Model 3 Proves EV Doubters Wrong By Racking up 1,000 Miles in a Day
Engineering Explained takes their Tesla Model 3 on a cross-country trip with very impressive -and interesting – results.
EV detractors utilize the same old arguments any time someone so much as mentions the fact that electric vehicles present a number of benefits over ICE vehicles. We’ve all heard them a million times over – EVs still need dirty grid power to charge, they take forever to charge, and there’s simply no way you can take a long road trip in one without adding days to your journey. As we all well know, an argument can be made against all of these topics, and Jason Fenske of Engineering Explained recently set out to debunk the last one with his own cross-country road trip in a Model 3.
Prior to even making this video, Fenske polled his viewers to get a sense of how many miles most people are actually willing to drive in a single day, and the results are unsurprising. Even though most EV detractors claim to rack up 1,000+ miles in a day on a regular basis, out of 165,000 people who responded to Fenske’s poll, 90 percent fell between 0 and 1,000 miles, with 60 percent willing to go 500 miles or less. Thus, as he points out, EVs do in fact make a lot of sense for most people, as Fenske went 973 miles in one day behind the wheel of his Model 3. Why not 1,000, exactly? Well, he made it to his hotel and stopped. Good enough for us.
What’s more impressive is that Fenske managed to rack up this large amount of miles without giving up too much time charging. In total, it took him 16 hours and 30 minutes, which means that he averaged 59 miles per hour. Total driving time came in at 14 hours, 6 minutes, while 2 hours and 24 minutes were spent charging. He made six charging stops at an average time of 24 minutes per charge. That boils down to around 20-25 minutes of charging for every two hours of driving, which Fenske admits gave him a nice break on his long drive that kept him fresh.
For those of us that have taken road trips in EVs, these are impressive numbers. But it really boils down to keeping the battery between a 20 and 80 percent state of charge, which is where Teslas charge the fastest. Fenske planned his stops so that he would arrive with 20 percent, charge up to 80 percent, then drive for another two hours. His average speed, minus charging stops, was 70 miles per hour, with an average energy usage of 293 watts per mile. Fenske wound up using 286 total kW hours of energy, which cost $88.72 to refill via Tesla’s Supercharger network.
Covering that same distance in a gas car that gets 30 mpg would cost around $100, so he saved a little bit of money. But as Fenske points out, this is a Model 3 Performance with around 500 horsepower, though it could stand to lose a bit of that wheel gap with a set of Holley’s REKUDO lowering springs, but we digress. Thus, it better compares to a performance ICE vehicle that returns around 20 mpg, which would cost $200 to fill up for this length of a trip, which makes the EV a value proposition by comparison. And as we all know, charging at home is far, far cheaper.
On top of all that, the car’s navigation system predicted that Fenske would arrive at his location at 8:27 pm, and he wound up getting there at 8:35 pm – a very impressive estimate. But the main takeaway from this video is that, as most of us already knew, EVs are perfectly suited for road trips, and are more than capable of traveling long distances in a day, going further than a lot of people are even willing to drive in that period of time.