My Ownership Experience With a Tesla Model 3 RWD After 5,000 Miles

My Ownership Experience - What I Like

I have owned my Tesla Model 3 RWD with LFP batteries since August 20, 2022. This is getting me close to 5 months of ownership and I've driven about 5,200 miles since then. Most of those miles were in the first 2 months as I couldn't stop driving the car because I was having so much fun!

I really like the simplicity of the car. There is a center console screen that controls just about everything. There are a couple gear stalks on the steering wheel that let me use the windshield whipers, washer fluid, and to put on the blinkers. There are scroll buttons on the wheel for audio volume and speed limit control with Autopilot.

I really like Autopilot for the long freeway drives. Whenever I have a freeway drive I just tap down on the right stalk twice and my car simply stays in its lane and keeps its distance from cars in front of me. That takes Energy and pressure off of me to drive.

I like that the car is easy to maintain. I will have to rotate tires, get new tires about every 30,000 miles and that will likely be the biggest maintenance. I've replaced the washer fluid once and that was easy. There are no oil changes, belt fixes, or transmission fixes of any kind.

I like the speed and acceleration even with the base Model 3. It's quick and fast and if I need to "floor it" I can when I need to get where I'm going. But, most of the time, I'm just driving around 69 miles per hour on the freeway in Autopilot, or about 40 miles per hour on city roads.

The ease of use and maintenance, as well as the speed and performance are very nice. Tesla mobile service even fixed an issue with my driver side seat free of charge because I was in the warranty period.

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My Ownership Experience - What I'd Like to See

Now on to what I don't like about the vehicle or what I'd like to see changed. The first think I'd like to see changed is information about the battery itself. When I am charging, I can see the kWh added to the battery, but this should be in decimal value. The reason for this is it lets me know my batteries remaining capacity.

People are using 3rd party software apps to try and determine their battery capacity and this should be a sign to Tesla to do a better job at showing the state of the battery. There are two ways right now you can determine the state of the battery.

The first is to see the total charge limit you reach when charging to 100% of your battery. This isn't totally accurate though because cold weather and not having a mostly fully discharged battery can affect this number.

The other way is to use my battery calculation formula, which I used for my Model 3 RWD. When you are charging, for however much you charge, you take 100 / (%Gained / kWh Gained). If you charged from 40% to 100% and the charging app showed 24 kWh gained, you'd do this:

100 / (60 / 24), which would give you 60 kWh, which is about what the Model 3 RWD battery pack is. Maybe it's 60.5. I wish Tesla would tell me what the original capacity of my battery pack was, so I can see battery degradation. That's probably my biggest gripe is that this isn't easy to see and I have to run my own formulas to see it.

After 5,200 miles, my charge limit is about 266 miles from 272 originally. It appears my battery has degraded anywhere from .9% to about 2.3%. I don't know the exact number though, so I hope Tesla can give better information. I'd love to see a Battery section on the main menu of items on the left of the center screen. I also do all my charging at public chargers, whether it be slow chargers or Tesla Superchargers.

Other than this, I love everything about the car. I love all the helpful software updates and the Energy usage screen. I love that my car gets better over time. Tesla vehicles are awesome!

Do you own a Tesla? If so, what has your experience been with it?

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Jeremy Johnson is a Tesla investor and supporter. He first invested in Tesla in 2017 after years of following Elon Musk and admiring his work ethic and intelligence. Since then, he's become a Tesla bull, covering anything about Tesla he can find, while also dabbling in other electric vehicle companies. Jeremy covers Tesla developments at Torque News. You can follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn to stay in touch and follow his Tesla news coverage on Torque News.

Image Credit, Tesla, Screenshot