If you live on the West Coast, the company Tesloop can give you a ride if you’re traveling around California. As you can expect, the company’s cars accrue serious mileage in a short timespan—and indeed, Tesloop says its first car, a Model S, just rolled over 300,000 miles on the odometer. Here’s how it held up.
The vehicle, dubbed “eHawk,” hit the milestone on Tuesday. It’s the only Model S in Tesloop’s fleet, the company said in a blog post, and each car travels up to 17,000 miles per month in and around LA, San Diego, Orange County and Palm Springs.
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Since the Model S was first deployed, Tesloop said it has been out of commission for only 12 days in a shop, and the combined maintenance costs were about $10,500. Tesloop can take advantage of the Tesla Supercharging network at a cost of basically nothing, so that figure breaks down to $6,900 for scheduled maintenance and $3,500 to repair headlights that were damaged while the car drove through deep water, Tesloop said.
Comparatively, Tesloop estimated what the costs would’ve been for a Mercedes S class or a Lincoln Town Car in that same timespan. According to the company’s analysis, the cost would’ve been $86,000 for the Mercedes, with 112 days of servicing, and $70,000 for the Lincoln, with roughly 100 days of servicing.
One question I had was over battery degradation. The company doesn’t clarify that in a post, and a request for comment wasn’t immediately returned.
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When TechCrunch inquired about the eHawk, after it hit 200,000 miles, Tesloop said the Model S only lost about 6 percent—despite receiving a full charge every day.
“For your daily driver, you don’t fully charge unless you’re doing a long trip,” a company exec told the news outlet. “We’re doing a long trip every day. We save, like, three minutes in charging in Barstow if we fully charge beforehand. We decided that we’re gonna suck it up, fully charge, and let it degrade. We figured that if it degraded enough, we could take it off a Vegas route and put it on a local Orange County route.”
Here’s more from the piece:
Then, just as the car hit 200,000 miles, the range estimator became inaccurate. Though the car didn’t actually lose any range, the estimator would say it could go another ten miles—and then power down.
Tesla looked into the issue, and told Tesloop that there’s a battery chemistry state that high-mileage cars go into, and the software isn’t properly compensating for that change. There will be a firmware update in three months that will take care of the discrepancy, but Tesla just replaced the battery to solve the problem.
“We got our 6% range back with the new battery,” Sonnad said with a laugh. “But had the firmware been updated, we’d be fine and plugging along.”
The company feels the Model S can tack on an additional 900,000 miles over the next six years, while it remains under warranty. We’ll update this post with more if we hear back from Tesloop.
Update: You can read the service records for the Model S below.
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