Tesla Model 3 with 100,000 miles

hello my name is Ed fessler and this is my 2018 Tesla Model 3 that I got towards the end of 2018 so I've had it for about four and a half years and I just turned over 100 000 miles and I thought I'd make a quick video just to uh you know go over a few things just for people who want to know or curious about the model 3 or thinking about getting one so uh first of all I do want to say every time I've gotten in this car and wanted to go somewhere it has always gotten me from point A to point B now uh that may seem kind of trivial or uh yeah we kind of expected but I just want to point out that even though you know you buy a new car that is not always necessarily the case I know people that have bought a car and it really doesn't get them from point A to point B every time so I just thought that was important to point out uh this one has always done that and uh you know that's a good thing so the next big question that most people will have is what is the battery range now after a hundred thousand miles so when I got this car new um charged up to 100 and it had 309 miles of battery range I think some of the newer models have better range but that's what this one was when I got it new uh the last trip I took I charged it to 100 and it showed 290 miles so I think that's doing pretty good that's about 94 of what it had when it was new uh so that's pretty good um you know if it's uh 290 miles or 280 miles or 270 miles you know is it really that big of a difference um you know I think there's a there's another question here that is kind of bigger than what is exactly the range why are people so concerned about the range and that is because they're trying to use that as an indicator of how long the battery will last which basically is an indicator of how long the car will last so that's a big question I think Elon Musk addressed at one point with the model 3 here and I think he estimated it you'd probably get 350 uh no 300 to 450 000 miles on the battery which is you know a big expense of the car so you know that's pretty good I'm hoping it does last that long um but you know there's a there's another thing to consider here that's that's a little different than internal combustion engine car with an internal combustion engine car or an ice car you pretty much know when it's done you know something big is going to break and the expense is going to be more than the value of the car you know typically with an ice car it's going to be the engine is going to go out or the transmission is going to go out something like that and then you're going to be like well you know it's not worth that big expense with an electric car I think it's going to be a little different you know I mean the the battery is going to degrade sure and when it degrades too much you're going to say okay I've either got to replace the battery or I've got to you know give up on the car and get another one but you know it's not going to be undrivable most likely so the question is you know if it gets down to 200 miles of range is that still good well for most people that probably is what if it down to you know fifty percent of the original range 150 miles you know that might be fine too what if it even gets down to 70 or 75 miles um you know you can't take it on trips with that but if you have another car in the family that you take on trips that might be fine for going in town and and doing a lot of things so I think that you know even defining uh when the battery is done is going to be a little different uh then I'll than you know your typical car um so but you know at that point you know when it becomes you know when does it become not useful is basically what it is I had a weed eater not a weed eater but a battery pack that I used in a weed eater and a drill and so on and so on I use it for years and years and years and it was getting really weak and I put it in my weed eater and I can only go halfway around the house but you know that was okay with me you know I I did halfway around the house then I put on the charger the next day I did the rest um and you know and eventually I was using it in my drill and I was trying to do a specific task and and it finally just wouldn't even do that little task that I wanted to do I was like okay now it's done I'm going to buy a new battery for it so I think that'll be similar to maybe what the car is going to be like you know it's going to you know it's still useful it's still doing most you know it may be eighty percent of what I wanted to do and then you know once it gets to a certain point um then we either have to like a gas car that has an engine go out you have to say Okay well what does a battery cost uh what is the car worth is it worth uh maybe just replacing the car or not and you know even the battery cost is going to be a little difficult to tell you know to forecast because you don't know when it's going to go out you don't know when you're going to be buying one and you really don't know what the price is going to be at that time hopefully battery costs go down and down and down and hopefully it won't be that expensive so we'll see how that goes but for right now 94 of uh original battery capacity is pretty good foreign on the car most people charge at their home for the electric cars except for you know if you go on a long trip you'll use superchargers very easy to use uh the superchargers on a long trip just go in the car or say where you want to go map South the uh the route and shows you what superchargers you're going to use and how long you're going to be at each one to charge so works out really well it is really quite good it's a it's a really good trip car as far as I'm concerned um you know I have solar on my house so typically I haven't really paid for home charging because I'm you know I'm using solar off my house to do so and there's also you know other free charging around you can get uh you can get different apps that will uh you'll point you to free Chargers around the city and I go to those fairly frequently and you know go to the coffee shop a restaurant maybe a little shopping plug in my car get some range you know it really it's really a kind of a good perk uh so even if I didn't have solar uh you know the charging costs would be quite low as far as lifetime uh kilowatts watts per mile on the car I've gotten about for my lifetime of the cars about 225 watts per mile so what that equates to is about for one kilowatt I can go about 4.4 miles now if you look up on the Internet or look at the specs of the car that's going to be a lot better efficiency than most places are going to show and there's reasons for that one is I just don't drive the car super fast um you know I decided a long time ago that I'm not in a hurry and I take my time getting places and I enjoy the ride and it's a very enjoyable car to drive you know and sometimes I give igoose it a little bit and occasionally I still get the uh the sports car you know come up beside me and rev their engine and you know well I'll Goose it a little bit with them and you know it's fun uh you know unfortunately I can't rev my engine uh maybe Elon Musk and then can put a little uh rev engine on the car this is the older car it doesn't have the external speaker I think the new ones do so that may be possible there but also you know and sometimes they even go under the speed limit like uh on the interstate 70 miles an hour a lot of times I go 65 much more efficient I also you know keep my tires inflated you know at a good pressure you know if you look in your door jamb you'll see a recommended pressure for the car if you look in this car it says 42 pounds you can also look on the tires to get an idea it has a maximum pressure I think that's for like a maximum load on the car if you load it down with people and stuff I think the maximum pressure with these tires which are pretty much uh the same as the original tires is 51 pounds on my original set of tires I actually kept it about 50 pounds for quite a while but I did find that that kind of wore the center of the tire just a little bit faster than the edges so uh so I've backed off of that with this set this is another set of tires and I keep it you know between the 42 and 50. and I'm not recommending that anybody else you know do a specific pressure that's something you should research yourself and decide what you're comfortable with but but uh you know I always make sure that the pressure in the tires is good which to leads to higher efficiency so at 10 cents to 4.4 miles um you know you can do a little math here so for a dollar I can go 44 miles um so you can compare that to any other electric or ice car that you like and just compare the efficiency and how much it costs to drive um incidentally on the tires uh you know when I first got the car you know I waited a long time for it and uh you know of course I was excited to get it and uh you know I would you know everybody wanted to drive in it so I took a lot of people for drives and of course you know as always like are you ready and then you know you Goose it all the way to the floor and it has the the good acceleration and everybody's like ooh you know and of course that's fun of course I was doing that quite a bit you know with all my different friends and relatives and stuff that wanted to ride on it you know it wasn't squealing tires it just it just goes and I thought well you know that's that's all good and everything and it didn't really occur to me that I'm really wearing the tires down kind of quickly you know it's not squealing tires so I thought no big deal well you know I I wore down the first two thirty seconds of an inch of the tires pretty quickly uh so I kind of backed off that after a while I still Goose it sometimes but not nearly as much as I used to because I don't like to wear the tires out too much prematurely so let's talk about maintenance next I've had a number of things fixed on this car under warranty the first thing uh first thing when I first got the car I did notice that it didn't have the little there's a little dual motor emblem on the back of it uh you know this is not really maintenance but uh you know I was just so excited to get the car out you know I didn't you know I wasn't too worried about that emblem but as the months went by I thought you know I kind of would like to have the dual motor emblem on the back so I called up Tesla and they said yeah it's supposed to have one and I said well you know could you send me one I'll I'll put it on and they said well no we can't send you one but we can send out a mobile technician and they can put one on for you which I thought was kind of funny because you know I said you know I live way out in the boonies you're going to send somebody way out here just to put a little you know sticker emblem on the car you know if you want to come out and do that that's fine but I'm perfectly willing to do it myself so they actually sent a mobile technician out and uh you know he came out with the emblem and I had the car nice and clean and of course he's got you know a uh a template you know that they put right on there to get it in the exact right spot uh I guess they didn't trust me to put in the right spot uh you know wasn't sure about my mechanical abilities I assume uh so I thought that was kind of funny but you know for maintenance uh you know one of the great things about Tesla is that they do have a mobile service I've had a few things that needed to be addressed and most the time they came to my home or my work and I didn't really it was no inconvenience whatsoever so uh a couple other things that uh they ended up one time they came to my work and I had some condensation in one of the rear tail lights which can happen with pretty much any car so uh so they came to my work and fixed that and uh also uh there was a pump on the lumbar support of the driver's side seat that uh was not operating so they they came and fixed that I believe that was to my home they uh they replaced the trunk wiring harness apparently when you open it and close it quite a number of times uh maybe the wires weren't quite right and uh and uh yeah I was having some problems with the uh with the rear camera I think and it was kicking autopilot out occasionally so uh you know it took them a little while to kind of figure that out but the wiring harness was replaced for free and I did have to uh I believe I brought that to a server Center to have that done there were a few other things uh that uh you know just a couple things that of course were not under warranty the only things really which wasn't really wasn't much was uh replace the tires uh of course I think I did that at like about 66 000 miles um and then also I bought a new cabin air filter for it uh but really that's the only money I've spent on it now of course this car gets software updates from time to time uh obviously when it was newer uh updates came quicker and you got a lot a lot of new features uh a whole lot of new features so there was a place where you could set the software update to standard or Advanced so I always had it set to Advanced because you know I wanted the latest and greatest things they were talking about quickly so you know that's worked out really well uh I think for the software updates it's it's a really good thing occasionally they change the screen layout or where things are which can be a little annoying but really the great thing about it is if you get in this car or you get into a new model 3 even though they change some things you're like oh crap where's the tire pressure that I can normally see going down the road I got to find it you know that is a little annoying but the thing is with the newer cars now since you know they keep the software the same here as in the newer cars you can jump in an old car on a new car I can jump in a new car and the screen layout's the same the controls are the same the options are the same so that really makes it really quite nice for the software updates one of the negatives for the advanced software updates is I did have a little bit of trouble occasionally that the autopilot would not function or would kick out a couple times it did that on a long trip about halfway home once which was was really annoying I actually had to drive the car myself terrible right so but but that didn't work and then the cruise control didn't work either the adaptive cruise control so I was really irritated at the time but uh I think at that point the wiring harness might have been causing a little bit of a problem and and maybe uh yeah the software update would fix that you know when a new software update came down and kind of reset everything but that was a little Annoying uh you know a couple things like that I've had you know some little things uh but uh you know I ended up switching my software updates to standard instead of advanced just because I decided that you know if there was a software glitch I'd Rather somebody else kind of get that at this point there's there's less software updates and uh you know you get a new feature every once in a while but there's not as many of them so I'm willing to wait for it and I just get the little more tried and true version of the software now the center screen for the control of the car uh you know when it first uh was displayed when the model 3 was first displayed people were thinking oh there must be a heads-up display because there's just a screen there's nothing else you know it was new and weird and different there wasn't a heads up display but uh but you know Elon said that uh you know that screen is really going to be all you need and and you'll love it and I do I really like that screen and just all almost all the controls are on the screen um you know everything's laid out pretty well and uh you know kind of once you get familiar with it uh yeah everything goes really smoothly I remember getting in you know some rental cars before like an SUV that I had to drive around and and it had a center screen and it had buttons around the center screen and it had buttons below and controls below and and there's knobs and buttons and and there's on the steering column and and on the side and on I mean there it was just everywhere uh there were screens and buttons everywhere and you know in any car you've got to kind of learn okay where is everything but with that one it just you know with the way a lot of the newer cars are today uh that have things scattered around I'm always wondering is it on the screen or is it a button somewhere else I can't remember uh so it's really you know I really think that the Tesla's way of doing things and the way it's laid out is just much simpler and much better than when you have this Myriad of controls everywhere on some of these uh Legacy cars and back to the autopilot uh on the interstate you know I really love that feature of autopilot it just makes trips so much easier and so much less tiresome um you know you just uh you know start autopilot and it goes down the road and you can look around and make sure everything's okay it's sort of like you know it works pretty well you know it's not perfect but it's really good and I equate it to uh like if you're in the car with a teenage driver and you know you're going to be going down the interstate and the teenage driver has some decent experience but they're not perfect and you'll sit in the in the passenger seat maybe if they're doing it and you're watching around and just making sure everything's okay and most of the time they do great but occasionally you're like no no don't do that you know and you take control and you kind of do something else and some of it is just a lot of times preference you know like uh you know sometimes it'll change lanes you know the car seems to want to change to the Middle Lane going down the interstate well since I drive slower than most people on the interstate um you know I don't necessarily want to change lanes sometimes it'll even change to the faster lane or at least it used to I haven't noticed that recently but it's like like I'm going 65 miles an hour on the interstate that the speed limit 70. I do not want to go in the fast lane and I think it does that sometimes for ramps coming up so it'll see a ramp where there'll be a merge lane and it'll it'll you know move me over so that anybody merging will have a free Lane to get in but you know when there's cars coming down you know and uh they're going what's this guy doing in the fast lane uh I always had mine set so so that it did not change lanes without my permission so and that's just a personal preference that I set but overall autopilot's great um you know they used to have a an issue with what they call Phantom breaking where it would just kind of break for no reason and if you had somebody behind you they would think you were a crazy driver I have not noticed that as much lately that really hasn't happened to me much anymore although I have had one or two people say that it's happened to them but I think it's definitely much less frequency frequent and I think they're maybe getting a little bit of a control on that so overall autopilot's awesome and uh love it I can do a long trip much much easier than I could before so one of the other benefits of the car I just want to point out is uh that you know whenever you leave in the morning you know you always kind of have this full tank or I charge to 80 90 is what they recommend so I've got like 250 miles of range uh when I leave so you know it's really great that uh that can be done and you've got a lot of range I don't have to stop for gas um you know even in the pandemic you know everybody was like oh there's germs on the on the pump well you know not for me I didn't have to stop at the pump um so you know that's a that's a really great thing that no more gas station stops you don't have to plan for that you have to take time out for that and uh you know charging at home super easy I just pull in plug in takes me two seconds and uh you're ready to go and and you know and I dropped quite a few miles you know I I drive probably close to 20 25 000 miles a year uh because I live out from the city a little bit and it seemed like you know people would call me and they're like where are you and I'm like I'm at the dealership getting an oil change you know with my my old gas car it seems like every two months I had to make an appointment or going to get an oil change and I'm sitting there and I'm waiting and and this that and the other and you know it was just a big time waster and I don't do that anymore uh it's not an issue I don't go to the gas station I don't get oil changes uh you know mobile service takes care of me if I if I do need something so it's really just a great experience a lot different than what it was like with my old gas car and uh you know it's been a really great car it's fun to drive it's quiet I love the quiet you know when I was young you know you want to sometimes you wanna you wanna hear the engine room and you want this specific sound you know the older I get the more I like quiet and I like peaceful so so uh you know that's just me you know maybe somebody will miss the the sound of the engine but uh but uh not me I like just the way it is and uh so that's my my video everything's good it's holding up well it still looks great as you can see and I'm looking forward to driving it and you know seeing how many miles I get you know I am kind of curious but I hope I don't find out how many miles it gets before it dies for a really really really long time

Channel: Ed Fessler

Views: 334,992

Keywords: Tesla, Model 3, 100000, 100K, miles, review, electric, car

Id: -RvjR_6WWXY

Length: 22min 30sec (1350 seconds)

Published: Sun May 14 2023