We plotted a route from the Supercharger in Exeter to another at Westfield shopping centre in London
Landmark EV is now a decade old – yet it still has what it takes to rival the latest and greatest
“The Model S is, quite simply, a landmark moment in our lives.”
Our tester’s words, printed in these very pages back in 2013, when we put an early, left-hand-drive Tesla Model S up against the Porsche Panamera and Aston Martin Rapide – and crowned the Tesla the winner.
Sales of the Tesla Model S actually began in the UK a few months later, in 2014. This, of course, was the real start for the American brand.
Sure, the dainty little Tesla Roadster whirred off the production line at Hethel and into a five-star Autocar road test verdict in February 2009. But when the Model S arrived in 2014, that was the game-changer.
The Nissan Leaf, Renault Zoe and BMW i3 had been chipping away at electrification for the mainstream market, but in a world where every other EV did something like 90 miles and charged at less than half the speed?
Well, the Model S with its 300-mile range and charging speeds of over 100kW was the iPhone to everybody else’s Nokia 3310. But how about now? A decade on, how does the Model S stack up?
What better way to find out than with a road trip in this mighty, streamlined hunk of metallic beige. Meet our Tesla Model S 90D.
I gaze at it, coffee in hand, dawdling back past Exeter’s banks of 32 Tesla Supercharger points.
This is one of the newest Tesla Supercharger hubs, not to mention one of the biggest; the most modern of henges, gleaming in the morning sunlight.
Our road trip starts here, and I’ve broken all electric car etiquette by allowing our nine-year-old Model S to charge its battery to 100%, because I want to find out what real-world range you can get from a hard-used Model S.
And it really is hard used. This car has been owned by Tesla from the off and used by its engineers to travel between Supercharger sites, racking up nearly 260,000 miles on the original lithium ion nickel-manganese-cobalt battery, not to mention a few scuffs, scrapes and bumps around the bodywork’s extremities.
The destination for our trip is one of Tesla’s original UK sites: the Westfield shopping centre in west London. Here, the company opened its first dealership at the end of 2013.
One of the early Supercharger locations also lurks in the car park beneath the bright lights and perfume.
Back to Exeter, and this being a new Supercharger site, our old Model S needs a converter to be able to charge from the CCS cables.
It’s all straightforward, though, and in under 60 minutes I manage a full charge from the 44% that I arrived with.
Now, we all know that electric car batteries degrade over time and mileage, and this one is no exception.
This nine-year-old car now has 84% of its original 85kWh usable capacity, but the 230 miles showing on the ‘guess-ometer’ at 100% charged suggests that it’s still got a very usable real-world range.
Rolling out of the Supercharger hub, I head east, towards the A303. The car is confident that it can reach Westfield, telling me that it will cover the 178 miles and still have more than 20% battery remaining.
It is yet another of Tesla’s miracles that it mastered the art of over-the-air software updates from the off, so this car has the same software that you will find in any modern Tesla.
It also feels pretty solid around the cabin, and smells like an airport taxi.
Which isn’t unpleasant but does make you wonder what precisely it is that makes modern high-mileage cars smell of the same, gentle musk.
The journey starts easily. I keep the 90D in ‘Chill’ mode, rather than Standard, as I don’t feel the need for any 4.0sec 0-62mph sprints anyway.
Other than that, I’ve got the air-con and the radio on, and regen in the lighter mode that I favour.
This isn’t an economy run and I want to know what a Model S will do on a single charge if you drive it in a completely normal fashion with the comforts that we all expect.
Predictably, the miles tick past smoothly, the light bouncing off the super-shiny steering wheel and the Tesla just doing its thing.
It doesn’t take long before, on clear roads, the estimated range starts to drop more quickly than the real miles.
At one point, it falls to 11% predicted charge remaining at our destination, before it creeps back up towards 20%.
Inevitably, the free-flowing traffic along the hilly stretches of the Devonian A303 was chiefly responsible for the drop in efficiency, but I’m still happy to sit back and enjoy the far-reaching views to the left and glimpses of the sea to the right.
Still happy to trust that the Tesla will make it.
Before you know it, it’s everyone’s favourite traffic jam: Stonehenge. A convenient halfway point on our route, this Neolithic hotspot is one of the UK’s most visited tourist attractions, as you’ll have been able to tell if you’ve ever tried to drive past it.
At this point, the Tesla’s range is getting a bit on the teeth-sucking side of things, not least because we have also taken a few detours to do some photography and added roughly 10 miles to our route.
As such, our total distance is going to be just over 190 miles. So I’m beginning to do electric car range maths – a complex branch of maths closely related to that executed at the end of a restaurant meal for many people, when the bill is being split.
In the end, the car is still confident that it will make it – sometimes with only 5% battery remaining, sometimes with over 10% – so I trust it and go with it.
It’s worth saying that there are plenty of rapid chargers, Superchargers included, on this route.
I don’t need to play range roulette at all but, on this occasion, I’m keen to stretch the car and see what it will do.
Onwards, then, and the M3 motorway flashes past, as do the rapid chargers at Fleet and those on the roadside, as London proper starts to crowd us.
It occurs to me, as we creep towards Shepherd’s Bush, that a Parisian-spec Model S is the ultimate London car. It’s already lightly scuffed and kerbed, so you’re not precious about it.
Yet it’s still got way more kudos than the overly common Tesla Model 3, not to mention its crushing traffic-light performance, a cushy ride, ULEZ exemption…
I’d even live with the fact that the frameless driver’s window doesn’t always go back up after you’ve closed the door, so you have to get in from the passenger side and raise it yourself.
There’s also no keyless entry, which feels weird for a car that has flush door handles and a proximity sensor so that they pop out as you approach them, yet you have to double-press the top of the key, which all feels a bit PC computer interface circa the early 2000s.
Our car’s efficiency as we creep through town is unsurprisingly impressive and the predicted range has simply stopped ticking down and has even started to rise.
There’s no question that we’ll make our destination with energy to spare and we eventually execute the Shepherd’s Bush gauntlet without issue and dive into Westfield’s underground car park.
Sure enough, the car was right to be confident. We pull up in the slightly sinister red glow of the Tesla signs that gives this bank of chargers the feel of a seedy members-only club.
Which isn’t entirely untrue, given that this Supercharger hub is Tesla-only – as opposed to the 76 Supercharger hubs that are now open to any electric car.
The figures? We have used 58kWh of energy en route over 192 miles. That is average efficiency of just over 3.3mpkWh, at a cost of 20p per mile on Tesla’s Supercharger rate of 67p per kWh.
We still have 29 miles of range showing and 11% of battery remaining.
Let’s call it a real-world range of 200 miles in summer before you’re going to want to find a charger pretty sharpish.
I’d expect winter running would reduce that to around 160-170 miles, which is not bad at all for a car of this kind of mileage that has been rapid-charged often. It just goes to prove the longevity of these Tesla’s batteries.
So, in hindsight, was the Tesla Model S a landmark moment? Absolutely. And then some.
After all, if you were asked to name a car brand that’s changed the world – never mind the car market – in the past decade, which would you choose?
Well, exactly. Happy birthday, Tesla. What a decade it’s been.
