Tesla Model 3 - long-term review

The Austin car factory (later BMC later British Leyland later Rover later – much diminished – SAIC/MG) at Longbridge south of Birmingham was once a global giant, employing 25,000 people. Across the railway line that formed its eastern boundary was the plant's distribution centre. Most of the plant has been flattened now, turned into retail and warehouse parks and housing. In a supreme irony, Tesla's new Delivery Centre now stands on the very ground of that old Longbridge distribution centre.

Tab back to Report 1 of our time with the Model 3 and you'll see it came to us second hand, having gone through the Tesla Certified Pre-Owned (CPO) programme. All manufacturers have an approved used scheme like that. What's unusual about Tesla's is that it handles all the refurb work itself, because it owns its own distribution system. And most of the work goes on at this centre in Longbridge.

It's tiny compared with the old Austin plant, but looks ruddy big to me. Both inside the hangar-like building and surrounding it, serried lines of hundreds of Teslas shrink into the distance. Shiny ones for a start, as this is a customer centre for new and used cars waiting their for their owners to collect, plus other used ones refurbed for sale. So in the corner you find the expected customer lounge with coffee machine, soft drinks and Tesla-themed merch.

And then there are all the trade-ins, before and during their fixing up. They vividly demonstrate how some folks just can't be bothered to care for their cars – or maybe that's because they drive cars that aren't theirs. I see one 190,000 miler that still looks pretty much box-fresh, but another with barely a tenth of that, all its wheels kerbed and most panels carrying paint wounds too. But it's largely superficial damage in Longbridge. What you'd call crash damage is repaired at another Tesla centre in Dartford, by the M25 Thames tunnel.

After a wash, the incoming Teslas first get a body inspection, and all those dings are marked out in chinagraph pencil. Then it's into the building's workshop, and up on a ramp for a check of the running gear. Paintwork is tidied, small dents erased, electrics fixed and trim repaired or replaced. No surprise to see that the most common parts to be swapped out are bumpers, wheels, screens and tyres. In that sense it's easy being Tesla: the range of this stuff is far smaller than rival manufacturers', so holding stock is a piece of cake.

Each car gets Enhanced Autopilot, whether or not it was specced when new. Out they roll with a one-year extension to the original four-year warranty. Alongside the workshop is a white photo cove so the website shows images of the actual car.

Batteries get a check, of course. People often say it's a concern with used EVs. From new, 'our' car had an eight-year, 120,000-mile guarantee of 70 per cent retained capacity. Tesla's data, they claim, almost never sees anything like that drop. A quarter-million-mile Model S still registered 86 per cent, and the average of Model S and X is 88 per cent at 200,000 miles. They're old technology too. Batteries have got more robust since.

The falcon-wing Model X is very rarely bought new these days. It's LHD-only and Tesla needs to give £12k discounts on its own website. But used right-hand-drive ones are still in demand, and supply is short, so they're £40,000-plus on the CPO scheme even at four to five years old.

But the Model 3s start at around half that. Choose from either higher-miles Long Range AWD or Standard Range (254 miles WLTP) with mileage in the 30s. That's quite the pitch: 30 per cent down and then about £180 a month. One like ours – 2021, AWD, 35k miles – would be £7,300 down and £220/mo on a PCP over three years. And as we're finding, it still acts pretty much like new.