I’m sure that we’ve driven over six orbits of the Earth on EV power alone!

Last week, I noticed that my wife’s Roadster reached 24,000 total miles on the odometer on May 4.

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A few days later, on May 7, we reached 75,000 total miles on the Model S Odometer as well.

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My wife is the second owner of her Roadster and it had 2,200 miles when we picked it up and the Model S had 22 miles on the odometer.  In the three years and eight months of Tesla ownership, it was a bit of a shock when I realized this morning that the total of these two mileages was 99,000 and that we were very close to having a 100,000 Tesla miles on our own vehicles.

Considering that we turned in the Active E with 54,321 miles on the odometer in February 2014 after two years. That means that our total EV mileage driven on vehicles that we’ve owned or leased now totals greater than 150,000 miles on electricity.  As impressive as this is, it is even more interesting to note that our actual totals are much greater than this.

During periods when we’ve had our cars in for service, I’ve been tracking our EV vs ICE miles and we’ve done about 80,000 miles on loaners and rental EVs.  So, our actual total is about 235,000 miles of electric driving.  In the meantime, we’ve done about 24,000 miles of ICE driving on our 2001 BMW X5 (both our driving, and when we lend the car out to visitors) as well as the times that we’ve rented ICE cars when we travel.

When I reached 74,000 miles of the Model S earlier in April, @Brian_Henderson (FYI: 75k is 3 orbits of Earth 🌏 driving pole over pole. ⚡🚘😃) reminded me that a circumnavigation of the Earth is approximately 25,000 miles and this is also cool to hing that all the vehicles that we’ve owned or leased means that we’ve travelled 6 orbits of the Earth.  So, that’s cool.

So, are we going to reach 75,000 miles on the Model S this month?  I’m pretty sure that we’ll get there before the end of this month.  If not on our beginning of June trip.

Model S at 47,000 Miles. What About that Extended Warranty?

We got home and parked in our parking spot in our garage at exactly 47,000 miles.

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We’ve had the car since November 2013, so, this means that we’re probably going to hit 50,000 by the end of the year.

So, it got me to think about whether to get the extended warranty or not, and this thought process led to me reading the Out of Warranty Concerns thread on Teslamotorsclub.com.

Apparently, the Model S extended warranty has some interesting features to it. Aside from the $4,000 cost to purchase the warranty, there is also a co-pay of $200 for each system that is reported.

So, if there’s a problem with the charge port door, pano roof, and something else, the co-pay is $600 and not $200. Considering the cost of the warranty, and what is normally in the marketplace, it seems that the Tesla Extended Warranty is priced quite high. Perhaps, Tesla should offer multiple levels of warranty.  A higher premium with no-copay, for example. As it stands, the current program shouldn’t really be called a warranty as it doesn’t mirror the experience and expectations set up by Tesla service in the first 50,000 miles of ownership.

At 47,000 miles, it’s time to seriously consider whether to opt for the warranty or not. Perhaps it’s time to talk to my service department and ask for an approximate cost of all the items that have been done on the vehicle during the previous 47,000 miles.

On another note, between the ActiveE at 54,321 miles and the Model S at 47,000 miles, I would guess that I, personally, have driven 100,000 EV miles.  Since I share driving the cars with my wife and her Roadster is just over 17,500 miles, I think this is a good approximation.  So, “Yay me!”

[edited 8:45 AM PDT 8/6/2015 to include 2 referral paragraphs below]

You know, that referral program EVERYONE is sending links to… add mine – http://ts.la/dennis5317 after all, if ONLY 4 of you have been convinced by me to go pick up a Model S during this test period, then I can at least get the warranty for free.

For those that are unfamiliar with the referral program, here is the official Tesla Link. So, you’ll save $1,000 USD (if you’re in the US) or whatever the equivalent is in your region (I clicked on a few out of US links to folks I knew and it defaulted to USD for me) if you build and buy a new Model S under that link and as a referrer, I get $1,000 in credit, which I figure to use for my warranty. However, only use my link if I helped convince you to get your Model S.

Achievement Unlocked = 10MWh of EV driving on our Tesla Motors Model S

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Granted this photograph was after the round trip commute home (which is why the total was actually 10,025 kWh.)

We were at 32,571 at .8 kWh from the 10 MWh when I left home. It does figure to the 307 watt hours per mile, so it’s nice to check the math against the built in calculations.

Anyway, kinda anti-climactic after the 100,000 All EV Miles.

100,000 All Electric Miles reached by our household today…

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About 1/3rd of the way home today, we reached 100,000 All Electric miles on all vehicles owned or leased by our family. We reached this landmark mileage figure with the help of our Active E, which we picked up on February 23, 2012 and returned on February 23, 2014, as well as our Roadster and Model S…

One of the side-effects of tracking our hybrid garage (our minimizing gas use post, first year, and recently posted second year) use has been to track the number of all electric miles that we’ve done since we picked up our vehicles. Which means that we deduct the original 2,220 miles on the Roadster when we picked it up CPO, we deduct the 14 miles that we had on the Active E, and the 22 miles that was on our Model S on our acquisition of each vehicle.  That’s how we get to the 100,000 Total EV miles on our family vehicles.

So at 3:29 PM Pacific Time on March 10, 2015, we hit 32,221 miles on the Model S which made our total for the family at 100,000 all electric miles. Additionally, it turned out that we hit that 100,000 EV miles target on day 1,111 of our ownership/lessor of our primary EVs. These totals mean that we averaged about 90 miles of electric driving per day for the past 1,111 days. That’s more than double the US average commute of 40 miles roundtrip. Additionally, 54,321 of those miles are on an EV that averages 80-100 miles of range in the Active E. So to those that say that EVs are for short distances only, need to check on the mileage that we did with our vehicles. Range Anxiety? Not around here.

Ended today at 100,024 total household EV miles. Next target? 10 MWh [corrected from 1 MWh thanks to @grahamparks] of energy consumed on our Tesla Model S. [as was pointed out by @grahamperks on Twitter, I understated myself. 1 MWh=1,000 kWh. So, I’m about to hit 10MWh on the Model S]IMG_20150310_160416

9901.3 kWh consumed for the 32,245 Miles that I ended my commute to home today at a conservative 291 wH per mile for the day (still at 307 wH per mile since we picked up our Model S).

A fitting mileage post… 31,310 miles for a car in the 310 area code

I was going to write about how the Model S is doing at 30,000 miles…

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However, I wrote a post at 29,000 miles, so 30,000 would be tight…

So, I figured how about one at 31,310 miles…

31,310 @TeslaMotors Model S Miles in the 310 area code!

What can I say, the car’s great. It’s still between 227 to 228 rated miles when I charge at 90% on a daily basis and average consumption of 308 wH per mile. What’s great about this mileage is that we’re getting that much closer to 100,000 EV miles for all three EVs. Tomorrow would be the 2nd year of our tracking the EV vs. ICE hybrid garage study. It would’ve been great to have hit 100,000 EV miles by then, however, have to be happy with 99,506 total EV miles by the end of today. After tomorrow, probably closer to 99,600 EV miles vs. approximately 11,000 miles. But that’s the subject of another post.

Quick update… after firmware patch.

So, the first 90% charge after the firmware of the Model S at 29,000 miles was updated from V6.0 (1.67.125) to V6.0 (2.0.81) and I was able to remotely verify that it was still holding at 226 miles for that charge. This is only a few days after the 29,000 Mile post (also, mileage is now 29,460).

29,000 Miles in the Tesla Model S

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We’re getting to the point where we’re close to “doubling up” on the miles on the Model S than our Roadster. It’s got a lot more to do with the utility of a Model S vs. a Roadster as well as the number of miles that I drive for work.

The Model S is a 2013 that we picked up in November 2013 and the Roadster is a CPO that we picked up in September 2013. The Model S had around 20 miles when we picked it up and the Roadster had around 2200 miles when we picked that up.

They’re both great cars in their own rights and we’ve put in close to 15,000 miles on the Roadster at this point.

Ideal Miles – 291

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Rated Miles – 251

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The battery degradation on the car has shown its effect in the last few hundred miles. My 90% daily charge has gone down to around 226 Rated miles/261 Ideal Miles. Range charges in my most recent charge is 251 Rated miles/291 Ideal Miles. Most parts of the world, winter has a very noticeable effect on range. This is not normally the case in Southern California. With 291 Ideal miles or 9 lost miles. Doesn’t look bad vs 300 miles. But I live in a rated miles world and my 265 is now down to 252, so that sorta hurts, after all 13/265 is almost 5% of usable range gone vs. the Ideal loss around 3% (291/300) though this is also 4.6% (291/306).

I often charge the car to 90% on most days.  The Roadster has a feature called “Top Off” that I mimic on the Model S.  What that means is before I roll off, I extend the charge and run the pre-conditioning to cool the car and battery down.  I wonder if that contributed to the degradation.  Either way, there it is.  Still waiting on Tesla to step it up and provide some sort of warranty and guidelines on what to expect.

If battery loss is linear, then should I expect 20% loss by 116,000 miles?  Or is loss on a curve and 20% is closer to 150,000 or even 200,000 miles?  Or is it accelerated and 5% loss is actually good for 29,000 miles.  Not to mention the fact that I am measuring this based on Rated miles, which is what really works, but should I continue to normalize and look at Ideal miles, which may be ideal, but unrealistic.  Because, as I’ve written, that’s currently closer to a 3-4.5% loss of Ideal miles.

Do I need to change my charging behavior?  Because 9,000 miles ago, I was still range charged to 260 Rated miles.  So, if we plot my two data points.  I lost 5 miles in the first 20,000 miles and 8 more miles in the next 9,000 miles (Rated miles again).  One thing to note is the car has been constantly updating with new firmware.  So, one needs to wonder if these losses were already in the car and that changes in the rated mils is because of firmware changes and “fine-tuning of the algorithm.  If it’s based on our driving, I’ve been rather conservative over the past 29,000 miles.  My average since we picked up the car has been 308 Wh/mile (see the Trip A meter on any of the three pictures.)

Perhaps I should charge the car less and let it dip below 100 miles more often.  Some guidelines from Tesla really would help here.  In the meantime, we’re saving for replacement battery packs for the Roadster and Model S.  Even without some sort of guidelines on what that will cost, the recent 400 mile Roadster upgrade announcement makes me hopeful that the same, or at least a replacement pack price will be announced for the Model S when our pack drops down to a level where either something kicks in to replace it or it gets unbearable and we decide to replace it ourselves.  Tesla Gigafactory anyone?

As I’ve mentioned before, c’mon Tesla be AWESOME again! Publish a Battery Degradation Warranty that we can count on or at least start to provide pricing on replacement Model S packs for folks to start saving up for.

[UPDATE 2015-01-17]
I’ve been asked several times on social media as to the firmware at the time of the publication of this post.

It is V6.0 (1.67.125). The car is actually going in for a patch to fix an unrelated bug with regard to the clock switching from 12h AM/PM to 24h seemingly randombly.)

Now updated to v6.0 (2.0.81) at the Service Center.

The Model S just past 21… thousand miles!

Our family is approximately 12-13,000 miles away from our 100,000 miles of EV driving.

It’s so funny, if you read earlier postings on this blog of a little over two years, all the mileage milestone posts that I did. Catching miles on the Model S is harder because of the display screen vs. the manual counter of the Active E. Photographing a display screen is inherently more difficult.

As I was getting in the car yesterday to proceed to drive home, I noticed that I was leaving the office at 21,003 miles.

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It’s interesting to note that over the past few weeks, the lifetime rated consumption (Trip A on the pictures) dropped from 311 Wh/mile to 310 Wh/mile on our Model S (meaning we’re just driving more efficiently).

So, after getting home, in traffic,

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It just shows how much more efficient I am at driving the car is in traffic than on the open road (the 291 Wh/mile figure). Still not as efficient as I’ve been with the Active E (at 5.0 Miles/kWh (or 200 Wh/mile).

Still gathering Battery Degradation stuff, but did find out that we’re on a D Pack, and that’s at least the latest version reported (as of the writing of this post.)

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Definitely on pace to get to at least 24,000 miles by the 1 year anniversary of the car, and that is lower than the Active E. Then again, most of the time that we had the Active E, it was the only EV in the family.

50,000 Active E miles and a Happy New Year


Yes!  The current acquisition of an astromech droid made me think of the run on the Death Star on Star Wars…  (Episode 4, A New Hope for you young ones!)

I was thinking…

Almost there…

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Almost there…

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Then…  Woohoo!

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before returning to base and parking…

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50,000 miles of BMW Electric driving…  There have been others that have driven more combined with their Mini Es…  There’s been exactly one guy who has driven more Active E miles…  So, I would think that with less than two months left before the Active E goes back to BMW.  It’s time to really concede the Active E crown to Tom!

As I mentioned when Active E #1 suffered its crash, perhaps my goal would be to tie or come in one mile short of his 53,683….  With the amount of Tesla driving we’ve been doing lately…  That might just be the goal.

Happy New Year!  And may you find yourself electrified and enjoying it!