Hello Tesla motor club forums,
I was eyeing a used 2016.5 model s 75 without the air suspension or power trunk. It does have a power sunroof. I am mainly interested in the free unlimited supercharging. Is this tesla reliable? What are some things I should know about the car? Are there other years and trims of vehicles I should be considering instead that are equally or more reliable? Is the drive unit, batteries and other expensive components likely to fail? I appreciate your expertise.
Run away, as fast as you can! Read my posts about the 2014 model S 60 I bought 4 months ago and the run around I've gotten trying to get SuC and CCS enabled.
If the car doesn't already have SuperCharging (SuC) Tesla will likely want to gouge you $12K to enable it. You may be told that it will only be $2500 to enable it, like I was told, but that's just because most of the people who work there have no idea about these older models and how ala carte they were and they just assume that all the cars had all or at least most of the major features. They won't bother checking any records. And they won't tell you anything about the cars history or service records.
I'm a new Tesla owner so will not say about the 2016 MS 75 you're looking at, but there were issues with the LDU, large drive unit, with it leaking past the seals and requiring replacement. Which MCU does it have (the big main screen)?
Mine has an MCU1 which had 3G cellular which is no longer supported. MCU1 can be upgraded to 4G LTE. MCU2 has 4G LTE. MCU1 has a Tegra processor. MCU1 had emmc memory issues.
There is an MCU2 upgrade option that replaces the Instrument Cluster (IC) display over the steering wheel and the main screen and has a faster processor. The original screens suffered from leaking a sticky goo and the screens have what look like air bubbles. The MCU2 upgrade is $2500.
I replaced my bubbled IC myself and upgraded to 4G LTE in my MCU1 by buying used parts off eBay, total cost $410. There are YouTube videos showing how if you are ok with DIY, but it does require tearing your dash apart, which isn't really that hard, but if you'd rather buy the upgrade, if you even need it, that's certainly easier. Check the forums for posts about all these issues.
If you still want to consider this car consider getting a 3rd party service contract. I got one from CarShield specifically for EVs for $90/month for peace of mind in case a "big ticket" item dies and needs to be replaced since my car is out of warranty. There are other vendors as well.
As for the battery, they do degrade over time even without a lot of use. My 2014 MS60 only has 42K miles. The degradation on mine appears to be about 7% which isn't bad for a 9 year old car.
Be aware that the rated milage is an EPA estimated range, just like estimated MPG with gas vehicles. Ever heard the saying "your milage may vary"? That is equally true of EPA estimated range, it is often optimistically high. And it's for 100% battery charge. It's not recommended to charge the o.det battery packs to 100% regularly and it's never recommended to run the battery down to zero. That can damage the battery.
Recently I've told my non-EV friends and colleagues that the range is "85% of 85%" as a rule of thumb estimate for more accurate results. By that I mean that you'll get roughly 85% of the EPA estimate and you'll use about 85% of the total real-life estimate, from say 95% max charge down to 10% charge when you'll want to charge up again. I just did the math for my own car, rated at 208 miles. 208 x .85 x .85 x .93 (7% degradation) = 140 real life miles.
I work from home so don't drive every day other than short errands and 1-2 longer work related trips per week, so I haven't really done a detailed analysis of my range, but 140 miles seems much closer to accurate than 208 miles when it was new, before degradation.
I'd be curious if others range matches my "85% of 85%" SWAG which I initially came up with more as a method of understanding that the EPA estimates are unrealistic, and that you never use 100% of your battery, and not really as a mathmatical formula. But when I did the math, the formula seemed to work pretty well, at least for my car.
