Today marks 1 year of ownership of my Model S. It also marks 1 year of only supercharging. I thought I would do a recap of all the maintenance I’ve done, my experience, and more interestingly, what’s happened to the battery after 1 year of almost exclusively using supercharging to charge the car.

Battery Degradation Report

No need to bury the lead here, let’s get to the reason you’re most likely reading this article. Here’s a graph from TeslaFi showing the estimated charge at 100%. This includes all charges over the last year with an ending point of 60% or greater.

When new, the car should report 270 miles of available range. My starting range when I first purchased the car was around 252.5 miles at full, with 92,700 miles on the odometer. In the year since the range has fluctuated. At points, it got higher than the first charge but has since settled down to around 247.5 miles at full and 113,100 miles on the odometer.

This amounts to a loss of about 5.5-6 miles of range over ~20,000 miles driven. This doesn’t seem too bad for 1 year of only supercharging.

Charging Habits/Data

What makes this data interesting is that I have almost exclusively supercharged this car. This was due to not having an outlet available at my apartment. 98.8% of my charging sessions were done at a supercharger, with an additional 1.2% done elsewhere such as free AC chargers in malls.

I supercharged 258 times at 86 different supercharging locations totaling 7,600 kWh taking a total of 7 days and 3 hours with an average charge time of 36 mins.

Road Trips

I took several road trips during the year:

• Twice to Portland, Oregon
• Las Vagas, Nevada
• Three times to San Jose, California

All of these were quite pleasant as there are a large number of different locations you can choose to charge at.

Maintenance

Overall my biggest maintenance cost was more elective than anything, and that was upgrading my MCU. A year in and this was absolutely worth the money (~$1,750).

Other than that my entire cost breakdown is as follows:

• 2 gallons of windshield wiper fluid: $11.67
• 4 new tires due to a puncture that couldn’t be repaired – Goodyear Touring Eagle $994
• 2 replacement paddle gears due to failed self-presenting door handles – $6.47 * 2 = $12.94

The biggest thing to note is that I had 2 of my door handles fail within 6 months of each other. Tesla quoted me $297.53 to replace each handle but I opted to buy the $6.50 gear myself and replace it.

These repairs were pretty time-consuming and slightly nerve-wracking but worth it if you are mechanically inclined.

• Filed to:
• Tesla