Model 3 Degradation Test Q&A

What kind of battery chemistry is in the vehicle?

It's a 2019 Tesla Model 3 Standard Range Plus and it has the NMC battery pack in it. In 2021, I believe, is when Tesla had switched to an LFP battery pack, where I know those vehicles, those batteries you could charge them up to 100% on a daily basis. Whereas the NMC pack, to my knowledge, you're only supposed to charge them up to 80% on a daily basis. You don't want to top charge it unless you absolutely have to, to get out that extra range on a road trip, that type of thing.

What were the repairs that we had to get done from Tesla so we could successfully run our battery health test?

And we touched on that in the first video (linked). But I'm also going to just briefly touch on it right now. The cost to get that repair done was $1,423.42 Canadian. Keep that in mind. And the technician wrote that the found issue was due to a faulty actuator in the super bottle. Verified wiring. Actuator failing calibration. Replaced super bottle as actuator was integral to bottle, ran calibration and verified operation. So, we had to get that done so we could run the in-car battery health test from Tesla. And that's how we came up with our results.

Another common question that we've been getting an awful lot of comments on is how we did our test and the conditions that we did our test in.

So, we bought the car on March 12th, 2026. And when we bought the car, the day we bought it, I believe, I don't remember the actual temperature it was outside, but it was below 0 degrees C. Keep in mind, we're in Canada here. We have gotten a lot of people saying we did the test incorrectly. It was too cold. The temperatures will have skewed with the results of the test.

And I just want to say with these battery health tests from Tesla, I believe you're only allowed to run them once every 6 months. If you subscribe to the channel and you keep along with us on this journey with this Tesla resurrection series, you're going to understand why we do not have time to wait until it's 25° C outside to run this test. Time is not on our side. We needed to run the test. And I'm actually kind of thankful that the day we wanted to run the test, we ended up running into that error which we had to get Tesla to fix... because that day was a lot colder than the day we finally were able to actually run the battery health test.

Now, the in-car battery health test; that is the official one from Tesla. I've seen some comments of people mentioning how this is not the right way to do this test. Please educate me and educate us on how we should properly do this test because the battery health test; what it does is it basically drains your car down to zero, completely dead and then it charges it up to 100% and then it measures the capacity that is remaining compared to what the capacity was when the car was new.

So, lots of comments saying that we didn't do it properly and that we should actually be doing a drive where we drive the car from 100% down to zero until it absolutely dies. And that's actually going to be the next video coming up after this one where we are going to do that. But I wanted to touch on this comment because it is a comment that's been coming up quite a bit and a lot of people have been pretty direct with us not doing this properly, but how else are we supposed to do it?

Is this the original battery pack that was in the car when the car was brand new? 

When we brought the car into Tesla, I had them do a full vehicle inspection on it. And one of the questions I asked them was to confirm whether or not this was the original battery pack. And they confirmed that it still had the original matching number that was with the car. So, I have no reason to doubt them. I don't think they would have any reason to lie. Um, it is impressive that it is the original pack and I don't know how many Teslas have actually gone that high on the original pack. So, if you know of one that is out there that is higher mileage than ours and you've got some articles, links, YouTube videos, that type of thing, drop them in the comments. I'd love to see.