It's hard to answer conclusively but early evidence is good. Their vague goal is a million miles on the drivetrain of the 3 but they warranty 100k miles, so the million is really an aspiration. There are people with 300k on their Ss already. No spark plugs, no oil to change. No fan belt, no transmission, no spark plugs or gas filter or muffler. Tires are the main thing people change. The early worries were about battery degredation. No degredation for me after almost 40k miles.
For the long term Tesla S owners, it looks like the battery degradation levels off asymptotically at around 90% and looks like the curve will stay mostly flat.
Most Tesla owners charge the car only to 80%. The UI in the car for setting the limit encourages this by marking the zone from 60-80% as "Daily Usage" and the 80%-100% zone as "Trip".
When you purchase the car the default is also set to 80% and the delivery person tells you that you should usually have it set to 80% unless you are going to go on a long trip.
It's hard on lithium batteries to charge them up all the way and so Tesla and maybe some of the other car companies spreads the charge over more batteries to make their lives longer.
This seems amazing. Maintenance costs can easily overwhelm the average car-owner... if this is true, electric cars are more revolutionary than I thought they would be.
Well, lower maintenance is the easy part, that's fairly obvious. The harder thing is making batteries at high rates and keeping them healthy and charging long term. One of Tesla's strengths is their battery heating and cooling system.
One major cost with Tesla is the insurance. I was quoted $380 a month on a model 3. I pay ~$700 for 6 months on 3 cars, 2 of them are 20 year old beaters and one is a new mini convertible.
A small part of it is the aluminum body panels, I think. Aluminum body panels can be repaired, similar to steel, but requires additional training/different tools. The Model S and X are majority Aluminum, whereas the Model 3 is mostly steel with a rear aluminum subframe. Basically if you get in a fender bender you need to go to a specialty aluminum body shop, which don't exist in high quantities outside of south bay.
It also seems like even moderate damage, which would NOT be a write off on an ICE vehicle, results in them totaling it because Tesla refuses to work on anything with even relatively insignificant damage (and they won't touch anything that has a salvage title, so never buy a used Tesla with a salvage title. Ever.).
