Two and a half years have passed since that day when I excitedly drove my Model 3 for the first time in the late summer of 2019. Since then, I've used one of its trip recorders to accumulate mileage and electricity usage data across 6-month periods. While not being aligned exactly with the seasons, these periods give me information across summers and winters as I use the car in these varying conditions.
 |
| Car trip display for winter 2021/22. |
These results are entered into a spreadsheet because, well, that's what I do! Here is the resulting table to allow comparisons to be made.
 |
| Falcon's 6-monthly mileage and usage figures so far. |
The main takeaway I get from this is that the watt-hours per mile figure for this winter is nearly identical to the winter of 2019/20, and worse than that for the winter of 2020/21. This makes sense. For the first and third winters, I was driving back and forth to Skye regularly for a substantial part of the season. In the winter of 2020/21, we were all in the middle of the Covid-19 situation. There was much less hard driving through poor weather.
The car is filthy just now, covered with the dirt of the winter roads. I'm looking forward to better weather and a chance to tidy it up and make it sparkle again.
It has a small number of minor issues that I'll get addressed over the coming months. The first is a recall issue where the opening and closing of the boot may affect the cable from the rear-view camera. When Tesla get the parts in and exercise the recall, I'll have them look at the following niggles.
The door handles have a damping mechanism to stop them snapping back into their flush recess. This mechanism has failed in the rear offside door. When the same happened to the driver's door, they replaced the handle assembly.
Somehow, the vanity mirror in the passenger visor became cracked. Hopefully they will replace it. Finally, a squeak in the steering column has returned, only noticeable when making large manoeuvres; i.e. when parking.
Overall, I'm as happy with the car as I was when I got it. The battery's degradation seems pretty much what I expected. I don't monitor the available miles closely, primarily because the variations in driving style, weather and road conditions have such a huge effect on range. However, I have no sense of a precipitous drop in range. It fell a few per cent in the car's first year or so and seems to have settled down since.
The questions for the future are whether to keep it long term, or upgrade to the newer versions. One gain from a newer version of the same car is that Tesla now use iron phosphate batteries in the Standard Model 3. These are less efficient by mass but have the advantage of being more stable and tolerant, with a far greater charge/discharge cycle life when compared to the nickel-based battery in the Falcon.
Since the battery space in the Standard Model 3 is only two-thirds used, Tesla can fill the entire space with the cheaper iron phosphate cells and achieve a longer range for the standard car at less cost. They can be charged to 100 per cent daily whereas I currently only charge to full on a very occasional basis.
The new car comes with other goodies I don't have like a heating system based around a heat pump, a powered boot lid, and a heated steering wheel, remarkably important for someone like me with mild Reynaud's syndrome.
The other possibility that is dangled in front of me is the Model Y. Just recently introduced into the UK, it looks very much like a Model 3 but is enlarged and has no solid parcel shelf. It is a true hatchback. It would also be a bit of a stretch in cost. Maybe I'll just stay with the Falcon. Time will tell.
