UK man driving 245,000-mile Tesla Model 3 travels 1,300 miles in a week and it costs less than half a tank of gas

This Tesla owner wanted to prove that a road trip in the UK with a Tesla Model 3 – or any other EV – can still cost significantly less than a gas car in any conditions.

To prove his point, he used a Tesla with a very old battery.

The experiment went well.

In fact, it went even better than expected despite using a Tesla with incredibly high mileage.

This Tesla road trip proved EVs are even cheaper than gas cars than we thought

Electric car specialist Richard Symons, who hosts the RSymons RSEV YouTube channel, regularly conducts tests on EVs.

Among other things, he’s compared how the Tesla Model Y and Hyundai Ioniq 5 N fare in sub-zero temperatures and has even made a comparison video to find out which EV is the most comfortable. 

This time, he wanted to prove that a road trip in an EV is always cheaper than making the same drive in a gas car.

And there are two reasons why the result was even more impressive.

This Model 3 was not even new

To hammer the point home, Symons did two things.

First, he used his own Tesla Model 3 – nicknamed ‘Miles’ – which had over 243,000 miles on the clock.

This means the battery capacity was presumably far below 100 percent.

Despite being relatively old, Symons said his Model 3 has required minimal maintenance, mostly limited to tires and suspension work.

The second surprise came down to the actual cost of the trip.

Not only did he manage to travel 1,300 miles for less than it would’ve cost him to cover that distance with a gas car, but the entire journey cost him less than half a tank of gas.

After completing the journey and doing the math, he concluded that the trip had only cost him £48 – equivalent to $61.

For context, the same road trip with, say, a BMW 3 Series, would’ve cost him at least $250.

We should point out that this result was achieved using home charging, which is the cheapest way of charging your car by a significant margin.

But the gap between his EV total and the cost of gas is so massive that it couldn’t be bridged even if he had used Tesla’s much more expensive Supercharger network.