- Bjorn Nyland’s old 2019 Model 3 now shows ~21% loss at 182,000 km (113,000 miles)—higher than expected.
- He blames early fast-charging, but notes that the BMS may lowball capacity if it never sees a battery that is frequently full or near-empty.
- Even with the loss, he expects around 400 km (248 miles) of summer range and half that in winter—still usable.
Battery degradation is one of the biggest fears when buying a used EV, but actual capacity loss varies widely depending on many factors. If an EV lived its life in a cold climate, covered a lot of miles, and was frequently fast-charged, then its battery will show it. This seems to be the case with this 2019 Tesla Model 3 Performance, which reports a higher than expected capacity loss.
This old Tesla belonged to Bjørn Nyland, who sold it in 2021 with around 49,000 miles (80,000 km), and he measured the degradation at the time at roughly 8%. While he had the car, he fast-charged it frequently because it had free Supercharging, and he attributes the fairly high capacity loss at the time of sale to his charging habits.
Now he’s revisiting the car again, nearly 7 years old and with many more miles, to see how much more it’s lost now that its odometer reads 113,090 miles (182,000 km). He calculates the loss at around 20.8% and estimates the total usable capacity at around 58 kilowatt-hours, noting that it has a buffer of about 4.4 kWh. This buffer is essentially the juice it still has left when the state of charge reads 0%, which is why most EVs keep going even when they say they have no more range left.
Bjørn says he expected the total degradation to be closer to 12%, so nearly 21% seems excessive, even for a car that has spent its entire life in Norway. He notes that while he frequently fast-charged the car, the person he sold it to mostly charged it at home and set the charging cap at 80%
However, he also points out that he used a different methodology to check for battery degradation back in 2021, so the original 8% capacity loss may not have been as accurate as the 21% percent he measured now. There’s also a chance the car’s battery monitoring system (BMS), which is where Bjørn gets the data he shows in the video, might not be entirely truthful about the battery’s total capacity.
He says that in his experience, Teslas that aren’t fully charged regularly and are never allowed to reach very low states of charge end up being quite pessimistic about how much battery capacity they think they still have. Given that the second owner only charged it to 80%, the BMS estimate may not be completely accurate.
But for a car with that many miles used exclusively in Norway, where the winters are long and harsh, it’s not a terrible result. Bjorn estimates that with the current capacity, you could hit around 250 miles (400 km) in the summer or around half that in winter at sub-zero temperatures. That’s still plenty of usable range from an already pretty old Tesla, which would probably cost not much more than €20,000 ($23,600) to buy used in Europe today.
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