car into tow mode from there we were able to work as a team to get the car moving and soon others joined in and we pushed it into an empty space well sort of another push you just did the worst everist service so I had another go at reversing into the space again with the help of my new Tesla gang and my next task was to figure out why the adapter wouldn't go into the charge port right I've never used one of these before but will it work after a bit of fiddling it turned out there was a foreign object trapped inside the adapter there's something stopping it from going in I made it work oh yes cool okay all right so that's in and all I had to do now was cross my fingers and that's in charge please I heard something it clicked I heard it click is it charging yes charging oh get in Tesla Community comes together to save the day I was proper nervous there honestly I I I was so angry that the car was showing one mile left and that it just went nope you're going no further and I genely we thought I was in trouble you feel my heart all right let's see how far we actually went in the end what it got okay so it got 1886. Mi on a single charge and that's interesting because halfway through the Journey it said it was going to get around 209 miles we' done 100 9 and there was 100 remaining but then the weather changed it got a bit colder it started to rain and that seemed to affect the battery a little bit so we lost a significant chunk of range based on what I think is down to the weather affecting the battery or more accurately the fact I had to rely more on the air conditioning than previously another big factor was that the car may have been estimating my range based on the previous driver's driving habits and it might have taken some time for it to recalibrate based on my own speed and way of driving a decent amount I think 186 mil I thought it would go further and I was luckily going to pull in here just to show you guys the supercharging network anyway on my way to the destination and as it turned out we really needed the supercharger um so yeah we've made it and um no big dramas tune in next time to find out what we do with our high mileage Tesla Model S in this amazing series you got plann for you hit subscribe hit the Bell icon and I'll see you again soon I'm going for a lie down let's keep the foot buried and see what it does to the quarter mile woo going it go around corners let's see how this feels in comparison and we're going to see which one charges in the least amount of time this is proper Consumer Testing [Applause] n [Music]

Channel: AutoTrader

Views: 195,855

Keywords: tesla, high mileage tesla, used tesla, tesla model s, used tesla range test, tesla range test, rory reid, autotrader, model s range test, used electric car

Id: rCzwX3j_3Lc

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 13 2024