The Cheapest Model Y Went 360 km at 120 km/h — and Matched a Long Range Over 1,000 km

Bjørn Nyland has put the cheapest Model Y through his test set, and the car that Tesla sells in Europe as the rear-wheel-drive Model Y — the one badged Standard until recently — came out of it better than its position in the range suggests.

The measured numbers

Conditions matter for any range test and these were kind ones: mid-teens Celsius and sunny, so the cells had headroom to warm up and the air conditioning was working neither hard at cooling nor at heating. Nyland's 90 km/h figure is his stand-in for town and back-road use rather than a motorway number.

European cars get BYD cells

The detail Nyland opens with is one no spec sheet states. Cars built at Giga Shanghai carry roughly 64 kWh of LFP using CATL cells; cars built at Giga Berlin — which is what Europe and Taiwan are delivered — use LFP built on BYD cells. Same nominal product, different cell supplier, depending on which factory built your car.

The weight comparison underneath that is the honest cost of the chemistry. At 1.98 tonnes with a driver aboard, this Model Y weighs exactly what a pre-Juniper Model Y Long Range RWD weighed, and exactly what a Renault Scénic E-Tech with an 87 kWh pack or a Kia EV3 with 81.4 kWh weighs. The same two tonnes buys you 62 kWh of LFP or north of 80 kWh of nickel-based cells.

The charging curve is the surprise

Tesla's cars typically taper early. This one did not: it held close to peak power until around 26% state of charge, well past where the rest of the range starts backing off. That has a practical consequence Nyland measured rather than estimated — over 1,000 km, the shorter stops let the Standard finish in the same total time as a Model Y Long Range.

For a buyer, that is the number that matters more than the headline range. The cheap car does not cost you a slower journey.

It also out-ranged the Model 3 Standard

Consumption came in below the Model 3 Standard's, so the Model Y Standard travelled further on a charge than the smaller, lower saloon. Elektrowoz, which published the detailed write-up of the test, flags this as counter-intuitive — the Model Y is taller and runs a harder-working air-conditioning compressor behind its HEPA filter — and does not claim to have an explanation. Neither do we. If you do not need all-wheel drive, it makes the Model Y the more sensible pick of the two Standards.

Where the cost-cutting shows, and where it does not

The audio system is the visible economy: no subwoofer, fewer speakers. Nyland expected it to sound cheap and reported the opposite — clean, strong, with bass heavy enough to visibly shake the camera image.

What to hold lightly

This is one car, one test, in mild weather. Winter will take a substantial bite out of both numbers, and test procedures are not interchangeable — Edmunds ran a US-specification Model Y Standard on its own mixed-driving cycle and recorded 337 miles, about 542 km, which is not directly comparable to either figure above. Treat the 360 km motorway result as the one to plan a European journey around.