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Tesla Model 3 Drive System Validated after 1 Million Miles of Testing

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Really will be interesting to see how these cars age. 200K miles is the gold standard for ICE cars, and even to get there you limp through many brake jobs, a timing belt or two, and probably countless other repairs.
I'm not sure that it is. We have numerous long lived Priuses at Lifespan/Operating costs.

2 fas 4 u was one of the nuttiest at 465K miles on his 09 Prius (was consuming lots of oil for awhile) before he traded it in for a '12 Prius v wagon. That didn't last as long. He replaced the engine at 350K miles and hd expensive probs at 369K miles, so he replaced it with a '14 Prius v wagon which is at 442K miles as of a few months ago. Maybe it's starting to have probs?

Priuses have no timing belts. I believe his 465K mile 09 Prius was on its original brakes.

I posted at automotive reliability and durability testing about a Nissan NV 3500 van shown with 557K miles on the odometer
and
For the newly designed 2013 Malibu, Chevrolet engineers used about 170 pre-production test cars, driving each one about 45,000 miles per month for 22 months. (The re-designed 2013 Malibu Eco debuted in March.) In total, they put about 1 million miles on the test cars during the pre-production phase.
 
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Wait a second.
(1,000,000 mi / 60mph) = 16,667 hr
16,667hr / 24hr/day = 694.4 days

That would take nearly two years running constant to hit that mark. Even it you bumped it to 100 mph it's over a year. It also means it would (EDT: not) factor in the extra wear of stop/starts. Hmmm.

Silly, they just used a hundred of them in parallel to accelerate the testing.
 
Interesting follow up by Tesla in a tweet to a question specifically asking which drive units were used...

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Even if the drive units and reduction gears can go a million miles, how many battery replacements is that? The battery costs a lot more than the drive unit (or the engine/transmission in an ICE car). I don't buy the notion that EVs will be near zero maintenance — to me battery replacements are a big deal.
 
Even if the drive units and reduction gears can go a million miles, how many battery replacements is that? The battery costs a lot more than the drive unit (or the engine/transmission in an ICE car). I don't buy the notion that EVs will be near zero maintenance — to me battery replacements are a big deal.
Somewhere between 3 and 10. Probably closer to 3. Worth noting that engines don't get cheaper every year, but batteries do.
 
Even if the drive units and reduction gears can go a million miles, how many battery replacements is that? The battery costs a lot more than the drive unit (or the engine/transmission in an ICE car). I don't buy the notion that EVs will be near zero maintenance — to me battery replacements are a big deal.

That's true... you'll probably have to do one battery replacement over the million miles in normal use.

If you heavily supercharge it might be higher.

Here’s how a Tesla Model S holds up after 400,000 miles in 3 years

They got just under 200k out of theirs, and they supercharged basically 100% of the time, to 100% charge, since they were using it for a limo service.... it had only lost 6% capacity but Tesla replaced the batteries anyway, for free... since there was an "internal imbalance in HV battery due to consistent supercharging to 100% from a low state of charge (SOC) without any rest periods in between"

They also have a model X with over 300,000 on the original pack, with the same abusive supercharging going on.

So expecting the M3 batteries, which are better designed, to go at least 500k isn't at all unreasonable.

They might could go to 1 million too for all we know, but even 500k with near 0 maintenance ain't bad for a car.
 
That's true... you'll probably have to do one battery replacement over the million miles in normal use.

If you heavily supercharge it might be higher.

Here’s how a Tesla Model S holds up after 400,000 miles in 3 years

They got just under 200k out of theirs, and they supercharged basically 100% of the time, to 100% charge, since they were using it for a limo service.... it had only lost 6% capacity but Tesla replaced the batteries anyway, for free... since there was an "internal imbalance in HV battery due to consistent supercharging to 100% from a low state of charge (SOC) without any rest periods in between"

They also have a model X with over 300,000 on the original pack, with the same abusive supercharging going on.

So expecting the M3 batteries, which are better designed, to go at least 500k isn't at all unreasonable.

They might could go to 1 million too for all we know, but even 500k with near 0 maintenance ain't bad for a car.
I would be downright shocked if a Model 3 battery lasted 500k miles. So far as I've seen no Model S battery has made it to 200k without service or replacement. Your link mentions a Model X with 300k miles on a battery pack but I am skeptical. I think 200k is going to be the typical life of a large battery pack and smaller packs will be less than that because they get worked harder (cycled more).

It is unclear to me whether or not Supercharging is a factor in battery life. It would seem likely, but I Supercharge a lot — more than 258 times in 54k miles — and I've been told that my S60 pack is in the 80-85th percentile in range remaining, with about 12% degradation. So, most packs are doing worse and I Supercharge much more than usual. It seems counterintuitive.
 
That's true... you'll probably have to do one battery replacement over the million miles in normal use.

If you heavily supercharge it might be higher.

Here’s how a Tesla Model S holds up after 400,000 miles in 3 years

They got just under 200k out of theirs, and they supercharged basically 100% of the time, to 100% charge, since they were using it for a limo service.... it had only lost 6% capacity but Tesla replaced the batteries anyway, for free... since there was an "internal imbalance in HV battery due to consistent supercharging to 100% from a low state of charge (SOC) without any rest periods in between"

They also have a model X with over 300,000 on the original pack, with the same abusive supercharging going on.

So expecting the M3 batteries, which are better designed, to go at least 500k isn't at all unreasonable.

They might could go to 1 million too for all we know, but even 500k with near 0 maintenance ain't bad for a car.
Just counting miles is not an accurate way to determine the lifespan of Li batteries. They degrade from age as well. In other words, just sitting around for years will reduce their capacity. The factors are: Number charge/discharge cycles, temperature, age, and depth of discharges / peak charges (no order.) All four are important. A three year old Tesla with 300K miles on it will have more remaining capacity than a 10 year Tesla with 300K miles on it.
 
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I highly doubt they ran it to 1M miles but just subjected it to some sort of HALT and then claimed the results for PR reasons. (Highly accelerated life test - Wikipedia)

... and for those basing the long term reliability off of an early failure please read this: Bathtub curve - Wikipedia


HALT is typically used to find destruct points or weakness; i.e. where and how it fails, but not to generate a reliability estimate (i.e. X years, miles etc).
 
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