Now for today's installment
Buy a Warm Climate Car
In shopping for used Teslas you really need to change your perception of what it means to buy a used car. If I'm buying a standard car my primary concern is mileage on the drivetrain. In theory the engine components have a finite life as do the transmission internals. Statistically the higher the mileage the more likely something is to fail, and then something else and then something else. When there are thousands of potential failure points you can fix a bunch of them and still have a bunch ready to break. And so people look for lower mileage cars.
With an all electric car you approach that a little differently. Since the powertrain is exponentially less complex, your primary concern is the battery.
What you really care about is battery cycles. A cycle is a complete charge and complete usage of that charge. It doesn't have to be all at once. It can be over the course of several days with you charging in between. Wikipedia does a better job of explaining it than me:
Apple Inc. clarifies that a charge cycle means using all the battery's capacity, but not necessarily by full charge and discharge; e.g., using half the charge of a fully charged battery, charging it, and then using the same amount of charge again count as a single charge cycle.
But you can't measure battery cycles on the Tesla, at least not as far as I know. So you have to take some things into consideration. Things like, is the heat on in this car all the time? Was this car driven aggressively? Cars in cold climates like the midwest get considerably worse mileage in cold weather due to battery/ cabin heating and in the summer they tend to use the air conditioning more due to humidity. So a car with 265 miles of rated range may only get say 170 miles from that charge whereas a car in a more temperate climate might get 210 miles from that same charge. Likewise with abuse. A car that's driven hard is going to get considerably fewer miles out of the same charge cycle.
For reasons like this you could theoretically have a car with 50,000 miles on it and say 217 battery cycles and another car that came from a more extreme climate that only has 40,000 miles on it but the same 217 battery cycles.
The good news is that so far battery degradation isn't really a thing. People are seeing really low capacity drops with age/ use and Tesla accomplishes this by keeping the battery pack heated and cooled. So people aren't really talking about things like this yet but I suspect in the future they will. I suspect that eventually the single most important metric for a used electric car is going to be cycle count.
The bottom line is that more than ever, a California car is probably the best car to buy, just not for the normal reasons.
