Ron Burch Chose a New Battery Over a New Model S
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to Kilowatt, a podcast about electric vehicles, renewable energy, autonomous driving, and much, much more.
My name is Bode, and I am your host.
And on today's episode, we are going to get an interview.
No, I'm not doing the interview.
It's Allison Sheridan of the NOCILICAST is doing the interview.
And here's the thing.
Allison was very kind to share this with us.
But what I'm going to do is I'm going to put a link to the interview that she did for ChitChat Across the Pound.
And I want you to click on that link and go listen to it over there.
You're going to get the exact same interview, but you get to listen to it on Allison's feed, because she did the interview.
She deserves the download.
I mean, I deserve a download too, but if you want to go support Allison, you can do it over there.
She also put it on the NOCILICAST podcast as well.
So I'll put links to the both of those if you are interested in listening to it on Allison's feed.
Now, what is the interview about?
Because I haven't explained that yet.
Allison sat down with Ron Birch, who is a friend of hers and Steve's.
And Ron has a 10-year-old Tesla Model S.
And Ron decided to replace the battery in that Model S, and he explains why.
And this is a really good interview.
He goes into details like on how much it would cost and about how much it costs to do the battery replacement through Tesla versus a third-party company.
This is a really good interview.
And honestly, I think it does a lot for kind of the misinformation when it comes to batteries.
You know, it's still pretty expensive to replace a battery.
Like, don't get me wrong.
But it's not out of the realm of possibility anymore.
It's still a lot of money, but it's not stupid expensive.
It's just a stupid amount of money instead of being stupid expensive.
Anywho, I am a stupid host who's rambling.
So let's go ahead and turn the show over to Allison and Ron.
I'd like to introduce you to our dear friend in real life, Ron Birch.
You may have heard him on the show before, but it's been a minute.
Now, most people really love to buy new cars if they can.
But Ron owns a 10-year-old Tesla Model S, and he's done something unusual with it that I didn't even know was possible.
We're going to bury that lead and talk about a bunch of other stuff first, but welcome to the show, Ron.
Thanks, Allison.
Great to be here again.
All right, well, why don't you start off by describing the car, including the model and some of the specs on the range.
OK, I bought this Tesla Model S back in 2016.
It is a 85D, which means it's a dual drive.
It has two motors, and it has an 85 kWh battery, which at the time was kind of a mid-range sized battery.
And the car itself is in good shape after 10 years.
It's gorgeous. It's not just good shape.
I get into it every time.
I'm like, it's cannot be a 10-year-old car.
It's fabulous.
And, you know, I've maintained it pretty much according to the Tesla schedule.
So, typical driving for me, just a level set, is now that I'm retired, I drive less.
So, I probably drive about 6,000 miles per year.
Most of that, 80, 90 percent of it is city driving.
And then, occasionally, maybe once or twice a year, I have a longer trip, and maybe once a year, a very long trip.
Yeah, you take some crazy long trips.
But so, what was the rated range when you first got the car?
So, when I first got the car, the range, the 90 percent range, which is typically what I charge to,
was about 245 to 250 miles, something like that.
And so, the full range was about maybe 265.
Okay, okay. Now, imagine that's degraded in a decade.
It has, although it's interesting because, as many people know, the whole thing with lithium-ion batteries has turned into a large study,
as more and more of these things have been deployed.
And originally, Tesla and others had suggested a greater drop-off over a longer period of time,
about 1 percent per year or something like that.
And in practice, it's turned out that most of these batteries start to plateau a little bit more than was predicted originally.
Oh, so they degraded to a certain point, but then they don't just keep declining?
They do, but at a much lower rate than the original decline.
Okay.
So, that was just something that surprised a lot of people.
In my case, the range had decreased in 10 years from that 245 miles down to about 230 at the 90 percent point.
Now, it's interesting, an 85 kilowatt hour battery was originally 270 miles.
The 75 kilowatt hour batteries in the new, like the Model Y and Model 3 is like 304.
So, it's kind of interesting that that's one of the advances that Tesla has made is more efficiency
to get more out of that battery, I think.
Yeah, and in fact, I don't know how many, but there have been at least three or four
different generations of lithium-ion batteries since the time I bought my car.
Oh, right, right, light bowing.
Yeah, they've been making incremental improvements along the way, and that's certainly one of them.
Now, I think Tesla warranties or warrants the battery for, is it, eight years?
Originally, for my car, it was eight years or 100,000 miles, I think.
Okay, so that was two years ago from an age perspective.
How many miles have you put on the car?
So, I put about 78,000 miles on the car total, and that's been, like I say, pretty much
the same average seven or 8,000 miles per year.
Okay, dropped off more recently with the retirement.
Now, you, when you bought that car, didn't it come with supercharging for life?
Right, so I'm one of them that's been grandfathered.
They originally, to help sell the Model S, they were providing unlimited, roughly grandfathered
charging at the superchargers for life.
So, I had originally gotten that on my first Tesla back in 2013, and that continued,
they moved it over to this car, and that continues as long as I have the car.
You're their worst nightmare run.
Well, actually, it's kind of funny because I'm not, and the reason is because,
generally, I don't supercharge that often, only on the longer trips.
So, around the town, I'm just charging at my own charger at home.
Okay, okay, that's cool.
Now, people talk a lot about range and anxiety, and that you've taken some wild trips in a car
that doesn't have massive range, you know, you're talking 240 miles, something like that.
But this year, tell them about the trip that you did.
I took a trip, so I live in the Los Angeles area, right down the street from Allison,
and I had wanted to go to the northeast corner of California.
I'm a native Californian.
I'd never been up there, and I decided to make a big loop in California road trip.
So, I started here in LA, went up the coast through wine country, through another wine country,
up the northern coast, and then looped around through southern Oregon into northeastern
California, and then kind of back down the backside down the mammoth and in there.
And so, the total trip was about 10 days and about 1800 miles.
That's insane.
You know, I don't even believe that part of the state exists.
Like, you get past San Francisco a little bit, I'm real vague on what's up there,
so you've gone much farther than I ever have.
I might have flown over it before, but I wouldn't have ever been there.
So, range and anxiety, it not only did you have to charge more often than maybe somebody
with a newer car, but you're also limited by how quickly you can charge.
Is that right?
Yeah, and that actually turned out to be one of my motivations for doing this was because
over time, the one thing that I didn't realize was that in addition to the capacity dropping
a little bit, the Tesla actually restricts the maximum transfer rate of current as the
battery ages in order to better preserve the integrity of the battery.
And so they put internal limitations in the supercharger, which give you a maximum
that you can charge to over that curve.
And over time that lowers.
So, as a result of that, yes, over time probably took me after 10 years almost twice as long
to charge to a certain level.
So, wouldn't we go to a supercharger now that the good ones are 250 kilowatts,
and we don't really see that.
We just did it this week, and we're seeing maybe like 200, 210 kilowatts.
What transfer rate are you seeing in your car?
With the original battery, I was seeing probably a maximum of about 72 kilowatts.
Wow, okay.
More typically it was between 48 and 72 depending on the supercharger and how much I was charged.
We can stop and go potty, grab a quick sandwich, and we already have way more
charge than we need.
You might just get the amount of charge that you need in that length of time, right?
Yeah, so typically I do the charging the way Tesla intends, which is
you bring it down to a pretty low level, and then you charge up kind of in the middle where
the maximum charging rate occurs.
And so they intend for you, if you have enough stops, enough superchargers,
that you charge maybe a third of your total capacity, something like that.
For me, that would be typically 20 to 30 minutes.
For most people with new cars, that would be much less than that.
Yeah, we often get to a supercharger that goes, okay, you can stop for four minutes.
Yeah, no, I don't care, Doug.
I'm stopping for 20 because I got things to do here.
Right, right.
So that was, you're right, that was one of the things that was on longer trips.
It starts to add up in terms of the stop time.
A lot of times, of course, I do what you do, which is I stop for lunch or dinner or something
like that.
And as long as the supercharger is nearby, it's not as big a deal.
Yeah, so now the obvious thing to do is this car's old.
It's got a degraded battery, slow charging.
It's got low range.
So you didn't buy a new car though, did you?
No, I had heard probably over a year ago that there were people who had
gone to Tesla and actually had their main battery swapped out on the older cars.
And I dug into that a little bit more and then eventually I called Tesla directly and
talked to them.
And indeed, you can pay to just swap out the main battery and almost everything else is identical.
That seems insane.
It's a structural part of the car too, right?
I mean, I think...
Right, so in my case, there were two things that they brought up right away.
One of them was that the battery pack that configuration that I had was the 85 kilowatt hour based on the cells
they're building today and the configuration that was no longer something available to me.
So they bumped me up to the 90 kilowatt hour configuration.
So that was acceptable.
The second thing was though that I guess the density of the cells
and the configuration was a little bit different and so there are structural attach points for the
battery pack that needed to be replaced as well, beefed up basically.
That's because the battery was heavier, right?
Right, because the battery is a little bit heavier, maybe the center of gravity is a little different.
I'm not sure exactly all the mechanical issues, but that was an additional minor cost, right?
An additional minor cost relative to the battery, but it was something that I needed to have done
if I was going to swap the battery out.
Okay, so everybody's chomping at the bit to know how much does it cost to replace the battery?
Well, interestingly enough, there isn't a single answer to that because they gave me
a couple of different options.
They will provide you with a battery pack from reconditioned cells.
Which is cheaper or you can go with a brand new battery pack.
So for the first option, that was including the parts and labor, it was about $18,000.
I take that back.
It was about $16,000.
With the full brand new configuration, new battery, it was about $18,000.
Oh, wow.
So, I mean, that's not chump change.
You had waited a little while because you were waiting for the cost of the batteries to drop as well, right?
Yeah, so I should also say that there was an additional $1,000 or so that was added for,
that was kind of a separate line item for the structural upgrade, which was not technically
part of the battery. So that was kind of on top of the battery cost.
Seems like a good thing not to opt out of, like you want to opt into.
So it might fall off, do you feel lucky?
But yeah, so that was kind of the cost of the whole thing and
there were no other changes to the car at all other than that battery replacement.
So you had gone 78,000 miles and you did have them do one of other piece of maintenance
that I love this. You had one other thing had them do while you were in there?
I had a couple of things, but one of them was I had the brake pads replaced.
And how long it had been since you'd replaced them?
Never.
They were the original brake pads.
It is hard to describe to people how delightful regenerative braking is.
I mean, I tell people I use the brakes maybe like once a week, twice.
If I'm really misjudging things, you just don't use them.
They're there if you need them.
And that's the thing. So as far as the motivation, why would look into this?
First of all, the car again, it's in pretty good shape.
Otherwise, the second thing was, if I were going to buy a new car, I would probably,
I really love the Model S. It's a well engineered car.
It's comfortable. It's something that I really like.
And of course, as most people know, the Model S is being discontinued by Tesla.
You won't be able to order one after probably May.
And if you want a new car.
And so the idea that if I were going forward, I would probably still be heavily influenced
to go with the Tesla of some kind.
But it would probably be more like a Model Y, which is a little bigger car than I need.
Or it could be the Model 3.
So knowing that that was happening.
And of course, the fact that the company itself is kind of being reoriented toward
building robots in the future.
I wasn't entirely... Focus Elon, focus.
Yes, I wasn't entirely confident that this battery swap option was going to be available
in the future either.
And so I think that if you had a problem where the battery failed,
they would probably replace it.
They'll continue maintenance on the Model S.
But this particular thing where the battery is still operational,
I wasn't sure that that might be an option going forward.
So even though the battery, theoretically, it could last a couple of hundred thousand miles.
I just felt that given the conditions of the time, it was a good time to do it.
Yeah. And even before they canceled the Model S,
they hadn't done a real update to it in forever.
So buying a new one wouldn't have been that much different than what you already had.
Well, and in some cases, it would have been less because the new Model S is,
they're taking away the cruise control.
So I have what was called Autopilot Version 1,
which includes the lane control and the adaptive cruise control.
You have to buy now the new package of the automated driving
in order to get the cruise control back.
So I'm not even sure we can get that.
We got to keep poking at the menus, but with Steve's new Model Y,
that's the method we actually prefer.
I know, sure, we paid for full self-driving and we should use it,
but it's anxiety prone.
You don't know what it's going to do, when it's going to do it,
and it never drives the way you would drive.
It might be more aggressive on a lane change.
Steve used it a bunch on a recent drive and it was just cut too close to somebody behind you.
It just still drives a little bit like a jerk.
It's got a bunch of different modes now, which is nice.
You can choose between Chill and Mad Max and five different levels in between.
But what we really want is, stay on the lane, keep my speed.
I'll tell you when I want to change lanes,
and then you change lanes and I'll change lanes back.
And it used to stay in that, but we haven't been able to find that mode.
So I'm not even sure with full self-driving that you can get back to what you have today.
So, yeah, I would agree. That's kind of a downside.
Yeah, so, you know, just, I think a lot of it had to do with uncertainty on my part.
And as you said, I had been tracking battery prices for quite a while,
with the idea that once it was out of warranty, I was a little concerned too.
I should say another advantage of buying the battery is that I now have a new four-year warranty,
or I think it's 75,000 miles on the new battery.
That's a great deal, really, for under $20,000 to extend the car another four years.
And it feels like a lot's shaking out in the car industry right now.
I'm a big fan of Lucid Motors. I think they look really great.
But you know, how long are they going to be in business?
Are they really in it in the long-haul?
Polestar is good, but probably my next favorite is Polestar.
But they don't roll out the good models in the United States.
They're rolling out in Europe, and I'm very jealous of what they have.
But it's just not, we got to wait and see how those companies do, right?
That's a really good point. And that, you know, as I said, I kind of leaned
toward Tesla, obviously, because I'd been driving them for 12 years or whatever.
But I certainly have looked at a lot of the other EVs out there.
And you know, there are a lot of good ones to choose from.
I'm not wed to any particular one.
But again, like you say, the uncertainty from a business point of view of some of these,
I mean, Lucid and Rivian both have gone into some form of bankruptcy already.
And then you've got Polestar, which is out there, and it's doing okay.
But, you know, like you said, there's a shakeout and it hasn't come yet.
And then of course, a lot of the Detroit automakers have pulled back from their EV lines.
They've been canceling, you know, the lightning, the bolt.
So, you know, you would, I'm, you can tell already,
I'm a little conservative when it comes to my cars.
I don't tend to buy a new car every couple of years.
And so when I invest in something, I have a more long term, you know, idea about it.
And a lot of these things, it just seemed a little shaky right now.
Yeah. By the way, the Chevy Bolt was discontinued new production in 2023,
but they're doing a new model of it that's supposed to be coming out in 2028.
But still, that's, that's a long ways away.
And obviously not a car that meets your needs, but still, it was a really,
really cool car. A lot of people really like that one.
Now, how long did it take to do this massive reconstruction of your car?
Well, I dropped the car off at the end of the work day on, let's see, a Monday.
They got the technicians starting on it at 7 a.m. the next morning,
and they were done before 4 o'clock in the afternoon.
And that included two or three other things that I asked them to do in parallel.
Wow, that's insane. I was very excited when Ron went to do this,
because I was able to loan him my car since I can't drive.
Which was very gracious of her and it really helped me out because I had a lot of things
to do that day and I didn't want to move the appointments. So that was great.
Technically, I had planned on offering anyway, but it turned out to be really easy to offer.
And I've driven with Ron and he's one of the best drivers I've ever driven with.
We almost died once, but your reaction time is what saved our lives.
I'm convinced of it. Anyway, that's a story for another day.
So have you supercharged yet? What's got any experiences with it yet?
Yeah, so I did. So as you know, very close to us, especially close to you,
Tesla has opened up a new supercharger in the area.
And before I made the swap, I supercharged at that location with the old battery.
And probably it was down to about 50%. I was trying to bring it down lower because
Tesla requested that when I drop off the car, it was at 30% or lower.
And at that point, I was supercharging. I think it got up to about 40 kilowatts.
So it was giving me about, oh, I can't remember now if it was maybe
80 miles per hour of equivalent range or something like that.
Then after the new battery, I went to the exact same location, actually the same
supercharger unit with the new battery. It was down a little bit lower,
maybe down around 40%. And it was charging at 150 kilowatts,
which was about 400 miles per hour. So about four times the rate.
That's fantastic. It's so funny for people to hear that we talk about miles per hour in charge,
but it's how long are you going to have to sit there? But 400 miles, if your range is 275,
you're not talking very long to be able to go from 0% to 100%. But again,
the best part of the curve is going to matter on how quickly it does that.
What sounds like it was a big success. Do you feel any performance differences and how the car
accelerates or how it feels with a heavier battery? Well, it's interesting because
typically moving up in capacity, the higher capacity batteries tend to trend with a little bit
higher or quicker acceleration. So when they were making the P90 plus and part of the attraction of
having those really quick acceleration times was because they had this bigger battery and they
could source more current quickly. So going from an 85 to a 90 obviously is not a big deal.
But then if the battery is a little bit heavier, then you have two things that are offsetting each
other. So to answer your question, I have opened it up a little bit to see what the acceleration
is like and I can't really tell much of a difference. It certainly isn't any slower than it used to be.
This is a cool success story. I like it because we're kind of in the consumerism
phase of things by new, by new, and this is a different way to go.
Yeah. Well, and one thing that's nice is that obviously, again, most people know this, but
even when they're replacing failed batteries, Tesla can recycle these lithium-ion cells
with a very high replacement rate. I think they say that they can recover about
95% of the lithium from the battery. Oh, that's fantastic. And recycle it. So
by going to Tesla, not some third party, and I should mention that there are third parties out
there that will do it for you cheaper. However, I believe that most of the ones I found anyway
were using, you know, reclaimed cells. They were not brand new. Sure. I, you know,
there's a lot of things I'll do a third party on. That wouldn't be one of them.
No, I never really considered it. I was more curious about, you know, who these people were
and how they did it. But in the end, actually, the difference in price, you were probably saving
maybe, I don't know, $2,000 or $3,000. I mean, it was not like they were half price.
I might even worry more if it was half price, Ron.
Well, I definitely would have. Yeah. Yeah, that's not something that you want to, you know,
open the risk envelope on. Let's put it that way.
The only thing I can think of we haven't covered, I forgot to mention, when you
dropped the car off at seven in the morning, it was down at 4 p.m. The same day is they had
ordered the battery a couple of weeks ahead of time. So it was in stock. That's not
like they keep a big stack of batteries to throw into cars.
That's absolutely true. Yeah, I called them up. I had probably three or four really good
discussions and I will just say that generally I have, you know, general maintenance kind of
appointments with Tesla. I've had very good luck with that. I mean, I rarely had any kind of an
issue. There's nothing to go wrong, Ron. Well, but I mean, but this was really above
and beyond. I mean, when I had the discussions with them, I recognized that I'm probably an
outlier. So they don't, you know, do this very often. Yeah. And yet they had all the answers.
They got back to me really quickly and it went, you know, just according to plan.
And so I was pretty impressed with that. And yes, they had everything queued up. So
took them about two weeks to get the materials in. But once they had everything there, they had it
all ready to go. You know, there was no problem. That's fantastic. Well, is there anything else
I forgot to ask or should we call it here? I think you've covered probably, you know,
everything that people would find interesting. Yeah, we could go on longer and be boring,
but we've covered the interesting parts, right? Yeah, I think so. But I mean, I just reiterate that
as far as what I expected, my expectations going in, it has been very clean. It's been very
transparent and it's nice to, you know, to see the things that you expected to get
the benefit from as far as now I've got a new battery that's under warranty again.
I've got the higher charging rate. I've got a little bit more range. You know, all the things
that I would have expected that I would get out of this swap I have and generally speaking
for a reasonable price, I think. And I should say you were talking about the cost of the
battery and all. When I looked into this two years ago, the low end of the price range was
around $25,000. Okay, so it came way down. Yeah, and that was for a third party. Oh,
if you did it with Tesla, I think it was again probably 28 or something approaching 30,000. So
definitely the price has been coming down and there are predictions that, you know,
it will continue. So in the future, this kind of thing might be more common because more people
can afford it and are willing to do it and they might make it more of a, you know, general maintenance
kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. Oh, this is fantastic. I love this story and I look forward to when
my hip is fully healed getting to wax that beautiful car again. I've done it before,
but it's been a minute. So put that on your calendar for six months from now when I can
actually move fully. I will totally look forward to that. All right, thanks for coming on the show, Ron.
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All right. That was a fantastic interview and I want to thank Allison and Ron for
doing the interview. First of all, Ron for being so honest and given some really thought out reasons
why he decided to swap the battery out instead of buy a new car. I think that was great. Again,
I think I said this in the beginning of the show. I think this kind of thing is important
to hear because there's a lot of just random information out there and a lot of it's wrong
when it comes to the cost of batteries and the replacement and the whole bit.
Thank you, Ron, for doing that. Thank you, Allison, for sharing your content with me.
I'm sure there's something else. Oh, I'm going to put all of Allison's links
in the show notes. Please, if you haven't already gone over and subscribed to Chitchat
Across the Pawn and NoCillicast, or if you haven't visited podfeed.com,
I'll put all the links in there for you to do that as well.
Yeah, I feel like I'm forgetting something, but I'm probably not. We'll go ahead and in the
show here. Thank you, everybody, so much for listening and the next show will be news. I was
going through some of the news this afternoon. I got some good news for you on Friday,
hopefully not Saturday. Hopefully it'll come out on Friday. All right, everybody,
thank you so much for this. Oh, I know what I had to say. Ron mentions that Lucid and
Rivian are in bankruptcy. They're not in bankruptcy. If I had to guess, because I didn't
ask for clarification on this, if I had to guess what he meant was is both of those companies
are losing money, which is true, but they're not in bankruptcy. They are just losing
money on the regular. All right, I'm glad I remembered that before I ended the show.
Thank you, everybody, so much, and I will see you soon.
Get $50 off any General Assembly workshop with code Serious50. Start now at ga.co.seriousxm.
Modern enterprise. That's a lot of moving parts. Comcast business helps you orchestrate it all,
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and AI-powered networking that optimizes traffic across five continents.
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About this episode
Ron Birch explains why he kept his 10-year-old 2016 Tesla Model S 85D and replaced its main battery instead of buying a newer car. He breaks down real-world degradation (about 245–250 miles down to ~230 at 90%), slower supercharging due to aging limits, and the cost comparison between Tesla and third parties. Tesla’s swap bumped him to a 90 kWh pack, added a structural upgrade, and came with a fresh warranty. Charging performance jumped from ~72 kW max to ~150 kW, and he reports no noticeable loss in acceleration.
Original notes
Description:
In this episode of Kilowatt, I feature Allison Sheridan from NosillaCast interviewing Ron Burch, who shares his experience with maintaining a decade-old Tesla Model S. Ron's decision to replace his aging battery instead of buying a new car sheds light on electric vehicle ownership and maintenance longevity. We explore the specifics of his Model S, its impressive condition after ten years, and the battery replacement process, including cost comparisons between reconditioned and new cells. Ron offers insights on battery degradation, his driving habits, and the enhancements in charging efficiency with the new battery. This conversation not only uncovers the technicalities of battery replacement but also emphasizes sustainability in vehicle ownership amidst the evolving electric vehicle landscape.
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Kilowatt: A Podcast about Electric Vehicles
918Digital
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