A Tesla With 470,000 Miles Gets A Battery Upgrade
A 2015 Tesla Model S 70D with over 470,000 miles has received a battery upgrade — a “new” 100 kWh battery. The “new” battery was actually a used one in good condition. The fact that a Tesla Model S can be driven 470,000 miles and still be functional is news on its own.
Some online trolls and liars falsely claim electric vehicles can only go about 60,000 miles before they need a new battery. They are lying to make electric vehicles look bad. Secondly, they claim, again falsely, that a new battery will cost $50,000 or more. Well, no. Even a brand new battery does not cost anywhere near that much, which is clear from the fact that you can get a whole EV for less than $50,000 — several different models are priced lower than that in the USA. There are also used batteries in excellent, very good, or good condition costing less than a new one.
There are now enough used and wrecked EVs to provide a reasonable supply of used EV batteries available for battery replacements.
The used 100 kWh battery pack for the Model S only cost $8,500 plus a $1,000 freight charge. The Teslas’s owner is an EV mechanic and he said his cost was below average for such a battery pack. He also did the battery swap himself in his own shop. So, there was no labor cost to him.
For a customer, with the labor cost, a battery pack swap like the one he did on his own car would be about $12,000, he says.
There is an idea for a battery pack with some issues to try a module swap, but he says module swaps can be tricky and may not result in a lasting fix — maybe just a couple of years. Depending on the situation, that might work for some customers rather than a whole battery pack swap.
The mechanic dispels a myth that a Tesla Model S that had a smaller pack can not accommodate a 100 kWh battery pack. He says the larger pack doesn’t really weigh that much more, so it actually is feasible. If the weight difference between the older 85 kWh pack and the 100 kWh pack is just about 66 pounds, it isn’t that significant relative to the whole vehicle’s weight. The difference between the original 70 kWh battery pack and the 100 kWh pack might be about 240 pounds or less. He says just about any Model S or Model X could have the larger battery pack installed.
The 100 kWh battery pack can Supercharge and the 2015 Model S still has unlimited free Supercharging.
The previous pack when it was new had about 240 miles of range on a full charge. Over time and with high mileage, that range degraded to about 207 miles. When the 100 kWh pack was installed and charged to full, the car estimated the range to be about 303 miles. The real-world driving range might be about 280 miles because the estimates made by older Teslas may have erred on the high side.
Personally, while this video is really illuminating in terms of the validity of buying and installing a used battery pack because doing so is more affordable, there is another validating insight that stands out. The owner is an EV mechanic and he bought the Model S with about 400,000 miles on it. The vehicle did have some repairs along the way. At the same time, if an EV mechanic trusts an electric vehicle with a huge number of miles on it to the point of installing a replacement battery pack, the situation seems to indicate he expects the vehicle still has significant life in it.
Some time ago, I wrote about a guy in the UK who has two Model S vehicles, each with hundreds of thousands of miles on original batteries. Of course, that doesn’t mean every Tesla battery will last that long. It does prove such high mileage in an electric vehicle is possible.
So, what do you say, will the 100 kWh battery pack last another 10 years?
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