There & back

TESLA’S LATEST MODEL 3 CLAIMS EVEN GREATER RANGE, SO LET’S SEE IF IT CAN MANAGE AN EXTENSIVE DAY TRIP ON A SINGLE CHARGE

- SCOTT NEWMAN

IT’S NOT OFTEN you need to employ slipstreaming on the road, but these are desperate times, my friends. The Tesla Model 3 Long Range is currently indicating five percent battery and displaying a warning to stay below 75km/h if we want to reach our destination.

At this point you’re probably thinking, ‘Oh great, another story about electric car range anxiety’, but no, while there is a degree of anxiety within this story, it’s all the fault of the driver not the car. Inspired by the Model 3’s ‘Long Range’ moniker, we thought it would be instructive to see how far we could drive Tesla’s baby on a single charge in the real world.

As part of its recent facelift, the Model 3 Long Range is now claimed to be capable of an impressive 657km; this doesn’t make it the long-distance EV king – that title belongs to its bigger brothers, the Model S Performance (704km) and Model S Long Range (722km) with their monster 100kWh batteries – but 657km puts the Model 3 LR into a solid third place, on paper at least.

To test Tesla’s claim, we devised a simple test: starting at Tesla’s Melbourne service centre in the inner-east suburb of Cremorne, we would drive to the southernmost point of mainland Australia, Tidal River in the Wilson’s Promontory National Park, then complete the return journey, a total distance of 444km according to Google Maps. Why aren’t we trying to drive 657km? A few reasons. The first of which is we have to drive in the real world, not a laboratory, with traffic, wind and weather, corners and the need to run back and forth for photography and video (see the Wheels YouTube channel).