Sub-£20k Model 3 Long Range experience so far

Hi all.

I've been mulling over buying an EV as a daily driver for years, but finally got one over the weekend.

These seem to be a bit of a bargain now they're sub-£20k. Enough to lure people away from a performance ICE car.

Ideally I wanted a towbar for carrying bikes, but with EVs the choice is limited, especially at the sub-£20k end of the market. Hyundai Kona 2021+ model came close as it can take a towbar, but the rear leg room is terrible. Note that you also can't retro-fit a towbar to a model3.

A 2019 Model 3 LR popped up privately the other week, complete with factory towbar. One owner from new. 66k miles. Under £20k. Deal done.

Bodywork is mostly good. Some stone chips. A nasty looking dent on one rear wheel arch that i failed to spot when viewing it. Everything else seems ok.

Interior looks basically new. They really hold up well to use. The leather has no cracks or scratches at all.

The driver's door cracks a little when opening/closing. Some of the windows squeak a bit. Other than that, you'd think it'd done 20k miles.

Now the big one, battery and range...

On mine i'm seeing 228 miles of "range" after an 80% charge. When new it would have shown 310 miles from 100%. If you scale it up you can then work out the degradation. So 228 * 1.25 shows 285 miles at 100% charge. 25 miles lost, or 8% off the battery's capacity.

They supposedly had 73.5 kWh of usable battery when new, so rough guess is 67.5 kWh usable now.

So at 80%-20% it's showing 170 ish of real world "range" that could be used regularly. Obviously you can charge higher or run it lower on long trips.

However, that depends on driving style and conditions, using the heater, etc.

I did 75 miles yesterday and the car told me i'd burnt though 90 miles of "range". I was hooning around and enjoying the acceleration though. If i'd driven like that from 80%-20% i'd have only covered 142 miles.

I did try being sensible and it showed about 230Wh/mile, which is enough to hit the car's claimed range. It just seems to be very, very sensitive to conditions and driving style in a way that will take some getting used to.

There are also charging losses to consider. Overnight it added 20kWh to get it back up to 80%. But Octopus claim I've used 24kWh. So 4kWh (16%) has gone missing in the AC->DC conversion. Googling suggests this is normal, so that must be the efficiency of the onboard charger.

Either way, my 75 miles of messing about yesterday cost £1.80 on octopus intelligent (24kWh X 7.5p) = 2.4p/mile

I've still not got a charger fitted. I'm using a beefy extension lead from an EV cable supplier. Octopus are giving me 12 hrs of cheap rate every night if i need it to keep the car at 80%.

Hope that helps someone out.

I charged at a supercharger on the way home from picking it up at the weekend.

It was 36p/kwh. Took about 15 mins to take it up to 85% from about 45%. Just enough time to walk over to have a pee and walk back.

Absolutely. You've got to look at the cost of the energy going in vs distance covered.

The extra 4kWh in losses in my case was at a cost of only 30p. I was using a granny cable. As mentioned, a 7kW charger might result in fewer lost electrons

It would be like measuring the efficiency of an ICE car and choosing to ignore the fuel used to go to/from a fuel station, or ignoring the extra fuel that a diesel uses to raise the exhaust temperature to do a DPF regen, or the extra fuel that a petrol engine uses on choke to warm the engine up quickly when cold.