Long-term test: Tesla's battery capacity almost doesn't drop

The greatest fear of an electric car is the lack of range - which, as many people think, decreases with mileage. But the test shows that this fear is unfounded.

A group of Tesla drivers, mainly from the United States, collected data on miles traveled and battery loss on their cars in a database. Almost 600 vehicles were involved for this, all Model S. The total mileage of all tested cars was more than 23 million miles (38 million kilometers). The conclusion was very impressive, after seven years the average battery capacity is still about 93 percent.

The average Tesla driver drove nearly 16,000 miles per year. Most buyers opted for the 85 kWh battery option, only one in six uses the 60 kWh option.

The diagram below shows the declared battery capacity depending on the miles traveled for each vehicle in the Model S survey. Battery capacity is measured by fully charging and reading the “nominal range” from the car, which is the estimated range if the car was moving under the same conditions and parameters that were used for the official assessment of the range of the car. Cars in the U.S. and Canada are EPA rated. Other countries use the NEDC standard. The values ​​in the table are in accordance with the EPA standard, and reports in kilometers are converted to miles.

Vehicles are grouped by size of battery. Please note that different models with the same battery pack size may have slightly different EPA values ​​for their full nominal range (versions with two drives and one drive and performance)

Trend lines are shown for models with enough data available. This gives an idea that the data indicate the average experience of Model S.

Source: survey.pluginamerica.org

The chart below shows the vehicles in the survey by model.

Source: survey.pluginamerica.org