Tesla Model 3 Experience After 5 Years

Back in April 2019, I bought a dual-motor long-range Tesla Model 3.  I had some concerns about buying an electric car, but my research showed that none of these concerns were likely to be real problems.  Still, buying the car felt like a leap of faith.  Now that I’ve had it for 5 years and 4 months, I can say that it’s been the best car I’ve owned, even better than my Lexus GS400.

Some concerns I had before I bought the car were its price, the charging network when traveling, home charging, battery reliability, self-driving features, and ongoing costs.  Something I didn’t know about in advance that turned out to be a pleasant surprise is the one-pedal driving.  A negative about owning this car is that somehow EVs have become political.

Price

Compared to other luxury cars, Teslas are reasonably priced.  However, there is no lower end Tesla model suitable for the bulk of car owners.  Teslas are still too expensive for most people.  The lower annual cost of running a Tesla compared to gas cars helps to mitigate this problem somewhat, but isn’t enough to solve it.

Charging network

There is a huge difference between the Tesla and non-Tesla charging networks.  Tesla completed full coverage of the continental U.S. and Canada with chargers a few years before I bought my car.  I’ve never had trouble finding a charger when I needed one.  They’re generally very close to major roads and highways.  About 95% of the time, when I arrive at a charging station, there is a working charger available for me.  The other 5% of the time when the chargers have been busy, I’ve only had to wait 5 or 10 minutes to start charging.

The non-Tesla charging network is a different story.  While much of what you see on social media about EVs is nonsense, the problems with the non-Tesla charging network is real.  Quebec is a notable exception where they’ve gone to a lot of trouble to build a decent network.

When traveling, it’s common to charge from about 20% of battery capacity to about 80%.  Just as with a gas car, you generally don’t run your car to empty.  However, stopping a “fillup” at 80% of battery capacity is different from how we run gas cars.  The reason is that the charging rate slows down a lot as you get nearer full charge.  So, it’s faster to charge up a little more often than it is to charge to the top each time.

On average on long trips, I charge for about 20 minutes every 3 hours.  It was a little slower 5 years ago, but newer Tesla superchargers are faster.  Superchargers are nowhere near as plentiful as gas stations, but my car tells me when to stop and it directs me to the chargers.  

My wife and I are getting older, and we need the 20 minute stops to stretch our legs and find a bathroom.  Extending what would have been a 10-hour trip with a gas car to 11 hours with our EV has been good for our mental and physical well-being.  Others may feel differently.

Home charging

A fact that some people have a hard time wrapping their minds around is that people whose homes have garages hardly ever have to use the charging network.  I had a 220V, 48A charger installed in my garage.  I just leave the car plugged in whenever I’m home, and the car’s fancy software figures out the best way to charge up and stop charging when no more range is needed.

My charger can add about 60 km of range for each hour it’s plugged in, but I rarely notice.  Just as you don’t stand there watching your washing machine spin, there’s no need to watch a car charge.  Each day I wake up to a topped up car.

It’s possible to charge my car with a regular 110V outlet.  At 12A, an hour of charging adds about 7 km of range.  This isn’t much, but plugged in for 10 hours overnight when visiting friends out of town adds about 70 km.  When away from home, I’m often able to stay sufficiently charged for day trips using just a regular 110V outlet.  On a 5-month stay at a rental home in Florida, I only needed superchargers 3 times other than for the long drives between Canada and Florida.

Battery reliability

There’s no question that it would be expensive to replace the batteries in my car, just as replacing a gas car’s engine is expensive.  Fortunately, batteries don’t tend to suddenly fail.  They degrade.  My experience seems to be fairly typical: my range has declined from 500 km to 460 km, or about 8% in a little over 5 years.

This loss of range was faster initially, and is about one percentage point per year now.  If this persists for another 10 years, I can look forward to a 15-year old car that still has a range of 410 km, which is more than usable.  It might work out better or worse than this projection, but the odds are that this car will be scrapped for some other reason before the battery gives out.

Self-driving features

My car can drive itself in most situations with the latest software upgrades, but the truth is that I generally only use these features on highways for now.  Having the car drive itself for long highway stretches greatly reduces mental strain, particularly in the dark.  A day of driving used to leave me wrecked, but not any more.

For short distances I don’t feel the need to use the car’s self-driving features.  When I control the car myself, the safety features are still enabled.  A couple of times now when I’ve needed to make a sudden stop, and the car began braking before I could get my foot to the brake.

The most important features to me are the safety features, keeping the car in its lane, and adaptive cruise control.  Many other EVs and gas cars have these features as well.  Talking to owners of other cars, Tesla’s technology appears to be better, but perhaps there are cars I have no information about that have good self-driving features.

Ongoing Costs

My Tesla has never had or needed regular service.  All my gas cars have needed oil changes and other fluid top-ups a couple of times per year.  Even my brakes last longer because my car usually slows down using regenerative braking.  My brakes haven’t needed any repairs so far.

Apart from replacing tires once and swapping summer and winter tires, the only maintenance I’ve done is new cabin air filters for C$67, a camera realignment for US$34, and windshield washer fluid.  I don’t get charged anything extra for the software updates my car gets every month or so.

However, the big savings come from the low cost of charging vs. the cost of gas.  My car has averaged 0.185 kWh per km driven.  At the 13 cents per kWh I pay on my hydro bill, this works out to only 2.4 cents/km.  Tesla charges double to triple this amount at their superchargers, but I don’t use them enough to make much difference to my overall costs, and supercharging costs still end up being cheaper than gas.  Some hotels offer free EV charging which saves some money on long trips.

If my Model 3 were a gas car, Tesla says that it would get about 30 MPG, or about 7.8L/100km.  I’m guessing that a comparable 350 horsepower gas car would use premium gas.  The current Costco premium gas price in my area is 174.9 cents/L, and my car as a gas car would cost 13.6 cents/km to run.  So, I save 13.6 ‒ 2.4 = 11.2 cents/km.  For the 85,000 km I’ve driven so far, I’ve saved about $9500.

One-pedal driving

I didn’t know about one-pedal driving before I bought my Model 3.  When you ease up on the accelerator, it doesn’t just coast the way a gas car does; the car does some regenerative braking.  So, for most driving, including cornering, you just need to use the accelerator to speed up and slow down.  I only need the brake pedal for panic stops and coming to a final stop after slowing down to about 10 km/h.

It took a few days to get used to one-pedal driving, but now I really like it.  Whenever I drive someone else’s car, I find the going back and forth between pedals annoying.

Politics

Most people seem to find Teslas interesting, and they have questions.  However, a minority react negatively to my car for political or ideological reasons.  This isn’t a problem when it’s just words, but I occasionally get other vehicles doing stupid and dangerous things around me.  Fortunately, this has declined a lot since the first year or so I had the car.

Other people react negatively because they see it as a show off car, like a BMW.  It may be that some others buy Teslas for these reasons, but I don’t even wash mine.  I’ve never seen the point of washing cars.  I tend to think more about practical matters.

Conclusion

I love my Tesla Model 3’s quiet power and its well-designed features that get improved regularly through software updates.  It’s very cheap to run, but the purchase price was high.  Overall, it’s been the best car I’ve owned, but until they become cheaper, I can only recommend them to those who can reasonably afford a luxury car.